By and large, the easy way out… sucks.

But being addicted to it, to the pint where you can’t imagine taking any other route, is even worse.

It’s not hard to see how the easy way out becomes addictive. Laziness is an instinct, despite what some gym teacher types might think. We would be inefficient creatures indeed if we did not have an instinct for conserving effort.

This instinct makes avoiding effort inherently pleasurable. We get a nice buzz of electricity in the reward center of our brains when we successfully avoid “unnecessary” effort.

Throw in an element of feeling clever and smart that you came up with an easier way to do something (or avoid doing), and you have a recipe for addiction right there. Two kinds of reward means twice as addictive.

Then add in a third reward : relief of fear or panic. If the effort involved, even in something extremely minor, is also something which causes panic in you, then escaping the situation will make you feel like you just escaped a predator.

And our wonderfully plastic minds are perfectly capable of increasing our tendency to panic in order to get those three rewards. There you are, feeling efficient, smart, and relieved, and even proud of yourself, when all you have really done is reinforced the behaviour pattern that is ruining your life.

When you always, compulsively, take the easiest way out of a situation, you become a very weak and fearful person. Your list of options in life gets smaller and smaller with every easy way out you take, and soon you are effectively almost immobile because your addiction has hollowed you our and made you blind both to the damage you are doing to yourself and the possibilities that lie outside your proscribed low-panic area of comfort.

The easy way out of the situation is rarely ever the best choice. It precludes you actually dealing with situations, only escaping them, and so your problems only get worse over time and, of course, the worse they get, the more you want to escape them and the worse you get at actually dealing with them.

And you have to ask yourself : why am I looking for a way out all the time anyhow? What’s wrong with staying in? Surely there has got to be things out there that are worth staying in for. Only a fool would think that they can somehow know enough about the world to say that there is nothing worth sticking around for.

The truth is that it is the addiction that tells you that nothing is worth the cost of avoiding or even just delaying taking that easy way out exit. As long as you believe that, the addiction remains in your control. You are its prisoner. And if you dare to start looking outside those prison walls, it will enforce its will via fear.

But think about it. What is so bad about staying in? It’s not like you are trapped. The easy way out is still there. You could stay in the situation just to see if maybe it gets better. Maybe it won’t seem so scary if you just hang around. Maybe you will start to get curious. Maybe you will find your motivation to go forward.

And could it really be true that no situation is worth the cost? Not even extremely wonderful ones? Winning a million bucks? Meeting your favorite celebrity? Having the exact kind of sex that you have always wanted? Nothing?

Would you really turn down situations if they involved staying in an uncomfortable or scary situation for longer than you would like when there is an easy way to escape the whole thing?

No, right? So we have found that some things really are worth the cost of sticking around. It’s just a matter of degree.

Now think of those wonderful things, and imagine them happening. You’re in no danger… you are perfectly safe. It is just an exercise of the imagination.

Imagine them happening in as much detail as you can. It will help you to feel like it is a real possibility. Imagine them, then treasure the memory of that experience.

You will begin to get curious about the world. It doesn’t matter how probable the thing you imagined is, all that matters is believing that it is possible. That will provide you with the motivation to explore your life as it is now, and find possibilities that your addiction did not let you see before now.

Even finding one little thing that makes your life a little happier will do wonders for your outlook. You will begin to believe that there really IS happiness out there for you to find, and that if you just keep looking for it, you will find it.

And when the addiction senses it is dying and fights back with the fear and panic that has served it so well in the past, do not fight the fear. Fighting it only makes it stronger.

Instead, let the fear pass through you. Offer it absolutely no resistance. Let it pass through you like a crowd through the sky. And when it has passed through you, it will be gone… and you will still be there.

You can kill your addiction to the easy way out. It won’t be easy, but once you have the tools, victory is inevitable. Every time you hang in there and survive the panic without taking the easy way out, you will grow stronger and the addiction will grow weaker. Do this, and you can murder that evil addiction.

Soon, you will be able to look upon your addiction with amused pity. Oh, there’s that silly old addiction again, trying to scare me. What was once a mighty demon is now no more than a cranky kitten. You can keep it as a pet.

Don’t get trapped by the easy way out. Believe that there are things out there that make fighting the addiction worthwhile.

And someday, you will be able to leave the proscribed life behind.

I will talk to all of you nice folks again tomorrow.

Basically, it’s because we don’t know shit about probabilities and it makes us superstitious.

We all do it, or at the very least, all of us who do not live in small towns that are smug about how safe they are. We leave the home, we lock the door. To do anything else is simply unthinkable. If we come home to find the door unlocked, we panic. Maybe there’s a burglar in there RIGHT NOW!

This is true even if we clearly remember neglecting to lock the door on the way out. We are convinced that if we do not lock our doors every time, we WILL get robbed.

And if we find that open door and it was someone else who forgot to lock it, we freak out like that person had left a loaded gun in your child’s playpen. You idiot, they could have robbed us blind! And if they forgot to lock it at night, it’s even worse. They could have murdered us in our sleep.

Some people even lock the doors while they are home, and awake. That is how bad this paranoia has gotten.

But what is it we think is going to happen? What are we so afraid of? What exactly is the sequence of events we think will lead to us being burgled if we don’t lock our doors?

First off, how does a potential thief even know your door is unlocked? Unless they were there at the exact moment when you left and watched intently to see if you locked the door or not, the only way to find out that your door is unlocked is to go around checking doors, and that kind of thing tends to attract attention.

And what is the thief doing in your neighborhood anyhow? Despite what we seem to think, there are not gangs of criminals continuously circulating every neighbor like hungry wolves, just waiting for the first sign of weakness so they can strip your home barer than a well picked carcass.

And really, while nobody wants to lose their hard earned stuff, it’s not the end of the world.

Sure, breaking and entering does legit happen. But like all crime, it is extremely rare. You are far more likely to get in an auto accident than be the victim of random crime, and yet we act and think like our homes and our possessions are under constant threat of being violated.

Where does this superstitious belief in personal danger come from? And can we free ourselves of it? Should we?

I think this belief has several sources. The first and most obvious is the media. Crime might not pay, but crime sells. We are constantly bombarded with exaggerated stories of crime. Some of these stories are true, but even they are distorted for maximum impact by a sensationalistic news media.

But the vast majority of them are fictional. And here’s the funny thing about human nature : if you see enough of something, even if you know it’s fictional, you start to believe it is true. Sure, an individual instance of fictional crime has a tiny impact compared to the real thing, but if you multiply that tiny impact by thousands of instances of seeing crime in some form or another in the media, you can see how it can seep into the public consciousness and convince you that crime is rampant.

But why does that world view appeal to us? What is the draw of crime stories? What would cause us to actually prefer the version of reality in which crime threatens everyone constantly?

For one, it’s more exciting than the boring truth that most of us lead extremely safe and secure lives free of and serious danger, and while that is very good and a monumental and unparalleled achievement in human civilization, it can also get pretty boring, and thinking we are surrounded by crime and mayhem livens things up a little.

I think it goes deeper than that, though. I think there is a deep animal need that belief in crime’s prevalence satisfies. We are not programmed for safety. We are programmed to be vigilant, alert, and ready to defend ourselves at a moment’s notice. That is how our predecessors survive. The alert, paranoid, vigilant cave dwellers survived the night, and the ones who let they guard down were tomorrow’s sabertooth shit.

This is so deeply ingrained in us that we cannot handle the idea of actual safety. Part of us, at least, has to believe that there is something out there in the darkness, ready to take us down, or the world simply stops making sense to us. So when the world refuses to provide us with real wolves at the door, we are compelled to invent them.

That is the real force behind our strong cultural belief in crime. The simple act of locking our doors satisfies the part of us that cannot handle the concept of safety. It is also the force behind scapegoating, be it individuals or groups. We simply have to believe that there is a threat out there, one we can confront and control.

We are incapable of believing anything else.

It doesn’t matter that you could probably leave your door unlocked for a decade without anything bad happening. Locking that door is a ritual, not a practical measure. It is a bit of modern magic that makes us feel safe against a danger that lies mostly within our semi-civilized monkey brains.

I claim no exemption from this. I would find it wrenchingly difficult to knowingly walk away from an empty apartment with an unlocked door. I’m the smartass quoting statistics and saying how irrational our attitudes are, and yet I share those exact same attitudes and can’t imagine being otherwise.

And for the record, I am not saying that we should all stop locking our doors. The risk is tiny, but so is the effort. It’s like getting meteor insurance for a dollar a year. Sure, you will probably never us it, but it’s so cheap that you might as well.

I just want people to understand that what they are doing is based on superstition, not reality, and while locking your door at night is one thing, basing your worldview and your politics on these imaginary demons is another.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

Please share this around.

(This was inspired by this very awesome Cracked podcast. Listen to it! It’s the best podcast around. )

Why are there so many orphans amongst our popular protagonists?

Harry Potter? Orphan. Conan the Barbarian? Orphan. Luke Skywalker? Orphan. The three most popular superheroes in the world… Batman, Superman and Spider-man? All orphans.

In fact, Spider-Man is an orphan one and a half times over (lost both parents then Uncle Ben) and Luke Skywalker is a full fledged double orphan (both parents then aunt and uncle… and then Obi-wan!).

Even spookier are the undeclared orphans, where were are never told that a character is an orphan, but their parents are never seen or even mentioned, even in situations where you would think they would show up.

This is especially prevalent in kids-oriented media. A lot of children’s entertainment seems to take place in a world where children’s lives neither include nor require adults, let alone actual parents.

And don’t even get me started on the bizarre world of Duckburg, where Uncle Scrooge can be Donald’s uncle and Donald can be Huey, Louis, and Dewey’s uncle without any apparent need for any actual parents to be involved.

So what’s the deal? Why do we have so many orphans, declared and undeclared, in our media? What is so appealing about the orphan character that it becomes so commonplace that you barely even notice it any more? What’s killing fictional parents?

As usual, I have a number of theories, any of which and/or any combination of which may form a full explanation.

The murderer of all these fictional parents is, of course, their writer(s), so we have to start from the writer’s perspective in order to get a grip on the issue. What does the writer get from having his protagonist(s) be orphaned?

First of all, having your character be an orphan is an instant, easy way to generate sympathy. Loss of one’s parents is one of the most primal childhood fears and it does not go away when we become adults. Therefore, making a character an orphan is an instant road into people’s hearts because in one word – orphan – you establish that this person has had one of the worst possible things happen to them.

The literary furniture we still have in the collective subconscious of the English speaking world of the Dickensian orphan has, over the years, become part of this.

Another advantage of orphaning your protagonist is that it simplifies things enormously. It is way easier to write for a character when you don’t have to take into account complicated things like multi-axis family relationships.

But this is not mere laziness on the point of the writers. It is actually a solution to a very difficult moral conflict.

See, the classic hero’s journey requires that the hero leave home and travel far, far away. They have to put themselves in danger and risk all. They have to leave behind all they know in order to do What’s Right.

This would all be extremely irresponsible if you have living parents and an extended family who are all relying on you to do your part for the family unit. It makes for a far cleaner narrative arc, without complicated moral questions about family and duty, if your main character has, through no fault of their own, been severed from all primary family responsibility.

Witness Spider-Man’s issues with being a superhero while also looking after his Aunt May.

Another reason to kill off your protagonist’s parents is that it forces your hero or heroine to be independent, and one of the deepest messages of modern, individualist culture is that the only acceptable hero is the one who is the most individual. That means our heroes cannot have any help or guidance from anybody, as that would diminish their individuality.

I mean really, would you be able to respect a protagonist who is part of a huge extended family, including two living parents, and everything they do is with enormous help from a gigantic support network, of which they are only a small part?

How would we decide who was the winner and who was the loser then?

The only acceptable form of assistance is from the mentor character, and even that is bent towards individualist aims, because the mentor is never allowed to provide anything like literal, direct, physical help.

Instead, they provide deep but vague wisdom that serves mostly to aid the hero in their journey of self-discovery. This effectively turns the mentor into an individualist net gain, as their advice makes the hero even more of an individual.

Clearly, any kind of permanent, strong connection to living parents and relatives would suggest that our hero actually needs somebody, and we are far, far too addicted to the simple and satisfying tale of the rugged individualist hero who does it all themselves to willingly accept such a complication.

A darker potential reason for the plethora of orphans is that, for whatever reason, a lot of us have a lot of both latent and blatant hostility towards our parents, writers included (especially?). By orphaning one’s main character, a writer might be acting out that hostility in a morally acceptable way by creating a world where their parents are already dead.

As you can see, there are a lot of different reasons why a writer, especially a lazy one, would orphan their protagonist. It satisfies so many of the demands of both the writer and the audience, both of whom, of course, are products of the selfsame highly individualistic culture as the rest of us.

At this point, the truly original and independent thing to do is create media in which people are fully dependent on one another and freely admit it. The radical move is to pierce the illusion of autonomy by showing just how thin and phony it is, and how much of what we believe about ourselves is based upon this lie.

Who knows, I might be the one to do it.

Meanwhile…. I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

What, exactly, makes you a grownup? And how has that changed over the years?

Because it definitely has changed. At least since World War II and probably even before that, it has seemed to successive generations that the generations before them were more competent, organized, tough, and strong than them.

Partly, this is an illusion created by the power gap between parents and their kids, and kids’ need to feel that their parents are powerful and in control of things and that adults, in general, know what they are doing.

That is the only way a kid can feel safe enough to be able to relax and be a kid. Part of the job of a parent is to help maintain this belief, even if privately you feel like you have no idea what you are doing and any minute now it will all fall apart.

But there is real truth to this idea as well. With every generation, we specialize more and end up knowing less. The human animal, despite shaking our spears at the sky and declaring our individuality, actually becomes more interdependent with each successive generation. The role of the adult as an individual lessens, and the adult as a society emerges.

The parents of the Greatest Generation were tough. They ran farms, built their own homes, raised animals, bought and traded goods, pumped cisterns, and in general worked a hell of a lot harder than their kids ever would. Even city dwellers faced far more hardship, death, and horror than we can possibly imagine in our safe and golden age.

Their children survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, and built the very foundations of modern society. They made it through childhoods plagued by diseases like polio and the Spanish Flu, wars that destroyed entire nations, and poverty so severe that people ate their shoes. They might not have been quite the rugged loners of their parents generation, but they were tough, resourceful, and survived lives that seem like living hell to us now.

Then came their children, the Baby Boomers. Much has been made of their self-indulgent ways, but they still managed to have families, careers, and homes. Sure, they might not have been (or had to be) as tough and competent as their parents, but they at least had their lives together.

And then we come to my generation, Generation X. Very few of the people my age that I know have anything like the sort of lives their parents had at their age. They sometimes have some of the aspects of it, like a family, or a career, but very few of them have the whole basket of competencies that our parents had.

And what did we do? We overprotected our kids and created a generation even less capable than ourselves.

So that is what has been happening to us as individuals over successive generations. And yet, somehow, society continues. In fact, it has never been better.

It seems like as individuals lose competencies, society as a whole gains them. While generation after generation becomes less capable, society becomes more just, sane, safe, secure, and healthy. Just what the heck is going on? Where is all the competency coming from?

The only possible answer is that as we develop our modern societies, said societies become more complex and interconnected. The competencies that once had to reside within individuals now resides in systems. The further we modernize, the more power, authority, and competence flows away from traditional power structures and more into the spaces in between the power blocs.

In short, the competency becomes less of a hierarchical strength and more of an emergent phenomenon.

Way back in our hunter-gatherer days, there was no specialization apart from gender differences. All men were hunters. All women were gatherers. All hunters had the same set of skills. Ditto gatherers. A hunter could survive on his own for weeks because of all the jungle lore he had acquired over the years.

But as populations grew, specialization was required. First, the chieftain, who organized and led the hunters. Then the shaman, someone who neither hunted nor gathered but whom they supported because he was their intermediary with the unknown.

Then as populations grew still further, you have the blacksmith, the seamstress, and countless other specialized jobs emerging. And always it was the same tradeoff : in return for the kind of quality and quantity a society gets by having people who do nothing but their trade, society has to support the specialists.

Thus, it could easily seem like generation after generation, people became less competent. If a hunter has a son who’s a blacksmith, he could very well say that his son would be helpless on his own, and he’d be right.

What he is missing, though, is that while his son is less capable of surviving on his own, the society in which the son operates is greatly enriched by having someone who knows all that there is to know about working metal and making durable metal goods. The son’s competencies might be more specialized, but they still require a great deal of knowledge, both applied and theoretical, and his hunter father would be just as helpless in the son’s world as vice versa.

So perhaps it is mere narcissistic neurosis to compare ourselves to our parents and bewail our lack of their apparent competence. We are merely products of the process of specialization that is the very foundation of civilization and that has been going on since the time of the caveman.

We don’t know everything our parents did. But they did not know a lot of it before they had us either. And they would be lost in the modern world we understand, just as one day we all will be lost in the world our children create.

We don’t lose competency. We simply build it into the world we create.

And that conclude another meandering diatribe. I will talk to all you nice people out there again tomorrow!

Human beings are status seeking creatures.

It is an instinct as old as it is deep. In order to survive on the plains of the Serengeti, our tree-dwelling ancestors had to come down from the trees and leave the Eden that was the food-rich jungle.

In the jungle, food was everywhere. Fruit, berries, insects, roots, leaves, and even the occasional hunk of meat made up the diet of our arboreal ancestors, and all of it was available with very little work.

The rich, dense biome of the jungle was a never-ending feast for our ancestors. But then, the climate shifted and the jungles were replaced by wide grassy plains, and they who would one day be human had leave the way of the monkey and, at least in part, adopt the way of the wolf.

We became pack hunters. And the thing about hunting in packs is that it requires a very firm and clear hierarchy. In the jungle, leadership mattered little. But on the plains, it was a matter of life or death.

And where there is hierarchy, there is the need for status. It is this desire for status that provides the energy for the dynamism of the hierarchy. Without it, nobody would seek advancement over others and hence no leaders would emerge.

And so was born the need for both the alpha and the omega of the tribe, and all the rest of the tribe in between. Some seek status strongly, and become leaders. Others seek status at a moderate level, and rise to occupy a niche in the hierarchy. And others do not seek it at all, and they form the lowest ranks.

With the coming of language and specialization, the hierarchy could grow more sophisticated. People could hone their skills at specific jobs, and hunting parties could coordinate in powerful ways.

With the rise of civilization, our hierarchic nature rapidly became formalized. From small groups which only needed a chieftain and a priest, we advanced into world requiring kings and queens and princes and dukes and mayors and all the rest.

But then something odd happened. We invented freedom. The hierarchy pyramid had grown too stiff, unfair, inefficient, and above all, intolerable to the increasingly urban people who had enough education and enlightenment to start to believe that they had value and deserved safety, security, and dignity.

Once we were gathered together in sufficient numbers in cities and hence came into far closer and more frequent contact with our government every day than a peasant on a farm has in his entire life, the status difference and the arbitrariness of its method of determination (hereditary rule) became increasingly intolerable, especially to the newly emerging middle class.

To an educated middle class person, being stuck between royalty and peasant was a terrible situation because their superiority over the uneducated peasant made them very aware of status, and gave them an appetite for more. But under a monarchy, there was a hard limit to how high they could rise.

So the monarchy had to go. Most proletariat revolutions have been led by a disaffected member of the middle class. Via rabble-rousing, a low status member of the middle class could become a high status member of the working class, and use the weapons of the middle class like education and organizational skills to topple the royal class and create a world where the middle class is in charge.

Thus, we have revolution.

Fast forward to the modern era, and we modern homo sapiens live in arguably the least hierarchical era since the days of the chieftain. All the usual pyramids have been flattened considerably and we all share the privilege of being, in the eyes of the government, citizens, all equal, and all worthy.

Has this somehow banished hierarchy? Heavens no. Of course not. Instincts aside, hierarchy is quite simply how things get done. There will always be leaders and followers on every level because there will always need to be someone how decides what to do and others who do it. The body always needs a brain.

What we have achieved, however, is an enormous growth in the middle class. This has created a situation where you have the vast majority of the population with, from a historical perspective, all the exact same status.

Hence, the seemingly petty madness of the middle class need to keep up with the Joneses, or even better, bury them in the dirt. When you have a lot of status seeking naked beach apes all accorded the same status, the tiniest of differences in status get blown up into full blown crises.

That’s why, for instance, a group of neighbors will get upset at a neighbour who neglects their lawn. They will say it is about real estate values, but that’s a lie. It is really about status. That unmowed lawn makes the neighborhood seem lower status, and hence brings down the status of those who have invested some of their self-esteem capital in a particular version of their neighborhood.

But this does not end at the neighborhood level. Households have hierarchies too, and competition within them.

Hence, sibling rivalry.

But even more so, hence a lot of the seemingly irrational behaviour of parents toward their children. Behaviour that seems at odds with their parental role.

The secret is that, unbeknownst to any of us, there is a secret deal made in every family household, and that deal is that no matter what their status is in the outside world, at home, the parents are the alphas. Period.

This is how the modern person solves the complex puzzle of status conflicts in a complex world never dreamed of by our primitive instincts. That is why they used to say “a man’s home is his castle”.

We all have high status in the tiny little hierarchy of our own homes. That is how it is before a couple has children (spouses are presumed equal) and that is how they try to keep it after they are born.

But kids have status instincts too, and thus there is conflict.

That is it for my brief history of status.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.