Eating right is a long-term goal, eating better is something we can start today.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think is really great. It’s not just prescriptive tactics (eat this, don’t eat that). It takes a bigger perspective, drawing on psychology and environmental influences, and suggests some guidelines with those pressures in mind. Smart, moderate changes over long periods of time.

There’s a double meaning in the title there: there’s “mindless eating” in the sense of the subconscious habits and tendencies we have around food (grazing, over-ordering, overeating, impulse purchases), and there’s “mindless eating” in the sense of re-writing those scripts and re-structuring our eating environments so that our choices about food are easier, healthier and more automatic in a smarter way. And since we make ~200 food decisions a day, relying on willpower alone is a recipe (ha!) for disaster.

Besides, deprivation diets don’t work. Our body and brain and environment tend to conspire against us. There are all kinds of signals and cues, both internal and external, that persuade us to keep eating. That brings us to what author Brian Wansink calls the “mindless margin”. We can only lose roughly half a pound per week without triggering our bodies’ metabolic alarms. It’s science. Lose weight more quickly, and your body panics a bit and starts compensating by being more stingy, storing more fats, etc. If 1 pound is ~3500 calories, we’re talking about cutting 1700 calories/week or 200-300 calories a day. Doable. At that amount, you basically won’t miss it. Slow and steady is the key.

With a modest goal in mind, the books explores a lot of the psychology and research behind eating, and comes up with some simple tactics. Many of these are great even if you’re not trying to lose weight, but just trying to maintain weight or get some better habits:

• We tend to eat by volume, not by calories. So triple how much healthy stuff you put on your plate. Consider serving 20% less of the unhealthy stuff. You’ll tend to eat all that you serve and see in front of you, so get a head-start on setting a smart satisfaction point. Don’t cut the unhealthy entirely, immediately, because deprivation tends not to work and that’s no way to live, anyway.
• See the food. Plate everything beforehand, and leave the serving dishes in the kitchen. Don’t clear away the refuse like chicken bones or corn cobs. You need a reminder of your progress through a meal.
• Presentation counts. We eat more from bigger packages → Buy food in smaller packages. And dear God, don’t eat straight out of the box. We eat more from bigger dishes and silverware, and and drink more from shorter, wider glasses → Replace your dishes and silverware with smaller versions and get yourself some taller, narrower glasses.
• We eat our expectations. We tend to think better-named products taste better. Those aren’t noodles, it’s Grandma’s Artisan Pesto alla Genovese. Would you rather have wine from Burgundy or Tallahassee? We eat what we think we eat. Remember this if you’re hosting a dinner, or if you’re the primary cook in your household. It’s salesmanship.
• Beware variety. There’s a thing called sensory-specific satiety. You tend to get tired of one flavor or food item and stop eating. Introduce a new flavor(s), and it’s like getting a fresh new appetite. More variety, more consumption. That’s one reason why you overeat at buffets. Besides the fact that it’s really awesome sometimes.
• Beware variety, part II. Since you’re gonna get bored with any flavor, remember you’ll get the most bang for your bite by ending dessert after a few forkfuls. Perhaps split one with the table.
• Beware extra food. “Leftovers signal that you made too much—and probably ate too much—of the original meal.”
• Beware visible food. We eat more of what we see (and think about) often. Apples and carrots go on the kitchen counter. Cookies go in the pantry. (Storytime!: I woke up one recent morning to find a cake on the kitchen counter. I walked past it about a dozen times that day, proud of my will to resist. Then I found myself in the kitchen at 1130 that night, staring at the platter, and sighed, knowing exactly what was about to happen. The next morning I draped a napkin over the cake stand. Haven’t touched it since.)
• Beware eating scripts. The way you always do things. Do you eat cereal until you finish your magazine? Do you eat Peanut M&Ms until the TV show is over? Do you order a cheese plate basically every time you walk into Brick Store Pub because that’s what you do there? (Oh, me? Guilty on all counts…)
• Beware distractions. TV. Books. Friends. These things pair well with just about every dish, and you’re pretty much guaranteed eat more and eat longer. Try pacing yourself with the slowest eater.
• Welcome smart hassles. Leave food in the kitchen so you have to get up for a second serving. You’re much less likely to eat from the candy dish at the office if it’s tucked away in your desk drawer, or better yet, in the office kitchen. Maybe keep only one or two beers in the fridge, instead of the whole six-pack.

Great stuff. A couple other parts I appreciated…

• I loved the observation that fast food places are designed for high turnover: bright lights, hard surfaces that do nothing to diminish noise, and high-contrast and high-arousal colors. I’d never put it all together.
• One reason we tend to buy name brands, despite the added expense: “We like to remind ourselves that we’re not hopelessly cheap.”
• When it comes to comfort foods, males tend to prefer meals like pizza, pasta, soup, etc. (Think: attention, being pampered, cared for). Females tend to prefer ice cream, cookies, etc. (Think: convenience, ease, time away from other people’s demands).
• So simple, but kinda blew my mind: “Food companies don’t care if you eat the food, as long as you repeatedly buy it.”

The First 20 Minutes is a decent summary of what we know about exercise, at least for those of us who aren’t preparing for the Olympics and are just trying to avoid dying. It’s worth flipping through for a hour or so.

“Exercise more!” Yeah yeah yeah. What’s best here is the attitude. It’s not motivational or encouraging, really, but it’s practical. The author calls out her own failings and averageness, which helps drive home one of the early points: if you’re looking to not die a stupidly early death, you have to exercise, but maybe not as much or as hard as you think. This book pairs very nicely with Mindless Eating. Moderate changes with a long-term attitude will do you a world of good.

The vast majority of exercise’s benefits come with any movement at all above zero. Think power law relationship or Pareto principle. If you get about 150 minutes of walking each week (or equivalent light activity), or about 75 minutes of jogging each week, you drastically reduce your risk of fairly avoidable things like diabetes and heart disease. When it comes to mortality, the benefit of a small activity change like that is right up there with laying off cigarettes. Anything beyond is icing on the cake.

And with that in mind, if you’re not a driven athlete and don’t particularly care to be one, you don’t need to train like one. Spare yourself the need for exercise paraphernalia that people would love to sell you. You don’t need special shoes, special clothes, performance gels or nutritional supplements. Basically the stuff you’ve got and a reasonable diet and you’re good to go. And exercise is going to make your brain even more awesome, too. Better memory, better mood, etc.

There’s also some good myth-busting in this book:

• Static stretching before a workout isn’t worthwhile; a simple warm-up is.
• Massages and ice baths don’t have much benefit for muscles after workouts, though the psychological perks probably still exist.
• Your basic grocery store chocolate milk is pretty ideal for workout recovery.
• Carbo-loading before a race isn’t particularly useful if you’ll be replenishing while you run, anyway (via sports drinks, gels, etc.).
• Eight glasses of water a day is kinda bullshit. Drink when you’re thirsty. Don’t drink when you’re not.
• There’s no “afterburn”/metabolic ramp-up over the day after moderate exercise–if that’s what you want, you have to do intense workouts.
• Strength training can be just as beneficial as cardio, especially when it comes to the effects of aging. If you’re not a runner/swimmer/whatever, hit the weight room. And you’re not gonna Hulk out unless you really amp up the protein, too.
• Simple running shoes are best. Shoes that feature fancy structure for high arch or pronation/supination control do what they advertise, yes, but they don’t seem to have any effect on injury rates.

One last interesting idea here was that inactivity has its own physiology. Sitting and laying about cause their own (often negative) processes in the body, like normal gene activities shutting down or enzymes getting made in the wrong proportions. And that’s gonna happen every time you spend a lot of time on your ass. I don’t claim to understand the science, but the point is, exercise can’t reverse all of it. You gotta stand up more. Walk around. Do some more ironing or cooking or carpentry. Pace while you’re on the phone. Dance. Wiggle. Fidget.

One small complaint: I wish this book had a better index.

In mid-September [of 2008], just slightly off-season, I spent a couple days hiking Laugavegurinn (translates something like “the warm pools way” or “the hot springs route”) in south-central Iceland. I started at Landmannalaugar and hiked south to Þórsmörk. Immensely helpful in planning my hike, which I sandwiched between some tourist days, were Andrew Skurka’s Iceland page, Jonathan Ley’s Iceland photos and advice, and Ferðafélag Íslands, a group that maintains some of the very nice huts along the way.

The weather wasn’t very extreme, but it did change frequently, like every half-hour or so. Temperatures were mostly in the mid-40s to high 50s F (5-10C). Low-hanging clouds mostly–just a few hours of genuine, full sunshine. No terrible rainstorms, but the occasional rain changed to sun changed to mist change to light rain change to fog, etc. Heavy winds were common, as there was no tree cover until the last 30 minutes of my hike.

I’ve got the full set of photos on the Laugavegur available on Flickr, but here are some highlights:

First morning out, looking back at the hut at Landmannalaugar:

A short walk over a lava field and into the hills beyond:

Unfortunately fog and high winds were the norm on the way to Hrafntinnusker, where the trail skirts a volcanic crater at about 3000 feet. This is where I had repeated moments of being lost and found, lost and found. And when I stopped to take a break with no shelter from the wind, my hands froze. Lesson learned:

I made it over the crest of the volcano and back down, then stopped and warmed up at Höskuldsskáli hut for an hour or so. The old season’s snow had melted, and the new snow hadn’t yet arrived. So the next stretch was up and down and up and down a series of small creek valleys.

Here’s a look back where I came from. The hut is a speck about 1/3 of the way in from the right edge of the image:

Then uphill again, where thankfully the weather was fair enough to see those famous rhyolite hills:

Next was a steep drop down to Álftavatn, where I spent the night:

The second morning featured several very cold river crossings. Bláfjallakvísl was easily the widest, deepest and coldest I’ve ever crossed on foot. Just over knee-deep at the worst, and really swift. NOT fun. VERY stressful. I had to run for about 10 minutes afterward to warm my frozen legs again.

I was glad that the Nyrðri Emstruá had a bridge!

The most of the rest of the day was mostly flat, going through some very cool volcanic wastelands. Only a few little plants could eke out a living there:

I finished the second day in the early afternoon at Emstrur/Botnar hut, so I spent a few hours trail running and exploring the surroundings, like the Markarfljótsgljúfur. The Markar river canyon is about 500 feet/180m at the deepest point.

The third day was the warmest and best weather, the only day I got to wear shorts. The trail snaked down to cross the river at the bottom of the Syðri-Emstruá canyon (Entujökull glacier in the background), then bent back to head towards the right side of this photo:

A walk in the lovely Sandar, a glacial wash, and then up the basalt cliffs in the distance:

Up and over the basalt cliffs, it goes on to the Almenningar plateau:

One last break to reflect on the trip before the last major river crossing…

…and then into the more lush environs of Þórsmörk Reserve:

And lastly, I took a quick jaunt up Valahnúkur while waiting for the bus back to Reykjavik.

I highly recommend this trail if you happen to be nearby. I’d gladly do it again.

Long-time readers will recall that I loved The Bin Ladens, a previous book by Steve Coll. So, I was really glad to get a copy of Private Empire in the mail a few weeks ago¹.

This one doesn’t have the same narrative drive as The Bin Ladens (it’s not as biography-based, for one), but it’s dang good. It covers the modern history of ExxonMobil from the 1970s, 80s, and beyond, just touching on the old Standard Oil days briefly here and there. The bookends are disasters: Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon. It’s an ominous way to open and close the book, but those parts—like the middle sections on ExxonMobil’s involvement in Indonesia, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia and elsewhere—are really fair and thoughtful. I’d wager that public opinion weighs pretty heavily against ExxonMobil, so a lot of this is good corrective or at least perspective. Think of it as a healthy re-complication of the simpler stories you might hear or assume, whatever your stance.

My favorite parts of this book weren’t the environmental concerns or the human rights horrors or the tangled geopolitical wrangling so well documented here, but the perspective on the business side. It woke me up to the sheer nerve (impudence?), courage (recklessness?), and (evil?) genius it takes to run a business like this. It’s incredible. Things I hadn’t thought much about before:

• The planning has to take into account huge time scales. If you’re building new wells, new pipelines, new plants, and new shipping routes… for billions of gallons of reserves… in a war-torn country… you’ve got your hands full. And on top of that, assessing environmental risk, political stability, and managing investments over 30, 40, 50 years and behond in those environments, and managing to turn a profit? I can’t help but admire it.
• ExxonMobil much prefers to own the whole process, upstream to downstream, from ground to well to refinery to processing to gas stations and other end products. Reminds me of Apple. Owning the whole value chain makes it easier call your own shots.
• ExxonMobil isn’t a place for cowboys. Of all the big players in the industry, it has the reputation for being the most anal, rigid, calculating, precise, conservative, family-oriented, engineering-minded culture. And the most cocky. But it’s earned.
• I kind of cynically assume a little bit of chicanery for any really big company, but I was surprised by how much ExxonMobil seemed to prefer to stay away from the government. A request here and there, but the firm seemed staunch in its stance: it’s not the Red Cross, and it operates worldwide. Global responsibility to employees and shareholders means that ExxonMobil’s interests may or may not always align those of the U.S. government. Best to keep your distance and keep the favors to a minimum.
• With these volumes of money that ExxonMobil makes, tax becomes a huge concern in negotiations and business operations worldwide (not just the IRS). Even small variations can swing earnings.
• There’s a great section on the we-started-the-Iraq-War-for-oil fallacy and our dysfunctional understanding of “energy security” in general, a corrective I wish we’d heard more 10 years ago. But, alas, it’s so hard to keep a holistic perspective in stressful times.

If anything, Coll errs on the side of detail. There were times I wondered why I was reading about so-and-so’s time in college or career trajectory, when I knew I wasn’t going to remember it and they wouldn’t be mentioned after the next 7 pages. But it’s that careful, steady, inclusive approach, carried out over hundreds of pages, that makes it easier to trust Coll’s sense for the nuances in really sensitive topics. Think “oil industry” or “global corporation” and try not to have a strong gut reaction. I’d thank this book for tempering my knee-jerk response on a lot of topics. Life is messy. I’m really glad I read this one.

—
^1. Disclosure: I got it for free on the condition that I write about it. I would have gotten it for free from the library anyway because I like Coll’s writing. But just so you know.

Then I spent roughly 900 hours punching holes and sewing:

Not too shabby.

My hindsight hunch is that I should have reinforced this better. Time will tell:

Dyed and ready for action:

Fits the 13-inch model like a dream. Other things I’ve made: a super-simple wallet, a leather tray.

This is all about violence, evaluating risk, and how to keep yourself from being a victim. The Gift of Fear is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

The key idea here: trust your intuition. Early on in the book, Gavin de Becker won my interest when he appealed to my inner word-nerd. He points out that the root of the word intuition is “tueri”, meaning protection, defense, guardianship. As he says later, when it comes to violence,

Intuition is always right in at least two important ways: 1. It is always in response to something. 2. It always has your best interests at heart.

Whether we respond correctly, or even interpret those signals correctly, is another matter.

We’re born with a lot of relationship sensitivity (“all relationships start with predictions”), and by the time we’re adults, we’ve got pretty good wiring. Becker:

You can imagine every human feeling and it is that ability that makes you an expert at predicting what others will do.¹

So he gets practical. Those ideas and impulses tip us off. Let’s look at De Becker’s Pre-Incident Indicators or PINS. Lazily copying and paraphrasing from the Wikipedia page on the book:

• Forced Teaming. This is when a person tries to pretend that he has something in common with a person and that they are in the same predicament when that isn’t really true. Look out for “we” and “us” and “together”-type language.
• Charm and Niceness. This is being polite and friendly to a person in order to manipulate him or her. “Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait”.
• Too Many Details. If a person is lying they will add excessive details to make themselves sound more credible to the victim… and to themselves.
• Typecasting. An insult to get a person who would otherwise ignore one to talk to one. Negging, anyone?
• Loan Sharking. Giving unsolicited help and expecting favors in return. Give a little, collect a lot more.
• The Unsolicited Promise. A promise to do (or not do) something when no such promise is asked for; this usually means that such a promise will be broken. For example: an unsolicited, “I promise I’ll leave you alone after this,” usually means you will not be left alone. Similarly, an unsolicited “I promise I won’t hurt you” usually means the person intends to hurt you. An unsolicited promise shows nothing more than that the person wants to convince you of something. There’s no collateral.
• Discounting the Word “No”. Refusing to accept a clear rejection is a big signal.

What instantly struck me about this list? It made me think of salesmen and pick-up artists. Not all of whom are criminals, but winning confidence and power plays a big part. And thus, one of the best forms of protection is a healthy bullshit detector. After all:

The nicest guy, the guy with no self-serving agenda whatsoever, the one who wants nothing from you, won’t approach you at all.

It follows from those PINs that good strategies to avoid coercion or worse might include…

• A single, crystal-clear, direct “NO”. Anything less as a first volley is open to negotiation. Backing down from it later just makes you weaker.
• Communicating awareness. If you’re walking down the street, that might mean direct eye contact and sustained attention on an approaching stranger.
• Don’t give threats credence. Threats don’t usually come from a position of power, anyway. It’s the listener who decides how credible it is. After all, who benefits if the victim acts like the threat will be carried out? Which relates to the idea of…
• Forcing the person to be explicit. If extortion is the goal, “I don’t understand what you’re getting at” forces the asshole to be explicit. Many would rather back down rather than be clear about the evil they want to do.
• Allow opportunities for retreat. Give alternatives to violence. Avoidance first, folks. Fighting is always a later option, but it’s really hard to reverse it.

I should mention here that the book is focused on predicting and avoiding pursuit/coercion/violence from men, as we are the source of most of it. And it won’t surprise you that women are much more likely to listen their instincts without second-guessing.

I thought the best parts of this book were on relationships and stalking, but there were other good sections on workplace violence and threats to celebrities/politicians, and plenty of great psych-factoids throughout, like:

• Everything a person does is done twice: once in the mind, once in execution. Ideas and impulses are tip-offs. Someone who has bothered to smash a beer bottle is more likely to fight. Suicidal people who can describe their intended methods in greater detail are at a much higher risk.
• Threats against random public figures are generally unreliable. More likely tip-offs are (perceived) connections like lovesickness, adoration, rejection, feelings of debt or being owed something.
• Non-anonymous threats are more likely to be credible and dangerous, because they’re attention-seeking.
• Restraining orders are common, but aren’t much of a solution. Shelters, on the other hand, are generally awesome at preventing murders.
• Stalking/unwanted pursuit is a form of relationship addiction. The only way to make it better is to make yourself unavailable.²

And later there’s a good bit on anxiety and worrying, when he points out that “Most often, we worry because it provides some secondary reward”. Like what? Worry is a way to avoid change, avoid a feeling of powerlessness, avoid disappointment in the future by moderating expectations, and to connect or commiserate with others. I also like his notion that “anxiety is caused by low-confidence predictions”.

Read this book. Get other people to read it. It is so good.

—
^1. Two tangents here: One, it makes me think of the power of fiction — how much we relate to fictional characters, how the fun of great storytelling is our participation and trying to guess what’s coming. And two, it reminds me of a part from the Philosophy Bites interview with Alex Neill talking about the paradox of tragedy: We love tragedy not only because it tugs our heartstrings but also because it offers insight. And that insight is what sets it apart from other blatant emotion-rousing genres like horror or porn.
^2. Carolyn Hax connection here: Behavior is easier to change than expectations are. Never not loving Carolyn Hax.

What I love about Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter is Tom Bissell’s ambivalent relationship with video games. This is a book by an enthusiast, yes (aren’t most books?), but he also hates them sometimes:

I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do, especially when, very often, I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how purely they bring me back to childhood, when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single-handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car while the police try to shoot out my tires or told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was the rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are twelve years old. They are far less intriguing if you are thirty-five and have a career, friends, a relationship, or children. The problem, however, at least for me, is that they are no less fun.

And that’s the thing. I’m reminded of Daniel Mendelsohn once again, from How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken:

Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.

And Bissell is definitely a critic, and a very good one. He gets really annoyed when video games don’t try hard enough, or try to do things they really aren’t made for. Here he is in the midst of talking about Fallout 3 and other open-world games (the genre at the core of the book) in general:

The art direction in a good number of contemporary big-budget video games has the cheerful parasitism of a tribute band. Visual inspirations are perilously few: Forests will be Tolkienishly enchanted; futuristic industrial zones will be mazes of predictably grated metal catwalks; gunfights will erupt amid rubble- and car-strewn boulevards on loan from a thousand war-movie sieges. Once video games shed their distinctive vector-graphic and primary-color 8-bit origins, a commercially ascendant subset of game slowly but surely matured into what might well be the most visually derivative popular art form in history.

The art comparison comes up a lot. Here he talks about the idea of surrender and participation in art, which gets right to the core of video games’ special offering and really, really difficult challenge:

When I watch a film, the most imperial form of popular entertainment—particularly when experienced in a proper movie theater—I am surrendering most humiliatingly, for the film begins at a time I cannot control, has nothing to sell me that I have not already purchased, and goes on whether or not I happen to be in my seat. When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent. Entertainment takes it as a given that I cannot affect it other than in brutish, exterior ways: turning it off, leaving the theater, pausing the disc, stuffing in a bookmark, underlining a phrase. [...] Playing video games is not quite like this. The surrender is always partial. You get control and are controlled. Games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike any other form of popular entertainment.

And later, tying in with Mass Effect, he talks more about the control that video games offer. It’s not just kinetic/spatial; it can be moral:

Games such as Mass Effect allow the gamer a freedom of decision that can be evilly enlivening or nobly self-congratulating, but these games become uniquely compelling when they force you to the edge of some drawn, real-life line of intellectual or moral obligation that, to your mild astonishment, you find you cannot step across even in what is, essentially, a digital dollhouse for adults. Other mediums may depict the necessary (or foolhardy) breaches of such lines, or their foolhardy (or necessary) protection, but only games actually push you to the line’s edge and make you live with the fictional consequences of your choice.

There’s one excellent extended passage—seriously: exciting, edge-of-your-seat writing about a video game—where he talks about a particular moment of Left 4 Dead heroism. I’ll let you find the details in his book, but it’s followed up with this sharp comedown experience:

I then realized I was contrasting my aesthetic sensitivity to that of some teenagers about a game that concerns itself with shooting as many zombies as possible. It is moments like this that can make it so dispiritingly difficult to care about video games.

Delightful sometimes. Infuriating sometimes. That’s video games for you. I haven’t really played video games since I sold my dearly beloved PlayStation and Dreamcast. This book made me miss them.

It’s a stretch to call this a review, because I mainly just wanted to purge some quotes that I’ve had lying around that I kept being lazy about sharing because they were a bit too long or needed more context than I wanted to bother with on my tumblr. Anyway. Great book, especially the first five chapters on modernity, business, art, self, etc.

On bullshit, and where to find it:

It is hardly surprising to find that the two areas of human enterprise most concerned with sincerity as opposed to truth—namely, politics and advertising—are also the two areas most steeped in bullshit. Or would it be better to say that politics and advertising are the two areas most concerned with the appearance of authenticity? This might be a distinction without a difference.

Validating the suburbs:

The people who move to the suburbs aren’t nearly as stupid or careless or brainwashed as the urbanites seem to think. They know they’re going to get a lawn, a garage, and a backyard. They know they will be miles from a store or cafe, and that they’ll have to drive everywhere. Most people move to the suburbs with eyes wide open, fully aware of the tradeoffs they are making. They are not looking for some pastoral idyll, but for more privacy, space, quiet, and parking.

On meaning in a modern world:

The search for authenticity is about the search for meaning in a world where all the traditional sources-—religion and successor ideals such as aristocracy, community, and nationalism-—have been dissolved in the acid of science, technology, capitalism, and liberal democracy. We are looking to replace the God concept with something more acceptable in a world that is not just disenchanted, but also socially flattened, cosmopolitan, individualistic, and egalitarian.

A good example of his cantankerous sarcasm. He likes jabbing at liberals:

The exact mechanism of the apocalypse is unknown, but if you troll around the Internet you can find any number of speculative scenarios. Most of them presume that there’ll be a sort of massive ecological collapse and extinction event caused by a combination of global warming, deforestation, peak oil production, overfishing, overpopulation, suburbia, megacities, bird flu, swine flu, consumer electronics, hedge funds, credit default swaps, and fast food.

With regard to recent developments in art (specifically pivoting off of Alec Duffy and his Sufjan Stevens recording):

Can you see what is happening here? It is the return of the aura, of the unique and irreproducible artistic work. Across the artistic spectrum, we are starting to see a turn toward forms of aesthetic experience and production that by their nature can’t be digitized and thrown into the maw of the freeconomy. One aspect of this is the cultivation of deliberate scarcity, which is what Alec Duffy is doing with his listening sessions. Another is the recent hipster trend to treat the city as a playground—involving staged pillow fights in the financial district, silent raves on subways, or games of kick the can that span entire neighborhoods. This fascination with works that are transient, ephemeral, participatory, and site-specific is part of the ongoing rehabilitation of the old idea of the unique, authentic work having an aura that makes it worthy of our profound respect. But in a reversal of Walter Benjamin’s analysis, the gain in deep artistic appreciation is balanced by a loss in egalitarian principle.

On consumption gravitas:

Conspicuous authenticity raises the stakes by turning the search for the authentic into a matter of utmost gravity: not only does it provide me with a meaningful life, but it is also good for society, the environment, even the entire planet. This basic fusion of the two ideals of the privately beneficial and the morally praiseworthy is the bait-and-switch at the heart of the authenticity hoax. This desire for the personal and the public to align explains why so much of what passes for authentic living has a do-gooder spin to it. Yet the essentially status-oriented nature of the activity always reveals itself eventually.

Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.

Funny to think how I am still very much myself. Same Mark, more detail. If you overlapped all my pattern-stereotypes I had around 1992, you’d get a pretty good picture of me today of what 2012 Mark is like.

Summer of last year, I started reading more works of and about Stoicism, and that led to tumbling a lot of stoicism quotes. This was not a new interest by any means. I remember thinking Stoics were cool back in childhood, when I first learned about them. I think my interest then was more of a tough-guy, counter-culture, I-am-a-rock/island sort of thing. Maybe a way of validating introversion, independence, self-protection.

Men seek retreats for themselves–in the country, by the sea, in the hills–and you yourself are particularly prone to this yearning. But all this is quite unphilosophic, when it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself. No retreat offers someone more quite and relaxation than that into his own mind, especially if he can dip into thoughts there which put him at immediate and complete ease: and by ease I simply mean a well-ordered life. (4.3)

I remember picking up Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations on at least three different occasions, but never finishing. In fact, barely starting each time. Some lessons can’t be learned early, I guess. I still like the independent-minded ideas, but I think now a lot of what gets me are the ideas of acceptance, attitude, gratitude (which is the focus of the entire amazing first chapter). And, yeah, being hard on myself….

They cannot admire you for intellect. Granted–but there are many other qualities of which you cannot say, “but that is not the way I am made”. So display those virtues which are wholly in your own power–integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity. Do you not see how many virtues you can already display without any excuse of lack of talent or aptitude? And yet you are still content to lag behind. (5.5)

I bookmarked the hell out of it when I was reading and made a bunch of notes to myself (hypomnema!). I’ll probably be turning back to this one for a long time to come. All the quotes below come from Martin Hammond’s translation. The numbers refer to chapter and sub-section, should you decide to pick up this book. Which you should do.

—
On gossip. (3.4)

Do not waste the remaining part of your life in thoughts about other people, when you are not thinking with reference to some aspect of the common good. Why deprive yourself of the time for some other task? I mean, thinking about what so-and-so is doing, and why, what he is saying or contemplating or plotting, and all that line of thought, makes you stray from the close watch on your directing mind.

On hurt and its source, our compulsion to draw conclusions and render judgement on what has befallen us. (4.7)

Remove the judgement, and you have removed the thought “I am hurt”: removed the thought “I am hurt”, and the hurt itself is removed.

On revenge. (6.6)

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

On transience. There were several moments of this kind of beautiful writing that makes you slow down or rest the book and think it over. (6.15)

Some things are hurrying to come into being, others are hurrying to be gone, and part of that which is being born is already extinguished. Flows and changes are constantly renewing the world, just as the ceaseless passage of time makes eternity ever young. In this river, then, where there can be no foothold, what should anyone prize of all that races past him? It is as if he were to begin to fancy one of the little sparrows that fly past–but already it is gone from his sight.

On history repeating and our shared universal experience. (6.37)

He who sees the present has seen all things, both all that has come to pass from everlasting and all that will be for eternity: all things are related and the same.

On adapting to and embracing what is, caring. (6.39)

Fit yourself for the matters which have fallen to your lot, and love these people among whom destiny has cast you–but your love must be genuine.

On composure, comportment, grace, style. (7.60)

The body, too, should stay firmly composed, and not fling itself about either in motion or at rest. Just as the mind displays qualities in the face, keeping it intelligent and attractive, something similar should be required of the whole body. But all this should be secured without making an obvious point of it.

On vice and keeping good company. (7.71)

It is ridiculous not to escape from one’s own vices, which is possible, while trying to escape the vices of others, which is impossible.

On change, being wrong, graciousness. (8.16)

Remember that to change course or accept correction leaves you just as free as you were. The action is your own, driven by your own impulse or judgement, indeed your own intelligence.

On looking back, looking forward, being present, letting go. (8.36)

Do not let the panorama of your life oppress you, do not dwell on all the various troubles which may have occurred in the past or may occur in the future. Just ask yourself in each instance of the present: “What is there in this work which I cannot endure or support?” You will be ashamed to make any such confession. Then remind yourself that it is neither the future nor the past which weighs on you, but always the present: and the present burden reduces, if only you can isolate it and accuse your mind of weakness if it cannot hold against something thus stripped bare.

On simplicity, kindness, perseverance, virtue. Like water off a duck’s back. (8.51)

If a man were to come up to a spring of clear, sweet water and curse it–it would still continue to bubble up water good to drink. He could throw in mud or dung: in no time the spring will break it down, wash it away, and take no color from it. How then can you secure an everlasting spring and not a cistern? By keeping yourself at all times intent on freedom–and staying kind, simple, and decent.

On fame, attention, transience, obsessions, Facebook, death. (10.34)

All things are short-lived–this is their common lot–but you pursue likes and dislikes as if all was fixed for eternity. In a little while you too will close your eyes, and soon there will be others mourning the man who buries you.

On duty, openness, constancy, honesty. (11.27)

The Pythagoreans say, “Look at the sky at dawn”–to remind ourselves of the constancy of those heavenly bodies, their perpetual round of their own duty, their order, their purity, and their nakedness. No star wears a veil.

On dying. (12.36)

It is like the officer who engaged a comic actor dismissing him from the stage. “But I have not played my five acts, only three.” “True, but in life three acts can be the whole play.” Completion is determined by that being who caused first your composition and now your dissolution. You have no part in either causation. Go then in peace: the god who lets you go is at peace with you.

January
The American

February
Double Indemnity
The Virgin Suicides
Brazil
Force of Evil

March
High Noon
Chinatown
Winter’s Bone

April
Some Like It Hot
The Social Network

May
Shotgun Stories
ATL
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

June
127 Hours, by default.

July
Days of Heaven

August
3:10 to Yuma
The Last Days of Disco

September
Apocalypto
The Seventh Seal
Ivan’s Childhood

October
Drive
Mystic River
Scarface (1932)

November
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Badlands

December
D.O.A.
The Purple Rose of Cairo
The Artist