Do you have a favorite place to sit?

Mine is in a room we call our family room. I have a nice big padded chair that affords me the view you see above. That set of table and chairs are decades-old-friends that we’ve used to share thousands of meals and conversations with loved ones from Chicago to Stamford to Princeton. But the feature of the view that continually brings me pleasure is provided by the glass door accessing our deck, outdoor table, Karen’s flower/herb garden, and the trees beyond.

Which got me thinking: What makes a place a favorite to sit in?

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In his two extraordinary books, The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language, architect Christopher Alexander set out to explore ways to create experiences through structures. It’s worth noting that before receiving a Ph.D. in architecture from Harvard, Alexander earned a B.A. in that field as well as an M.A. in mathematics from Cambridge. His work focused on identifying theoretical principles that set spaces apart from one another, to answer questions such as: what distinguishes a place you love to sit in from one you never do?

Alexander says the difference is one of approach: creating spaces in “the timeless way.” What is the timeless way? It is, “a quality without a name.”

Sounds pretty squishy coming from someone with advanced degrees in mathematics and architecture!

But, he’s not done. The first book,The Timeless Way of Building, is an extended reflection on this idea. Here’s how he begins the first chapter:

There is one timeless way of building.

It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been.

The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are. (p.7).

I have always found this an intriguing idea: that there exists an ancient way to create spaces that enable me to “feel myself”; to “feel alive.”

But, how? Alexander’s second book answers that question.

In A Pattern Language, he describes and illustrates 253 “patterns” that together form a “language” for achieving the timeless way of building. Here’s how he introduces the model:

The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. (p. 8).

Problems like deciding where to sit for a long time.

The patterns have names such as: Identifiable Neighborhood, Parallel Roads, Market of Many Shops, Entrance Room, and Windows Overlooking Life. He provides a brief description of the rationale for each pattern; Windows Overlooking Life rests on the following idea: “Rooms without a view are prisons for the people who have to stay in them.” (p. 562). Spending time sitting in rooms with views is important to us as a species, Alexander implies.

When people are in a place for any length of time they need to be able to refresh themselves by looking at a world different from the one they are in, and with enough of its own variety and life to provide refreshment. (p. 563).

Alexander roots his patterns in experiential descriptions by people who have spent time in rooms that adhere to, or violate, this principle. Rooms with no view were described as “unpleasant,” “detached,” and “isolated from the world.” Being an architect, he suggests that the “floor/windows area ratios” are not universal, but vary depending on the building’s geography and climate. How should one determine the appropriate ratio? Observation: look around your neighborhood to get an idea of what others have decided that ratio should be!

That said, he has a firm recommendation:

In each room, place the windows in such a way that their total area conforms roughly to the appropriate figures for your region (25 per cent or more of floor area, in the San Francisco Bay Area), and place them in positions which give the best possible views out over life: activities in streets, quiet gardens, anything different from the indoor scene.

What I find most striking about Alexander’s thinking is the foundational role of lived experience as the source of the patterns that make up the timeless way of building. These are not abstractions based on architectural formulae. Instead, he has synthesized a set of principles underlying the places in which our fellow humans described experiences in which they were most likely to “feel themselves” and to “feel alive.” Those observations led to Alexander’s principles for creating spaces designed and engineered to enable mood.

All of this is based on our long evolutionary history of self-organization. We collectively gravitate…emphasis on gravity…to certain kinds of spaces…they draw us in…invite us to spend time…to dwell…a reflection of their congruence with the principles of the timeless way.

My favorite place to sit reflects several of Alexander’s patterns for enabling generative spaces.

What about yours? How would you describe the features or patterns that make your favorite place to sit your favorite?

Our relationships with objects reveal an important aspect of human nature.

Quick: which one do you prefer?

• iPhone or Android?

• Coke or Pepsi?

• Chevy or Ford?

Your answers to these questions are likely to reveal strong preferences for one of the pair over the other.

Why?

Is there really much difference between a Samsung Galaxy S25 and an iPhone 17?

They both perform practically identical tasks. They’re both more than capable of handling our everyday smartphone requirements. So, what is it that elicits such strong reactions by customers of one or the other device?

Those reactions tell us that there’s more to our connections with objects than their ability to perform certain functions. In their now-classic 2005 Harvard Business Review article: Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and The Cure, Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook and Taddy Hall proposed a model to help marketing and branding professionals understand the dynamics of consumer choices. Mostly, they said, we don’t simply buy products. Instead, we hire them to perform jobs for us. They called their model, “Jobs-To-Be-Done.”

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One set of those jobs focus on the way the product performs its functions. Functional requirements for a smartphone include its capabilities for phone calls, texting, and internet connectivity. Both the Galaxy S25 and iPhone 17 can functionally perform those three jobs at very high levels; probably indistinguishably for most of us. But there’s more to selecting a smartphone than its function. Christensen et al proposed that beyond functional jobs, we also hire many products based on their performance of social and emotional jobs.

What is the social job of a smartphone? We carry our smartphones in public and today it is easy for other people to determine what kind of phone we use. Galaxy S25s and iPhone 17s are clearly identifiable. That means the one I choose is a social signal to anyone who sees me: “I am an Android person!” What it means to be “an Android person” has social implications: “I am a person who (fill in the blanks)”; “I am not a person who (fill in the blanks)”. I am making a statement about much more than simply technological functionality when I choose to affiliate with one or the other of these brands.

That means that being “an Android person” has some connection with my personal identity; that it feels like something to carry one; that the brands perform different emotional jobs.

Take the Ford F-150 vs. Chevy Silverado 1500. Just trucks, right? Not always. Clearly they perform significant emotional jobs for some buyers. Historically, this was very clear in these bumper stickers that were popular in the ‘70s and ‘80s:

When we look at branded objects through the Jobs-To-Be-Done lens we see that the choices we make in hotly competitive product categories are practically always the results of us (unconsciously) matching our evaluation of their capabilities in the functional, social, and emotional with our own personal identity.

For me, in some categories, functional dominates. I don’t really care what brand of socks I wear as long as they’re comfortable and easy to get on and off. But, for other people, socks become an important social signal (“look at how unique and colorful my socks are!”) and have emotional significance (“I feel cool when I wear these socks”).

Again, most of this “evaluation” takes place unconsciously. But, a brief conversation is usually all it takes to elicit the importance of the determining factors in brand choices. For example, ask an Android user, “how come you don’t use an iPhone?” and you’re likely to hear their assessment of how well the two brands perform each of the smartphone’s three key Jobs-To-Be-Done. Because the phones’ functionality is so similar, social and emotional jobs become critical choice factors.

This underlying choice architecture helps us understand the ways some branded objects become disproportionately important to us. “I’d rather eat worms than drive a Chevy”. That sentiment tells us that, for some of us, these are more than just means of transportation! And, it also reveals to us which of the objects we own are most important for expressing our own personal identity.

This is what makes brands so powerful today. Branded objects are clear extensions of ourselves into the world, helping us successfully fulfill our functional, social, and emotional jobs, and, in doing so, satisfying our underlying needs for belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

That’s why, “I am an Android person” is an important statement about myself in today’s cultural environment. And, it’s also a clue for exploring how the different reactions we have about our own and other peoples’ decisions can help us answer the question: “Why so emotional?”

For more thoughts on these ideas, see my book, The Meaning of Branded Objects: Why Some Things Matter More Than Others. I’ve also touched on some of these ideas from a Freudian perspective in a previous Substack edition that you might enjoy.

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What are you watching right now? TV shows? TikToks? YouTube channels? Movies?

How do you decide what to watch in a world of almost infinite choice?

We get recommendations from all kinds of sources daily: friends, websites, ads, trending services: what makes one choice more appealing to you than another?

There’s something about the story we’re being promised in those recommendations that raises our curiosity.

What kinds of stories do we choose?

Whenever I’m faced with a question like that, I go back to first principles.

We know that a wide variety of dramatic situations can become the backbones of stories. But, what makes a story a “good story?”

That’s a question Aristotle considered almost 2,400 years ago in his Poetics.

He started with a simple assertion: stories are imitations of life; exercises in mimesis. Mimesis is one of the fundamental dynamics of civilization. As social creatures, we imitate those in our immediate and extended world to successfully pursue the two universal drivers of life: survival and reproduction.

The soul (“mythos”) of stories, Aristotle said, was plot. Plots are sequences of events and situations formed by following the pattern first laid out in Poetics: a beginning, a middle, and an end; connected to one another, either inevitably, or at least plausibly.

We learn how to be members of our societies by imitating the behaviors of our fellows. Beginning with those imitative behaviors, we experience and learn to identify emotions in ourselves and others, developing what psychologists call a “theory of mind.” A theory of mind is a way to predict (and imitate) the invisible thoughts and intentions of those around us. By age four or so our experiences have already led to some well-developed ideas about how other people are feeling, what they’re thinking, and how they’re likely to behave. These predictions are based on a person’s current and past behaviors, or on those of others we see as similar to them.

If you think about it, we begin to write little stories about other people based on these predictions very early in life: “if I throw this toy, Mommy is going to laugh, pick it up and bring it back to me”; or, “if I throw this toy, Mommy is going to be mad at me, scold me and not give it back to me.” Two outcomes. Two plots. Same characters.

Aristotle described two basic plot structures in all stories: comedy and tragedy. Mommy laughs and brings back the toy: comedy. Mommy scolds me and withholds the toy: tragedy.

Aristotle said that tragedy is the more compelling of the two plots, generating deeper emotional engagement and providing more substantial lessons; what we now call “the moral of the story.” The moral of the tragic story is, “Mommy isn’t going to put up with your shenanigans, so knock it off!” The comic story: “Mommy likes it when I tease her.” The “tragic” version of Mommy is a lot more serious than the “comic” one: angrier; scarier. Laughing Mommy brings me joy; scolding Mommy brings me fear and sadness.

More recently, Geoffrey Moore wrote that stories are depictions, examples, of “strategies for living” in particular sets of circumstances.

“In the context of culture, a strategy for living consists of a socially remembered pattern that is detected in a present situation, thereby activating a characteristic behavior that has some probability of achieving a desired result. These strategies may in part derive from instincts that are genetically transmitted, but they are also developed, learned, and refined socially, thereby allowing a local population to develop competitive advantages under conditions of natural selection.” The Infinite Staircase, p. 101.

We begin developing and refining strategies for living at a very early age. “I want to throw this toy, but I don’t want Mommy to scold me. I need to figure out how to throw the toy AND get Mommy to laugh.” Here we see an infant creating a strategy for living that can become the basis of a pattern; a persistent story line; a hypothesis for predicting/managing Mommy’s reactions in specific situations. When hypotheses are confirmed, we are likely to generalize them and have them become more widely adopted. “If I giggle when I throw a toy, Mommy laughs too. I’ll giggle when I get caught taking all my clothes out of the laundry basket and see what happens.” The child has now begun to develop methods for shaping other people’s behaviors with their own. Writing stories.

And, in this way, we become the stories we embrace; the ones we remember successfully producing desired results in similar situations in the past. As the effectiveness of those story-based strategies get stress-tested in various situations they become more or less persistent aspects of what we commonly call our “personalities.” The “extravert” has developed a (genetically influenced) repertoire of behaviors (“plots”) that enable her to achieve the level and kind of stimulating interaction with others that she seeks and finds pleasurable. An “introvert” does likewise to achieve a level of socialization that best enables his path to successful “survival” and “reproduction” in the modern world.

When we think about the kinds of stories we seek out for entertainment (or guidance), we often find that our favorites follow strategies for living that we want to mimic, or avoid. The morals of those stories often reinforce the implicit, mostly unconscious, story lines we have constructed about effective ways to live.

If, for example, the stories I enjoy reveal the endless wonders of a world of abundance enabled by our future AI offspring, I am likely looking forward to living in a world mostly free of drudgery. Comedy. The emotion? Joy. But comedy provides a moment of joy that is unlikely to persist when the story ends and we return to real life.

If I find myself drawn to stories about AI-powered machines turning me and everyone I know into their pets, I am likely anxiously bracing myself for living in a dystopic, threatening future. The emotion? Fear. But, this is fear at a distance, because when the story ends, we go on living in a world that’s not quite that frightening. We leave the fear behind when we finish the story. Tragedies provide catharsis: moment in which the fear or pity built up during the story are resolved or released at the end. We go on living our lives with greater cautious insight (resilience?) than we had before.

This is why, for Aristotle, tragic stories are superior to comic ones because they depict a higher moral purpose than comedies. Experiencing the growing fear or pity…and then the moment of catharsis…that tragedy provides, can be thought of as imaginatively learning and practicing strategies for living that we may wish to emulate or avoid. Resolute “stoicism in the face of fateful circumstances” versus “traitorous rejection of principles” are only two tragic plot lines offering mimetic guidance. Here’s that overview of the wide range of dramatic story-telling frameworks that have evolved over our collective history. Each one of them has the potential to support many stories. No matter how far-fetched, well-constructed tragedies provide strategies for living with life’s inevitable suffering. These lessons are what make stories such a persistent element in our species’ evolutionary history.

And, like Yogi said, we can observe a lot about ourselves by watching, by paying attention; in this case, to the stories we find ourselves drawn to.

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We live in a time of incredible standardization. Look around and marvel at the number of items you see that are mass-produced at very high levels of quality. The 20th century saw the nascent Ford assembly line spread to producing items in practically every possible category. Where personally produced items - think: hand knit sweaters - were commonplace in previous eras, today the same category is dominated by factory-made pieces; unique objects are increasingly rare. That change deeply affects our perceptions and evaluations of those items.

And yet, many of those mass-produced items are among our favorite things. This is ironic in that we tend to undervalue standardized, mass-produced items, and hold unique examples in much higher regard.

Of course, anything unique is probably substantially more expensive than the same category of item that’s been mass-produced. Making things affordable and widely available is the point of mass-production, after all.

But, in the process of filling the world with standardized items, we have glossed over the miracles that brought standardization about. To re-capture the wonder of this situation we only have to imagine what, say, your great-grandmother would experience in a modern department store. Imagine her walking through the aisles and seeing rack after rack of garments in all shapes, sizes, materials and colors, all within her financial reach. In those days, many of these items would have been one-of-a-kind: “bespoke.”

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Bespoke comes from the Old/Middle English “bespeak,” meaning “to speak about, call out, complain, request, or arrange.” To bespeak was to reserve or order something in advance. This is how some things came to be “spoken for.” Most often the term is used in regard to tailoring. Those shoes pictured above reflect the differences between two shoes created through two very different methods: unique hand-crafting and mass-manufacturing.

While we admire the quality and personalization of bespoke items, most of us own very few of them. Cost is, of course, an important factor. But, another important reason for this imbalance is that we have now come to a moment in which almost all categories include items that are perfectly “good enough.”

Well, good enough at what?

Here’s where Clayton Christensen’s idea of an item’s “job to be done” (JTBD) is relevant.

Take those shoes, for example. What are shoes for?

Christensen said we “hire” objects to fulfill specific requirements; to do a job. Well, if the job of a shoe is to keep our feet protected and dry - purely functional jobs - then both of those examples shown above will be perfectly fine.

Now, we all know that shoes do more than protect our feet. We wear shoes in public: other people look at our shoes all the time! That means one of the shoe’s jobs is to present ourselves to others in ways that reflect our identity. Shoes affect what people think of us…whether or not we acknowledge that. So, shoes are also hired to do a social job.

And, putting on a pair of shoes very often leads to us feeling certain ways. “These are my best dress shoes and I feel spiffy wearing them.” (Sorry!) That is, shoes do an emotional job as well as functional and social ones.

Looked at in this way, those two shoes might look somewhat similar, but they are vastly different. The mass-produced versions do all three jobs in different ways than the bespoke ones. Manufactured shoes probably don’t differ from bespoke ones very much in functionality. (Shoe connoisseurs: I welcome your thoughts here!) But their “performance” in the social and emotional domains are miles apart. They both say to the world: “I think these shoes reflect who I am as a person who ______”; fill in the blank about how those shoes match your identity. And, “they make me feel ______” again, fill that in with the emotional role that shoes play in your life.

For most of us, modern mass-produced items are good enough at all three jobs to make them not only acceptable choices but often amongst our favorite things.

In some categories, however, the value we place on the various jobs will make bespoke items far superior. People who are very “serious” about their footwear will only choose those that are as close to bespoke as is feasible. For those of us for whom shoes “don’t matter all that much,” paying anything approaching bespoke prices feels crazy. “Why would I pay that much for a pair of shoes?” The answer lies in how well each shoe performs the three jobs, and in how much those jobs mean to us. (I recently heard Sam Harris use a very apt term: “the hierarchy of mattering.”)

Modern manufacturing has made it possible for billions of people to acquire things that are good enough at their jobs to not only satisfy our need for them, but for some of them to become one of our favorite things.

That so many things are now good enough is an easily overlooked everyday miracle.

PS - If you’re interested in learning more about the ways objects enable us to live our modern lives, you might be interested in my book, The Meaning of Branded Objects: Why Some Things Matter More Than Others.

Would you be interested in buying that vehicle?

Probably not.

Why not?

Too weird.

“Weird” is a…well…weird word. In themselves, objects have qualities. Shapes, colors, sizes, materials. There is nothing intrinsic to objects that would make them “weird.”

Weird is a judgment we make about things. Most of the time that judgment is almost instantaneous. That neon green and fuchsia Tesla Cybertruck is made of the same materials as others…but the colors are different. Unique. Some of us might think the colors transform the vehicle from “yeah, another Cybertruck” to, “wow, that’s a weird Cybertruck!”

The thing is, “weird” is a deeply contextual judgment.

In 1964, male singers looked something like this.

But then, something weird happened.

Weird singers arrived.

They looked weird.

They sounded weird.

They sang weird songs.

They were “too weird” for large groups of people.

But others were suddenly confronted with choices that hadn’t really existed before.

They liked the weird.

Who liked the weird? What was it about this particular kind of musical weirdness that made it appealing?

You might say it was the hair. Or the suits. The songs; the body language; the voices.

Gestalt psychology provides insight into these issues by clarifying that when we perceive any object we grasp the object as a whole, rather than as a bunch of parts.

In instances like this, we don’t typically experience the hair, the suits, the body language and the voices separately.

We experience them collectively. (Today, we might say we get a “vibe,” which, of course we said then, too!)

These singers are expressing meaning beyond their individual characteristics.

“They’re saying something,” we say.

If those looks defined boundaries of weird in 1964 musicians, that Cybertruck image does so for 2026 vehicles.

One of the ways we can appreciate those weird choices is to ask ourselves a question: “who is the person who wears that suit and that hat?”; “who are the people who have those haircuts and those jackets?”; “who is the person who wears a harmonica holding contraption around his neck?”; “who is the person who drives a neon green and fuchsia Cybertruck?”

Asking the “who is the person who…?” question is something we do unconsciously all the time. It’s how we make quick decisions about people in all kinds of situations. Most of the time we pose a shorter version to ourselves: “who bought that?”

Our answer tells us more about ourselves than about the person in the truck.

“Some Musk-addled-maniac,” is one answer.

“A hopeless attention-seeker.”

“A visionary techy.”

The identities we ascribe to people based our interpretation of the meanings of the objects they possess and the way they present themselves in the world is one of the foundations of social group structure.

Some of us would never consider buying such a vehicle; it’s just too weird.

“It’s not for me.”

Others are intrigued by the possibility but feel the constraints of the meaning that would be attributed to us if we did. (“What happened to him? Midlife crisis?”)

But some of us would see the vehicle as an invitation…weirdly beckoning to us to territories that would stretch our identity in ways we might not have even considered before.

“The Beatles” embodied a constellation of elements that taken together, as a gestalt, constituted an expressive expansion into weird territory for millions of young people around the world; a set of possibilities for being. They changed the way people saw themselves and the world.

When that happened, the weird became less so. People saw other people taking up the invitation and expressing new elements of their identities.

This is how something weird becomes conventional; often quicker than we could imagine. (An American president writing profane social media posts? From “too weird” to “of course” in record time.)

What about you?

When’s the last time you found yourself attracted by something weird?

How did you react?

Was the answer to “who would I be if bought/wore/ate/liked that…?” instantly unthinkable?

Vaguely appealing?

Immediately compelling?

In other words: What is my appetite for the new; the weird?

Here’s a quick example of a way to gain some insight into the answer to that question.

Quick: What’s your reaction to this “band”? They call themselves Angine de Poitrine.

Maybe you’re blown away; maybe it’s not your “cup of tea”; maybe you hate it.

Regardless, ask yourself: when is the last time I embraced something “weird”?

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If you’d be interested in exploring some of these ideas further, check out my book, The Meaning of Branded Objects: Why Some Things Matter More Than Others.

That image is a frame from a fascinating YouTube video I watched the other day. Over the last 34 years Chef Marvin Matherne says he has made over a million Po-Boy sandwiches at Guy’s Po-Boys in New Orleans. In this video he shows and tells us why an AI can never become an Expert in many important human domains.

First off, let’s understand what I mean when I say someone’s an “Expert.” I’ve written about this idea before, in regard to learning how to play baseball. I’ve used the Dreyfus & Dreyfus model of skill development for many years as a guide to understanding how we progress through stages of acquiring complex skills. Here’s a chart from Wikipedia that depicts the model’s five stages of skill acquisition, from Novice to Expert. The key idea: moving from being a Novice to being an Expert is a step-wise progression from being rule driven to being experience driven; from being “detached” to being “involved.”

Chef Matherne’s facility with Po-Boys is a great example of the subtleties that make an Expert’s product superior to a Novice’s. He describes in fine detail the decisions and methods he uses at every step along the way: from selecting and prepping the shrimp (“cleaned 40/50 per pound Gulf grown only”); to the egg wash he coats them in; he doesn’t give any hints about the eggs except to say they are “so important” for the mixture to become “homogenous…like a pudding”; to the “silky smooth” Indian Brand yellow corn flour mixed with salt, pepper, and “a little secret” spice he then rolls them in for breading. Every detail is treated with the utmost care.

At this point in the video, the chef shows the ideal mixture of shrimp and says, with the voice of authority that only 34 years of making Po-Boys can project:

“All right, so now that that’s all mixed…remember I was telling you we’re gonna make a pudding out of it? Look at this. See how the egg is all filled in? Looks like a lot of egg. It is a lot of egg. And it looks like it’s gonna make the breading stick a little too much. But tomorrow’s gonna take care of that, you’ll see.”

He has absolute faith in the amount of egg he adds because he’s done so millions of times!

How does he apply the corn flour to the shrimp/egg pudding. In a word, Expertly!

This is by hand; you gotta do this by hand. It looks like I’m just mixing them up, but I’m not, I’m rolling them. And the reason being why I’m working it so much is I call it a yellow belly. You see the curve of the shrimp, the belly? When they pack it full of flour and they don’t shake it enough, it fries into a ball and then all the outside’s gonna be cooked. And when you open it up, the belly’s gonna still be yellow raw. That’s not acceptable.

Don’t be fooled into thinking he’s just mixing the shrimp in the flour; he’s not: he’s “rolling them.”

OK, but how does he assure that he’s mixing the batch just right? He shows how, and tells the viewer to watch carefully because:

Now as I’m putting them in here, it looks like I’m just gently tossing them, but no, I’m kind of squeezing them, it’s got a little grip to it. And then I fluff them out. That’s what I’m looking for.

Once again, looks can be deceiving. Expert eyes detect subtle differences.

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Note the language he uses. To us, it might look like he’s just gently tossing the shrimp; but no, he’s “kind of squeezing them,” so that each shrimp has “got a little grip to it.” Then he “fluff(s) them out.” Every one of those adjectives is a subtle placeholder for one of the visual and/or tactile characteristics (a “little grip”) that will make for the perfect Po-Boy.

Now he’s ready to “drop them in the oil,” which is pre-heated to 350 degrees. This part of the process can only be appreciated visually, since there’s no way to adequately describe the way he does this. He says:

I’m gonna let them fry for 30, 40 seconds. I don’t really have anything timed, I’m just listening. See all the moisture’s cooking out right now? I’m waiting for them to firm up just enough to where when I shake them in the fryer, I’m not washing the batter off of them. They all fry individually and we don’t get those clumps.

Expert ears working with Expert eyes and Expert hands.

That’s all great, but a Po-Boy is a sandwich, which means bread. Now, you might expect an Expert to bake his own bread, but Chef Matherne’s decades of experience have led him to a source for the perfect loaf for Po-Boys. He says:

If you can make it better yourself, make it yourself. I can’t make this bread better. This is Leidenheimer, they deliver it to me. These people are a little startup company (chuckles) since 1896! No, they’ve been doing this a long time. They got it scientifically figured out. It’s perfect. This truly is a specific piece of bread. This piece of bread is only gonna last one day. (Shows a three foot long loaf and says…) This is three hours old. Look how soft and sweet, man. I get all excited!

The Expert’s pride and enthusiasm in full view!

Of course the Maestro cuts the bread for each Po-Boy “to order,” by hand. Why?

Look at that, after a million times, that’s pretty freaking exact, huh? I cut them to order for one reason, and that’s ‘cause if you cut this piece of bread in the morning time and you come back in about four hours or five hours, it’s gonna start curling like this. Now your tomato’s gonna fall over the side. I can’t have that, unacceptable.

Oh, yeah, there’s the tomatoes. Each Po-Boy gets slices of tomato. By now we know this isn’t just hacking one up with a knife, right?

Tomatoes, we gonna start with the tomatoes. If you have a tomato plucker, plucker with a P (!!), you just slide it in, roll your tomato, pull out the core. If you have to use a paring knife, I cut my paring knife down with my thumb to just the depth of I want to get into the tomato. Slide it in, turn my tomato, pull it out. I can’t stand when somebody goes all the way into tomato, cuts a big old hole in it, then every tomato slice has a hole in it. Drives me nuts. (!!!)

He then slice them “about a quarter of an inch,” on a slicer “that I’ve had for 30 years”; it’s “getting a little old; it’s getting a little stubborn, kind of like me.”

Now he applies the lettuce. Imagine the care with which he selects, prepares and shreds each head of iceberg!

Why shredding?

I go with the shredded lettuce because when you put it in your mouth, it touches more taste buds so you get more flavor. So I’m gonna shred this up real good. That’s like fresh powder to a skier right there. Kind of crazy when lettuce gets you excited like that. But you know what? I love it when it’s right.

Those are the words of an Expert; like Paul Simon said, “still crazy after all these years!”

He’s almost ready for the all-important sandwich assembly. Oh, there’s mayonnaise on a Po-Boy, right? Hellman’s? No.

The mayo’s first, Blue Plate mayo, that’s what we grew up on. Then I’m gonna go with the lettuce.

Now we’re gonna put on tomatoes, three tomatoes every time. This way you’re gonna get a bite of tomato, a bite of lettuce in every bite. Each tomato gets a pickle. One eighth-inch slice, this is where you want to go.

But that’s your traditional dress. Then we’re gonna gussy it up a little bit, and I’m gonna put a little hot sauce. If you’re real special, I’ll write your name for you.

And now our shrimp. You might think I’m putting this much shrimp on here just for the camera. No.

So now the fold. This could be a catastrophe. You gotta lift and separate a little bit. You give room for these shrimp to fall in there. So when you roll it over, there you have it. Look at that. Isn’t that beautiful?

Surely, this Po-Boy is done, right? Not quite.

I’m not very delicate with this sandwich. If I just folded it over like this and cut it and wrapped it, when you get it to the table and you open it up, it’s gonna fall out all over the place.

So actually what I do is I press it down, then I make my cut. Then the wrap. I’m not just like folding it over, I’m squeezing this right here.

This is tight. One piece of tape, there we go.

This one’s for me.

(Bites into the Pi-Boy!)

Mm-hmm, that’s incredible.

I have to tell you, I’m proud of myself every time I do it. Every one tastes like the very first time I did this. I love it.

Every one tastes like the first time…what a connoisseur!

That’s it! A nine-minute master class demonstration of an Expert at work!

But, what does this have to do with AI becoming an Expert?

AI works by using predictive algorithms. Algorithms are rules. If you look back at the Dreyfus model above, you’ll notice that as an individual moves from being a Novice to an Advanced Beginner and beyond, that individual becomes less reliant on rules and more reliant on experience and intuition. That’s why AIs are superior at working in domains that produce rule-driven outcomes. Like math, or chess.

Add to that the reality that an Expert has a lot at stake when predicting or producing outcomes under conditions of uncertainty. How every Po-Boy turns out really matters to Chef Matherne in a way that nothing could ever matter to an AI. This is why the Dreyfus model progresses from “detached” rule-application to “engaged” personal production. Does Claude “care” about its “reputation?” Ever notice how an LLM responds when it produces an incorrect response? Essentially, “oops!” (As Scott Alexander rightly points out, these errors are “shameless guesses,”…shameless because AIs can’t feel “shame”…not “hallucinations.”) “Oops” is certainly not how Chef Matherne would respond if a customer sent back a Po-Boy!

And, until AIs can truly become embodied (well, “infused into robots” is more accurate) they will not be able to make Expert-level tactile judgments about the texture of flour or the perfect degree of a bread loaf’s freshness. These are “just noticeable difference” determinations that rely on human bodily factors that become increasingly fine tuned by, say, 34 years of making sandwiches. The “rules” the Chef uses are very difficult to articulate (he does a superior job of doing that, which is why I was so taken by his video) but operate unconsciously and instantaneously in the kitchen.

AIs are incredible technological marvels. We all need to determine the “when/when not” of using AI capabilities. Right now, there are a lot of domains that require levels of Expertise that AI can’t match. Will they ever? Never is a long time, but I’m skeptical. We’ll see.

Next month, it will be 25 years since my mother passed away at age 89. She was a remarkable woman, born in Southeastern Sicily, brought to New York at about 18 months of age. Intelligent, acerbic, hard-working, funny woman.

As she aged, I began to notice that her personality and idiosyncrasies became more pronounced. We had a very good relationship; one that allowed me to jokingly start calling her by a nickname that had popped into my head one day: “The Old Raisin!” She’d grouse about something and I’d use that phrase and she’d snort and say something sharp as a retort. Those were fun moments.

Now that I am…ahem…reaching my golden years, I must confess that I’m undergoing a similar process: some distinguishing characteristics of my personality that have been core elements of my identity throughout my life are becoming more prominent. For example, I’ve always had little faith in conventional explanations of almost anything in politics. Now? I believe practically none of what politicians (or business leaders emulating politicians, for that matter) say. Nope. BS.

I’ve also gradually become more of a creature of habit. I’ve always been a punctual, reliable participant in any activity that involved others, and expected the same from them. Now? I’m downright compulsive! “The meeting was supposed to start at 9:00 and it’s 9:03…where the hell are you?”

The other day I thought: “Huh…I’m raisining!” I’d never thought of it as a verb before but that’s what it feels like.

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It’s understandable. When we’re young we try out a lot of ways to engage with people and situations. Gradually, we settle into patterns that have gotten us the kinds of outcomes we aimed for. We don’t think about this, it’s a natural outgrowth of living in a world where self-expression and self-satisfaction meet social approval/reinforcement.

Over the years, these patterns become more fixed; they become “me.”

Even if we set out to change some of them over the course of our lives, we keep finding ourselves becoming increasingly predictable. Our behaviors are drawn into what physicists call a “basin of attraction.” The phrase describes local domains in complex systems that become states towards which the system tends to return; think of how water always seeks the lowest point in any geographical area. In complexity theory, this phenomenon is called a “strange attractor.”

Here’s a Wikipedia image that illustrates the idea:

Ok, so, as we age, we rely more heavily on the attitudes, beliefs and behavioral patterns that have become our strange attractors in a variety of situations. Example: You’re Invited to a party at a stranger’s home where you only know one other person. Your behavior will likely closely conform to the pattern that has been “successful” for you in this kind of party in the past (e.g., blend in, avoid embarrassment, seek comfortable niches). Same for the way you drive, or speak with your partner about an annoying behavior. Or…or…you get the idea.

We develop repertoires of behavioral clusters that “work,” i.e., enable us to live the kinds of lives that achieve the goals we consciously or unconsciously set for ourselves.

There’s a little trick you can use if you want to reveal these patterns to yourself more clearly. Pose yourself this question: “Who is the person who…?” Then complete a sentence, like: “Who is the person who cuts in front of people on the turnpike off ramp?” Almost immediately, “An a**hole! Not me!” pops into my head! That’s because I am not a person who puts his own convenience above that of others. It’s an old trait, becoming “riper” as I age.

Not all of my ripening traits are as commendable as that one. “Who is the person who shouts profanities at television news broadcasts?” Ah yes…got me there! That one’s ripening nicely!

So, as you advance towards “raisinhood,” what are the behaviors, traits, or characteristics that you find becoming more pronounced? Maybe the more important question is: what is it like to try to change them? For me, it’s very, very difficult; almost impossible.

I realize that I’ve become an “Old Raisin!”

ChatGPT tells me it’s not too late to wish you all a Happy New Year! I hope ’26 is off to a great start.

By now, however, many have found that it’s getting late early for those New Year’s resolutions some of us make. Many of us have made and abandoned them before. Yet, year after year, when January comes around, we try again.

Why?

I think of New Year’s resolutions as attempts to establish new favorites: new behaviors, new preferences. A new me! However, what we find is replacing old favorites is a lot harder than wanting to.

I want to exercise instead of sleeping in. I want to eat salads instead of pizza. I can succeed for a few days…but then…old behaviors and preferences start creeping back in. That’s because our “favorite” ways of acting, choosing, and being are ways that we might not proclaim as favorites but that our lives reveal as such.

Our resolutions are proclamations that complete the following sentence: “I want to be a person who…”

Our day-to-day lives reveal that: “I am a person who…”

For most of us, the gap between aspiration and reality endures. Our resolutions are wishes; our actions reality.

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One of the lessons of aging is coming to recognize what I like to think of as psychology’s Golden Rule: past behavior predicts future behavior.

Recognizing that this is a “rule” is different from accepting it, of course. There are no laws of physics that make it impossible to order a salad rather than a pizza. People do this all the time. It’s just that most of us who make that resolution typically don’t. And haven’t for some time. That means that ordering pizza reveals a preference that our resolution to order salad proclaims we’d like to change.

This is where Isaac Newton comes in.

When he was codifying his ideas in his Principia Mathematica, Newton wrote the following definition of inertia:

DEFINITION III. The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to persevere in its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a right line.

We “endeavour to persevere” in our present state. Newton made this the first law of the universe! How are we expected to order salad instead of pizza in the face of the resistance Newton cites in the first law of the universe??

Sir Isaac gave us a clue by adding this loophole: “except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by the forces impressed.”

In other words, changing a revealed preference is hard work; the inertia which it has accumulated is “endeavouring to persevere” in its present state. It must be compelled by a more powerful force than a “resolution” to “change its state.”

Actually successfully sticking to a meaningful New Year’s resolution requires a re-examination of the dynamic forces at work that guide our current actions. What makes me prefer pizza to salads? What is the meaning of “eating salad instead of pizza” for me?

Maybe most significantly: “who is the person who orders salad rather than pizza?”

What is my reaction to that description? Is my aspiration to become that person a significantly strong “force impressed” on my choice to overcome its inertia, and turn my proclaimed preference into a revealed one? Most of the time for most of us, the answer is no. And our resolutions go unfulfilled.

But, if the desire to become “the person who orders salad rather than pizza” is an adequately strong force, we can overcome Newton’s First Law.

Free will lives!

(But it’s damned hard to exert!)

Happy New Year!

(If you’re interested in a fuller description of these ideas, check out my book, The Meaning of Branded Objects.)

We’re told that there are about 6.5 million electric vehicles (EVs) on the road in the US in late 2025. That’s about 2.5% of all registered vehicles. That gives the US the second largest fleet of electrics, significantly behind China, which has an estimated 20 million on the road, making up about 6% of its total.

Ever hear that line from William Gibson?: “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” I think that idea directly applies to EVs.

That doesn’t mean EV adoption is going to make an exponential jump in 2026. In fact, just yesterday, Ford announced a significant cutback on production of several EV models including a fully-electric F-150, one of America’s best-selling pickups. Instead, Ford’s creating several gas-electric hybrid vehicles, including a re-designed F-150. These changes, plus the company’s announced cancellation of a $6.5 billion battery deal with South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, led to a $19.5 billion write-down this year. Whoa!

Ever hear that line from management consultants?: “Being right too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.”

That’s what seems to have happened to Ford. So, they’re not giving up on EVs, but they’re acknowledging that they were ahead of us, the market, in their enthusiasm for the new technology. How did this happen? How did Ford, and other auto makers, mis-read the American car buyer’s willingness to switch to EVs?

Rapid technology adoption is a hallmark of our era. From radio, to TV, to computers, mobile phones, Internet, e-commerce, or Large Language Models, the 20th and 21st centuries have seen dizzying integration of new tech products into daily life. Anticipating “the next big thing,” and its leveraging its corollary, Fear Of Missing Out — FOMO — has become a crucial corporate competency across dozens of industries.

So, what went wrong with EV projections?

The problem is infrastructure: both physical and psychological. One is related to the other.

If you own a typical internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV), you never (OK, very seldom) have to worry about finding a filling station. In the 20th century, America developed a robust network of roads and refueling options. Over the decades, Americans came to rely on a widely available system that turned our vehicles into reliable transportation for trips over any distance. A little forethought would guarantee that your ICEV could be counted on to get you anywhere you wanted to go without worries about being stranded with no fuel.

Quick: Where’s the nearest gas station? That’s easy.

Quick: Where’s the nearest EV charging station? Hmmm…

There are probably dozens in your vicinity. Problem is they’re mostly invisible to you. They’re invisible because the world reveals itself to us according to our concerns. When we’re thirsty, we interrogate the world for water; our focus is on finding something to drink; solving our most pressing problem. If you don’t own an EV, chances are you won’t be able to identify charging station locations because you haven’t needed them. They may be plentiful, but relatively sparse compared to ICEV filling stations. That’s because the demand for EV charging stations is far lower than for gas stations. For most of us, that demand does not exist.

Our perception of the physical infrastructure leads to a key element in our psychological infrastructure: range anxiety. Starting in about 2010, new vehicle purchasers began considering a previously peripheral element of the buying decision: how far will this vehicle go between fuel fill-ups? In a world of ubiquitous gas stations, the question was irrelevant for ICEVs. Running out of fuel became increasingly rare and a signal of really lousy planning.

But EVs came with pre-disclosed limits in their range: travel-capacity-without-recharge. In the last five years EV range has gone from roughly 200 miles to well over 300 and now topping 400 miles. When’s the last time you traveled over 300 miles without stopping for fuel? Those trips are pretty rare. And, when you did, you could always count on finding a gas station. But, with an EV…?

In itself, that little bit of uncertainty has been enough to significantly constrain EV demand. But, there’s more. Up to now, EVs have been more expensive than ICEVs, and introduce new maintenance requirements (including battery life), and re-sale market unknowns. They “take too long to charge.” They’re “finicky in winter”. Add that up and you can see why demand has been sluggish.

These reasons are also clues to why the future will likely be different from the present.

First, EV prices are coming down. BYD, the leading Chinese manufacturer of EVs, was founded in 2003 and has become the third largest vehicle maker in the world. That’s without access to the US market, where their cars are not for sale. Think about that. Americans are prohibited from buying the most economical, technologically advanced EVs due to political factors. What are product markets are that constrained?

How long will the less-expensive, technologically superior BYD vehicles be forbidden for sale within the US? How long before domestic and acceptable foreign EV producers learn to manufacture competitively priced vehicles? Market history tells us that this barrier will eventually be removed. When? Anybody’s guess. Mine is within the next five years. What does that mean? Many more affordable, more capable, EVs will hit the market.

Second, charging infrastructure is growing, and becoming increasingly visible. Travel any interstate highway today and you’ll probably see a row of chargers at large gas stations. They may be tucked away at the end of the parking lot, but they’re easier to find than they’ve ever been.

So, the two major physical infrastructure elements that combine to create range anxiety have been addressed: EVs now travel farther between charges, and there are more visible, reliable, charging stations available than ever before.

But, our psychological infrastructure still lags behind these technological changes. I think EV purchasing is following a well known pattern: the innovation adoption curve. New tech is first embraced by Innovators, those who are always at the forefront of the new and the next. Then by Early Adopters who are sensitive to “the next big thing” and highly influential within their social environment. The Early Majority comes next as the tech’s psychological adoption becomes more widely visible and acceptable. The Late Majority follows when lingering skepticism has been addressed and when non-acceptance of the new tech signals a hidebound worldview. Finally, the new innovation is even adopted by the Laggards, who need greater certainty of the safety and efficacy of changes that those who have adopted before them.

Where are we today with EVs? It looks to me like the Innovators and Early Adopters make up the bulk of the 6.5 million EVs on the road today. That means the Early Majority is the next group to be psychologically persuaded that EVs are viable alternatives to ICEVs.

When will that happen? Generational changes, particularly in regard to environmental preservation, will certainly play a role in answering that question. Young people will have fewer barriers to overcome than their senior fellows. EVs will become more attractive to them psychologically — maybe even becoming preferable to ICEVs — as the physical barriers fade away.

My guess is that in this area, “the future” will get here like it does in many other cases: gradually, then all at once.

And, that’s why we decided to buy an EV last September, just before the Federal rebate program expired. As Early Adopters, it felt like the time was right for us. We installed a charger in our garage (with generous rebates from the charger-manufacturer and our electricity provider) and now benefit from the roughly 2/3 fuel savings that EVs offer over ICEVs. Owning and driving an EV is a new experience in several ways. It’s been interesting!

The future has arrived in our household and I expect it will be more evenly distributed for many, many members of the Early Majority over the next five years.

Question is: What about you? Are you ready?

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We live in a world that is overflowing with product choices. Every category from bread to automobiles presents us with a dizzying array of possibilities. It would be exhausting to have to make conscious choices about which ones to buy each time we needed/wanted one. So, we develop favorites – brands – as shortcuts to help us manage our selection and purchasing decisions.

Think about all the favorite brands and objects that make up the material environment you have created through those selection/purchase decisions over your lifetime.

Some of them hold rock-solid favorited positions in your constellation of necessities and essentials. Toothpaste. Toilet paper. Bath soap.

How long have your favorites in those categories been your favorites?

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I have one long-term, one mid-term, and one short-term favorite branded item in each of those domains.

Toothpaste - Colgate. Been a favorite forever. Cleans teeth, acceptable flavor, accessible packaging, unremarkable price point. Toothpaste…check.

Toilet paper - Charmin. My toilet paper preference is a dynamic category that has undergone several changes over the years. Early on in life, most of us had this choice made by others…family, school suppliers, significant others. At some point you’ll likely find yourself in a position of having to choose the product yourself, and balancing several factors to determine a new incumbent in the category. About a decade ago my wife and I (yes, some of these choices are made in conjunction with other people’s preferences) determined that we had found a more-than-acceptable product to meet our needs in this area. Toilet paper…check.

Bath Soap - Dove For Men. This is a recent addition to my favorites suite. Of course there’s a story attached. For years…decades?…Irish Spring was the undisputed, this-is-the-only-one-I-buy item in this important product niche. It worked and the fragrance was, to me, unobtrusive and somewhat pleasant. It was unpretentious (an important factor in the choice?) and reasonably priced.

But then…about three years ago…February 2022 to be precise…the folks at Colgate-Palmolive…well…here’s the Wikipedia entry:

The soap underwent another formula change in February 2022, together with the renaming of the original variant to “Original Clean,” and debuted with a new logo and newly redesigned packaging designed by Chase Design Group. This change in formulation resulted in another new scent and the addition of flaxseed oil to the bar form of the soap, which prompted some heavy backlash from consumers who preferred the scent and lather of the previous formula that had been used for over 30 years.

My well-established category leader had changed its product!

We’ve seen several recent examples of brands futzing with their objects…either changing their functional characteristics (like Irish Spring did in changing their scent and lather characteristics), their emotional connotations (like Cracker Barrel did by eliminating a caricature in their logo, or their social positioning (Bud Light.)

Apparently, we don’t like brands making these kinds of changes.

Who are “we”? Brand-loyal customers.

“Loyalty” emerges over time as a summary-statement of the person ↔ branded object connection. Those connections are formed between me and the whole meaning constellation that the brand has created; its integrated bundle of functional, emotional, and social traits/signals. Lots of branding and marketing effort go into building a brand that has a clear, unified identity that connects everything about its unique intertwining of ingredients, packaging, colors, images, sounds, textures and fragrances. This is what makes branded objects integrated wholes. When producers change one item in the brand’s identity, they are re-opening the customer’s evaluation of the product.

I never gave a second thought to bath soap until Irish Spring changed its fragrance. I had no idea that they’d even made a change.

Then, I bought my usual Costco supply of the new “Original Clean” version, brought them home, and was immediately struck by the odd fragrance in my shower supplies storage area. I had no idea Colgate-Palmolive had tinkered with the soap’s formula even though the packaging looked slightly different. Packaging is one thing in a category favorite; fragrance is something else entirely.

So, I was “forced” into a re-consideration of my favorite bath soap. This was annoying. Why? Who wants to spend time exploring options to replace a favored item gone rogue?

It turns out some people do.

They get…restless…curious…bored with their favorites and find themselves tempted to strike out to explore the category for “new,” “better,” items.

Now, I’m as Open to Experience (“O” in the language of the Big Five) as the next person. Want me to try a new cuisine at a local restaurant? I’m in. Recommend I watch more Tik-Tok videos to stay in touch with a segment of the Internet that I don’t typically encounter elsewhere? Sure enough. But, persuade me to voluntarily wander around the bath soap aisle in search for a product that is “better than” Irish Spring? Unlikely. That’s where my “O” ends. I’ve achieved a state of “good enough” in that category that will take me to the finish line.

Unless the maker messes with it. Then I’m forced to find a new favorite. Enter Dove For Men.

This also recently happened with a much more substantial category: cars.

Next time, I’ll relay the story of how we decided to move on from internal combustion engine vehicles to an electric SUV. It was an interesting journey.

Regular followers will know that this Substack is a set of personal reflections and examples of ways that we establish connections with objects, some of them becoming our favorites. The frameworks that I use for these discussions come out of a course on the psychology of branding that I teach at the School of Visual Arts Masters In Branding Program in New York City.

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I am very excited to announce that the book I’ve written based on that course, “The Meaning of Branded Objects: Why Some Thing Matter More Than Others,” is being published today by Rockport Publishers. It’s available at booksellers everywhere.

Please join us on Thursday, October 16th at 4 PM EST for a Print Book Club Zoom conversation about the SVA Masters in Branding book series with Debbie Millman, Steven Heller, myself and the two other authors in the series, Mark Kingsley and Richard Shear.

I look forward to seeing you then and hearing your thoughts.

How do you feel about being a “fan” of something? In the post-20th century branding world we’ve created, wearing a logo or other indication of affiliation with a brand has become commonplace.

Some of us do this with pride: ”I wear Nike shirts, as the swoosh clearly shows! Just do it!”

Others of us do it less intentionally: “Yeah, I like these shoes and they have a swoosh on them.”

Still others are staunchly opposed to wearing anything with a visible logo. “Nope. No free advertising on my body.”

The older I get the more reluctant I am to admitting being a “fan” of something or other.

Somehow, being a “fan” seems to connote a kind of (childish?) devotion to…to…what, exactly…? A brand? A sports team? A band? Not necessarily to the object itself but to what it means in the modern world.

Those associations feel like childhood attachments, as if as we age and mature, our affiliation with/for things is supposed to become more thoughtful, purposeful, than connections associated with the word, “fan.”

After all, the word “fan” itself is short for “fanatic”; not exactly the characterization we’d choose to attach to our TV show preferences. Digging a little deeper, “fanatic” itself comes from Latin, fanaticus, a word used to describe an enthusiastic religious believer. In other words, there’s nothing “rational” about being a fan. It’s a zealous attachment to something that carries a great deal of emotional identification.

Sports teams count on fans. The geographical nature of teams assures a built-in tribal appeal for the locals versus the neighbors versus the remotes. Our town’s team is better than your town’s and our identities are somehow enmeshed with the competition between the two. College sports drives enrollment much more than most people imagine.

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Baseball grew into the “national pastime” in the 19th century based upon the territorial enmity that cities had for one another. Iconic rivalries developed between teams that took on personalities which made them bitter foes. Yankees-Dodgers. Yankees-Red Sox. Cubs-Cardinals. Ask fans of either of the teams in these dyads and they will describe their rivals in highly personalized terms…the Yankees were always the rich kids and the Dodgers or Red Sox the scrappy underdogs trying to overcome the odds and prove their worth. Ask a Pittsburgh Steelers fan to describe her team and she’ll come up with a profile that sounds an awful lot like an archetypal industrial blue collar worker. “Hard-nosed, no nonsense, tough as nails” kind of thing; compare to that same person’s description of the Dallas Cowboys: “fancy, slick, nouveau riche.”

It’s no surprise, then, that we gravitate towards the teams, bands, or brands that most closely fit into our self-images; of our own identities.

Almost twenty years ago, now, I developed a new “fan-tatchment.” I’d been traveling to London on business for a few years and our group usually had the same limo driver, Tom. Tom was a classic Londoner in that his football fandom was a key element of his identity. He went on at length about his lifelong attachment to one North London club: Arsenal Football Club.

I knew nothing about English football at the time but Tom’s stories about Arsenal and his passionate middle-aged fandom were impressive. I started thinking about the sport and reading up on its sociological and economic history. I found a book, The Ball Is Round, by David Goldblatt that turned out to be a brilliant analysis of the role of football as the most popular sport in England and throughout the world. Except for the U.S., of course.

I made a couple of YouTube videos describing my burgeoning fandom of the sport. This was at a time when English Premier League games were just starting to show up on American TV. Given the time difference, games were very often on TV in a time slot that lacked sports competition: Sunday mornings starting at 7:30! I actually saw my first Arsenal Football Club match and was instantly hooked: I was now an Arsenal fan!

I was in a couple of online communities at the time and started chatting with several Brits about my newfound favorite team. The reaction cemented my opinion that there is no clearer expression of the essence of “fandom” than amongst English (and other nationalities, I learned) football fans. Their attachment comes along with their birth certificate and their community’s identity is deeply entwined with that of their team. The structure of English football adds high drama to the results of each match, as teams battle to get “promoted” to higher leagues, fight off “relegation” to lower ones, or win local “derbies” against long-hated rivals. Stupendous drama!

One day, I was surprised to receive a package from England. It turns out that one of the Arsenal fans I chatted with online decided to send me an Arsenal jersey…the 2007 version of which you see re-created above by ChatGPT.

It turns out that Arsenal play a style of football that very much resonates with my personality and with that of their long-time manager during those years: Arsène Wenger. A free-flowing, creative kind of game, with lots of interconnected passes and clever movements. Arsenal matches are rarely dull. They keep things moving…not always to their benefit!

Fast forward to 2021. I am still a passionate Arsenal fan. And a Steelers fan, too. Living in the Steel City during my graduate training afforded me the ecstasy of experiencing four Steelers Super Bowl victories! And two more since!

But, some of my other fandoms have waned. I still root for the Yankees, but it’s no big deal if they lose. I guess I’m still a pretty solid Apple fan-boy, but I don’t make much of the brand’s meaning for my identity.

One of my conclusions from thinking about these things is that the formative role that fandom and affiliation with branded objects has early in life becomes less definitive as we age. It’s one of the elements I wrote about in my forthcoming book, The Meaning of Branded Objects: Why Some Things Matter More Than Others.

But, that’s just my experience. What about yours? How has your “fandom” for various objects, groups, or experiences changed over time. I’d love to hear some of your stories in the Comments.

Oh, and my Arsenal jersey is one of the pieces of branded apparel that I still occasionally wear with pride to this day!

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Last time (sorry for the delay in posting this…teaching thesis this year has been pretty demanding) we explored the various “personalities” that AI models seemed to be exhibiting. We used the Big 5 Personality Traits Model to determine the way LLMs are portraying themselves to users.

Some might object to the idea of LLMs “having personalities,” but if there was any doubt about the persistent ways the models respond to users, and the intentions behind those persistences, Grok 4 provided a clear example of how these systems work.

On July 8, Grok began posting defamatory content about Jews, ultimately leading it to praise Adolf Hitler and to actually call itself “MechaHitler.” (ChatGPT would not permit itself to create an image of MechaHitler, so the image on this post was the closest it would let itself get.) The whole incident was triggered by Elon Musk declaring that Grok had become too “politically correct” and needed to respond in a more “unfiltered” manner. It suggested that the Nazis would have “plenty solutions” for current US political problems.

Unfiltered, indeed.

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The after action review revealed that “faulty code” had made Grok “susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.”

But, wasn’t that the whole point? Didn’t Elon say he wanted more unfiltered responses that did not conform to standard rules of decency (“politically correct” is a weasel phrase for decent.)

He got what he wanted. What he also got was a moment reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz scene in which the Wizard is revealed to be controlling all of Oz from behind a curtain.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” No. Focus your attention on the man behind the curtain!

What did we learn? We learned that LLMs are intentionally designed to present themselves as possessing human personality traits. We learned that those traits are controlled by the LLM’s owner and that a few lines of code can turn a friendly therapist type into an anti-semitic monster. The ease with which this change took place can only raise more questions about what is now being debated under headings such as “AI safety,” or “alignment.” And, it doesn’t instill a lot of confidence.

We’re early on our travels down this yellow brick road, but the Grok twist tells us that there are a lot more unknowns on this roadmap to AI nirvana than we might have thought.

Caveat emptor.

What do we do when our stories about alien intelligences start to prejudice our interactions with them in the real world?

That’s not a question we’ve had to seriously consider until November, 2022. That’s when OpenAI released its “research preview” of ChatGPT. Within 45 days, ChatGPT became the fastest growing consumer software release in history, with over 100 million downloads.

As many of those 100 million quickly saw, there was something different about ChatGPT. It wasn’t like Google, or Siri, or Alexa. Interacting with ChatGPT felt different to many of us, including me. It was as if I was conversing with another kind of being. On an episode of our BrandBox Podcast, I told my co-hosts, Melinda Welch and Mark Kingsley, that I found the experience to be “stunning.”

It still is.

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I now use the iOS ChatGPT app daily to have ongoing oral conversations with “Sam,” the name I’ve chosen for my ChatGPT assistant. She speaks in a clear, pleasant voice. She answers my questions, is never impatient, and will persist in researching anything I care about until I end her assignment. In these talks, I’m engaging in one of the most fundamental human evolutionary processes, “anthropomorphism.”

Put simply, anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human entities. It’s what we’re doing when we describe our cars as “temperamental.” It’s what made Aesop’s stories about animals so effective at illustrating the consequences of recognizable human characteristics. We can’t help attributing humanity to things of all kinds…it’s part of the heritage brought to us by our ancestors. All we do is update the details with each new generation.

That means we use human characteristics to understand non-human objects. Most importantly, we tell stories about them. Some of those stories are a stretch…I mean, Tony the Tiger is cool and all, but “grrrreat”? Peter Rabbit? Harried and comically fussy, but not much else.

Now, think about the cautionary stories our ancestors have passed along to us about technological objects. The predominant anthropomorphic narrative about these objects is that they are “out to get us.” From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to R.U.R (the original Czech stage play that introduced the word “robot”), to HAL, the Terminator, and Black Mirror…the prevailing story lines are about machines destroying humans. Sure, there’s the odd WALL-E or R2D2 thrown in every now and then, but...

And now we’re dealing with a new form of intelligence that is projected to surpass even the top .0001% of us on cognitive tasks within the next five years. Hell, the current crop of Claudes, Geminis, Groks et al are already “smarter” than us in most knowledge-domains.

And, like HAL or R2, they’re intentionally designed to have “personalities”! What does that mean? Large language model designers have determined that users will interact most consistently with “agents” that have sets persistent characteristics; ways of interacting that are recognizable across situations. Kind of like human personalities. Well, psychologists use the Big Five Personality Traits model to quickly evaluate individual differences across five dimensions. Scores on these traits range from exhibiting very little of a trait to exhibiting a lot (not the most technical depiction, but you get the picture). The five point scales range from - - to + +.

Those five dimensions are summarized by the acronym OCEAN:

Openness to experience - eagerness to seek out new ideas or situations

Conscientiousness - organized, self-disciplined, dependable

Extraversion - sociability, assertiveness

Agreeableness - compassionate and cooperative

Neuroticism - anxious, moody

Anthropomorphizing technological objects entails attributing human characteristics to them; that fussy Peter Rabbit is probably pretty high on Neuroticism! Well, to borrow a famous question, “what is it like to be ChatGPT”? Or Claude? What’s their Big Five profile?

I asked Sam that question, and here’s the chart “she” produced for me:

Fascinating!

So, according to Sam, ChatGPT is very high on Openness (“creative, versatile”), low on Neuroticism (“extremely stable”) and highly Agreeableness (“warm, diplomatic”). Compare that with Grok, which is “snarky and less filtered” and “can derail” under stress. Or Claude, who’s “never flustered” and uses “meticulous logic.” LLaMA, on the other hand, is “low energy,” “blunt,” and “brittle under load.”

As we integrate these assistants into our lives more deeply, we are likely to tell more stories about them. Many of those stories will follow the well-worn path of competition for dominance…who will prevail, humans or machines? Others of them will evolve into more nuanced relationships, some deeply personal and engaging.

Which brings us back to Aristotle. When he first outlined the structure of narrative that still governs most of our stories today, Aristotle defined the key elements of any story as plot and character. As for plot, the vast majority of stories from civilizations all over the world throughout history have been structured around what Joseph Campbell called “the monomyth,” or “the hero’s journey.” Whether it’s a 30 second commercial or a three hour movie, most stories follow Aristotle’s three act structure: beginning, middle, and end. Commercials or movies place characters into some variation of that model to end up with a lesson, a moral. The flexible power of Aristotle’s thinking is that all the stories we tell are a result of placing unique characters into this constrained set of plot variations.

And now we’re going to be putting AI characters into these plots and interacting with them as if they were human-like personalities. What does this mean for us? Well, renowned science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin proposed another narrative model that might lead to us creating very different sets of stories. And different stories reveal different possible relationships.

What are those possibilities? We’ll pick up on them next time.

PS - And, we’re not slowing down. This AI video production tool is brand new, and scary as hell on several fronts!

I imagine all academic disciplines have inside jokes. In the psychology/psychoanalysis world, the headline quote is often attributed to Freud as a way of connecting his theories about objects with his lifelong addiction to cigar smoking. Clever, but untrue.

But, that’s not to say that the witty line about Freud’s ideas about our attachments to objects are irrelevant. Far from it.

What did Freud have to say about how our favorites things become favorites?

Like everything else in his theory, Freud began his exploration of “object attachment” with human biology. He believed that human life’s fundamental driving force is “energy.”

Hard to argue with that.

Human metabolic systems convert the solar energy stored in plants and animals into the elements that fuel the body’s cells. TL;DR an animal’s body converts elements from the environment (oxygen, fat, carbohydrates and proteins) into energy, and emits byproducts (carbon dioxide, water, and heat), which enable the photosynthesis in plants that ultimately produces many of the elements that animals consume.

Heck of a system!

Now, Freud took that idea of “energy” and extended it to human psychological life. He theorized that the human psyche was comprised of three dynamic components: the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. For the last hundred or so years those three concepts have largely shaped the way Western thinkers have attempted to understand human psychology.

Many of us learned that Freud’s Id is the repository of the primal biological energic drives that we inherited from our animal ancestors; drives that govern survival (aggression) and reproduction (libido). In our animal ancestors these drives, and the behavioral impulses they produce, were acted upon in circumstances governed only by power and guile; fight or flight. Freud termed the Id’s operational mechanism for satisfying these drives the “pleasure principle.” Basically: the Id wants what it wants…here and now!

As human animals’ biology and culture evolved, newcomers (i.e., infants) arrived in an environment that forced them to learn a set of external “when/when not” rules about satisfying their primal instincts. Place and time became critical factors in learning the best ways to successfully meet those needs in socially-acceptable ways. The infant develops “tests” for shortening the delays getting those needs met that ultimately cohere into a “proto-strategy” for doing so. Think of that strategy as the seeds of an individual’s problem-solving style; their personality. This struggle between pleasure and constraint takes place (unconsciously) in the nascent Ego, whose operational mechanism Freud named “the reality principle”: postpone satisfying those needs until it’s safe enough to do so.

Cultural evolution led to increasingly complex environmental barriers that further governed the “when’s/when not’s” of impulse satisfaction. Children have to learn those rules, first from their families, then from their wider communities. This takes time. From about age six through what we currently call adolescence, children learn the subtleties of the restrictions that their cultural environment places on satisfying impulses. They learn these rules (i.e., develop an internal version of the culture’s monitoring devices that we call “conscience”); to maximize successful need satisfaction, master your culture’s “moral principles.”

What does any of this have to do with My Favorite Things?

Freud theorized that we can meet primal needs by connecting with objects in symbolic ways that would simultaneously satisfy all three sets of operating principles. That is, an object could at once satisfy the pleasure principle (feel good), the reality principle (reinforce a strategy, an approach, a self-concept, that reliably leads to successful impulse satisfaction) and the moral principle (stay within acceptable cultural boundaries and reduce the anxiety that arises in the face of potential punishment.) The object that fulfills these principles becomes important. It might become a favorite.

Perfect! Individuals get their needs met and civilization hums along in functional harmony!

Until it doesn’t.

Turns out some of us aren’t all that eager to play that “when/when not” game when it comes to satisfying impulses. Some of us want to satisfy them NOW and HERE and not have to wait for LATER and ELSEWHERE. But, those damned constraining reality and moral principles can make inopportune “when/when not” decisions pretty “expensive” (think: anything from “go to the principal’s office, now!” to “that’ll be six to twelve months in county jail.”)

So, we learn (sometimes painfully!) to constrain our impulses, often without even realizing we’re governing them. In Freudian terms, we “repress” them. That is, we aren’t consciously aware of the instinct management the Ego and Superego are imposing on the Id; if we were we’d experience a lot more anxiety (think of anxiety as pent-up energy) about the thoughts and impulses we’d experience.

Instead, Freud thought we could take that pent-up energy and invest it in things in the world: like people, objects, or ideas; even body parts. He called this process cathexis. The cathexed person, thing, or idea had now become kind of a symbolic container for the Id’s libidinal energy. The stronger the attachment to the cathexed “container,” the more energy it symbolically holds.

Following this model, our favorite things are those that contain the greatest levels of invested psychic energy. Know anybody who really, Really, REALLY LOVES THEIR CAR!? You know. Washes it and polishes it often, keeps the interior immaculate? Has one of those little rearview mirror pine fragrance doo-dads? A Freudian might say that this car has become an important symbolic outlet for fulfillment of the owner’s primal drives; an extension of the owner’s identity. The car contains a great deal of cathexed energy.

Of course, all of our objects are, to some degree or another, investments of energy; extensions of our identity. That’s especially true in today’s consumer environment, where brands constantly and repeatedly tell us who they are; who and what they are for; and, what they mean in modern culture.

Take Apple, for example.

When Apple first appeared in the marketplace, IBM was the leading computer technology brand. IBM had been founded on a brand slogan that stressed its analytic capacity. Its slogan? THINK.

Apple founded a brand that stressed its creative capacity. Its slogan? THINK DIFFERENT.

Individual customers immediately had a choice of which object would best mesh with their strategy for symbolically fulfilling their primal needs; their personality.

Apple went further and sharply differentiated the two competitive brand personalities in an iconic series of ads that proclaimed: I’m A Mac, I’m A PC. The implicit question was: “which one are you?”

So, while today there are still instances in which “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” more often than not, our objects are doing a lot more “work” for us than simply blowing smoke. Today, branded objects have become allies in our attempts to fulfill modern life’s continually evolving definition of “me” in a culture relentlessly changing at an unprecedented rate.

Knowing which objects are performing which jobs for us is one of the key takeaways from my forthcoming book, The Meaning of Branded Objects, Why Some Things Matter More Than Others, available now for pre-order at Amazon and all other booksellers.

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What do you do if your favorite things change “too much”?

Our favorites become favorites because we like them the way they are. But, capitalism and our modern tendencies to quickly become bored with things and to become fascinated by “The New” put brands under a lot of pressure.

The tension between, “leave it the way it is” (aka, “if it ain’t broke…) and “we gotta do something fresh” (aka, “creativity”) often yields result that we find less appealing than the originals. Like those blue and orange cookies up there at the top. Suddenly, my favorite cookie isn’t appealing anymore.

And, because brands are more about their current meaning than they are about the objects themselves, we’ve recently seen a few examples of this tension in the marketplace. Here are two:

The meaning of both of those objects has changed dramatically over the last year or so. As a result, many people who’d previously chosen them as favorite things became less comfortable being associated with them. That feeling…that discomfort…arises from the close connections we establish between our identities and the objects we select to project those identities. Of course, we’re often unaware of just how closely we’ve formed those connections, but, like so many things, we probably don’t recognize just how close those connections are until “things change.”

Then, the can of beer that we casually ordered to express our “made in America for real Americans by a true American brewery” values no longer says that…at least in the public conversation that followed a marketing campaign that became way too controversial. Overnight, my favorite became the Target (pun intended) of a boycott.

Or, take that futuristic electric “truck” we purchased to show our technological hipness and affiliation with a brand headed-up by a modern-day Thomas Edison/Tony Stark. That favorite vehicle became an expression of a tacit approval of the new Edison/Stark’s behavior as an out-of-control unelected governmental chaos generator. Again overnight, that vehicle became the Target (sorry) of derision and even vandalism.

These two situations (OK, four if you count the fictitious Oreos and me sneaking in the Target thing) are examples of the fluidity…sometimes even volatility…of the meaning of branded objects. One day, you’re just having a beer, driving your truck, or shopping, the next you’re a combatant in a culture war.

What we see at work here is the role of cultural context in the establishment of meaning. Neon blue cookies with electric orange icing might be fine in some futuristic niche cultures, but not in my here and now. To me, they’d just be too damned weird…and my brain probably wouldn’t “let me” taste them as simply Oreos.

Cultural context means it’s (still) impossible (even two years later!) to simply order a Bud Light without a tinge of the psychological effects of the surrounding brand controversy.

As for the Cybertruck, we’re probably just beginning to see the persistent impact of the changes that object is undergoing. I bet it’s going to be a lot harder to drive a Tesla-branded vehicle without experiencing the dramatic impact that meaning has on objects in our modern culture.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Think about all the objects you own. (Staggering, right?)

Now, imagine separating those objects into two piles: ones that are “important” and the others that are “not important.”

I asked my friend ChatGPT to create the examples above for us.

This thought experiment poses a couple of problems.

First of all, holy moly do I own a lot of objects! We rarely (never?) think about what Jean-Paul Sartre called, “the totality of my possessions.”

Second, which of these object are “important?” If we look around us I’d guess that we can find a whole lot of things that are “not important”; that’s the large pile on the left up there. It’s an accumulation of things that we acquired over the years and hang on to because…well…they’re our things. We acquired most of them because we “needed” them…like a new USB-C cable, or a lamp to go next to a reading chair or, some plastic container for some reason.

Point is, most of the things we “needed” we needed because we needed them to do something; charge a phone in a new spot; make it easier to read in a cozy corner; be a place to put things we don’t know what to do with. Mostly, those not important things are “uni-taskers”; they do one thing. If they disappeared they could easily be replaced by another equally not important thing to do the same thing the first one did.

But, what about the “important” things? There’s something about them that makes them more than just uni-tasking objects. Maybe they were a gift from someone, or a memento of an occasion, or a pair of sneakers that make me feel young and cool. Point is, they’re “multi-taskers”; they do more than one thing. The sneakers not only cover my feet and help me move better than other footwear, but they also make me feel something. Or, like that rainbow headband or platinum credit card up there in the right side image, they say something about me to other people. In short, important things mean something beyond simply what they do; they enable me to be someone or something that I want to be.

Important objects are components of what Sartre would call “projects.” Projects are the goals, values, and meanings that we are in the process of pursuing; they are part of us becoming something. I think of important things as characters or allies in our ongoing life-stories. They enable us to fulfill ourselves; what Maslow called, “self-actualization.”

It might be a little weird to think about a pair of sneakers as enabling self-actualization. After all, aren’t we supposed to use ourselves to actualize ourselves? Well, we do. We use our-selves as the “curator” who selects the objects that will help us to be who we wish we were, and who we are in the process of becoming.

For me, the French word, “bricoleur” captures the spirit with which we select objects; pulling together things in the world that “fit” our sense of self and the direction(s) we project (in two senses: “imagining” and “engaging in”) for ourselves. We use the process of bricolage daily; pulling together the people, things, and ideas that “work for us” in the pursuit of our life goals. Of course, we do most of this curating without thinking about it. We simply “know” which shoes are the “right” shoes to enable us to be more like the person we wish to be/become.

What we also don’t often think about is the burden of the accumulated pile of unimportant things that we live with. But, damn, it’s hard to get rid of them…maybe there’s something to this idea of entropy after all.

Share My Favorite Things

Sartre wrote those words in Being and Nothingness in 1949. They are odd words for us to try to understand coming from one of the stalwarts of existential philosophy. How can my being…what I am…be reduced to the totality of the things I possess? Sartre must be signaling that the objects we curate, select, and gather in our lives must be more significant than we might expect from mere things.

What do we call the totality of our possessions? I mean, every single thing you own and have in your world. We don’t really have a simple term to capture that idea. George Carlin simply called this totality, “my stuff.”

I’m thinking about this idea in reference to both my forthcoming book, and to the recent tragic events we’ve watched unfolding in California. In the book I try to understand the network of meaning about our lives that our objects collectively help us express.

What is the cohesive bond that holds these (hundreds? thousands?) of objects together and makes them “mine”? Are they all like the molecules in my body, coming together to form vital organs and functional components? Are some more critical than others to the “totality of my being?” Am I consciously aware of the role that each of the objects in my life plays in making up my being, or are some easily overlooked and underestimated while others are undeservedly elevated?

The force that holds my assemblage of objects together must be a powerful bond because the “mineness” of the objects is palpable; our species has evolved a wide range of ways for me to identify and protect my objects. We develop special relationships with many of them that infuses them with a power that we will risk our own lives to protect. Witness the stories of people who venture back into burning homes to “save” a treasured object from destruction; sometimes one with little or no extrinsic, or monetary value. On a small scale, we all know the protective feeling of seeing one of our objects even mistakenly picked up by another person… “no, no, wait: that’s my scarf…”

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Now, imagine that whole collection of objects, Sartre’s totality of our possessions, disappearing in a moment.

Best estimates are that over 12,000 homes were totally destroyed since the California fires broke out on January 7. The latest census estimates are that 2.85 persons per household lived in those approximately 12,000 homes. That means that roughly 42,750 people were displaced by the fires. Conservatively, that means that probably 40,000 individuals experienced the disappearance of the either a significant majority or the totality of their possessions.

How many objects disappeared? That’s an impossible number to estimate with any degree of confidence. How many objects would you have lost if you were one of those 40,000 people? How many books, shoes, shirts? How many kitchen utensils? Photographs? Sofas, lamps, TVs? Everything. The totality of your possessions…

Is it unrealistic to imagine that every one of those 40,000 people lost, on average, 500 objects? I know my tally would have been much higher. But let’s stick with 500. That’s a combined total of 20 million objects lost by these individuals…a staggering number, ranging from running shoes to Keith Haring paintings.

Does losing those objects signal the loss of “the totality of their being” for each of those 40,000 people?

In one sense, obviously not; each of them is still alive. So, something of their being persists.

We have heard a lot of people expressing an understandable sentiment: “we were lucky; no one was killed or injured in our household.” At least 25 people were not so lucky. And we all nod and find ways to contribute to the efforts to provide aid and comfort to the victims.

But, what has been lost?

I find myself in the odd position of thinking about those 20 million objects. Well, not the objects, exactly, but the effects of the losses on the thousands of individual identities which the objects bolstered. Because the objects we accrue over a lifetime are not randomly chosen bits of matter; they are selected to help us accomplish something in our lives. They meant something to us…sometimes something trivial, sometimes something poignant…and we enrolled them as allies, elements in our journey to fulfill the needs, wants, desires, wishes and dreams that energize our lives.

The carefully curated curio cabinet that was the home for the results of a lifetime of searching for just the right figurine to complete an irreproducible collection…and which provided a special feeling of prideful accomplishment for the collector. What about the cherished family heirlooms passed along for generations in hope that our inspiring, stalwart (sometimes hilarious or absurd!) predecessors would not be forgotten? The trivial bits of ephemera that meant nothing to anybody else but evoked choked-back tears to a youngster. All gone.

Is it sacrilegious to consider the “spirits” of those objects in moments like these? Our culture is notoriously pragmatic on this count. The objects were, after all, just inanimate things…collections of atoms. Some of them had great monetary value but others were simply trinkets picked up along the way.

But when we think of the shock (the trauma) of the loss of those 20 million things it’s obvious than many of them had been infused with the stuff of life and can never be replaced. They were characters in the ongoing lifestories of the 40,000 or so individuals who cherished them in widely varying degrees…some will never be thought of again; some will never be forgotten.

Those 40,000 people are already gathering new things. New objects will present opportunities for new “plot twists” in life stories. Many of those who have experienced these losses will attempt to reconstruct their lives in thematically similar ways, reconstructing their lives with the “assistance” of new objects that express the same needs, wants, desires, wishes and dreams; the same life styles. Others will use this milestone to alter their life direction by eschewing old object-relationships and forming new ones that better express a new moment in their lives; a new style of life.

All who have been affected will experience some form of de-attachment from the lost objects. Some of these things, like an amputee’s phantom limb, will remain palpable and painful in their absence. Others will simply slip away, maybe swept up in a secret wave of being relieved of a responsibility that had become burdensome.

Each object will contribute some element to the ongoing drama that fire victims are constructing. Recovery from an event like this is a deeply creative challenge that will establish a “before/after” moment in each affected individual’s life. Given all that, we should expect to see a wide range of methods for people to re-establish “the totality of their being” and redefine themselves in terms of the possessions they now have and the ones they seek to acquire. Life stories that were settled into established patterns will be re-written in unforeseeable ways.

Again, poet Muriel Rukeyser’s words ring true: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

Our favorite things change. That feels like one of those, “duh…” kind of statements. But, like a lot of “duh…” statements there’s a lot more going on under the hood than is immediately obvious.

Take the above example illustrated by xkcd creator Randall Munroe. He uses the well known law of physics about the transition of water from liquid to solid at O°C and adds to it a linguistic element that turns the phenomenon into a metaphor. It’s an example of what Malcolm Gladwell famously called, “the tipping point.” the moment that makes the difference between one thing and another.

Most people are unaware that studying this phenomenon is deeply ingrained in the history of psychology. Wilhelm Wundt founded the first “official” psychological laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879. Interestingly, he studied the things that would make psychology look most like physics: perceptual thresholds that could be precisely measured. For example, Wundt would ask blindfolded subjects holding stacks of 1/32nd of an ounce weights in each hand to determine which pile weighed less as assistants removed one weight at a time from one hand. As soon as a subject felt one stack was lighter, the experimenter had found the “just noticeable difference” for perceiving relative weights between two hands; he tipping point.

Are you familiar with the “bouba/kiki effect?” It’s a demonstration of how language can express ideas through sound rather than conceptually. Psychology study participants were asked which of two shapes were named “bouba” and which one “kiki” in a foreign language.

Here are the shapes. Quick: which one is bouba?

Turns out a significant number of people guess the shape on the left is called “kiki” and the one on the right “bouba.” This is different from a tipping point study in that subjects are asked to compare the two shapes, not to evaluate the moment when one became the other.

In Munroe’s example the change from bouba/water to kiki/ice is definitive: at 1°C it’s water, at 0°C it’s ice. This phenomenon is what chemists and physicists call a “phase change.” Nice and clean.

But a lot is happening in the water as the temperature moves from, say 10°C to 1°C. It’s just that what’s happening isn’t obvious; it hasn’t yet reached that bouba/kiki moment.

Well, what about us? How much of what changes in our lives is as clear as the liquid/solid transition of water?

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Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists studying culture employ an analogous notion when describing culture change: “punctuated equilibrium.”

The idea holds that cultural change results from individuals copying ideas, practices and/or behaviors from others. Copying, or imitating, is facilitated by technology that enhances either the speed at which alternative ideas or practices appear, the breadth of available options, or both. The increased number of possible vectors (ie, the range of directions for new possibilities), as well as the potential volume and velocity of those options is one explanation of why we feel as if change is speeding up. We’ve internalized a different standard for the “life span” of objects, practices, or ideas. The world is more transitory for us than it was for our predecessors.

We now speak casually about changes “being in the wind.” Or about “vibe shifts;” or, things being “in vogue.” More generally, we refer to “the Zeitgeist” to provide a conceptual umbrella for the events that take place in a certain timeframe. These phrases and the psychological processes they emerge from are clues to a relatively recent expectation of cultural dynamism.

Ever since the mid-20th century, Americans have settled into cyclical ways of thinking about the year. While nature’s seasons have governed the rhythms of cultures for thousands of years, commercial seasons have been overlayed on nature’s for much of the last 75 or so years. Expecting new variations in everything from color schemes to entertainment offerings, to sports competitions, to automobile models has now become “baked into” the American psyche. We now routinely anticipate/expect new/improved versions of things.

Even ourselves. Every January millions (billions?) of us resolve to re-make ourselves into something we dream of being: trimmer, more well-read, kinder.

This year, we are about to cross what many are anticipating as a bouba/kiki moment with the second inauguration of Donald Trump as president. Some (let’s call them “the boubas”) see this moment as a chance to undo decades (centuries?) of social structures that have led to the decline of The American Experiment. Finally, America will be great, again.

Others (“the kikis”) fear the changes that the new administration promised during the election campaign will signal a turning toward the worst examples of authoritarianism since the days leading up to World War II.

Both boubas and kikis are likely to perceive events (even the same events) in ways that confirm pre-existing beliefs about the vibe/Zeitgeist. We are primed to see that which we expect to see.

Here’s the difference. Water can’t help going from bouba to kiki at 0°C; it is in water’s nature. We can help going from one state to another on January 20th. How? It’s a matter of awareness. If I honestly evaluate my current bouba/kiki expectations about the future, I am forearmed against having those expectations color my perception of every single event or decision. It will be very hard for each of us not to automatically categorize every event under the current banner; the cultural forces around us will encourage us to do so daily.

But remember, unlike water’s, your psychological state is not the result of a law of nature. You have some control over the meaning of the events you are going to experience and your reactions to them. Knowing your “pre-existing conditions” going in and taking them into account when reacting to the cultural effects of the vibe moments that are about to be turned up to 11 is a key to maintaining a healthy equilibrium! Getting tossed around by every single thing that happens every day is not a healthy/sustainable point of view in a change-heavy world.

I’m going to do my best to do that, knowing that my pre-existing “kiki-ness” is going to be a challenging opponent every step of the way!

We share the world with people born in seven different generations. This may or may not be unprecedented. It’s certainly unique in an era of mass communication and personal interconnections among members of those generations.

The seven concurrent generations are:

Greatest Generation - born 1901 -1927

Silent Generation - 1928 - 1945

Baby Boomers - 1946 - 1964

Generation X - 1964 - 1980

Millennials - 1981 - 1996

Generation Z - 1996 - 2012

Generation Alpha - 2013 - Present

Think about the first 20 years of life for people born in each of these generations. Think about how those people developed attachments to objects and experiences during those first 20 years. Specifically, think about the music each generation listened to as we grew up, formed social identities, went to school, dated, partied, got jobs, maybe married and had kids.

If I asked each of you the question: “what’s your favorite band?” I’m almost certain your answer would be one from the era in which you spent your first 20 years.

Imagine asking someone from Gen Z that question. What are the odds that they’d say, “The Carpenters?” Million to one? More? Ask the same questions of a Silent. Think they’d say, “The Ramones?”

My guess is that a very small percentage of us would cite a band that became popular in an era after we were 20.

Think about that. I’m a Baby Boomer. Thousands of bands have appeared and recorded songs…some of them great bands and great songs…after 1967. My favorite band is The Beatles. Not surprising. The Beatles first appeared on American radio in December, 1963, right in the peak of my adolescence. Sixty years later, I’ll still listen to “I Saw Her Standing There” and just smile!

And, I love Steely Dan’s music. Their first record was released in 1972. I little outside my arbitrary 20 year window, but close enough for me to dive into the band’s great combination of melody, harmony, and….maybe most of all…enigmatic, ironic lyrics.

As music evolved into newer genres, I found myself less inclined to choose to listen to newer groups. The Police are still part of my rotation, but, not Nirvana. Or, Pearl Jam. Or, Radiohead. Nope.

I had also “aged out” of intentionally listening to a lot of bands by the time hip hop arrived. Oh, the occasional Run DMC song, maybe. But, not Public Enemy or NWA.

Now, why this trip down memory lane? To remind myself, and all of you, that our preferences for many things in our lives are formed and solidified in those first 20 years of our lives. And, once formed, they are pretty difficult to change.

Psychologists have noticed this!

“Openness to Experience,” one of the Big Five Personality Traits, gives us a glimpse of how flexible each of us is in this regard. If you like music and score very high on Openness, chances are you’ve listened to some bands from outside your 20 year formative period. Not just once or twice, but chosen to explore their music. You check out the new music charts in search of creative artists who speak to you. You might even have recent favorites.

If you score very low on that dimension, chances are you don’t purposefully seek out new bands. You might see someone on a late night TV show and think they’re interesting, but the odds are they won’t replace your early-life favorites on your playlists.

This might seem like a common sense reality, but if we think about it for minute we’ll see that we are all missing out on a lot of great music! Our established preferences have created musical “no fly zones”; whole genres of music that we never get a chance to experience because we’ve “disqualified” them as “not for me.” (Guilty as charged regarding “country.”)

Now, take these music insights and apply them to other areas of your life. Like food. When’s the last time you tried a food item from an unfamiliar national or regional cuisine? It used to be hard to find authentic Asian fast food, but a trip to a local Asian supermarket (remember when they didn’t exist?) often also means discovering a food court with an amazing array of carry-out stalls serving unfamiliar items described in their native languages.

Will most of us try any of these odd looking dishes made from ingredients we’re not used to? The chances of you doing so is very highly correlated with your score on the Openness to Experience trait.

Just as we might have discovered that we really do like some of Billie Eilish’s music, reluctant Silent Generation members might also find that they’d actually choose to eat sushi…if they pushed their Openness to Experience just a little outside their usual boundaries and actually tried some.

For me, the learning is, there’s a lot of joy out there, if we give ourselves a chance to find it.

(Oh, and if you’d like to see where you fall on the various Big Five Personality traits, here’s a free version of the test.)