There are two different ways to say no and I think it’s important not to get mixed up.

One way to say no is to turn down opportunities. and within this, I would include certain specific no’s like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m not ready” and of course the worst of all, “I’m not worthy.”

But there is another very important kind of no, which is setting a boundary. To say “I’m not going to do that because it’s not right for me,” or “I understand that is what you want, but it is not what’s best for me” is very different from saying “I’m not going to take that chance because I don’t believe in a positive future.”

I’m sure there are narrow exceptions to this general rule, but good things in life come to those who take risks, not to those who indulge only their fears against taking action.

This of course comes back to two main topics in personal psychology that I’ve been studying for the last couple years, boundaries and attachment. These two things are very closely related, because people with attachment problems usually also have boundary problems, and people who learn to set and enforce healthy boundaries usually get that skill from a basis of secure attachment. There are many excellent and lengthy books on these topics, and I can’t expect to adequately summarize them in a blog post. But if I wanted to try, I would say that the essence of good boundaries is being able to recognize the difference between what is good for you versus what someone else desires, and the essence of secure attachment is similarly the ability to be confident that you’ll be OK even if this particular risk doesn’t work out. Secure attachment enables healthy boundaries.

People seem to mostly talk about secure attachment in the context of romantic relationships, but it really does touch on just about everything, particularly your ability to take risks in life. When you are not secure, every risk is amplified on the negative side. When you look at a potential risk like applying for a desired job or pursuing an attractive potential romantic partner, secure attachment allows you to say “the downside risk is manageable, so it’s worth taking a chance on the upside risk.” Insecure attachment, or simply the lack of secure attachment, tends to make a person fixate on and exaggerate the downside potential, the negative aspects of the risk, and often minimize the upside potential. Minimizing the upside potential while amplifying the adverse side of the risk equation is a pretty effective way to talk yourself out of anything. Surefire, even. If you amplify the negative (cost) while minimizing the positive, your math will always “rationally” land on “no.”

And yet we cannot fix this just by saying “yes to all.” The “yes man” concept can be a great exercise, but it’s a learning experience only. (There is a book and a movie directly on this topic, but it’s explored in many other places.) Saying yes to everything might be a great shortcut to taking bigger risks, but it’s also a recipe for burnout and bad boundaries. Saying yes to everything can indeed mean that you take that big adventure or challenging job, but it also might mean you get stuck babysitting while someone else does all the fun stuff. You need to be able to distinguish between the “nos” that enable you to say “yes” when you should, and the “nos” that really should be “yeses.”

I am by no means any kind of expert on this but increasingly I’m receiving confirmation that i’ve learned some things worth knowing and had some not quite unique but unusual enough experiences that there are people who want to know how and why. And the how is “By saying yes when fear might have otherwise led me to a no.” Going to law school, enlisting in the Navy, going river kayaking for the first time in a February when I was in bad physical shape, and yes, accepting that case that my paralegal didn’t like (and quit over) were all risks that paid off in one way or another. And of course the potential payoff was kind of obvious: (the benefits of each is easy to guess) but the costs or downside risks are also obvious enough. Law school could mean debt and lots of work and maybe wasted years, especially if you don’t get through the whole program. The Navy could have been a great career, but it could have led to a tragic premature demise; where it actually went for me was neither of the poles of that spectrum and took years for me to see how it really paid off (and boy did it pay off). Winter kayaking was nuts, and most people still think it is, but it became the best part of my life for a long time. These are prominent examples from my own life but the list from others lives would and does fill entire libraries. 

Did you ever take a big risk that paid off? Hopefully you did, and can articulate what that was. What could have gone wrong? What could have gone right? How did you get your mind to see the upside as worth the risk? Odds are good that it was either being down enough in some way to be willing to risk it all no matter what (rock bottom), or it was having the “faith” or “confidence” or just security it took to believe that taking the risk was worth it. 

Learning to say no at the right times helps you get there. And this is probably an easier thing to see in the other direction, unfortunately. Can you recall a time when you said yes for the wrong reasons, usually a sense of social obligation or frustration, and paid for it, perhaps dearly? Can you think of another time when you instead said no to something that you felt pressured to do but knew wasn’t good for you? 

The subtlety is indeed tough. How do you really know the difference between a good no, that is boundary protection or truly rational self-care, and a bad no, that is letting your fear and doubt take the wheel when it should be confidence or faith in command? I definitely don’t have an easy answer for that either, and if i did it would probably be the “happiness project” key i’ve been seeking. And yet, what was that key? Years of research confirmed that human happiness comes mostly from good social relationships, strong connections that do not drain your energy by more than they replenish you. And this is such a hard thing to get to from a position of trauma, loss, poverty, or disability. But I remain convinced that it is possible. I would never go as far as the “toxically positive” lies that anyone can do anything, or that “If I could do it, anyone can.” Neither of those things will ever be true, at least not in general. What I do believe is true is that everyone who has a bad life could get to a slightly or significantly better life if they are able to learn boundaries and security, and that there are in fact small and concrete steps, which I would generally categorize under “mindfulness”, that just about anyone could take to make small but significant improvements in their outcomes. 

Logically this makes sense. But there are actually some basic problems with it.

In physics (as a metaphor) I could explain it as the entropy problem: no matter what we do to increase how organized and coherent things are, entropy (useless disorganization) of the universe always increases. So we can know as a general principle that we can never make things universally better everywhere – the chaos will only be displaced to elsewhere.

Now to the psychology. Most of our present problems are caused by errors in group reasoning and coordination. Look at politics – it’s a battle to get people to make a binary decision and it’s usually between the builder (Democrat) and the demolition guy (Republican) – plainly obvious on one level, but we have this whole media apparatus trying to convince people that destruction is the true creation.

Making complex decisions is hard enough for individuals, because understanding consequences often requires multiple steps of reasoning and most people want to stop at one. “If I drink this milkshake, it will be delicious” is pretty easy logic but may not ONLY lead to the good outcome. But who wants to add “unnecessary” logic? If I drink this milkshake, it will be delicious, and then what? Will the dairy disrupt my gut functioning? Will the sugar disrupt my metabolism for hours? Will the surplus energy of the drink be converted to fat and add to my weight, causing other problems later? Will it contribute to a future heart attack?

Nobody wants to think about all of that and none of it is on the billboard saying “The shamrock shake is back!”

It’s even worse for politics where the decision or policy that feels pleasing on the surface level – cut a tax, end a program that benefits someone I don’t care about, go to war, drill more oil – often has far reaching consequences that are very hard to understand. Externalities, unintended consequences, perverse incentives, and often even intentional consequences that people don’t talk about. People don’t WANT to think all this through.

So yes, people could in theory do better through democratic means. But getting them to actually do so is no trivial task.

Wrote another essay… probably too long for where I meant to put it. Haven’t edited much yet either. Thoughts? (On rent seeking)

“Rent seeking“ is essentially the tendency in a capitalist economy for all economic activity to be manipulated to create passive income for investors. This is not an automatic or natural process, but it does seem to be an inevitable consequence of the very idea of capital. Basically the nature of capitalists (as in, owners of capital) is to manipulate their property interest and the processes associated with it in order to maximize their income and minimize the work required of them. Obviously the easy example of this is literal rent, such as in real estate, and we see this in entities who provide no real service other than access to physical space and charge enormous premiums. Most working people understand that landlords can be and usually are parasites on the working class, but I don’t think people realize that they are parasites on businesses as well. When you hear them complain about $15 an hour for flipping burgers, isn’t it odd that they aren’t also complaining about $15,000 a month for rent at every Wendy’s? Yet if you look at the budget of just about any retail business, rent is usually the largest line item, which is why one of the major advantages of the largest businesses is the ability to make massive investments in real estate. The greatest cost saving measure that allowed Walmart to become a dominant player was not low wages, but having the capital to purchase all of their own land and therefore get out of paying a tremendous percentage of their revenues to landlords as rent. That’s why most Walmarts are in suburbs and almost none are in established downtowns. 

But again, rent seeking is inherent to all aspects of the economy, not just real estate. Another easy example is intellectual property licensing. Look at pharmaceuticals. These are products that are inexpensive and relatively simple to physically produce, but the manufacturers who own the patents to those chemicals charge literally whatever they feel they can get away with, often times making life itself unaffordable for the working poor. “Rent“ in this case is the manufacturer continuing to extract additional profit from something that they own without contributing additional labor or innovation. And like real estate rent, they will charge whatever they can get away with without any rational connection whatsoever to the cost involved in developing the property. 

The frustrating aspect of rent seeking is that it doesn’t just affect prices, it affects the tangible quality of products and services as well. The popular idea of planned obsolescence is itself a form of rent seeking; rather than provide the best quality product that they can at a reasonable price, manufacturers and merchants of products instead engineer the absolute minimum quality and durability that they can get away with in order to get away with selling the same product repeatedly. Rent seeking also describes the tendency of companies to intentionally hold back features and improvements in order to force users to buy incremental products year after year, most popular in consumer electronics, but also in things like vehicles. 

The one rent seeking trend that has me personally the most annoyed is cloud computing. The cloud computing paradigm is basically the idea of removing functionality from local devices and software and instead moving it to a remote server. Companies like Apple, Google, etc. offer insincere rationalizations claiming that this paradigm is somehow good for the consumer, but it’s generally not – in the era of pocket supercomputers, there’s no real reason to revisit the 1950s-1970s paradigm of centralized mainframe computing, except that doing so allows the capitalists to retain control and charge rent day after day, as opposed to allowing consumers to use the full power of the devices they’ve paid for. In fact, the “cloud” services are usually worse than what could be done locally – less reliable due to internet connections being inconsistent, slower because of communication lag, less secure, less reliable, and of course, most importantly, more expensive. Moving computing tasks to the cloud allows capital to not only convert what could be a one-time purchase to a continuing revenue stream, it also allows them to pilfer consumer data to sell for additional revenue. Notably, when you look at software companies like Adobe and Microsoft who have altogether removed the option to purchase lifetime licenses in favor of recurring subscriptions, the quality of the software either tangibly declines or visibly slows the pace of improvement – Adobe Acrobat Pro has not added meaningful features in decades, despite going from a one-time purchase sometimes as low as $99, to a subscription model with a minimum price of $180 a year, and Microsoft Office… well, in the nineties it was a lifetime license released every two or three years with new features, but since it became Office 365 coming up on a decade ago, I honestly cannot name a single useful feature that has been added, besides imposing cloud requirements on features that used to work offline and making it harder than before to work with files. All of this is rent seeking – making moves in the structure of products and services to minimize the value delivered and the cost expended while maximizing the profit extracted from consumers. 

Rent seeking is responsible for many of our economic problems today, across many industries. Basically all of the problems in healthcare; drug prices, hospital fees, the whole idea of medical debt, and of course every aspect of the idea of health insurance, is all rent seeking – structural changes to how goods and services are delivered and billed in order to maximize profit extracted without increasing services provided. Rent seeking is also responsible for most government inefficiency, as capitalists obtain contracts to provide government services, such as Medicaid and Medicare administration, food stamp distribution, student loan servicing, even jails and prisons, and apply rent seeking behaviors to maximize the revenue extracted while minimizing the labor expended providing services. In our society, massive swaths of government services are administered by private contractors, and each and every one of those contractors, without exception, is engaged in rent seeking behaviors that increase costs and lower quality of service. 

Rent seeking is a fundamental trait of capitalism. There really isn’t any way to structurally eliminate it while preserving the basic idea of the means of production being owned by people other than the laborers themselves. Any time you see the phrase “passive income” you are hearing about rent seeking behavior portrayed as a virtue. 

I have tried not to move my personal views all the way to full communism. There are structural problems with institutional communism as well, and in basically every large-scale attempt at it, rent seeking behavior has still come in and perverted the system. Rent seeking, it turns out, is embedded in human nature even apart from any given economic system. It caused problems in the Soviet Union and in other nominally socialist countries, with government agents taking the place of capitalists in engaging in the rent seeking behaviors. North Korea and Russia exemplify government agents (dictators) carrying out the most extreme forms of rent seeking, finding ways to exploit literally the entire society for personal profit. 

More research can be done, sure, but as I see it the best way to ameliorate the effects of rent seeking – which likely can never be truly eliminated – is with distributed ownership of resources. This means small businesses owned at least in large part by actual workers, and more importantly profits shared directly among workers, not captured by owners. Unions having a greater say in all company policies, not just aspects traditionally considered labor issues. There will still be rent seeking and various forms of corruption, but by engaging democratic labor principles throughout the economy, it can be better controlled and managed. Government action has never been effective at controlling rent seeking because of the tendency of rent seeking entities to seek and gain control of the government. 

Right now, we are very much within late stage capitalism. Capital has gotten very good at capturing all economic activity. Whenever a new business activity comes along and threatens to disrupt things, capitalists buy it out. Basically the entire software industry is premised on the idea that, regardless of what product you are creating, the plan from day one is for the product to be sold to capital for rent to be maximized as soon as the product is proven. Look at Wordle – a disruptive startup piece of software, just a game, that as soon as it was well known was bought by capital and monetized for data harvesting and subscription sales. Look at dating apps – every app that was ever successful has been modified to be less effective, intentionally, in order to maximize revenue (by keeping users on the platform longer spending more money, as opposed to quickly finding a partner and moving on). All social media platforms. There’s no shortage at all of examples of how rent seeking destroys everything that starts off decent. 

I am not an economist, just as I say a simple country lawyer. But these issues are fairly obvious to anyone who looks at them. Solutions are not obvious and basically every economist since even before Marx has worked on the issue in one way or another – Marx and Hegel striving to overcome or solve the issue, but many others simply working on how to make rent seeking more sustainable in order to prevent the revolutions that Marx and the like have all concluded are the inevitable result of end stage capitalism. And that’s where we are. The millennial  and Z generations have had our economic opportunities stripped away from us. Wealth is more concentrated today than ever before, and working age people today have less wealth, less real estate, fewer small businesses, and less disposable income than any generation since the advent of modern social structures. Our forebears in the labor movement had made great progress on these issues, raising wages for workers and forcing capitalists to allow inroads for social mobility, but all of that is basically gone now through regulatory capture and propaganda-driven politics. Capital isn’t winning, it has fully won. Our parents, who benefited from the labor movement more than any generation, have abandoned the movement in favor of the “I got mine” mentality that Fox and others have marketed to them as virtue. 

So where do we go? Is there a pathway forward away from a dystopian return to feudalism and slavery? I am not sure there is. But I don’t think we are all going to agree to give up without a fight. I am troubled by the fact that so many of us seem to understand the problem and so few have any workable ideas at all for how to fix it. I would really like to see a peaceful solution to this issue, but I cannot yet figure one out. And there never will be a simple solution. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to somehow wrest control of the government from capital and impose taxes on capital to start attacking its concentration. We need various kinds of wealth taxes – Warren’s idea of skimming a percentage off of all large wealth pools is a good start, protecting and increasing inheritance taxes and making it harder to dodge them with creative legal structuring is necessary, and restructuring the tax code to start taxing forms of wealth accumulation that are currently not taxed at all. I think that using the structure of government and taxation to forcibly interrupt the concentration of wealth is really the ONLY way to prevent the inevitability of violent mass uprisings and outright collapse of society. I just worry that people will give up and acquiesce to the role of being cogs in an economic machine that benefits only a few elites. 

If you’ve been following my posts lately, you’ve seen me talk a bit about themes of manipulation and the neuroscience of arousal and anxiety. The neuroscience knowledge underpinning these ideas has come to me from several sources, with a prominent one being the book “Behave” by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky goes through the evidence gathered from FMRI studies and other brain imaging techniques by which the activity of the brain has now been pretty well mapped. We do not have the technology to read the actual content of neuron impulses, but what we can do is we can measure what areas of the brain are active and when, and correlate that to behavioral and cognitive outputs. Some of these studies consist of things like showing someone an image or playing a sound and measuring what part of the brain lights up. Others consist of measuring nerve impulses and response times. Studies along this line of inquiry are what led me a long time ago to reject the idea of strong free will.

Consider this experiment: the subject is stimulated with a hot touch (“hand on a stove”) and the activation of nerves and brain centers is measured. The objective measurements show that their physical response, pulling their hand away from the threatening object, happens physically before the nerve signal has had time to reach the brain. But when interviewed, the subject insists that they made a conscious choice to move their hand. This is a study that you could replicate at home if you wanted to; it’s an objective, irrefutable truth, that in at least some clear cut situations, human beings behave without conscious input and then after the fact insist that they decided consciously. This is essentially my baseline experimental input to reject the idea of strong free will, which is a phrase I used to refer to the idea that human beings act entirely out of voluntary choice and therefore can control their own behavior, and by extension are personally and morally responsible for their life outcomes. Because we often act before we are consciously aware of what we are doing, this worldview cannot be true.

So then we go deeper. Sapolsky’s book primarily focuses on the circumstances that stimulate activation of the amygdala and deactivation of the frontal cortex. What you need to know about these two brain structures is that the frontal cortex is essentially the center of both reason and empathy, and the amygdala is the “lizard brain” that acts impulsively and generally just unconsciously reacts to stimuli. You don’t think with your amygdala, it is where you act without thinking. But also, the amygdala sends signals to the frontal cortex that influence it in turn. Activation of the amygdala is essentially responsible for all of our worst behaviors. Racism, sexism, and other latent biases all come through the amygdala. This is part of why you can’t just decide not to be racist, incidentally, but that’s another chapter. The amygdala leads us to make impulsive decisions, to behave emotionally rather than rationally. And it turns out that to most corporations, all of that makes us better customers. And that idea is where I basically lose touch with society.

I have come to realize that social media is designed around the premise that an activated amygdala makes a person a better consumer of advertising. This can be phrased another way: A person who is in a state of mental anxiety and distress, aka a bad mood, is a better customer for social media platforms. This isn’t a secret; even Google won’t hide from you the actual published news articles revealing that indeed, Facebook was caught in the act of and even openly admitted to running experiments on users to stimulate a state of anxiety. This is at the core of their algorithms that determine what content you see as you scroll, and who sees the content that you post and when. And I have come to realize that this is now in all social media and essentially every social app or platform that we interact with. Ultimately, it’s about competing interests. You and the company do not have aligned interests, which is another way of saying that you don’t both want the same thing. When you go onto a social media platform, you want to get updates on the lives of your friends, be entertained, and share the stories and experiences of your life with others. But that is not ultimately what the owners of the platform want. What they want is to get other businesses to happily give them lots of money for ads, and having been on that side of things as well, I can lend you some surprising insights. First off, most ads are “pay per contact” so Facebook is heavily invested in not just showing you the ad but getting you to click on it. What makes a person more likely to click on an ad? My advertising consultant told me, back around 2019, that the best keywords to use to get clicks on your ads aren’t anything to do with the content of your ads themselves or the attributes of your particular target customer – in my case, people who were out of work and had a disability – but instead terms like “hillary clinton” and “donald trump” that simply correlated with people who tended to interact with ads more. Why is that? It’s because those topics of discussion provoke anxiety. When you go on Facebook or Reddit or TikTok to discuss politics, or labor issues, or the various ways you’ve been mistreated, you are yourself entering a state of heightened anxiety, and you are also stimulating anxiety in the people interacting with your posts. Why does the algorithm promote this content, when so much of it is vocally against their interests? The answer is because regardless of the content of the posts and comments, often stuff decrying the very problems these companies are amplifying, those posts are effective at stimulating a toxic state of mind that makes people more receptive to advertising. And they know, because they have the data that tells them that when people interact with a particular user on a group page, they become statistically more likely to click ads within the next few minutes. So, the algorithm works to promote content from individuals who provoke anxiety in others, and invites trolls and bullies to be the first to comment on posts.

This is of course the exact opposite of what you as a user want. When I go on a Facebook group, it’s often with the goal of finding an answer to an obscure question, in hopes that the large size of the group will help me connect with the obscure expert. But what happens instead is that the algorithm shows my post not to the expert who has a track record of calmly and politely explaining the relevant ideas, but instead to a bombastic bully who has no meaningful advice to offer, because the platform’s data has shown the bully does a good job of pushing other users into a mental state where they are more receptive to ads. So the parts of the experience that we as users and the mental health community feel are the worst, are actually the parts that the companies themselves are most interested in. The algorithm is directly working against your goals, directly trying to thwart you from having a positive experience, and ultimately actively and intentionally set up to harm you.

It turns out, though, that it’s not just Facebook. It’s basically any piece of software where this paradigm could possibly be applied. So games, especially mobile games, have gone from being stress relievers to little devices programmed to actually increase your stress, because that makes you more impulsive and more likely to either click the ad (they are all pay per click) or to engage in some microtransaction. And it really is absolutely everywhere on your phone; damn near every app you can get these days has ads, microtransactions, or both. The whole industry rapidly adopted that, and if you talk to individual workers at these companies, most of them will say we have to because the rest of the industry is already doing it. Where else? Search engines. retailers like Amazon, and now even in-person retailers are getting in on it as well, with a recent major newspaper article acknowledging that retailers have intentionally abandoned the old paradigm of making stores welcoming and inviting to stimulate “lingering” and impulse buys from boredom and comfort, in favor of the online data-driven paradigm of triggering anxiety and utilizing the worst parts of behavioral neuroscience to make us better customers, and worse consumers from the individual standpoint. It is absolutely everywhere.

This leaves me in a pretty uncomfortable position. What can be done about this? Many people, most people really, just accept it. They say there’s nothing to be done and it just is the way of the world, so might as well embrace it and just try to get your piece of it while you can. And I can’t do that. But what do I do instead? There’s no way for me to get the message out. Ironically, the platforms don’t mind me talking about it for one simple reason: because by talking about it, I’m doing what they want and getting people in a heightened state of anxiety. Talking about it doesn’t fix it, not directly, because for most people there is no accessible alternative. We are on these platforms because we don’t know of anywhere else to go. How are you going to stop using Google? There aren’t a lot of good alternatives. DuckDuckGo may not do as much cookie tracking, but it’s still driven by a search algorithm that is easily manipulated by marketers. You aren’t going to get meaningfully better results there than on Google; on both you will still get pages and pages of low quality chaff before you see any real quality content. And quitting any of these things is just like quitting any other addiction, except that also everyone around you is still deeply addicted and will actively try to engage FOMO to lure you back. The toxic establishments are everywhere and easy to find with prominent locations and giant signs along every road, while the less toxic alternatives are fewer and harder to find, and for the most part, reluctantly or not, engaging the same techniques on that same logic of “if we don’t do it our competitors will beat us.” And so it gets harder and harder every day to find mentally safe places to engage in basic commerce and the logistics of daily life, as well as to keep in touch with others and to stay entertained. It’s basically everywhere, pervading every corner of western civilization, in our pockets and hands, on the devices I am using to compose this thought.

I’m just not sure what to do with this information besides Quixotically try my best to share it, and I know ultimately that I won’t ever win.

To me, social media had one main draw, which was that it could enable me to interact with a vast number of people.  This is consistent with a dominant paradigm in our society, the idea that you need to interact trivially with thousands of people in order to get what you need from the few that actually do matter.  This is a sound theory, but doesn’t work because the algorithm has contrary goals.  In my mind, posting to a facebook group that has 150,000 members should be a great way to get advice from an expert in the field, because surely out of that 150k users, if 1% have the knowledge that I need, that’s 1500 people who could potentially reply to my post with high quality advice.  But what do I get instead?  Almost always some asshole with something irrelevant and toxic to say.  On a photography group, when I posted asking how to change a particular behavior on my camera, figuring that surely someone out of that many users would have encountered a similar scenario before, instead I just got some asshole telling me that the setting I’m in couldn’t be real because he’s never personally encountered it before, and of course personally attacking me with slurs.  Not helpful.  Earlier, I had posted to a car group about a particular tweak I wanted to make to my car.  Instead of anyone with relevant advice, what I got was a guy loudly arguing with me that I’m morally deficient for wanting to modify my existing car instead of just buying a new car with different factory options for dozens of thousands of dollars.  In both cases, the person with the helpful advice should have been there, just based on the membership numbers, but that person didn’t participate, just some troll.  Why?  Obviously, it’s the algorithm’s choice of to which of the myriad group members to show my post.  And how does it make that choice?  Is it based on the quality of that person’s posts to the group?  No, it’s based on Facebook’s metric of “engagement” which is really just which users prime people more effectively as consumers.  And these individuals who bullied me with irrelevant attacks meet that metric better than experts who give good advice, because they make people upset, and people who are upset oddly enough turn out to be statistically better consumers because they/we are much more likely to make an impulsive decision such as a frivolous purchase.  

Where I get lost down the rabbit hole is that our whole society is based on this premise.  Outrage as a manipulation technique.  All good liberals know that Newt Gingrich and Fox News started the idea, but it may have gone back further in advertising.  Everyone in marketing today knows the idea and has been taught it.  People who are in a foul mood are better customers online, more engaged.  And so the platforms are actively designed to get you in a bad mood and keep you there.  The algorithms reward content not that is “thought provoking” in a positive way, but that makes you angry and irritable.  It isn’t designed to promote a healthy meeting of our social needs through positive interactions, it’s designed to overwhelm our brains and shut off our empathy, activate our amygdylae and get us into fight or flight mode so that we don’t think too hard before clicking an ad.  

It’s not actually good for anyone, really.  It’s good for mediocre businesses who can’t sell their products to savvy consumers, really.  That’s all.  For everyone else, it’s really all downside without any benefit.  

So that’s kind of the crux of it.  The things that I want out of Facebook aren’t happening because Facebook doesn’t want them to.  I want to share my photos and my stories of my travel and life, but for the most part, Facebook is only going to even bother showing them to my 3000 friends if they seem to demonstrate to a test audience that they drive amygdalar activation and get people riled up.  If they don’t, the algorithm just doesn’t share the post widely, and it’s kept quiet.  That’s really the same whether you’re posting to a group or your own feed.  

There’s more, too, but this post I know is getting long.  The short of it is that human beings have a finite capacity for social interactions, and what we don’t realize is that even trivial interactions chip away at that energy.  So for example, when you “just scroll by” to preserve your energy, it doesn’t work.  The very act of scrolling – of glancing at someone’s content and making a decision whether to engage further – took a hit at your social energy capacity.  Scroll for hours and you get into a state of exhaustion, and that’s where they want you, exhausted and less able to make good decisions.  And so from this perspective, paradoxically the algorithm is directly incentivized to show you “bad” content more, to keep you frustrated, keep you on the prowl, to lower your threshold to engage with an ad.  For this reason, it’s basically impossible to scroll or browse the site at all without having your mental state damaged, and the damage is intentional on the part of the platform.  They want you to be hurt.   

How can I rationalize staying on a place like that?  I can’t.  Any excuse I give myself is ultimately just a variation of “just one more hit won’t kill me” by an addict.  No, every time you go on the platform you lose a little bit of your positive energy.   So, I’ve got to leave.  

I could and will write more on this topic and it will be either here on whitewaterlawyer.com or in a published book at some time in the future.  

I’m gonna summarize this as briefly as I can, though off the cuff because I didn’t think to prepare a post before cell service.

For years, one of the core struggles in my mental health has been dealing with social rejection. Most of us primarily think of rejection as in very specific contacts, like if you ask a person out on a date, but in fact we experience social rejection all over the place all the time and Facebook and online dating dial it up by 100. Social media is advertised as giving us increased ways to connect, but really what that translates to for the majority of people it’s just increased opportunities for rejection. Because I have 3000 Facebook friends, everything I post on here becomes an opportunity to be rejected by 3000 people at once. Completely toxic, and something I need to simply stop doing.

In truth, social rejection is completely unavoidable in any kind of setting where we encounter a lot of people. Social contact is critical to human health and survival, and like every need we have it comes with a limit which varies individually. When we hit our limit for social contact, we become incapable of having quality interactions. Most of us don’t think about this, but deal with it instinctively by altering the boundaries that we set up with people around us. This is healthy, and we should do it. It’s worse when you live in a city, because the nature of the setting forces you to interact with hundreds of people every day, and no matter how extroverted you are, you will run out of energy if to each person that you encounter on a city street you say hello and genuinely mean it. Many people don’t understand that this is happening in their lives, but it happens to everyone, and most people survive it by altering their behavior to minimize the psychological expense of contact with others. Blinders you could say; we simply avoid eye contact, often outright ignore each other, or just do our best to get through every interaction as superficially as possible. Almost all of us find this frustrating and almost everyone at some point has bemoaned the existence of the standard dialogue, how are you/fine, what’s up/nothing, etc. We all absolutely hate the insincerity of these strategies, we all depend on the strategy for survival. I had a bit of a false Enlightenment a few days ago when I thought that this was really just a reason why we shouldn’t live together in large numbers, but now I realize that it’s inherent; we will always need to find ways to survive crowded places, And crowded places will indeed be everywhere that people want to be for the rest of history. So, even though we all hate them, we do indeed have to nonetheless employ strategies to minimize the psychological cost of our daily interactions with all of these people.

Anyway, this became crystal clear to me traveling the Alaska highway and noticing that when there are fewer people around in general, we don’t work so hard to avoid each other, and for the first time in recent memory, almost nobody has tried to avoid me or brush me off in the last few days . It eventually got to a point where I had to self limit because otherwise I would be allowed to tell my whole life story everywhere I went. It was great at first being truly paid attention to, and then abruptly I hit that point where I had to start adjusting my behavior. Now it is more clear to me than ever before that I do you need to tell my stories, in full length, but on paper, and books and magazines and the like, and actualize my reality as a writer and not try to pretend to fulfill that need through another channel that wasn’t designed for it, a channel such as social media. I’m not gonna go quite as far as calling this a goodbye post, but lately every time I touch Facebook it becomes clearer that it is not the right place for me. I believe that Facebook is very intentionally optimized to be as toxic as possible, to very specifically overwhelm us with too much stimulus and simultaneously make us feel chronically rejected and keep us filled with a sense of longing for more. I am not speaking a conspiracy theory, this is very much the truth about how Facebook is intentionally designed for “engagement” and well-documented. It’s like a cigarette, it is meant to be bad for you.

So what’s the answer? First off, less of this. Instead, talk to your actual friends. Make a phone call, send a text if that’s all you have, visit someone in person if you can. Stop scrolling, stop checking for likes, and stop posting to places where nobody really wants to read what you have to say like groups we’re a lot of people or just they’re looking for fights because that’s how they get a sense of feeling recognized. And yeah that’s on purpose as well, Facebook is designed to get people arguing because apparently arguing is “engagement“ and that’s what sells their ad views. It’s not designed to inform or connect, it’s designed to addict and enslave. So, though I know that three or four of you have been wanting to use this to follow my journey, I haven’t been posting much largely for these reasons, and I’m not sure that will change. I do have messenger on my phone, and if you genuinely want to keep in touch, use that to send me other contact information. I won’t be deleting Facebook specifically anytime soon because it is a business necessity like it or not, but soon enough I will be converting my personal page to a professional page simply in order to help me reduce my emotional responsiveness to the lack of engagement when I post. I remain present all over the Internet as @Whitewaterlawyer including that with a .com, and who knows how soon, but eventually you will be able to find me at your local bookstore and on Kendall with a couple of titles specifically on the way. There will be a memoir of the 50 state journey and there will be a short essay book with a title similar to “everything I wish you had learned in college but didn’t.”

Otherwise, you know where to find me.

Sometimes, when someone engages in a course of action that I hear described in a particular way, I cannot comprehend the line of logic that would lead a person to do that. There is no emotional input I can conceive of that, through currently documented theories, would lead to that course of action making sense. Accordingly, I tend to suspect that these people must have some motivation that is beyond my comprehension, with one possibility being a thought disorder. Yet, when this is the case, my base assumption is just that that there is a reason, and I simply don’t have enough data to know what it is.

Then, there are times when I hear of a course of action that takes place, and I find the action distasteful, even disturbing, but as I think through how the person must have come to that decision or sequence of decisions, I can discern a clear pathway from input to behavior, though I would have hoped a person could make better choices with those inputs.

This latter scenario is extremely common for me, and the former happens sometimes as well.

However, I quite often hear other people seem to describe a third scenario, a scenario that I somehow cannot recall ever having encountered: the thing is so inexplicable that they just insist that whatever happened was unexplainable, and they “can’t understand why a person would do that” or similar phrasing.

This almost never happens for me.

Sometimes I have engaged in discussion hoping that I was just misunderstood, and that when the person said the third statement they were really just lazily or poetically describing one of the first two. But I’m not really sure, because I’ve engaged, and they typically argue that it’s not worth trying to understand. This is also a foreign concept to me. Apart from perhaps love, which is best enjoyed without too much dissection, I’m not really aware of anything not worth the effort to at least try to understand.

These I think are just some of the ways that my experience is maybe different from that of some other people.