If there’s one question I get all the time, it’s “Why can’t I be as smart as you?” This is a good question, for which I have a brilliant answer. I am extremely smart. Extremly. No kidding. So, so smart. Some people refer to this…
via The New Yorker I have spent the last several weeks without my phone tethered to my side, and I need to tell you, it has been glorious. Not in a dramatic, life-altering, let’s-sell-everything-and move-to-a-cave-in-the-woods sort of way. Just quietly, steadily better. I started small.…
One morning, I woke up, and it was like a spell had been broken the way I looked around my house and saw how dull everything was, not because it was lacking but because of how full it was of stuff.
Stuff I didn’t particularly love. Stuff with no serious meaning to it. Stuff I didn’t care about. Stuff that, if you had secretly tossed, I wouldn’t even realize went missing. Stuff I bought because it was trendy at the time, because my friend had it, because I had seen attractive influencers brag about it on Instagram, and it made me think that I could be her.
So, I did a bit of Marie Kondo-ing and produced a few large bags of clothes and trinkets, and stuff for donation. Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. And the worst part is that I could’ve prevented it.
Materialism isn’t inherently evil; it can be gorgeous through the frames of abundance or art. Miranda Priestly’s “stuff” monologue from The Devil Wears Prada, for example, shows how material creates jobs, fuels culture, and shapes history.
This is the mindset that will make you waste your life away into bags of garbage: the idea that shopping is a material issue, and overconsumption is a budgeting problem, rather than a spiritual problem. It’s easy to be spirited away, whisked into another world operated by desires that come from ads and friends and fleeting trends. Your appetite for novelty and your fear of missing out sucks the joy out of you—the more you eat, the hungrier you are. The more you spend, the more vapid you fell. You lack spirit, not another fashion idenity. You don’t need another aesthetic, you need stronger values.
Do you know the movie Spirited Away? If not, go watch it because it is super good. The title Spirited Away in Japanese is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, and kamikakushi means “hidden by the gods,” a folk belief where people mysteriously vanish into another realm. This film is about magical abduction and losing your identity. Chihiro loses her name and becomes “Sen”: to be spirited away is like being stolen from yourself, forgetting who you are under the influence of forces like greed, fear, anger—and who’s to say that emotions aren’t magical? That desires aren’t demonic possessions of the mind (“demonic” meaning “godlike divisive superfactor” in Greek)? Who’s to say that feeling horny isn’t its own kind of spell? We literally use “mania” and “craze” to describe the way people desire something.
Lust, for example, is the feeling of wanting something really badly. It doesn’t have to be a carnal desire but it’s about a possessive craving that ends in a feeling of collapse, an appetite that, once appeased, reveals its emptiness:
Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination.
—Bernard Cornwell
Shopping (especially for books) has this effect on me, the voyage is more satisfying than the destination. There is such thing as post-purchase clarity: the moment when you buy something trendy and you suddenly sober up to how much you don’t care about it (let alone like it); you just want to be seen having it.
Birkenstock because I am German. No socks but with face, though.
Spirited Away is most known for the character with the least lines: a masked ghost who can conjure gold. He has no backstory, we only know that he is banned from entering the bathhouse. Chihiro, out of kindness, lets him in. No-Face is refused service at first, but the staff quickly compromise their values upon seeing his gold. They serenade him, “Welcome the rich man. He’s hard for you to miss. His butt keeps getting bigger, so there’s plenty to kiss!” while they fight for the gold nuggets that plop out of his fat hands. Then, he devours the workers in despair when he realizes their kindness is bought, and only Chihiro is genuine.
The painful part of loneliness is the realization that most people are ass-kissers and friendship is rare. Likewise, people feel the most alienated when they suddenly sober up to the fact that most of their desires are herd-driven, that most of them are no where close to the truth, if they even have a clear enough sense of what that is that matters to them. It’s like waking up from a trance state and realizing, What have I done to myself? I certainly felt this way standing in front of my garbage bags. Loneliness, alienation, addictions and self-defeating loops—these are not material problems, but ‘desire’ problems.
We think we want things, but every desire points to a way of life, a kind of person we long to become. Objects seduce us not with their utility but with their promise of transcendence—status, attention, belonging. That’s why No-Face has no face: he is desire itself, the appetite to become, the emptiness that consumes while wishing it were someone else.
Money reveals this: In Roman mythology, the temple of Juno Moneta was both sanctuary and mint (it’s where we get the words “money” and “monetary”). To strike a coin was to sanctify it with divine authority, so it circulated as both economic and spiritual power. It still does: money organizes meaning. Fiat currency works because we collectively believe it means something—fiatliterally “let it be” in Latin—its meaning assigned by our shared narrative. And because money is tethered to desire, it doesn’t just reflect value; it follows it. It’s the pull of eyes when a sports car glides down a street. Shopping is not independent from the spiritual realm that strips away our names.
When we feel the weight of our limits, we start reaching toward idols to imitate, goals to chase, places to explore, people to meet. What we’re really chasing is a sense of immortality or infinity, something that lives longer than we ever will. We want to be remembered long after we’ve left a conversation, the company, the world.
Desire is never about the object itself. If it were, once you acquired it, the desire would vanish. Yet, your wardrobe keeps getting stuffier while you still find yourself with nothing to wear. Desire is about what the object seems to promise us: a fuller, richer existence. This is why Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” test is great: it reframes consumption as discernment. It asks whether an object raises your spirit or weighs it down. Left unchecked, your possessions take away your freedom to be who you are. As Fight Club says, “The things you own end up owning you.”
You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.
—Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
Stronger values make you spend more mindfully because they shift the axis of desire. When you know what you worship—what you actually stand for and who you want to become—everything gets tested against that vision. Values act like a sieve: they filter out the empty cravings that come from comparison and they let through only the things that genuinely serve your spirit. Without values, desires lead you astray by following ads and algorithms and the envy of friends—a state commonly known as “being distracted”.
The scariest part of Chihiro watching her parents turn into pigs is that they could’ve simply walked away. The unattended food stalls feel like a test of whether one can resist charming distractions. Like the family in Spirited Away, you’re rarely forced to follow one desire over another (until you choose wrongly, and only later realize what you’ve done, if you realize it at all). But if you aim at your highest value—placing no other gods above it, coveting nothing of your neighbor’s—you free yourself from the distractions that split your soul and can refocus your being on becoming who you want to be.
Now, it’s unlikely for wealth to make one miserable. My point here isn’t that money is unimportant; it’s that if we have money without love, freedom, and a well-understood life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we can never be truly unhappy. It’s nice to have an expensive watch, but the watch will never be enough — feel enough — without having someone who will make you lose track of time.
“I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.” – Anna Kamienska It is what it is. This statement could simply define our collective malaise. Lately, I have been catching this phrase uttered…
Sometimes, it is not about working all this overtime and cashing in. It is also important to have actual time off to do what makes you happy. For example, to spend time with yourself in that house or apartment you are paying for, because money…
Via The New Yorker
Dating sites will continue to converge with social media. Filters guaranteeing you’re never exposed to opinions not shared by your friends will now ensure you never date anyone exposed to those opinions. Programs on your phone will decide for you when and where to date—and also who, based on their browsing history. The attractiveness of the soulmate you’re assigned will be proportional to the number of advertisements you agree to watch first. During the actual date, you’ll receive constant real-time dating advice generated by machine-learning algorithms. Your household appliances will tweet constantly about your relationship status—if they ever stop this, you will feel unaccountably melancholy.
If two people’s profiles are compatible, their phones will start sexting each other automatically—this will trigger at least one major international conflict. Your augmented reality contact lenses will instruct you where to find persons selected in accordance with biometric projections and DNA sample comparisons. When you approach a stranger, animatronic simulations will appear of products you might want to buy on a date and of how your future children might look. It will be possible to learn enough about a passerby to fall in and out of love with them within moments, although actually getting a glimpse of them will be tough because of the halo of real-time graphical overlays that now surrounds everyone. Your overlay will change style to suit the aesthetic preferences of whoever’s nearby and to signal your level of interest in them. All the standalone devices you own will be constantly trying to set you up. If you are ever not on a date, sensors will detect this from your eye patterns and direct your smartshoes to the optimal place for another hookup.
Everyone will be able to stalk everyone else at all times. Dating sites will take over most of the traditional functions of the state security apparatus. Matchmaking robots will be the sole inhabitants of Japan, as the rest of the population will have died out from the demographic impacts of low birth rates and the preference for virtual sex partners with tentacles. It will become legal to divorce your phone. Later in the decade, through computing your intrinsic social needs and evolutionary drives, dating technology will become a victim of its own success—since 99 percent of dates now lead to marriage. A pill and a vaccine that cures jealousy will be “voluntarily” injected into everyone.
Sensory augmentations will make possible ever-deeper transports of desire, as we use technology to expand beyond our biological bodies, while machines increasingly anticipate all our needs. First dates on Earth will now occur in full-immersion virtual realities. This is partly because genetic engineering will have made real humans so beautiful that anyone who glimpses one will be too love-struck to function coherently. In most relationships, at least one partner will be a simulation. Humanity will continue evolving into separate species and remain unaware of each other’s existence through social media. With the totality of the world’s information available to us through implanted electrodes, it will be possible to predict at birth who we will end up marrying, although breakthroughs in longevity tech will mean everyone has already dated everyone else in their network and is starting to feel a bit weird.
Cheap teleportation will transform dating culture, as most of Earth’s human population moves to the new planet HD 40307g. By now, you’ll just have to think about what you’re looking for romantically, and chips in your brain will infer the ideal person to inflict this on you, then manufacture them out of silicone and other materials. The “Internet” will make dating less traumatic, as our emotional needs are supplied by the same self-configuring dynamic global network infrastructure that handles all other inventories. All our personalities will at last be uploaded into a massive superserver that simulates all possible relationships. If it finds no feasible relationships for you, your personal self-narrative will be definitively scanned and, in the hope of your connecting with similarly encoded entities from other galaxies, transmitted out into space, where it will be a tricky point who pays for drinks.
While predictions of the future can never be absolutely certain, it’s a safe bet that after the Singularity—a technical term for the point in the future after which everyone will be single—the only surviving humans on HD 40307g will be bred in captivity, as part of a research project run by AIs. However, their online avatars will continue to have vibrant inter-dimensional sex lives—indeed, to some extent, this is already happening. Earth will be ruled by dolphins, except for the few unsubmerged land areas dominated by self-replicating 3D printers that sometimes wear humans as fashion accessories. The more sophisticated computer viruses will take on human form to go for long romantic walks along the beach, arguing about where exactly they parked. After all, the AIs destroy themselves in viral warfare, mutant sex toys will colonize outer space, and a functional crystal ball will be mass-produced, putting futurists out of business. That cute person you gave your phone number to last week will finally try to call you back, although this will be tough since by then you’ll both have been cryogenically frozen.
After striking futurists smash all the cryogenics pods, to protest the invention of the crystal ball, that cute person you gave your phone number to last week, and you will be unfrozen and set free to wander through the ruins of civilization, suffering from nothing worse than minor memory loss. As the only two surviving non-futurist humans, you will be in a good position to understand each other’s pop cultural references. You will expound lengthily on your neuroses. You will try to figure out what you’d have to change about yourself to make this relationship work, and will briefly even contemplate having the relevant neurohacks implemented. Meanwhile, robot academics will follow you along the beach—this is because the original purpose of dating has been completely forgotten, and the robots hope observing you will garner clues that will help them solve this problem and publish articles about it in robot-reviewed publications. Unfortunately, by this time, neither you nor your date will be able to remember what the purpose of dating was either.
via The New Yorker Some time ago, we watched the movie Eighth Grade about an eighth-grade girl struggling through those rough middle school years. (Have you seen it?) She lives with her dad, and one evening around the backyard fire pit, asks him the heartbreaking question, “Do I…
via The New Yorker We learnt self-pity when we were young. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon; you were 9 years old. Your parents wouldn’t let you have any ice cream unless you did your maths homework. It was achingly unfair. Every other child in…
For people in relationships or in love, February 14 is a day to celebrate romance with a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a thoughtfully written card. But for those in less clear-cut dynamics, Valentine’s Day creates a difficult quandary: How to acknowledge your insignificant other without jeopardizing the carefully crafted gray area of your situationship. They’re definitely not your Valentine, but they’re still… something. And surely that something deserves a card too? Get him a card. Something like this, maybe?!
And, for everybody who celebrates:
Ladies, are you ready for your man to commit to you with the same diligence and enthusiasm he pours into his War Movies binge-watching?
Then optimize your relationship this Valentine’s Day with this date guide.
This list has something for everybody—long-term lovers, a new fling, and everybody else.
Morning coffee date.
Why wait till dark to get the romantic juices flowing? Gaze deep into your lover’s eyes as he gazes over your shoulder at the low-angle morning sun. For the absolute best result: make sure the coffee machine is broken, the dog took a nice shit in the house and you are both late for work. The photons flooding his retinas at this point may help regulate his circadian rhythm. If you add one or two requests at this point you might have sweet conversations all day AND night.
Kitchen kisses.
First, you kiss him and then you watch if his enzymes have trouble breaking down the macronutrients in those meat-free turkey soy balls and the matcha soy latte you serve him for breakfast. Let the chaos unfold.
Hit the dance floor.
Start dancing early in the morning. Involve him. Then tell him about a research that shows dancing promotes activity in the neural circuit connecting your motor cortex to your adrenal glands, activating receptors on your vagus nerve that in turn excite brain areas that release norepinephrine, creating a brain-to-body-to-brain “arousal loop” that can improve energy and alertness. If the Tango you perform in front of him doesn’t turn him on, nothing will.
Lavish him with gifts.
Move over, Godiva Chocolate. This year, ditch the chocolates and spoil your sweetheart with a six-month supply of omega-3 fatty acids. Don’t forget the heart-shaped pill case.
Visit a cozy cocktail bar.
Go ahead, pick your poison. Hand him his cocktail of choice, then whip out your notepad because you will spend the next 90 minutes explaining how alcohol increases cortisol in the adrenal glands, negatively impacts gut health, and is, technically speaking, a poison.
Sweat it out.
Maximize your longevity and love connection with a steamy hot yoga session or spin class. Feeling strong? Level up with kickboxing. It’s a perfect way to let out some pent-up frustration—just shut your eyes and imagine him whispering in your ear, “Actually, today at work….” Boom, knockout!
Ask him many questions.
The quickest way to your man’s heart is through the right ventricle by way of his tricuspid valve, as he explained (with diagrams) on your first date. The second quickest? Ask him whether microplastics disrupt the body’s fragile hormonal balance. Ask him if he wants (more) children. Even on the first date.
Deliberate cold exposure.
Picture this: You two in an oversized tin trough filled with enough ice to sink an early twentieth-century sea vessel. Can you imagine anything hotter? And yes, your body might go numb. But you’ll still feel all sorts of butterflies.
Couples therapy.
Are you and your partner struggling to connect? A couples therapy session might help facilitate better communication, deepen your relationship, and SAVE. That’s right, visit sometimesraw.com for 15 percent off your first counselling session if you buy all of my books. That’s S-O-M-E-T-I-M-E-S-R-A-W. dot com! Don’t wait!
Leave him alone.
Who are you kidding? Give your man what he really wants: a quiet night alone. Get him a beer, a steak, and turn on Black Hawk Down. Light yourself a candle, get a cup of tea, some chocolate, and a good book. The best part? You get a night to yourself, too which is all you want anyway.
Happy Valentine’s Day to all the Lovebirds out there. Enjoy the day. Treat yourself to a day at the SPA. I know I will. And buy yourself some roses. You deserve it!
Me, posing and staring at my son who is doing something he is not supposed to. So you want to have a baby. Spring is around the corner and people are getting ready to reproduce. I heard too much baby-talk lately so I think it…