There’s a certain type of self-important buffoon clogging up airports from sea to shining sea who needs to be placed squarely in your crosshairs. The boarding process begins with priority, then the disabled, then the parents of small children before turning to a numerical countdown from small to large. Even if you had never before flown, the numerical part is so easy to comprehend that ignorance isn’t a viable defense. 

Yet, there’s the target – proud owner of a group #7 ticket – stalking so close to the line of people with lower boarding numbers you’d think he’s actually in line. Now, if he was deciding to circumvent the boarding order entirely and was truly in line, boarding group be damned, we’d call him unethical and leave it at that. After all, his gross action has minimal consequences. 

What we cannot tolerate, nay what we MUST not tolerate, is the person who thinks he can hold himself in high moral esteem by not actually getting in line, but by being so close to the line that when #7 beams out over the loudspeaker he’ll be the first #7 to board. For this action has ripple effects that materially taint the boarding process: people with lower boarding numbers will accumulate behind him incorrectly believing they are in the real line. With fake disbelief, our target will eventually address the duped fliers incorrectly accumulating behind him by claiming complete innocence and attempting to redirect blame onto us. We are not fooled. You know what you have done. We know what you have done. 

Sic ‘em. Woof, woof, woof!

You, like so many parents including my own, say you hope your kids wait until marriage for sex. The reasons, I presume, go something like this: Sex is a big deal you should share with someone who truly cares about you. If you wait until marriage, you’ll reduce the probabilities of all sorts of downsides – unwanted pregnancies, emotional distress, abuse, and disease – while making sex maximally special and free from jealousy. I don’t disagree with any of that. I do, however, think it’s worth pointing out that undergirding the advice is the assumption that your children will find love and get married while they are young. Not an unreasonable assumption, especially for an older generation, but still an assumption that will not apply to bachelors/bachelorettes who simply can’t find a good enough match. Worse still, as time elapses, following the no-sex-before-marriage philosophy probably militates against the goal of getting married – the 20-year-old virgin who is “waiting” is viewed more positively than the 30-year-old who is “waiting.”

So, would you still offer the same advice if you 100% knew your kids would be unmarried at, say, age 30?

The thing about hitting the bottom is that outsiders view it much differently than insiders. You are convinced your friend will finally change her ways because of a terrible episode last weekend. How could she not? This was so clearly the nadir. But your friend doesn’t see it that way because, of course, if she was seeing the world clearly she never would have been so close to a nadir in the first place. 

Still, your friend isn’t happy about last weekend, isn’t so confused to think apologies are unnecessary. This is the frustrating disconnect: both parties agree the weekend was bad, but only you think it obviously proves radical change is required. While you grant that your friend hasn’t been a model of responsibility and accountability for some time, you can’t help but think this episode would trigger such traits. And that’s the mistake: projecting your high-functioning self onto someone who is running different software is all but guaranteed to create that frustrating disconnect. 

Software upgrades are indeed always possible for your friend, but don’t count on them being downloaded per your expectation timeline – you truly can’t comprehend what it’s like to be operating from your friend’s base.

The best you can do is not care about what your friend is losing so long as it doesn’t directly affect you. How could she throw away her job, her boyfriend, her whatever? It’s beyond frustrating to witness for any halfway compassionate human, but it is frustration you must learn to dissipate. Step one: make sure you have honestly and kindly expressed your concerns. Step two: help where you can. Step three: stop caring. 

Step three sounds brutal and perhaps impossible. Achieving it begins by never initiating. Instead of calling to check, inviting to events you hope will help her psyche, or comforting when you feel she needs it, you act to help if, and only if, she requests it. There will be times when you feel like you should do more; you must remind yourself you did what you could – it’s on her now.

Lastly, don’t ignore your own selfishness. With a look of utter exasperation, you retell the entire episode to another friend painting yourself as some Mother Teresaesque altruist. You are not. While you truly may want to help, a notable part of you craves recognition for these efforts. And the fact that your friend isn’t singing a paean for your intervention is a contributing factor to your general irritation.

Oh, and one more thing. You may well be perversely enjoying your friend’s struggles because they make you feel better about your own life. Given this undercurrent, your I hope she gets better claims are outright false or deeply conflicted. And if you don’t actually want your alleged friends to be well, maybe you shouldn’t be so worried about others hitting bottoms, maybe you should instead focus on how to improve yourself.

I’m now officially on Team Ursula, and I’m stunned that you and every right-thinking person isn’t with me.

First, I see no good reason to hold a fictional world where people live and speak underwater to arcane bits of American jurisprudence, so the whole “she’s a minor” point is trivial. More importantly, though, Ariel’s world clearly views minors differently since she gets to marry a grown man.

Then there’s your consternation about selling a body part. Indeed there are interesting discussions to be had regarding the sale of kidneys, assisted suicide, or, in this case, selling one’s voice, but it’s certainly not obvious that these acts are “immoral” and should be deemed illegal. But even if they were, we are back to a mere technicality taking down Ursula.

In Ursula’s defense, however, is a concept so robust most people – from legal scholars to the woefully uneducated – would uphold: your word is your bond. Thus, the hysterical, unethical reaction by Ariel and her companions (culminating in murder) is condemnable. Of sound mind Ariel signed a deal – she should have to live with the results instead of getting a bailout from her dad and future husband (future statutory raper, I should say).

Anyway, you are the man and I have learned much from you. I look forward to your next episode.

because it failed to properly address the most frequent objection I hear: “I’m not getting vaccinated because I’m not at risk. Covid is just another flu for someone like me, and I don’t get flu shots.” If you ignore pleas about “community responsibility,” their logic isn’t easy to defeat:

• 79% of deaths are by people 65 or older (30% older than 85)

• 94% of people dying of Covid had at least one comorbidity 

So yes, it’s quite sensible for my young, healthy friends to think Covid is “no big deal,” especially when speaking from a selfish perspective. Of course, there are bad outcomes other than death, but I’ve found those are less motivating once anchored to the You should be terrified of Covid (incorrect) narrative.

Furthermore, if a healthy person is skeptical of the vaccines for any of the reasons you discussed, 12,000 random deaths from vaccines (if true) represent a greater risk than 600,000 deaths concentrated among at-risk people. Additionally, it’s reasonable to expect that the side effects from the vaccine will be worse than contracting the disease. Most people in my circle who got the vaccine were knocked out for at least a day; most who got Covid were asymptomatic.

Lastly, some of these anti-Covid vaxxers (most aren’t anti-vaxx) happen to have a starting bias that’s less trusting of authority. When you rightfully point out the countless institutional failures during the pandemic, you see “exceptions” that reduce your priors while they see “rules” that validate their priors.

A tricky problem, indeed.

Anyway, you are the man and have positively affected my life more than any person I’ve never met. Thanks for all that you do.

That I actually do have a nice, long list of interests. That there may be more to discover, but only in the way that there is more to discover in a city you’ve resided in your entire life. Which is to say, harvesting is now preferable to searching. The shift to harvesting remains true regardless of the weather: it’s the understanding and commitment to this fruit as the best you will do that makes the fruit the best it can be.

try living with someone who lacks a memory. The rhythm of do something nice = credibility gain is immediately snapped and you’ll be forced to witness how much of your own esteem was a product of that tried and true formula.

This reckoning is all the more severe if nobody else knows that you live with someone lacking a memory. It’s just you, all alone, doing yeoman’s work for the direct benefit of someone who won’t actually really know what you are doing. Except, of course, outside of the in-the-moment appreciation that may never be properly communicated, but must be felt, if only for an instant.

I consider it a massive victory to gain even a slightly different perspective on a topic. After all, the most important elements of the human condition have been so thoroughly addressed for so very long that a genuinely new take is incredibly unlikely. This unlikeliness increases the more common, more universal the topic of inquiry: it’s harder to write a unique love song than a track about Newcomb’s paradox.

Enter poet David Whyte doing the near-impossible. Not only does he reliably offer refreshingly new insights, he does so regarding “everyday words” firmly stuffed in a societal bin labeled “We Already Know What These Words Mean.”

I distinctly remember laughing after consuming “Honesty.” I definitely know what honesty is, but I’m sure he’ll say some pretty things that will prove useful in reminding me what I already know. Wrong in a wonderful way. Outlier this was not: at a rate only Barry Bonds could sniff, D Whyte pumps out unequaled originality that will change what you think, know, and believe.

I concluded this from a few of these pieces (which I’ve circled) that I encountered outside of this book. So yes, in breaking from tradition, I am sending a book that I have not completely read. I am willing to make an exception because I’m so confident in Whyte’s brilliance. And, really, if you only read the circled pieces, sending you this book will have been worth it.

it’s our smartphones.

This may seem like a semantic difference, but I contend it’s more meaningful than just that. The big problem is constant access to information, however it’s delivered. Just think of all the dead time 20 years ago: on the toilet, smoke breaks, walking anywhere, waiting for a friend to arrive, etc. That time was reserved for you and your thoughts. You still read and watched the news, yes, but these activities were necessarily limited because you had to be near a TV, computer, or a newspaper. Those limits were destroyed by the smartphone combined with unlimited, cheap cellular plans.

This is not about how we’re all lacking attention now; this is about how ever more of our attention is devoted to the news. Yes, the maximum-outrage bent of social media plays a role. Still, if the news was only delivered in prosaic terms, the problem of thinking wayyyyy too much about politics would exist so long as looking at a phone was more interesting than doing nothing. And just about anything can surpass doing nothing.