“He who buys what he does not need steals from himself."—Swedish proverb.

I characterize the mindset of American conservatives—specifically the ones who are blasé or antipathetic toward anti-COVID measures such as vaccines and face-masks—thusly:

Bad things happen to other people. That is, until they happen to me.

Oddly enough, that is also my progressive-but-not-lunatic-fringe-liberal mindset. I figure that it is more healthy to assume I will probably be all right, given the precautions I take, rather than to expect the worst and be anxious about it all the time. (I’ve already done that about COVID for a solid year or more.) I prepare for the worst, so that I can protect myself and my family as best I can, but I assume the worst won’t happen to me.

I admit that new information, such as learning that breakthrough infections are a thing and that the are new COVID cases in my daughter’s school and my wife’s school every day or so, shakes this mindset quite a bit sometimes. COVID is like a specter that is constantly moving closer.

Based on the COVID-related stress I am still dealing with on a daily basis, this healthy-when-I-apply-it attitude is all I have to keep me going. I know I am whistling past the graveyard. I know the Angel of Death will not pass over my house forever. I know I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. But for now, the thought that “bad things happen to other people” is getting me from mini-crisis to mini-crisis without completely losing my mind.

Viewing this wonderful lecture on the importance of a classical education made me wonder if I had, or did not have, a classical education. I read a lot of great works, struggled a lot with deep reading, philosophy, and trying to understand the human condition, but I have many, many gaps in my reading and education, too. Reading Ulysses for the first time lately has truly impressed these shortcomings on me. I miss many allusions to classic and Christian thought, not to mention Irish history and geography.

For much of my life, my cynical mind has been more interested in the lies that make the world than in the truths that make the world. I am trying to reverse that balance now. Earlier this year, I made a decision to return to reading classic literature almost exclusively—even at a snail’s pace, and even if I struggle to understand it—to improve both my education and my outlook on life. I think it has been a worthwhile journey thus far, but I have far, far to go. It is a journey that ends only when I do.

Move slow and fix things.

Grace is accepting others’ limitations. Humility is accepting your own.

Wisdom is neither quickness nor intellect. It is seeing the world how it really is.

I can’t clean my office because I’m too busy to do anything with it all day, even though I am working in there, and at the end of the day I don’t want to be in there anymore. I have been thinking that I should break up the mess into chunks, box part of it each day, and organize the box while I watch TV. The problem is, I don’t really watch TV much anymore. When I do, it’s usually “good” TV that I have to pay attention to. I no longer have mindless TV shows that are good to kind-of pay attention to while folding laundry. When I was younger and lived alone, I always had sitcoms and sports on that I didn’t really care about, but were good distractions while I was puttering with something or doing light choses. That took up a huge part of my evenings. Now that I have a family, all of that is gone—mostly for the better—but I think I need a little of it back in my life sometimes.

I got my first job when I was sixteen. I was a dishwasher at a restaurant for about half of summer. Soon after I started, my mom wanted me to tell my grandfather about my new job. She was proud of me for getting a job, even though it was a job with low status and poor pay. My grandfather had worked as a short order cook and a baker for most of his life, so he was well-versed in working in a kitchen.

When I told him about the dishwashing job, what he said back to me was really strange. He said, “That’s great. Washing dishes is a good skill to know in case society collapses and machines won’t work anymore.” It was out of character for him to say something so cynical, and it pretty much stopped the conversation in its tracks.

Now it is over 25 years later, and I wonder, as I listen to podcasts dissecting news, technology, and podcasts as I wash dishes in my house four times a day: Is society going to collapse? Is climate change the thing that does us all in? Are we, as a species, extinguishing all of the natural resources we need to survive? How long is it going to take for things to start falling apart because of it? Maybe not as long as I would like it to be.

If that is how society collapses, perhaps machines will be the only things left that will be able to wash dishes. In that case, my dishwashing skills will not be useful after all.

We are all replaceable. That is written into our biology. Our social and economic structures reflect it, too.

We are all unique. A human life is irreplaceable. But a human is replaceable.

You don’t have to be smart to be right.

Just because you are smart doesn’t mean you’re right.

L’Shana tova for all those who celebrate. Let’s hope for a better year ahead.

When I was in business school, back in the early aughts, I did a team presentation project on the topic of the male/female wage gap. To this day, I am embarrassed at my work on this project. I was young, hard-working, and idealistic, but I was unknowingly naive to the world and think I got it all wrong.

At the time, I worked at an insurance company, and there was a huge number of women in the departments I worked with at manager and director levels. I was just starting out in my career, so I was lower in rank than almost every woman I worked with, too. That may have clouded my thinking a bit, because I lacked the perspective of someone who worked in a more exclusively male-dominated work culture. I didn’t see how women were treated at other workplaces.

To prepare for our project, which was a group presentation, I did a lot of reading on the wage gap issue. It didn’t make sense to me that it could exist. I could understand if compensation amounts averaged out with a gap between male and female average wages, but I thought there had to be a sensible reason for that. It must come down to things like the type of job taken, the number of hours worked per week, the number of overtime hours worked, employee performance, and on asking for a higher salary when applying for a job. The literature I read on the subject supported that, conditionally, but was noncommittal about whether a wage gap really existed, and about what the average male and female wage numbers actually reflected.

My main logical argument against the wage gap actually meaning that there was a male/female bias in the workplace, was that if women made less money for a particular job than men, I, as a rational employer, would predominantly hire women for that job, to save money on labor. That isn’t happening; therefore, the gender pay gap did not really exist. My project team was mostly young corporate women. They agreed with me. We didn’t even really argue about it, though I remember acting a little embarrassed about the conclusion I had come to when I presented it to them. We presented on the topic based on my conclusion, and otherwise had a successful, if uneventful, presentation to our class.

The problem is, my idea of rational hiring decisions does not reflect how the world works. People make hiring decisions—and all kinds of other decisions—for reasons that don’t make rational sense at all. At the heart of these decisions are preferences, and preferences are largely affected by bias. Bias is, essentially, a preference that can’t be adequately explained. Put another way, bias just doesn’t make sense. No sense can be made from it because it doesn’t depend on sense.

I came to this conclusion shortly after my team completed that project. I have thought a lot about it since. The thought of it pops into my head unexpectedly sometimes, like the memory of a time I sang the wrong line of a song in the high school musical, in front of everybody on closing night, and it crowds out memory of the rest of my performance, across all the performances, where I made no mistakes. It’s easy to dwell on the times you get things wrong, I suppose. At least in this case I learned something.

Now that I am older and have more experience with and exposure to the world, I notice that bias is everywhere. Bias is the sort of thought virus that nibbles away at logic and replaces it with something that feels more right or more comfortable to the thinker or decider. You do not choose to be biased; if anything, bias, soaked up from the society around them, chooses you.

Since I made that business school presentation years ago, my conclusion on the topic has completely reversed. Bias must affect hiring decisions and wages to the detriment of traditionally underserved or discriminated against groups of people, including women, because it affects everything else. Moreover, you can’t go looking for it with logic, because bias is inherently illogical.

In the 1990s, the old guard of educators—mainly white men like Harold Bloom—decried the decline and of the Western canon. In general, the Harold Blooms of the world lost that argument. High school reading lists today are far more diverse and are—as my high school English teachers feared—diluted in quality. The classics have been pared back, to make way for new ideas and more diverse voices.

Case in point: my wife is teaching The Hunger Games to high school juniors this school year. I have read The Hunger Games and could probably craft a few lessons based on its material, but I don’t think of it as literature; it’s a fun Y.A. beach read devoid of subtext. The dilution in quality is not a function of the increase in diversity. It’s a function of trying to hold kids’ attention.

I think it must be possible to make classic literature interesting and relevant to high school students. That said, it is a challenge I do not face.

Vulnerability is a new ideal masculine trait. Being open, honest about, and comfortable with your flaws is nontraditional, unexpected, and disarming.

But that isn’t vulnerability. It’s invulnerability. You need to be tremendously self-assured to take social risks and not be flummoxed if things do not go your way.

When I was in college, I longed not to be learned but to be wise. I was learning rapidly, and soaking up new ideas all the time. I was making connections between all sorts of different systems of thought and culture. I thought I had human nature all figured out.

I was, however, wise enough at the time to know that I would be foolish to consider myself wise. That paradox never really resolves itself. The moment you think yourself wise, you have made a fool of yourself. Go ahead…try it, then wait a while.

Still, I must have shot my mouth off about how wise I was, because some people thought I was wise, and would ask me to help them sort out problems in their personal or academic lives. I was foolish enough back then to try to help them.

Now that I am middle-aged and raising two children with my wife, I feel both smarter and more foolish than ever. It is hard to feel wise when you can’t get your kids to do the simplest things most of the time. I find people–even the ones I am closest to–to be, at turns, more predictable and more inscrutable than ever. It is much easier to predict what people will do than it is to understand why.

What does it really mean to be wise? It’s certainly different than being smart, clever, or quick–though all those things don’t hurt. Being wise is about seeing the big picture, especially when those around you have lost sight of it, and using that viewpoint to help others help themselves.

I can write. I always could.

In high school, I wrote cogently and forcefully, like someone who read the up-Ed pages of two newspapers every day. Unlike most of my peers I had figured out how to revise and shape text—how to edit out hedging and weasel words and unfinished thoughts. Essay structure and organization fascinated me.

In college I wrote passionately with explosive figurative language. I wrote and put on a play: a farce poking fun a dorm life at my school. My seniors honors theses had jokes in them and won awards. My prose was called “airtight” in creative writing class.

As a young adult, I thought I might write professionally. I wrote four or five nights a week, at the local library, after work and dinner were done. I worked on short stories and screenplays that, sadly, didn’t end up going anywhere.

Writing was a lonely hobby for me. I had no community. I lived in the suburbs and didn’t think I could even find a writing community near me. I envied friends who lived in cities and could join writing classes or groups. The worst part of it was that I couldn’t figure out how to create interesting plots. I could write stories, but I had no stories to tell. I have no gift for plots—only for telling. Eventually I stopped writing entirely, in favor of business school and other things.

So, I can write. I have a voice. But I don’t have much to say. I never know what to write about. I lack ideas, which is frustrating when I have the ability (perhaps the gift) to shape and communicate them clearly.

Recently, I decided to write and publish…something, maybe something small, maybe a whole essay…every day, to force myself to think, write, revise, and publish even when the ideas don’t come. I think that the activity will help me get over whatever block or self-editing has been standing in the way of my writing endeavors for so long.

I always used to dread meeting new people. They always asked “what do you do?” And what I do (for work, naturally) has mostly been nebulous and boring and unglamorous.

When I worked in corporate systems, I was too young to be an interesting (read: rich) tech nerd. When I worked in management consulting, no one really knew what that meant, and neither did I. When I worked in internal audit, no one wanted to hear about it. (Let’s just say people like to complain about auditors.)

For much of my career I’ve had the same kind of job: an ill-defined amalgam of consultant, auditor, and regulatory examiner. When I met someone new, we would be inevitably get into conversations like this:

“Do you work in insurance?”

“No; not really.”

“Do you work in audit?”

“No; not really.”

“Do you work for the state?”

“No; not really.”

You would basically need a weeklong seminar in an absurdly dull hotel conference center to understand what we do at my company and why it is important. It is technical. It is dull. It involves financial solvency (yawn). It involves close reading of legislation that even the legislators probably don’t understand.

Recently, I figured out a better way to express what I do: I help regulators make sure insurance companies are doing what they are supposed to do. That simple, vague explanation seems to be the best one I have come up with yet. Insurance may be dull, but it has the benefit of being, well, hated by a lot of people. Everyone wants to make sure insurance companies they are customers of do what they are supposed to do.

I think the best answer to “what do you do?” is always “I help people.” Because if you don’t help people, then what purpose is there to anything you do.

In college, I studied literature. What I learned about literature is that history, religion, and general knowledge are all wrapped up in narrative. So are our memories. We are the story we tell ourselves, as individuals, as nations, as peoples. Narrative is memory, and sometimes the narrator is an untrustworthy one.

I learned a lot about literature there, but I missed the important lesson: Why do we study literature? To learn empathy.

Lack of empathy is a fundamental problem in our society. Blame social media. Blame political polarization. Blame whatever you want. You could argue that society fractured in large part because we no longer share a common literature. We don’t read the foundational texts that, in part, make up our culture. We don’t read the foundational texts that make up other cultures—which may just help us understand other people. In school, whatever books we do read, that are “taught” to us, are dissected and analyzed, but not often enough put back together again and connected to anything real.

I think literature should be taught to teach empathy to students. Students should be told that is what it is for, and stories should be compared to real life events—not just personal experience, which is limited—as much as possible. We should think about making connections to ourselves and others, not just about connections between texts and ourselves.

When I was in high school, I was a guitar teacher. I was probably a terrible guitar teacher, but it wasn’t a job I wanted, it was a job I kind of couldn’t get out of. I had only one student, the son of a very nice teacher at my high school. After school in the drafting classroom, my student and I would listen to music he liked and try to transcribe it and learn how to play it.

Several times he asked me a question as we puzzled through a guitar solo: “There’s no way I’m ever going to be as good as Jimmi Hendrix, so why should I even bother playing at all?” I answered: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It matters that it’s yours. It matters that you did it, and it reflect what you as a person were feeling at the time.”

Maybe you can’t be as good at guitar as Jimmi Hendrix was, but you can be your best self at whatever you put yourself to: poetry, songwriting, fiction, musicianship, business, charity. The list goes on.

To err is human. To forgive, divine. But to have a good chance to detect and correct mistakes, you need controls. That’s what I have learned in my audit career.

A control helps you understand if a transaction or business process completed completely, correctly, and timely. It is designed to answer the auditor’s most probing question: “How do you know?”

The term itself is jargon, and isn’t widely understood outside of accounting, finance, audit, and compliance circles—unless you are pulled into an audit of some kind as a subject matter expert. One of my bosses used to say all the time, as a joking impersonation of management, “What is a control?” (It would be silly to say that joke killed, but we all got it.)

Of course “control” has a slightly different meaning in everyday language. I think most people want control over their lives: freedom, autonomy, and independence; and also, somewhat paradoxically, stability and predictability. As societal norms and expectations shift, and political, environmental and economic pressures escalate, the present feels more and more uncertain over time—it is literally out of control. As a counterweight to that, a lot of people long for strong leaders who promise to exert control by force of will, or just by force—in other words, authoritarian control.

The problem is that all leaders, both good and bad, know that it is easier to assert that things are correct rather than to actually correct them. In the business world, the same kind of situation applies. An executive can say that a company is doing everything it can in certain areas, but without controls and transparency, there is no way to know if such a statement is true.

On an individual basis, we can’t control everything that happens in our lives. What we can do, however, on an everyday personal level, is to implement the controls (in the audit sense) over what we do and the decisions we make. These can be gaurdrails and double-checks as simple as The Golden Rule and Measure Twice, Cut Once. Just ask yourself sometimes: How do you know if what you’re doing is right?

I am at the point I my vacation where I am contemplating how I can be a better person after I return home.

One of the lies I told myself when I packed for vacation is that I would spend more time writing and coding (for fun) each day. My MacBook has sat in a box in the closet, unused for all but one evening. I did not expect:

1. My kids going to bed at 10:00 or 11:00 PM
2. My RSI to make typing in the MacBook quite painful (at home I use an external keyboard exclusively these days)
3. Me taking up reading through the prose of James Joyce (I recently started Ulysses, after reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners) and all sorts of related background material

I am OK with this. I am resting and recuperating. I am also studying James Joyce fairly seriously late at night, which is something I would not have attempted during non-vacation time. I don’t have to churn out essays and source code to be productive.

One frequent and inescapable sight on the rural roads of New Hampshire is the Trump campaign sign. In every town, there are Trump campaign signs flanking the ends of driveways. Huge Trump/Pence billboards are proudly hoisted over the signs for legitimate businesses, presumably by the owners themselves. Trump flags—and the occasional anti-Biden flag—hang limply from the front of houses; some of them are accompanied by the MAGA battle flag: the black-and-blue parody of the Stars and Stripes. This is unusual. Trump lost almost a year ago. In every other election I have lived through, all the campaign signs came down in short order. But in 2021, in every town I drive through, I pass by monument after monument to the loser.

Celebrating a win for too long is gauche and sad. Mourning a loss, however old, is noble. This is especially true when that loss neatly dovetails into an even greater loss that the MAGA movement clearly draws its inspiration from: The Lost Cause. They both stem from the very same great lies: “this [thing I don’t like] isn’t fair” and “my humiliation is your humiliation.”

It is too soon to know if The Big Lie will have the weight and longevity of The Lost Cause. It seems likely, though, that The Big Lie will simply get folded into The Lost Cause, remembered as yet another indignity in a long line. In that way, it can last, essentially, forever.

Those Trump campaign signs can stay up forever, too, even after the former president runs again in 2024, retires from public life, or dies. I think that it would be a mistake to extend sympathy to the sore losers who leave them there, because what they believe—that they were cheated by a clean democratic election—undermines the American ideals of representative democracy, equal protection, and law and order.

The Big Lie is not going away, at least not anytime soon. It has embedded itself as the base of the Republican platform. You will see politicians run on it in 2022. The mid-term elections are going to be rough, and will merely set the table for the circus that will be the next presidential election season. We are in for a difficult couple of years ahead.

Procrastination is just a fancy word for avoidance.

Socially, it is acceptable to procrastinate. After all, everyone does it sometimes. This makes it easy to not even think about why you are procrastinating.

Conversely, it is not normally acceptable to avoid something or someone. It smacks of cowardice, and almost no one wants to be considered a coward.

Think about that when you know you are procrastinating on certain tasks. Ask yourself: What am I avoiding? What am I afraid of?

Who here wouldn’t want to buy a “I’m really big on Micro.blog” T-shirt? 😀