You Can't Make Enjoyment a Goal

 

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.

— Thomas à Kempis

Minus the prayer, I spend a lot of my time in retirement along the lines recommended by Thomas à Kempis, a 15th-century advocate of what today we would call mindful living.

I read, write, ruminate, and try to remain a productive citizen.

I hope in the long run to devote even more time to mindful activities, reducing to near-zero the time that I spend on mindless pursuits, such as watching TV, scrolling through social media, and worrying about the state of the world.

But no matter how I wind up spending my time, there are no guarantees.

For as I have discovered in four years of trial and error, you can't design a retirement guaranteed to produce enjoyment.

You can only try things. 

Golfing, gardening, hiking, biking, birdwatching, breadmaking, singing, sailing, painting, philanthropy, or songwriting.

Globetreking.

Tutoring schoolkids.

Or playing dominoes in the park.

Whatever floats your boat.

When they promise you that, with sufficient planning, you'll enjoy your golden years, the retirement experts are lying to you.

Yes, retirement is an opportunity to reimagine yourself.

You no longer have to react to bosses and customers, or go places and perform tasks not of your choosing.

You're free to do what you will enjoy.

The problem is, you can't decide in advance that you'll enjoy an activity.

You cannot make enjoyment a goal.

"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity," said the writer Paul Goodman.

The best you can do is to test out a lot of important activities, and learn whether enjoyment follows.

While they're still working, people wonder mostly whether they'll have the money to retire. 

The smart ones make saving a goal.

But they don't give thought to whether they'll enjoy retirement.

And there's a good reason for that.

You can't make enjoyment a goal.

Faking It

 

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.

— Arthur Herzog

Fraudsters know it's easy to make a fast buck from a phony "news" website.

To prove how easy it is, journalist Megan Graham conducted an experiment a couple of years ago.

She built her own website and filled it with stories she stole from CNBC.

"Within days, I had the ability to monetize my site with legitimate advertisers," she reported. 

"It was shockingly easy."

Graham's success was no doubt due to advertisers' shoddy ad-buying systems, which funnel ad money through third parties.

Those companies take their fees off the top and buy ads with the money left over.

But in their haste to earn fees, the companies lose track of where that money is spent.

"Half a brand’s digital marketing spend is absorbed by middlemen," Graham says. "It’s impossible for advertisers to know exactly where their money is going."

But suckering advertisers and their agents isn't the real crime here. (It's perfectly legal to create a website filled with gobbledygook.)

Plagiarism is.

To sustain the illusion that they're legitimate publishers, fraudsters rip off stories from legitimate publishers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.  

Fraudsters can even automate plagiarism by using website plug-ins known as "scrapers," which swipe articles from legitimate publishers hourly.

To cover their crime, before posting the stolen stories, the more artful fraudsters run them through a paraphrasing app.

These apps thinly disguise the plagiarism—but only thinly.

They also provide inadvertent chuckles.

Consider, for example, how one fraudster mangled parts of a story about a Congressional hearing on stock-trading:

Original 

Some legislators called for more transparency. Rep. Nydia Velázquez asked about the lack of requirements for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

Fraudster

Some legislators necessitated additional transparency. Rep. Nydia old master asked regarding the shortage of needs for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

In this case, the fraudster simply published the paraphrasing app's results verbatim:

• Called for more was replaced by necessitated additional
   
• Velázquez was replaced by old master
  
  
• Asked about the lack of requirements was replaced by asked regarding the shortage of needs

How do the fraudsters get away with this?

As Graham showed, they count on advertisers' inability to detect original from plagiarized stories.

"It’s easy to make money from advertisers just by setting up a web page," she said, "That means there’s significant incentive to create sites filled with outright plagiarized content."

But fraudsters also count on visitors' shabby reading habits.

As studies have shown, digital readers are evincing ever-greater degrees of "cognitive impatience," robbing them of the ability to "deep-read."

To put it succinctly, digital readers lack discernment: we'll accept any crap that's dished out, no matter the source or the quality.

In a real sense, we're complicit in the fraudsters' crime.

My Rabbit Hole

I lead a monastic life, a theater unto myself, sequestered from the tumults and troubles of the world.

— Robert Burton

Crime, violence, vanity, ignorance, disease, poverty, corruption: I'm done with them. 

Done with the day's news stories and current events. 

Done with the real world—with the theater of the forlorn. Done with sorrows, follies, afflictions, and lies.

I can't take them any more.

I'm heading down my rabbit hole, where I can escape the world's heaviness and be a "theater unto myself."

If you care, you can find me there painting.

"A simple line painted with a brush can lead to freedom and happiness," the painter Joan Miro said.

He got that right.

How about you?

What's your rabbit hole? 

Above: Baron von Hoppin' by Jan Weir. Oil on linen. 6 x 8 inches. The Rabbit King by Joan Miro. Etching, aquatint and carborundum on paper. 38 x 28 inches.

Trump's Undeniable Charm

I so want to ignore Trump, but cannot. His name comes up every day. He's the car wreck you can't look away from.

Yesterday, at the America First Policy Institute Summit in Washington, he outlined his authoritarian vision of his next presidential term.

It was the speech of a crackpot through and through.

And scary as hell.

Yes, Trump is an unlettered buffoon, but he has his certain appeal.

It's the appeal of the reluctant savior, the hero and patriot whose hour has come.

Ours is a “failing nation,” a “cesspool of crime,” he told the crowd of 600. "I have to save our country.”

In March 1940, George Orwell reviewed the first English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf, overlooking the book and reflecting instead on Hitler's charm.

"Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality," Orwell wrote. 

While der Führer promotes a "monstrous vision," "the fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him." Perhaps it's his face, Orwell suggested. 

"It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs," he wrote. "In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself."

Hitler harbors a personal grievance of unknown origin, Orwell said. His impulse is to avenge himself.

"He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to."

But charm alone isn't Hitler's secret weapon, Orwell wrote. He also knows that all aggrieved people crave vengeance.

"Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also want struggle and self-sacrifice. Hitler has said, 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

The similarities to Trump are unnerving.

We all don't fling ourselves at his feet, thank goodness, but millions of Americans worship him.

It's that undeniable charm—and the craving for vengeance—that explain Trump’s attraction.

Down

Well, I caught Covid.

I have been down for three days with the standard array of symptoms, which are now in retreat, thanks to Paxlovid.

Down is our metaphor for ill.

Well is up, ill is down. 

When we're well, we feel up, upbeat, high-flying, on top of things.

When we're ill, we feel down. We fall ill, come down with a disease, keel over, are laid low, feel under the weather, and—if we don't recover—are cut down. 

In a pandemic, we sink fast and drop like flies.

When we suffer symptoms we're afflicted, from the Latin verb affligo, meaning "to throw down." We feel low, run down, down and out, down for the count, or just plain down.

Feeling down sucks. The chronic fever and chills, soar throat and body ache make it impossible to feel anything but down. 

I sleep a lot and watch old mysteries on TV.

Does illness have any upside?

Thoreau thought so. "'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes," he wrote in his Journals.

We can only guess what he meant; there's no more to the entry.

But we can assume Thoreau had in mind recovery.

An illness is an opportunity, first off, to recover our bodies, because in illness, bodily events become the events of the day.

In illness, we can reflect on the unforgiving primacy of our bodies; take inventory of the bad habits we should shed; and remember that our bodies are impermanent—that time's awasting and there's much to be done.

In illness, we can recover our selves. We can read good books—at least until brain fog recurs. (I'm reading, in fits and starts, a delightful biography of the painter Monet). We can read and reflect on our values, our goals, our weaknesses, our debts, and the things we've left undone. We can also cultivate the "attitude of gratitude" for our partners and caregivers—in my case, the same person—and for our family members, friends, and neighbors.

Last, but not least, in illness, we can recover leisure. We can be mellow, indulging ourselves with "extreme self-care." An illness is an excuse to take hot baths, drink soothing fluids, eat comfort food, crawl under a blanket, lounge on the sofa, and take constant naps. We can do these things any day, of course, but not with impunity, because over-indulgence can quickly turn self-care into torpor and sloth.

"I don't respond well to mellow," Woody Allen's character says in Annie Hall. "You know what I mean? I have a tendency, if I get too mellow, to ripen and then rot."