My random thoughts series has all led to this: Part 22! It sounds portentous, but it's actually just trivially true. Your whole life has led to you reading this blog post! See?
My random thoughts keep coming. If anything, my thoughts get more random every year. Or is that actually not random at all? If something becomes incrementally more random, is it thereby not random? Maybe let's set the AIs on that one instead of deciding people's economic fates or giving students new ways to cheat.
Anyway, enjoy this crop of random thoughts as well as another non-random fact: the ever-more ridiculous amount of random memes!
565. I’ve always been lucky to have good teeth. So, going to the dentist has almost always made me feel good about myself. Is this what skinny people experience at the doctor’s office?
566. The whole red state/blue state narrative has always bothered me, because it encourages the obviously false conclusions that these categories are fatalistically eternal, that every person and every area in an entire state fits this narrative, that some states (and the people who live there) can be written off entirely, and that large groups of Americans are a monolithic Other rather than messy, complicated human beings. It’s a prime example of how a narrative can drive thinking and experience rather than the other way around, one greatly exacerbated by the news media and especially social media. Whose interests does this narrative serve? Note that I am not saying vicious, harmful policies should not be fought against, but rather that the whole red/blue state narrative often impedes one from doing so.
567. In almost all cases, the best way to end a strike is to meet the workers’ demands.
568. It’s not that I think there are no aesthetic criteria, no difference between bad and good art. It’s not all--in that confusing popular idiom--“just subjective.” But I think whatever aesthetic criteria there may be are far less clear and far more difficult to apply than most people think. Or maybe I just mean: don’t be too attached to your aesthetic judgments. Or more fundamentally: don’t be a condescending jerk about it.
569. Semis in the left lane: Why?
570. My biggest pet peeve on road trips: anything that prevents me from using my cruise control, especially semis in the left lane.
571. It has been cool lately to love autumn as the best season, but I’m gauche enough that my favorite season has been and remains summer.
572. Even though I still love summer and think the “I love fall” thing gets a little out of hand, I have to admit that Americans’ seemingly collective decision to turn Halloween into a two-month-long festival of ghoulish goodness is one of the best things this country has done in a long time.
573. I’ve read a lot of fancy philosophy in the last few decades, which has greatly enhanced my life, but a lot of what you need to know about basic human decency and our current society’s lack thereof can also be gleaned from two films of the late 1980s: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and They Live (1988).
574. Other people’s ideas and actions often confuse me. A few examples: Skinny people who go on diets. People who don’t want to join a union. Non-millionaires who support unregulated capitalism. People who blame their problems on those who have little power in our society--immigrants, trans kids, the poor--rather than the rich assholes who actually cause their problems. People who value greed, hatred, and competition over love, compassion, and basic decency.
575. It is often said that having children makes one less selfish, which at some level may be true, but I have also observed that having children makes some people more selfish, at least if you include their children in the domain of their “self” as opposed to the “other” of other people’s children. I often suspect that this sort of expanded selfishness is the root of a lot of our society’s ills when it comes to education, housing, healthcare, transportation, fair employment, and other public goods.
576. I wish I knew how to make people care about other people. I really do. But maybe the best we can do is to encourage people to think--to really, deeply think--about this simple fact: we’re all in this together—we all come into this universe with no idea what it’s all about, we all suffer, and we’re all going to die someday. If that doesn’t get you to care about other people, I don’t know what else to do.
577. At some point in human history the morning people all got up early to conspire to create “civilization” while the night owls were still dreaming about getting back to their weird little projects in the serene hours of the night after the obnoxious morning people go to bed.
578. A terrible confession: I secretly dread the beginning of the NFL (American football) season every year. I don’t ever say this to people because I don’t want to come off as trying to ruin anyone’s fun or begrudging other people for liking something. It’s not that! Really! I’m all for people liking things that aren’t my thing! We humans are a diverse lot and live in a vast universe with many wonderful things to like. Rather: dread arrives for me every August because football talk pervades our entire culture and discourse in a way no other sport does in the US. It becomes inescapable. It doesn’t bother me at all that some people care about football. Go for it! But I do find it annoying that everyone is expected to care about football.
579. Whenever I wear a shirt or hat in public with the name an academic institution with which I’ve been affiliated, I often encounter people who want to talk to me about sports. And it catches me off guard every time. But then I remember that for most Americans, colleges are sports teams that offer a few classes on the side.
580. Even if it takes longer and is an unpopular route, I’d rather go my own way. The best way is not always the fastest or easiest way. – Thoughts on life and directions
581. I’ve never understood how people drink scalding hot liquid. Are their mouths fireproof? Is my mouth especially burnable?
582. Community is as important to human beings as food, air, water, and shelter. Without it, we become less than fully human.
583. What a sad culture in which we all love the entertainment provided by music, art, and stories, and if it weren’t a bit gauche to say so, we may well admit these things are part of what makes life worth living—but then we simultaneously don’t think most of the people who make music, art, and stories deserve to supported by the society that relies on them.
584. What a strange society we are! Do we really think people who move wealth around and/or produce wealth off the labor of others should be richly rewarded while the people who do the work essential for civilization should be scrambling to meet their basic needs?
585. Sometimes it feels like the US was specifically designed to rob its citizens of any communal feeling, basic decency, or time to just be.
586. Sometimes in the last couple years I’ve felt that we Americans may be reaching a new level of consciousness of what should be an obvious idea: we should just care about people, and we are a wealthy enough society to give everyone a minimally decent chance at life. But then I hear some successful Republican politician talk, and I am quickly disabused of such notions.
587. It's kind of funny that some of the same people who think soda is poison will drink eight or ten cups of coffee a day.
588. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. Aside from machines that wash dishes and clothes, I have yet to notice this effect.
589. Can the petty shortsightedness and selfish cruelty of many humans be disappointing? Yes. But is it better to hold on to this disappointment against the background of hope for some small improvement than to give in to the view that petty shortsightedness and selfish cruelty are the best humanity can do? Also, yes.
590. “I’ll just go through my email real quick. It’ll only take a minute.” – one of my most delusional thoughts.
591. A new way to maintain work-life balance: be so frazzled and absent-minded that you miss the deadlines for new things you shouldn’t be taking on anyway.
592. War begins with political and moral failures of elites, leading to the injury and death of innocents. The line between legitimate self-defense and bombastic militarism is often crossed by forgetting that war is always and everywhere a tragedy.
593. Fashion is one of those enduring human mysteries to me, like sports, religion, jingoistic patriotism, and people who never use their turn signals.
594. I’m not an ambitious person when it comes to things like honors, money, power, leadership, or influence over others; I can occasionally be talked into a leadership position out of a sense of duty, but I rarely seek it out. But when it comes to my own weird little projects and all the odd paths they could take, my attitude is usually, “Why not?”
595. It’s amusing when people talk as if capitalism makes sense.
596. People don’t want to get involved in a union or other organization because they’re not sure it will be effective, but then these organizations can’t be effective because people don’t want to get involved, which creates the impression that these organizations aren’t effective, which makes people not want to join… and so on.
597. Mimetic fiction is a strange thing: why would you use this mysterious human power of imagination to create something that could easily happen in the course of your regular experience when you could imagine … literally anything else?
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