I was on a long, overnight flight this week and three rows in front of me was this middle-aged man telling his entire life story to the poor lady next to him. In full outdoor voice. Like, just short of a shout; the sort of volume you’d use to speak to a 20-person board room without a mic. The more he drank, the louder he got. Not swearing, not saying anything rude, just broadcast mode: So that was my fourth year in the Marines. And then…

Um yeah that shit kinda sucked because I, and everyone around us, was trying to sleep and stuffing various combinations of earbuds, tissues, pillows into ears but this man would not shut up. At some point I had managed to doze off only to be awoken by his pronunciation of like, a comma, and I went to the bathroom and from inside the closed room I could still hear him yammering on.

On my way back to my seat I used all my courage and walked up to him and said, “Excuse me, could you please keep your voice down?”

He stared at me for probably 5 seconds with a look of total bafflement. Like he cannot understand what is happening to him right now.

And then he actually SALUTES me. And goes: “Yes sir.”

And then he spoke at a normal volume the rest of the way :)

Still feel bad for that lady though. Anyway here’s Wonderwall.

I haven’t really used Reddit over the past 10 years or so, ever since they did the terrible website redesign and started pushing people toward the even-worse app. But I have an account and log in once in a while since it continues to be the best/only place to get semi-human information about products, local issues, whatever.

Anyway, I have been bored lately, so I went on Reddit to get a sense for how much I could sell some old junk for, and have been sucked into the Reddit portal for a few days ever since. They really have the “engagement bait” thing down pretty good. You used to have to curate your home feed by subscribing to subreddits that interest you, but now it recommends related topics based on what you click/read and it’s very easy to get lost in a vortex where it shows you tons and tons of opinions that enrage you in the most relateable way.

Where was I going with this? Well, I share the common opinion that these algorithmic feeds are probably doing something bad for the human soul and on other sites (Tumblr, Twitter back when I did that, Mastodon) I have always aggressively configured the app to show me only things I directly follow. But that was an easier choice to make 10 years ago, when the algorithmic feeds were still kind of bad and would surface a bunch of generically popular stuff (sports, celebrities) that it was easy for me to regard as merely a distraction.

Now, the algorithmic feeds are “good.” Not good as in chicken soup, but good as in, shit, this is a really interesting headline, I just want to read the top comment, that’s it, etc. until 2 hours whirls down the pool. And the truth is, Reddit is unlike other social media sites in that (at least to me) the population on Reddit seems quite “normal.” People don’t have super extreme political beliefs or shape their whole life around one issue the way they do on Tumblr or Twitter, they mostly just complain about every day nuisances such as HOAs and bad customer service.

It’s like … a warm and fuzzy blanket that turns off the critical-thinking part of your brain. Everything that trends on Reddit is so cut and dry, easy to process. Relationship issue? Break up with him.

If I know myself, then I will get bored of this and move onto something else in about a week or so, but it is unsettling to see just how easy it is for a website to turn my brain into mush.

So I’ve noticed that when a customer service phone line is experiencing high volume, nowadays they try to build a “safety valve” where they upsell you extra hard on trying to solve your problem via the website and/or make you say “I really need an agent” a few extra times before they put you through. This is pretty annoying but at least there still is a path to a living, breathing representative who can solve your problem as long as you are willing to wait on hold.

However, I recently encountered a truly evil, novel variant of this safety valve. Basically, I needed someone in the billing department at a company to correct an error. Only billing department staff have the power to do this; a regular customer service representative can’t do anything but forward the call to billing.

Naturally, when you first call the company and say “Agent please” 17 times, the agent who finally picks up after waiting on hold is just a general purpose customer service rep. I spoke with the customer service rep and she said, “OK, yeah, you need to talk to billing for that, let me put you through.”

Waited on hold for five minutes, and someone picked up: “How can I help?” I explain my problem. “OK, yeah,” he says, “That’s something you’ll need to talk to billing for. Can I put you through?”

Uhh, sure? 5 more minutes on hold, another rep answers: “Hello, this is customer service, with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

FRICK man

Thinking today about online communities that enable members’ obsessive-compulsive tendencies:

• “Zero covid lifestyle” subreddits/Mastodon groups that encourage germophobia and contamination thinking
• Anti-AI forums that portray any engagement with AI tools or products thereof or products of products thereof as a sin against intellectual property, the environment, and god
• Pro-AI forums (have only really seen this in the context of programming) that portray AI maximalism and “how many repos did your agent create today” as the standard of True Productivity
• Pro-ana forums—literally just communities for enabling anorexia

A common feature of these communities is that they provide users with a moral and social rationale for engaging in compulsive behavior. It’s not just “Here are some AI-free alternatives to XYZ.” There is a whole added layer of “you are a fucked up and bad if you violate the rules of the community.”

This may seem counterintuitive, but for people with OCD and adjacent personality types, the strictness what makes these communities so appealing! The community elevates a particular flavor of scrupulosity above all else, providing members the opportunity to align their identify and self-worth to something consistent and legible. If I can clear my conscience merely by following these 27 rules for covid-free me, or by adopting this specific hard-boiled-egg-only diet (or whatever tf is the trend now), then of course I am going to choose that world, and the attendant compulsive behaviors, over the chaotic moral patchwork of real life.

A rationale that traps people in these communities, and keeps them going even when the compulsive behaviors start to feel unhealthy, is the idea that this is a “community of empowerment”: Look at all these people who share my values and worldview—they must want what’s best for me!

Here is the logical error: Empowerment is (or should be) about empowering you. Communities of enablement don’t empower you; they empower themselves, feeding on your independence and self-worth in the process.

I don’t really do astrology, tarot, and other such woo-woo stuff. But I know a bit about it via osmosis because I follow a bunch of queer people on Tumblr and watch a lot of content on YouTube about mindfulness.

I used to find it annoying how things like astrology fly in the face of science and don’t even both attempting to offer a justification for why they should work or why we should find the theory credible. I know a bunch of smart and thinking people who love to give tarot readings and it has always seemed a bit cringe—like, you can’t possibly believe in that, right?

However, I just watched a video where someone talked about how she had gotten super deeply into new-age spirituality and taken a conscious step back when she realized that all the rituals were preventing her from staring the problem in the face. Her story made me realize that these practices have a sort of meta-value that is difficult to appreciate if all you are trying to do is gauge whether the theory is real or not (it obviously isn’t).

This woman had an experience doing tarot where she found herself “resisting” the cards as they came up—she really wanted to see card A but instead was shown card B, again and again. Through this experience, she was able to work through a blocker in how she perceived herself: She thought she was the sort of person implied by card A, but the deck laid out an alternate narrative. And then she did the hard work of thinking about which narrative she actually wanted to accept.

This wasn’t a story about replacing narrative A with narrative B because the tarot deck knew something new about physics or the human soul. The point was rather that tarot can offer narratological challenges to how we see ourselves, or get us unstuck when we are invested too deeply in the wrong narrative, not unlike lateral thinking.

I’m still not really interested in tarot and I honestly am not sure that all practitioners do so with the amount of self-awareness needed to unlock the benefit described above. But I am open to the fact that human nature is complex and sometimes you need to use a back door to get inside of your head and see what’s really going on in there.