Hurtling Toward the Void

She’s in bed, sleeping. Dog, too. It was a long week for all of us.

I’m up, reading a book. Something about the economy. It’s surprisingly quiet here, perched atop a hill in the middle of the city, save for the occasional trolley bell and the fairly incessant woodwind hum of a nearby hotel doorman’s taxi whistle. It’s Friday night, after all.

When we moved here nine months ago, I had this idea that by now I’d know each cable car operator’s distinctive staccato, and that when they rang the bell as they hauled past our apartment window I’d say, “Oh, there goes Ken!” or “Sounds like Leo today!”

But I don’t. I don’t know those guys or anyone else here. The city can be impenetrable, especially if you have an underdeveloped social instinct. It’s crammed full of people, and you rarely see the same face twice. If you want to make friends, you have to make an impression, and that’s not easy when your natural inclination is to sit in the corner like a potted plant and just observe.

On the other hand, at least there’s plenty to watch.

I watch it mostly with her. And the dog. Not sure I need much else, really.

Certainly not after a long week.

So I’m just sitting here, reading my book. Sipping a cocktail. And, yet, somehow — probably because it’s Friday night — I feel oddly like there’s something wrong with me that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I wouldn’t, though. For the first time in 43 restless, ridiculous years, I can honestly say I wouldn’t.

I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and — gosh darn it — people like me.

It was about six months ago that I quit my job. The work was fine, the people were nice and the pay was adequate, but my decision to walk away had nothing to do with all that. At some point, at least in my head, the benefits of sticking around were overshadowed by the opportunity costs.

“I have more to offer the world than this,” I thought. “I can do better.” This was my mantra. It was my inspiration. It may also have been my hubris.

I’ve applied for roughly four dozen jobs since then. The net result? One interview and two rejection letters, which leaves about 45 who couldn’t even be bothered to say, “Fuck you.”

I’m not alone, of course. Unemployment the last few years has been at its highest point since the Reagan era. In the human capital market, supply is up and demand is down. That means even if I find work, it won’t likely be rewarding, either personally or financially. But I try, anyway.

How could I not? I grew up in a country that glorifies work. Only in recent decades, the Puritan work ethic has given way to a new value system, where work is judged on the basis of whether or not it’s paid. In today’s America, if you’re, say, a mortgage underwriter who’s systematically flirting with economic ruin, you’re a productive citizen. But if you’re a mother who busts her ass all day keeping a household running, you’re just an entitled deadbeat.

Trouble is, the more signals people get that they’re useless wastes, the harder it gets for them to ignore it. Being sequestered on the margins of society and having your repeated attempts to reconnect ignored feels a lot like not getting invited to the cool kid’s party in high school. Only this party — the labor force — is supposed to be a meritocracy, not a popularity contest. So if you’re not invited, what’s the logical conclusion?

Save your sympathy; I’m not depressed. No, I’m pissed off. Not because I think I’m entitled to a job or even to an interview, but because of the not-so-faint whiff of self-importance I’m getting off the job creators. Every single job description I read is rife with smug asides about how goddamn special the company is, and (often explicit) warnings for potential applicants that if they even think about sending something as pedestrian as a resume and a cover letter outlining why they’re a good fit, the company will devote all of its resources to developing time-travel technology for the sole purpose of going back to the very moment your parents first met and punching them both in the face.

The good news is those threats are idle. The bad news is that what really happens is worse: Basically, you spend a whole day of your life (sometimes more) jumping through a ridiculous series of hoops to tailor your pitch and craft it just so, taking things like design, language, overall tone and choice of medium (or media) into consideration. In other words, you work.

And sometimes you’re not going to be right for the job. Or they’re going to find someone better. And that’s fair.

But you’re telling me they can’t even find time to e-mail a polite, “Fuck you”?

Fuck you.

Because while you might think you’re part of the solution (creating jobs, innovating, smashing old-school inside-the-box conventions), you’re wrong. For every person you hire, you’re initiating or sustaining the shame spirals of dozens of others.

See, the more times I get ignored, the less I even bother to try. So let’s just cut to the chase. Here’s the cover letter you deserve, and may eventually get:

Dear obliviously undifferentiated company,

I’m writing about the job opening for an Assistant Deputy Manager for Mundane Activities. As you describe it, the work sounds dreadful, tedious, degrading and quite frankly beneath me. However, I have bills to pay. I’m sure you understand.

I’m a smart guy with a lot of experience in a variety of fields. While it’s difficult for me to translate the industry jargon you used to describe the role’s responsibilities into anything remotely meaningful, I’m confident that I can learn whatever routine tasks are involved and master whatever banal “strategy” you apply to them in order to make yourselves feel less hopelessly ordinary.

While the tone of this letter may seem brusque, I assure you I get along splendidly with people who are not assholes.

When you’re prepared to have an honest discussion about what you need and how I can help, you may contact me at the number below or through any of the zillion other Internet-based methods you’ve no doubt heard about from your socially maladjusted nephew.

Go fuck yourself,

-Rommie

Previous installments:

Unemployment: Day 3
Unemployment: Day 23
Unemployment: Day 24
Unemployment: Day 100

An angry virtual mob of Batman fanboys took to their torches and pitchforks (or, at least, keyboards and mice) this week and unleashed their impotent rage on Film critic Marshall Fine, who had the audacity to not like the new movie about their favorite masked sociopath.

I was amused was disgusted experienced emotions when I heard about this incident not only because it reminded me of how surprisingly shitty it can be to be a professional critic, but also because it reminded me of how much more people used to appreciate their voice when they barely had one. I’m sure there’s an overly literal, no-duh psychological theory that captures this scarcity-creates-value phenomenon, but I can’t remember which dead guy it’s named after right now.

Internet comments are like graffiti. Every now and then you accidentally turn down an alley and stumble on a masterful artwork, but mostly it’s just bored kids with destructive urges splattering the equivalent of neolithic grunts on whatever canvas is made available to them.

You know what technology has killed? Technology has killed the art of outrage. When I first started out in the newspaper biz, readers had to actually make an effort to have their voices heard. They had to sit down and write a letter to the editor. Most of them even had to do it with a pen and a piece of paper. Then they had to affix a stamp to an envelope, wait for the mail carrier and check the paper day after day on the off chance their missive was selected for publication. You see, not just any old rant was good enough for mass consumption. It had to be cogent, concise, perhaps even clever.

Hell, I actually miss the hate mail I used to get.

But now? Now all you need is a caps-lock key and a string of obscenities to reach the whole wide world in an instant. (And if you bothered to try any harder you’d probably just exceed most people’s attention spans, anyway.)

Anyway, I digress. Point is, I think I kind of like this Fine guy. I might even start checking his site on the rare occasion I actually give a shit about whatever value-added deliverable has most recently sputtered forth from the day-glo plastic asshole of Hollywood. I saw an endless litany of crap pictures during my years as an entertainment journalist, and just as the psychologists would predict, the more you see the harder you are to impress.

Which is why I think there’s a decent chance Fine is wrong about “The Dark Knight Rises.” Just in case, though, this fanboy is avoiding reviews and saving his impotent rage for Christopher Nolan. I imagine he probably appreciates good hate mail, too.

Looking up from his keyboard, he wondered to himself, “What’s another word for ‘improve’?” Sitting at a desk in a long row of identical desks, he was busy writing his umpteenth newspaper article about a local event, one he’d covered annually for nearly 10 years end-on-end. “Boost? Enhance? Augment?” He’d written this story a thousand times. Or nearly 10. Whatever. “Maybe ‘facelift’? No.” The only challenge left was to write it better. OK, differently.

And, of course, for fewer readers.

That’s when their thousand-yard stares met. Across the aisle, a colleague was similarly lost in thought. They’d begun their careers here within a few weeks of one another, when the future seemed as bright as the newsroom did electric. But today was as quiet and grey as the pages of their product, and as dull as their senses.

They shook their heads and laughed, sharing a thought without speaking. It didn’t need to be said, because it already had been — at least a thousand times. “We are wasting our lives.” So they didn’t say anything. He just nodded in resignation, and his counterpart responded in kind.

And with the unique sort of nonchalance and simpatico that only develops from 18 years of mutual suffering, his co-worker slowly closed his eyes, and softly affected his finest Morrissey falsetto:

Oh, mother,
I can feel
the soil falling over my head

He didn’t realize it then, but he would come to miss that.

Yesterday I posted a brief excerpt from a New Yorker magazine article about politics. At age 42, I’m plenty old enough to have known better. Unless you were born in the handful of seconds since I began typing this sentence, you’ve most likely become aware that people tend to have strong opinions on such matters. To paraphrase one of my buddy Geoff’s more enduring and brilliantly reductive tweets, it seems that some folks believe this, whereas other folks believe that.

As is normally the case when I ignore my better judgment, repercussions ensued. It’s been forever since I gave up monitoring my follower count (and to you last few holdouts, I highly recommend it), but the qualitative fallout still stings. When someone you respect or consider a friend judges you harshly — or, indeed, at all — you find yourself suddenly taking cover in intellectual foxholes, digging in for the coming onslaught, and preparing to defend … well, what, exactly?

Curiously, as I discovered in the exchanges that followed, not one of the feathers I’d ruffled had bothered to click on the link and actually, you know, read the article. Again, a person of my vintage probably shouldn’t be surprised by this fact. But even so, it perfectly illustrates the point I apparently failed to make.

It’s a point that the article’s writer, Ezra Klein, made eloquently in writing about the work of a number of scientists and scholars: The human mind is biologically predisposed to promote its group’s interests in competition with other groups. In other words, we have evolved into exceptional “team players.” Critical thinking, as it turns out, is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for evidence to support the interests and goals we have already settled on. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning.”

This seems counter-intuitive to anyone who assumes that rational, reasoned debate is firmly rooted in the cold, hard facts of objective reality. It seems less so to anyone who participated in debate club or whose thoughts ever brushed up (formally or otherwise) against the concept of epistemology. We process our objective environment through the filter of our own cognitive appraisal — which includes our beliefs, attitudes and other predispositions — to create our psychological environment, and then we judge the latter to be every bit as “real” as the former. It’s sort of like the rose-colored glasses theory, only not all of us see rose. (The hue my correspondents perceived yesterday was far closer to red.)

Or, as Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school, succinctly summarized: “Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.”

It’s perhaps unfortunate that the excerpt I chose to post focused on the propensity of Republicans, in particular, to change their position. I chose it, partly, because it offered the most concise — and given the events of the day, the most relevant — example of this phenomenon. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit I also chose it partly because it seemed certain to stir debate. Having spent a few years in the 1990s writing headlines for a daily metropolitan newspaper, I am not entirely immune to the allure of editorial sensationalism, which wears a reporter’s gumshoe on one foot and a marketing executive’s shiny Italian leather slip-on on the other.

It was unfortunate for at least two reasons:

1) The quote may have implied, to some, that Republicans are alone in their use of “motivated reasoning,” when, in fact, both sides of our national political divide engage in what I like to think of as “confirmation bias on steroids.” Both sides, after all, are human — something they would do well to remember from time to time.

2) I was misunderstood, which, of course, is hardly a tragedy.

Then again, when you consider why, maybe it is. Those who made an effort to contact me (because, hey, it’s easier to judge than to be curious) fell into two camps: Offended Republicans and Offended Apoliticals. Both groups made some basic assumptions about me, none of which are true.

Republicans assumed I am a Democrat. I am not. Apoliticals assumed I am a proselyte. In fact, of my 1,386 (now 1,387) posts on Tumblr, this may have been the first related to politics. But of course self-delusion feels better than cognitive dissonance, so facts be damned.

In both cases, people see what they want to see, and quite logically consider it real-world evidence in support of their established beliefs. We promote our group in competition with other groups, real or perceived. We are good team players. As unsavory as it may be to acknowledge this self-evident truth, we are just like our politicians. We are human.

It’s something we would do well to remember from time to time.

Sometimes when I’m driving and another motorist comes speeding up behind me, I think to myself, “Say, that person must be in a real hurry,” and I take the earliest opportunity to move over to the right lane and let them pass.

I drive about six miles to get to work each day. It takes me roughly 15 minutes. Maybe five of those minutes are on an Interstate, the other 10 on city roads. During today’s commute, I saw six fellow motorists who had been pulled over by Florida State Troopers and one more who had been stopped by a local cop.

Fucking pigs, right? Yeah. It’s easy to blame the officers — and certainly at least a few of them are sanctimonious assholes who deserve our contempt — but deep down we know they’re just cogs in a complex government machine. A law enforcement career is anything but lucrative, and as taxpayers we get what we pay for. Let’s just say these folks didn’t end up in this line of work because the brain surgery center wasn’t hiring that day.

Even so, you have to wonder if those often paltry salaries are money well spent. In business, there’s a concept called “conformance costs.” The idea is that you spend a little bit of money up front to prevent problems rather than spending a lot of money after-the-fact to fix them. In other words, over the long run it costs less to do a little extra R&D and testing than it does to recall 500,000 cars to repair a faulty seat-belt latch. The latter would be called “failure costs.” And that’s what State Troopers’ salaries seem like.

We put so little effort into teaching people to be better drivers and so much into punishing them when they aren’t. (This would be less of a problem if we weren’t obsessed with only simple, objective and arguably irrelevant metrics like “speed.”) My stepfather was a driving instructor for many years, and he frequently lamented how far the standards had dropped and how difficult it was to get through to his students that driving is a privilege, not a right. They just wanted their license, sans the lesson on social responsibility — and they knew they could get it. You can be the most selfish, inconsiderate driver on the road, almost entirely oblivious to the world around you, but as long as you can execute a three-point turn and adequately navigate your way into a parallel parking space, you’ll pass the test.

Have you ever seen a State Trooper pull a driver over for moving too slowly in the left-hand lane? What about for failing to use a turn signal? Probably never, and it’s little wonder why. There’s no easily referenced yardstick for “self-absorbed asshole,” and they don’t get paid enough to use their judgment.

What about for driving under the minimum posted speed limit? Again, probably never. You might reason these drivers are usually just conforming to the flow of traffic, but isn’t that exactly what we’re normally doing when we “speed”?

Of course, even if the average cop knows better, s/he probably feels helpless to fix anything. “I’m just one GED holder, what can I do?” Look, I get it. Change is hard. I speak from experience. When I was a hopeless drunk, I was not only one of the worst drivers on the road, but I was spending a virtual fortune on “failure costs.” Each morning, I would wake up, check the driveway to see if my car was present and unscathed, then I’d make my rounds apologizing to the people I cared about for all the egregious things I’d done or said the night before.

Business analysts estimate that spending $0.08 on “conformance costs” up front can save you as much as $1 on the back end. Getting my shit together had a similar payoff. Exercising even the tiniest fraction of self-control the night before paid enormous dividends the next day. More prevention, less (self-)punishment.

It’s not easy, but you figure it out. You either figure it out or you perpetuate the endless cycle of making messes and cleaning them up, and where’s the point in that? Hey, I don’t have all the answers, but it starts with asking the right questions.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m here for you, cops. Let’s fix this thing together.

Right now I have to go register for traffic school, though.