Hi everyone. Long time, no talk. So much radio silence. But now the radio is back on, and broadcasting on all channels. And that’s because, dare I say it, I’ve got something to say.

The tl;dr is this—I’ve co-authored a book with the guy who created the Apple Store, Ron Johnson. It’s called SHOP DIFFERENT: HOW RETAIL REVEALED APPLE’S GENIUS. It is the untold story of the Apple Store from Ron’s perspective, it will be published by HarperCollins on September 22, 2026, and you can preorder it by clicking here.

If that’s all you want to read, you can stop here. But I am going to share a little bit of my story, a little bit of Ron’s and my story, and a little bit about why you might want to read our book below. If that is of interest to you, please keep reading!

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In 2017, I published an essay on the Apple Store—titled “The Luxury Network”—on Medium.1 (I miss Medium.) It went a little bit viral. Then, six years later, it made it to the guy who created the Apple Store.

Of course, I spent the better part of my life thinking that Steve Jobs created the Apple Store. And there’s some truth to that—he was certainly involved. But Steve wasn’t a retailer. To build a retail store, he did what he often did. He hired a smart person not so he could tell THEM what to do, but so that they could tell HIM what to do. And that smart person was the guy with whom I’ve co-authored SHOP DIFFERENT: Ron Johnson.

I’m going to back up briefly because the backstory on Apple will help you understand why Steve hired Ron. Steve founded Apple in 1976, took it public in 1980, then launched the Macintosh in 1984. And during that time, he was… tricky… to work with, and that “trickiness”—if you count orchestrating a coup against the CEO of the company as being “tricky”—led to his being ousted from Apple in 1985. But as Steve would share in a Stanford commencement address two decades later, getting fired from Apple in 1985 was the best thing that could have ever happened to him. It freed him up to enter one of the most creative periods of his life. And during that period, he not only matured—he planted the seeds that would eventually grow into the Apple we know today.

Steve returned to Apple in 1996 when the company’s third CEO since his departure, Gil Amelio, purchased one of the two companies he had founded during his time away—NeXT. (The other company was Pixar, which we’ll return to.) It is maybe not surprising that within a few months of returning, Gil Amelio was out as CEO and Steve had reassumed the position. And yet, Steve didn’t commit completely. He took the title of “interim” CEO (or the later abbreviated “iCEO), which some have since theorized was because he didn’t know if Apple could be saved, and didn’t want to fully commit unless he was sure it could. Also, as of 1996, Steve was still CEO of Pixar. So, he was literally running two companies. Maybe he called himself interim CEO because he didn’t know if he could conceivably pull off anything more. Or maybe the “i” in “iCEO” just stood for “insane.”

Anyway, roughly two years after his return to Apple, Steve—still interim CEO—launched the Bondi blue, egg-shaped iMac. It was the device meant to usher the world online, and it sold—but mostly to people who already knew Apple. Steve believed that the issue was his go-to-market strategy—and it’s hard to blame him, given that one of Apple’s resellers was Sears—so he made a bold bet. At a time when pundits like Marc Andreessen were predicting that the internet would kill stores, Apple would open one. And now we’re back to the guy without whom there would BE no Apple Store: Ron Johnson.

Ron is a pretty humble dude, it turns out. Minnesota-born and bred, focused on serving others, being kind, making things about anyone but himself. So, he would not be the one to tell you that as of 1999—at least, in the retail world—he was, to quote another guy named Ron, “kind of a big deal.” He had just launched a line of designer home goods at Target with the architect Michael Graves. This was Target’s first designer partnership—and part of the brand’s ongoing evolution into “Tarzhay”—and it caught Steve’s attention. He liked Ron’s focus on design, on the customer experience, on making an intimidating concept in design approachable for the masses. That, it turns out, is exactly what he needed to do with the iMac. And that is why, in November 1999, Ron ended up seated across from Steve in a conference room in Cupertino. It is also why Ron’s interview lasted not three minutes, as so many interviews with Steve did, but three hours.

The question I had when Ron first told me they spoke for that long was simple.

“What the heck did you guys talk about?”

A lot, it turns out. Three hours is a long time. And one of the things they talked about was who, exactly, the store would be for. Who was Steve trying to reach?

As of 1999, Steve told Ron, Apple was doing well with creative pros. Also as of 1999, 50 percent of Americans had a computer in their home, and Apple had five percent of that market. Steve believed that if he opened his own store, he could double Apple’s market share. But Ron pushed back for two reasons. The first was that it seemed like Apple could probably double its PC market share by improving its existing reseller strategies and building an online store (none of which would necessitate pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its own stores). The second was that Ron, coming from where he was coming from and having done what he had just done, had a different idea for what Steve—and Apple—could do.

This is where things get interesting. (And don’t you dare say I used AI to write that line, because this is actually where things get interesting.) Ron had just spent the last few years working to bring design—an intimidating concept—to everyone at Target. And now, here he is, sitting in front of Steve Jobs, listening to him talk about how easy the Mac is to use, but knowing that in the state he’s from—Minnesota—most people do NOT see it that way. He knows that his world is different than Steve’s. He knows that computers are intimidating to the 50 percent of Americans who don’t yet own them in the same way designer teakettles might’ve once been intimidating to people who thought they were relegated to Manhattan stovetops. Most of all, he knows that he just successfully made design approachable to the masses at Target. So, staring at an egg-shaped, design-focused computer, he has another thought.

If we could make computers approachable, why wouldn’t we just… go after everyone?

In the end, that’s really where this book starts. With this idea that a store could be the place where everyone launched their relationship with technology. This thought is what led to a store focused not on selling, but on serving. To a store with interesting people and theaters with classes and bars with support. To a store that just felt, to borrow a word from the book’s title, different.

Anyway. For everything I’ve shared about the book and everything people know about the store, there is so much more to the story. I don’t want to spoil it, but I’ll say this. If you love Apple—and are interested in a new perspective on the company’s golden years—you will love this book. If you love the origin stories of iconic institutions, you will love this book. If you have ever stood in an Apple Store like the 24-hour cube on Fifth Avenue and wondered HOW the HECK they created it, you will love this book. Dare I say, you might even want to preorder it.

With that said, the link to preorder is here. Ron and I spent three years on this book so you only have to spend a few hours with it. As with all labors of love, we love it. We hope you love it, too.

A month ago, Donald Trump started a blog. Then, a week ago, he shut it down. What happened?

The answer is, well, not a whole lot. From the Washington Post:

“On its last day, [Trump’s blog] received just 1,500 shares or comments on Facebook and Twitter — a staggering drop for someone whose every tweet once garnered hundreds of thousands of reactions.”

When Twitter decided to ban Trump, critics of the decision argued that it violated his freedom of speech. And yet, that Trump was able to start a blog illustrates that it wasn’t really his freedom of speech that Twitter was restricting, but his freedom of reach. If freedom of speech were the problem, where Trump was publishing would be irrelevant. It shouldn’t matter if his rants are on Twitter, or Facebook, or a blog. Clearly, though, it does.

In a recent issue of Platformer, Casey Newton cites the technologist Aza Raskin, who was the first to distinguish between freedom of speech and freedom of reach. Freedom of speech is the right to say what you want, but, as Renee Diresta put it in a 2018 essay for Wired:

“There is no right to algorithmic amplification.”

She’s right, of course. In theory, Twitter is well within their rights to take algorithmic amplification away from Trump.

Most of us, though, aren’t Trump. If we use social media, it’s to send memes to friends and doomscroll Twitter on public transit. At best, some of us have a few hundred sort of engaged followers who retweet us occasionally; we haven’t done anything that would make platforms want to take that right away from us.

In fact, most of these platforms wouldn’t want to take these rights away from anyone if they could at all avoid it. Algorithmic amplification is what fattens their bottom lines, after all—it is only amidst massive social backlash that they’d even consider taking it away. With this in mind, I’ve decided to change my strategy as it pertains to writing full-time.

The TL;DR is that I am going to start publishing not only on Substack, but on Medium and other platforms, too. This is a function of (a) wanting to take advantage of the freedom of reach that I very much still have, because I am not Donald Trump, and (b) wanting/needing to make money. If you’d like more detail, feel free to read on.

I’ll start by noting why, exactly, I started Anything Different. This requires some background—first about my writing, second about what I was doing immediately before the launch.

Let’s take each in turn.

My Writing

I started writing a few years ago. I found that it helped me deal with post-college anxiety.

I also came to enjoy finding new and interesting ways to articulate things. I liked editing, specifically, because I could revise thoughts in a way I couldn’t revise speech.

I found a home on Medium. Founded by Ev Williams, who also co-founded Twitter, Medium offered writers a seamless publishing experience and the opportunity to reach a built-in audience.

Over three years on the platform, I published several dozen long-form essays. A few went viral. I went from zero followers to over 10,000.1 My work was featured alongside publications like the New York Times and the Atlantic. I even collaborated with Medium on a collection of essays called Buy Yourself. That collection was featured next to No Mercy / No Malice by Scott Galloway. I was experiencing my “15 seconds of fame,” as they put it. And it felt good!

Success amidst a platform with a built-in audience, though, made it easy to think—incorrectly—that my writing would’ve succeeded anywhere. It further led me to believe—also, incorrectly—that regardless of how often I published, people that had once messaged me or shared my work would still want to read me, perhaps even to the point of wanting to pay me directly.

So it didn’t give me any real anxiety when my actual job got insanely busy in late 2019 and early 2020, and I lost the time and motivation to continue publishing for my audience.

Here, it’s worth understanding why, exactly, that happened.

Life Before Anything Different

As of late 2019, I had been working full-time at a corporate culture hub called Platterz for 18 months.

Platterz’ primary business was acting as a broker between restaurants and companies that brought catering into the office. This was a very good business until suddenly, it wasn’t. The pandemic took our company’s revenues from a lot to a little, basically overnight.

Now, we didn’t just lie down and die. We responded by building an entirely new business vertical. As we had once been brokers of food, now we were brokers of virtual experiences. Virtual escape rooms, virtual trivia nights, virtual mixology classes. If you did a virtual experience in 2020, you might’ve worked with one of our partners. We also rebranded to Thriver from Platterz, as a reflection of “supporting Thriving workplaces” no longer being synonymous with just brokering food.

As you might expect, the demand for virtual experiences was insane. We turned off inbounds multiple times because we couldn’t keep up. Still, just because demand exists doesn’t mean selling something is easy. There are other aspects of sales—dealing with logistics, or unreliable partners, not to mention expectation setting amidst uncertainty about what, exactly, the client’s expectations should be. We quickly realized that our expertise in managing food programs, which happened in-person, and dealt in physical goods, did not necessarily translate into expertise managing virtual experiences. It is astonishing how many things can go wrong with a Zoom call, or how difficult it can be to manage shipments of packages to people’s individual addresses. Hiccups—or, as we lovingly referred to them, fuck-ups—were varied and constant. It felt like we ran into a new crisis every day. And thus, the second half of 2020 was one of the craziest times of my working life.

Partially as a result of how much time I was spending on work, I stopped writing. Whereas I had been publishing on Medium about once a month, I couldn’t get myself to write even a word for the second half of 2020. I was making good money selling virtual experiences for Thriver, which made giving up on what I actually liked doing tolerable. Still, selling virtual experiences felt sort of opportunistic, and thus, I don’t know, hollow. I was making money doing something that I didn’t really feel like I should’ve been making money for doing. But it was a pandemic, so like everyone else who had a job, I found myself “sheltering-in-position,” as Linkedin dubbed it. The basic idea being, if you have a job, no matter how meaningless it is, or how much you hate it, just shut up and do it, because a lot of people are out of work right now and are way more worse off than you.

Granted, I should clarify that I really didn’t hate what I was doing. It’s admittedly fun to sell something people want, assuming it isn’t something that could destroy people’s lives. (Drugs come to mind.) I wasn’t initially convinced that what we were selling was worth wanting, but as demand exploded, it became easy to think that it was. This may just be human nature—that it becomes easy to convince yourself something is worth wanting when you see other people wanting it, too. I know this is true as a consumer—mimetic impulses undeniably drive consumptive behavior—but now I know it to be true as a salesperson, too. When people want something you’re selling, it becomes very easy to ignore that it might not be worth wanting in the first place, and it’s fun.

The other part of this that’s worth acknowledging is just how little else there was to do during the second half of 2020. My sources of excitement were cooking dinner with my girlfriend and spontaneous games of Sporcle Trivia or Quiplash with college buddies via FaceTime. There was literally nothing else to look forward to. No trips to plan, no dinners to go out to, no bars to stumble out of. My girlfriend and I spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at my apartment because we didn’t want to risk flying home. I couldn’t even muster up the motivation to get a tree, or hang lights. I’ll thus cut myself at least a bit of slack for trying to find some sort of direction amidst a pandemic, even if that meant trying to make as much money as humanly possible selling escape rooms and trivia nights to companies that didn’t yet realize paying $50/head for either one was absurd.

This last sentence basically describes my second half of 2020. From March of 2020 onward, I sheltered-in-position, survived two rounds of layoffs, and just kept my head down and ground it out, counting myself lucky to still have to wake up for a 9am Zoom call. As the virtual experiences vertical caught fire, I even found myself optimistic, thinking that we’d emerge from the pandemic in early 2020 with a new vertical added to our bottom line, and that once catering came back, too, maybe we could even hire back some of the people we’d had to let go.

Then, the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I woke up to a calendar invite I didn’t recognize, and immediately knew what was happening.

I—along with Thriver’s entire sales and customer success teams, among many others—was being let go.

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In retrospect, I probably should’ve seen it coming. Truthfully, though, I didn’t.

Virtual experiences had become a behemoth of sorts; a fraction of what our monthly catering revenue had been, mind you, but a lot of money for a vertical that had only existed for a few months.

Still, it wasn’t enough to justify a spend on a sales and customer success team, so our executive team made the decision to let go of everyone but product, engineering, and customer support. The idea was to keep supporting existing customers, but otherwise hunker down, wait things out, improve the product, and emerge from the pandemic stronger and leaner. This was the right move for the company, but it left a lot of people out of work.

I counted myself lucky not to need a new job immediately. Like many others, COVID eliminated a lot of my normal expenses, so I had some runway. Amidst a world where it seemed everyone was looking at life and wondering if what they were doing meant anything at all, I kept coming back to writing.

In a graduation speech at Maharishi University of Management, Jim Carrey tells the story of his father, who gave up on his dreams to take a stable job before being fired from it years later.

The lesson is simple:

“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

There are a few things I love. I love my parents; I love my girlfriend. Those aren’t occupations, though.

I love golf, too, which could be an occupation, but part of what I love about golf is that it isn’t what I do for a living, and I have never made money from it. Asking myself what I loved that I had also made money from previously led me back to writing.

I hadn’t written anything in a year, but I had some ideas. Still, I wasn’t married to going back to Medium, where I’d started writing. There were a few reasons for that. The first was that Medium doesn’t allow you to own your audience. Put another way, I had 10,000+ followers on Medium, but if the platform shut down tomorrow, they’d all be gone. This wasn’t as much of a risk when writing was a side gig, but it would be exceedingly stupid to build a business around an audience that could disappear in an instant. This led me to Substack.

The appeal of Substack is simple. You can import an email list, or start one from scratch, and reach your audience directly. You can also build an email list up with Substack. Critically, if Substack were to shut down tomorrow, I would still have that email list, and could use a different service to email them my work, as well as find another service that would allow them to pay me. From a business perspective, Substack made more sense than Medium.

I also had an email list of 400+ subscribers from a Wordpress blog I’d set up at the end of 2017. These were people who had emailed me at one point telling me they’d enjoyed my work, or had simply signed up to receive updates. Substack might’ve been less appealing if I were starting an email list from zero, but I wasn’t. I convinced myself that 400 people that hadn’t heard from me in over a year would gleefully accept my emails, and that a significant portion of them might even sign up to pay me monthly. This was, to put it gently, optimistic.

I should make a caveat here that my launch of Anything Different didn’t go terribly; it just didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. Many of you embraced my call to action and signed up for paid subscriptions. At this point, I have a few dozen paid subscribers. A few are friends and family; the rest are people I don’t know personally, but clearly found enough value in my work to want to pay me directly. I am grateful to everyone who reads my work; I am especially grateful to those willing to pay me for it.

Still, going paid as early as I did was a mistake. My eyes were bigger than my stomach. Not to mention that I had been let go from my job two months before starting Anything Different, and was anxious to start earning money again. So I turned on paid subscriptions, hoping for a deluge. I got a trickle.

In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been surprising. Substack works best for writers who have highly engaged audiences already. This usually means two types of people.

The first is someone like Matthew Iglesias, who started Vox. He already has hundreds of thousands of people who want to read him, specifically, and are willing to pay him directly. Substack enables him to charge those readers directly without having to go through a publication.

The other type of writer Substack rewards is someone who writes about something very specific, such that there is already an audience for them. I, for instance, would love it if someone wrote a Substack with hole-by-hole descriptions of every top-100 private golf club in America. For obvious reasons, there are only a few people who might have the access or social connections to enable them to do this, but there are a lot of golfers who would love to read it. This is a particularly niche example, but the niche is the point; there are people who would want that to exist prior to it existing; creating a Substack about it is just a way to connect with an audience that already exists.

For me, the calculus was different. I had people who wanted to read my work, but I didn’t have enough people such that the typical portion who would pay—10%, according to data from Substack—would offer me enough income to live on. I anticipated this, and worked out—basically via cocktail napkin math—that it would take me a little over a year to get to my target number of free subscribers—20,000. (10% of 20,000 is 2,000, and 2,000 * $5/month = $120,000/year, before taxes/fees, etc.)

Still, I was basing my estimates on the three years it took me to get to 10,000 followers on Medium—a platform with a built-in audience—while writing part-time. I also made the mistake of thinking that my productivity would scale linearly. If writing for ten hours a week for three years got me to 10,000 followers on Medium, I thought, then if I wrote 40 hours a week for Substack, I could reach 10,000 followers 4x faster. Aside from simply being incorrect—the nonlinearity effect, whereby there is not a linear relationship between an independent variable (time spent writing) and a dependent variable (follower count), is likely at play here—this also assumed that I could, actually, write for 40 hours a week. As any writer knows, the hardest part about writing is sitting down and doing it. Even if I sit at my computer for 40 hours a week, the chance that I’m actually writing for all of those hours is… low.

Having been unemployed for several months, though, and wanting to believe I was making the right decision, I ignored this reality, and—like a good economics major—simply assumed that writing for 40 hours a week would be a piece of cake. With this assumption intact, my cocktail napkin math said I could get to 10,000 followers in nine months—4x faster than I got to 10,000 followers on Medium. Once I was at 10,000, too, it would be much easier to get to 20,000. As anyone who writes online will tell you, it’s much easier to go from 10,000 to 20,000 followers than it is to go from zero to 10,000. (This is the same mechanism at play with the exponential growth of COVID-19 cases.)

Now, I’ll clarify again that things aren’t going all that terribly. My email list started at ~400 in March; it’s now up to 639. Things are moving, but they’re moving slowly. And it’s not hard to see this slowness as a function of my utilizing only Substack, and thus no longer having access to the freedom of reach that Medium provided me. Substack’s audience may grow in the months and years to come, and their discovery tools may improve, but for right now, their platform is best suited for those with dedicated audiences. If I am to make a living from writing, I need to focus first on building an engaged audience—not one that was engaged once, but was left to languish for a year while I tried to make as much money as humanly possible selling virtual experiences (because how the hell else was I supposed to find direction amidst a pandemic). This requires using not only Substack, but other platforms, too.

So starting today, I am going to begin publishing everything I write not only on Substack, but on my blog and on Medium. I am also going to pitch publications on new work so as to get my name out there. The goal, for now, is to use Medium and my blog to add to my audience and reengage my existing one, then direct people to Substack. As I continue publishing and earn new email signups, I will communicate with people directly, and gauge people’s willingness to pay for a subscription. Assuming the numbers appear to make sense, my plan is to begin monetizing once I hit 20,000 free subscribers on Substack.

Further, there is the more practical reason for publishing elsewhere—that is, I need to make money. I feel it worth noting that there is actually good money to be made from Medium, especially if you have a following, or decent relationships with the curators. My basic understanding of Medium’s algorithm for payments is that readers pay $5/month to Medium for access to paywalled content, Medium takes a small cut of that, then the rest is distributed to writers according to the percentage of time a reader dedicates to each writer’s work. So if someone paying $5/month reads only me for a month on Medium, I will get their entire $5, or whatever fraction of that $5 Medium doesn’t take.

Part of the reason I’m publishing this is so paid subscribers, specifically, are aware of my strategy. I’ve wanted to be extremely transparent since the beginning that if you are opting to pay me, you are doing so to support ME—NOT because you can’t read my work unless you pay. (To those who are paying, I really can’t thank you enough.) My work continues to be free for anyone to read. As I return to Medium and my blog, though, I feel it is worth acknowledging so anyone who is paying me who, in light of this new information, would like to stop, can do so.

The fun thing about doing all of this and defaulting to action is that you learn really quickly what works, and what doesn’t. For better or worse, in my effort to migrate to Substack, I found out very quickly that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach. Given that, for now, I have the ability to take advantage of freedom of reach—unlike Trump, who is confined to launching his own social media platform—I think I’d be foolish not to take advantage of it.

Diversifying where I post is the best way to take advantage of freedom of reach, and move towards my goal of having a self-sustaining business built around writing.

Thanks for reading! If, after reading this, you feel compelled to subscribe, you can do so below.

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“I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.”

—Charles Cooley

At the beginning of 2019, just days before I was supposed to fly to Toronto for my company’s holiday party, I got pneumonia.

The Z-Pack I was given guaranteed I wouldn’t be contagious by the party, but I’d still be contagious for the flight. Still, those I spoke to insisted I’d “be fine,” that I “wouldn’t want to miss the week,” etc.—basically, “Suck it up and get here.”

I admittedly wanted to go, but that didn’t make being told to fly internationally with pneumonia any less surprising. That said, it was early 2019—a full year before the pandemic. Doing so then was frowned upon, but it carried nowhere near the social stigma—not to mention legal repercussions—that it might today. So I agreed.

Before I left, I purchased masks. I wore one on the train, then another through the airport. I felt like a leper. People gave me a wide berth. Even the coworkers I was traveling with looked at me with a mixture of doubt and scorn.

Upon arrival, even though I was no longer contagious,1 I kept my mask on. I sounded terrible, and figured people would appreciate the gesture. I could not have been more wrong.

When I walked into the office, my boss took one look at me in the mask and laughed.

“Take that thing off, dude,” he said. “You’re gonna freak people out.”

Though I didn’t see it then, his rationale, aside from seeming completely insane in the COVID-19 era, actually made sense.

Consider that prior to the pandemic, at least in the West, wearing a mask anywhere was abnormal. Virtually the only reason someone would do so is that they were actually very sick.

I thought people would be freaked out by my cough, and wore a mask to be considerate. People, it turned out, could give a shit about the cough—it was winter; people are sick all the time—but they were terrified of the mask.

My anecdotal evidence for this is how I was treated while wearing it. What happened in Toronto happened at O’Hare, too; in both situations, people looked at me, then around at others, the same way they might if a belligerent drunk hopped on a bus with them. In both situations, people would be aware that some collective action might need to be taken. Looking around for support—that is, is anyone else seeing this?—is how they react before taking it.

Thus, my boss told me to remove the mask to prevent the creation of common knowledge—that is, information people know that other people also know. Had I kept it on, it would’ve quickly become clear to everyone that everyone else knew that I was sick enough to need a mask, even as I was only trying to be considerate.

This could’ve led to questions, or even caused unnecessary panic, both of which my boss was trying to avoid.

The irony here should be obvious—two years later, and the idea that panic could be avoided by telling someone to remove a mask is laughable.

After COVID-19 was officially designated a pandemic, communication exploded via the internet, and masks—once relegated to hospitals and construction sites—became the norm. Whereas a masked person might’ve once spooked passengers on an airplane, now, videos circulate of passengers shouting down those who forego them.

In other words, post-pandemic, no one gives masks a second thought—and common knowledge explains why.2

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Incumbent powers, of course, have long understood the relationship between common knowledge and power.

As Eugene Wei writes in “The Age of Distributed Truth,”

“The first thing oppressive regimes facing rebels at the gates will do is cut off public communication channels like television, radio, and social media. If the opposition cannot communicate with each other, they do not know how many others will stand with them if they march on those in power, weakening their resolve.”

It makes sense, then, that the establishment of common knowledge preceded social movements like #MeToo and #BLM. People are more likely to act when they know with certainty that they have others’ support.

The opposite of this is also true. People will not act unless they know they have others’ support.

Consider elementary school. If the classroom is a “state,” then the teacher is its “regime.” Most teachers wouldn’t consider themselves oppressive, but given those they’re tasked with “governing,” they often have to be.

Further, everything about their position—standing while everyone else sits, not to mention that students can’t ask a question or go to the bathroom without their permission—implies that they are. In a lecture setting, expressed curiosity thus takes the form of questioning authority. Though it might not seem one, socially, this is very much a risk.

This is why teachers are constantly saying, “Ask questions, because someone else likely has that question.”3 This last part is critical. What matters isn’t what the teacher is saying, but what they mean—that is, “the rest of the class won’t think you’re stupid if you ask your question.” Even with this reinforcement, for many students, questions aren’t risks worth taking.

If nothing else, this illustrates that we are constantly assessing what others think. Our ability to know—or even guess well—is not some narcissistic tendency; it is a literal survival mechanism.

In his essay, “Ads Don’t Work That Way,” Kevin Simler—co-author of The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life—proposes that public health campaigns capitalize on our tendency to focus on what others think.

Consider this ad from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene:

As Simler points out, it would be easy to see this ad as making a kind of individual appeal—that is, “if you drink sugary beverages, you’ll get fat.”

Still, individual appeals don’t change behavior as reliably as peer pressure does. In other words, this ad would be more effective displayed in a public place, where people wouldn’t just see it, but would know that other people were also seeing it. It makes sense, then, that this ad wasn’t run in mailers, or online, but rather on the subway.

Simler refers to the mechanism by which the ad works as “cultural imprinting,” defining it as:

“The mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings—which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product.”

By Simler’s reading, the ad’s explicit goal wasn’t to convince you individually that sugary drinks would make you fat; it was to convince you that everyone else knew that sugary drinks would make you fat.

Still, I think Simler misses a few things here. It doesn’t matter if people actually believe drinking soda will make you fat; it only matters that people believe that other people believe it—and, critically, that there is a negative stigma associated with obesity. On the internet, where information transmission is instantaneous, we can take this a step further: it doesn’t matter if people believe that other people believe something; assuming a significant enough stigma, it only matters that people believe someone might.

Obesity certainly carries such a stigma,4 but in 2021, so do many other things—like, say, being conservative. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that a few weeks ago, there was a joke going around on social media that vaccinated people would keep their masks on to avoid being mistaken for conservatives. Never mind why, exactly, that would be such a terrible thing; the fact remains that there is a perception, among some, that a small minority believe it would, just as there is a perception that being labeled as a conservative might limit your social mobility, or your children’s opportunities, etc.

Critically, I am not saying this is or isn’t true.5 I am only saying that when information moves as quickly as the internet allows, we are rewarded—or at least, aren’t punished—for thinking it is; for imagining the worst way something could possibly be perceived, and acting accordingly. Done often enough, this naturally leads to resentment, and to thinking the worst of people, even as most of us are more reasonable than the internet gives us credit for.

It would do us well to remember that our tools shape our discourse, lest we come to believe that we’re all just assholes in search of the next person to cancel.

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There is a well-established tradition in golf that if you make a hole-in-one, you’re expected to buy drinks for everyone in the clubhouse.

Some have proposed that this tradition exists to keep golfers honest; that is, a golfer is less likely to lie about having made one if they know that upon returning to the clubhouse, they’ll owe everyone drinks.

This sort of dry cost-benefit analysis is common among economists, who see humans as rational utility maximizers, trying to get the most out of the least amount of effort. From their perspective, if guilt (as a result of lying) is the only cost associated with becoming known as someone who has made a hole-in-one—the crowning individual achievement in golf1—lots of particularly unscrupulous golfers will lie about having made one. An economist would thus look at the tradition as a tax on lying, meant to stop golfers from doing it.2

However, while taxes are used to decrease demand for certain goods,3 it’s not as clear that the tradition-as-tax mechanism would stop particularly unscrupulous golfers from lying about making a hole-in-one. Consider that one of the “features” of having to buy everyone drinks after making a hole-in-one is being able to tell everyone that you made one.4 If someone cared enough about people knowing they made a hole-in-one to lie about having made one, the benefit of being able to tell everyone at once would vastly outweigh the cost of the bar tab.

Beyond the economic calculus not adding up, though, most golfers would find a tax on lying offensive. Its existence would imply that if it disappeared, we’d just as soon tell everyone we made a hole-in-one, even if we hadn’t. What an economist would fail to realize is that without golfers’ collective faith in one another not to do this, the game as we know it would cease to exist.

If I’m right, then the questions remain: how did the tradition originate, and why does it persist?

My theory is that the tradition originated because someone who made a hole-in-one wanted to celebrate.

This is not a grand insight; accomplishment is often followed by celebration. We celebrate after we make a hole-in-one, or win a championship, or pass the bar, or have a kid. But we never really stop and think about why.

If a newly-minted lawyer were found at a bar with friends and was asked why she was celebrating, she might say she’s indebted to those she’s celebrating with—perhaps her parents, who helped pay for her school,5 or her friends, who supported her through the lows. By this reading, celebration would be her effort to absolve herself of the debt she owes those who made her achievement possible.

Still, when I think of celebration, I don’t think of debt. I think of being out at bars with friends getting wasted and running up tabs with no real concern for who owes what to who. If I am making any effort to absolve myself of a debt that I owe as a result of whatever I’ve accomplished, it would be prior to celebrating—at, say, a ceremony whose explicit purpose was to allow me to acknowledge those I’m in debt to as a result of my accomplishment.

If ceremonies like the one I’m describing sound familiar, they should. Many familiar ceremonies are rituals of debt absolution. Rehearsal dinners are opportunities for couples to acknowledge the debt they owe to everyone involved in planning their wedding. Awards ceremonies—like, say, the Oscars, or the Emmys—are meant to recognize achievement, yes, but they also offer achievers the opportunity to acknowledge everyone they are indebted to. Trophy presentation ceremonies are opportunities for athletes to thank all those who made their accomplishment possible—their family, friends, fans, and often, even, the competition.6

This all seems normal beyond the point of being worth mentioning, but it is only because we have been conditioned to believe that if individuals achieve, it can only be at a cost to someone else. Achievement is thus a creature of debt. We have no other way to see it.

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Still, it is worth noting that the very idea of “owing” our accomplishments to anyone is, historically, relatively new.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber claims that the ability to conceive of our relationships in terms of debt is a function of the market economy. Sometime between 500 and 400 B.C., he notes, as India was first grappling with interest-bearing loans as a result of its evolution into a commercial economy—so too were the authors of its sacred texts—the Vedas—first grappling with the idea of to whom, exactly, they “owed” their existence.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that these two events are linked; it makes a certain sort of sense that as a country was first grappling with the idea of loans, interest, and thus, debt, that those in it would begin to wonder about not only their responsibilities, but their existence, through the same lens.

The authors’ conclusion, which Graeber summarizes, is worth noting. He writes (paraphrasing them):

“We owe our existence above all:

• To the universe, cosmic forces, as we would put it now, to Nature. The ground of our existence. To be repaid through ritual: ritual being an act of respect and recognition towards all that beside which we are small.

• To those who have created the knowledge and cultural accomplishments that we value most, that give our existence its form, its meaning, but also its shape. Here we would include not only the philosophers and scientists who created our intellectual tradition but everyone from William Shakespeare to that long-since forgotten woman, somewhere in the Middle East, who created leavened bread. We repay them by becoming learned ourselves and contributing to human knowledge and human culture.

• To our parents, and their parents—our ancestors. We repay them by becoming ancestors.

• To humanity as a whole. We repay them by generosity to strangers, by maintaining that basic communistic ground of sociality that makes human relations, and hence life, possible.”

Still, as Graeber notes, what is interesting about this list is that these are nothing like commercial debts. He sums it up nicely, writing:

“[One] might repay one’s parents by having children, but one is not generally thought to have repaid one’s creditors if one lends the cash to someone else.”

In his final thoughts on what the authors of India’s Vedas had to say about debt, Graeber drops a bit of a bombshell. He writes:

“One could in fact interpret this list as a subtle way of saying that the only way of ‘freeing oneself’ from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence the very notion of canceling the debt and achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the start.”

If this is true, and “achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the start,” celebration is our way of admitting it.

Consider that we commonly refer to celebration as “sharing” an accomplishment. This makes little sense in the world as we know it today; most of us are more comfortable owning something, even if it means being in debt to someone, than we are with sharing it.7 In a world without debt, though, sharing an accomplishment makes perfect sense. The reason for this is simple: if you remove debt from the equation, it becomes impossible to conceive of individual achievement. In such a world, it would thus feel weird to accomplish something—like making a hole-in-one—and not celebrate it.8

If you find yourself questioning this, consider that we commonly refer to acts of sharing as “selfless.” Acting selflessly doesn’t mean acting in the best interest of others, though that’s often how it manifests. It means acting as if the “self” doesn’t exist.

This is exactly what people are doing when they celebrate,9 and it’s what I’d like to propose originated the tradition of buying drinks for the clubhouse after making a hole-in-one.

At the beginning of this essay, I asked two questions:

1. How did the tradition of buying drinks for the clubhouse after making a hole-in-one originate?

2. Why does the tradition persist?

Though it might be tempting to say that my answer to the first question is also the answer to the second, I don’t think that’s the case. A quick look at how the tradition plays out today illustrates that celebration has taken a backseat to debt absolution as the tradition’s primary function.

This article in Golf Magazine proposes that if you make a hole-in-one, you could simply buy a bottle and leave it at the bar. Some clubs take this even further, offering hole-in-one insurance, whereby members pay a monthly premium such that if they make a hole-in-one, some portion of the clubhouse’s tab is covered. At many clubs, insurance is included in members’ dues, almost as a preemptive debt payment. Viewed through the lens of celebration, all of this is rather depressing; the financialization of celebration, by rendering accomplishment synonymous with debt, has turned it into a chore.

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Further, in any debt absolution ceremony, it’s not clear that you’re paying who you “owe.” Consider the golf example again. That you’re expected to buy drinks for the clubhouse makes it clear that the club’s members are your creditors.10 Still, any reasonable person couldn’t possibly see them as the only creditors.

If I make a hole-in-one at a club in the future, a reasonable list of creditors would include not just the club’s members, but—

• my dad, who taught me the game

• my high school teammates, without whom my passion for golf might never have developed

• everyone I’ve ever competed against, without whom I would never have been able to test my ability

• my playing partners that day, whose witnessing of my hole-in-one guarantees that others will believe it happened

• the manufacturers of the club I used to hit the shot, or the ball I used, or the clothes I wore

• the founders of golf itself, without whom I never would’ve had the chance to make a hole-in-one

• the golfing world—that is, everyone who has contributed to the collective understanding among golfers that a hole-in-one is, actually, an incredible accomplishment

Still, there are issues here, too. First, of those on this list, I would only be paying one group back directly by purchasing drinks (in bold).11

Second, if I were really determined to stick to the debt story, I would necessarily have to include not just those on the list above, but everyone who has ever existed. It isn’t a stretch to say that had anything in the history of the universe not happened the way it did, I would not have made a hole-in-one. Any attempt at creating a list of creditors for not just a hole-in-one, but literally any accomplishment, naturally leads to the realization that doing so is impossible.

This is the paradox of viewing accomplishments through the lens of debt. Our ceremonies of debt absolution persist because because we insist on seeing our accomplishments as having created debts, but the very use of the word “debt” implies that we could at least imagine paying it back. What I hope to have made abundantly clear is that this is, unquestionably, impossible.

Where, then, does this leave us?

The resolution to this paradox is in Graeber’s two separate ways of imagining humanity.

On the one hand, we have the market economy—and thus, the idea of debt—which insists that we are all individuals, and that achievement creates debts that must be absolved. We do this via ritual (awards ceremonies, etc.), or by simply thanking people; as I mentioned in “The Venmo Generation,” the words, “much obliged”—old-fashioned for “thank you”—literally mean, “I am in your debt.”

But on the other hand, we have celebration—the “sharing” of accomplishment—which appears to insist that, as Graeber writes, “…these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with.”

So which is it?

The order of operations is telling here. In just about every case I can think of—weddings, awards ceremonies, graduations—ceremony precedes celebration.

Amidst ceremonies, we are individuals making every effort to absolve ourselves of debt or “take credit” in order to reestablish some baseline of equality. Realizing, though, that we are not so much seeking equality as we are seeking oneness—that is, “we are not separate to begin with”—we follow ceremony with celebration, selflessly sharing our accomplishments, and discarding the very idea of the “self” in the process.

Thus, when we say that our accomplishments are only possible because of others, what we really mean is that our accomplishments are only possible because of the very idea of “others;” that is, the very idea that we are separate at all. Searching for an origin story for celebration, then, naturally leads us to the conclusion that there is something within us that rejects said separation—and thus, debt; we celebrate not because we want to climb the pedestal, but because we are desperate to escape it.

We know this truth implicitly, even if we don’t come out and say it explicitly—that is, being celebrated—like being a “celebrity,” derived from the same root—is, in a very real sense, miserable. Having “Happy Birthday” sung to you sucks. People who insist on flattery are exhausting. The cliché of “it’s lonely at the top” is only cliché because it is actually true.

Our rituals of debt absolution thus exist as a function of a society obsessed with seeing itself as a collection of individuals organized via debt, constantly striving to cancel whatever is owed—whether financial or simply perceived—to reestablish some baseline of equality.

By Graeber’s reading, equality is a myth because we are not separate, and thus cannot owe each other anything.

Celebration is our way of admitting it.

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I’m republishing an essay from three years ago (with updates) after returning from a week in Hawaii with my girlfriend. We boarded a 6pm flight out of Maui and landed in Chicago at 7am local time, so we’re both jet-lagged. If you catch errors in this essay, that’s probably why.

The reason I’m republishing this essay is because any time I go anywhere even remotely touristy I feel overcome with the feeling that none of this is “real,” or “authentic,” or whatever. This essay is about Amsterdam, but it could easily be written of where we were in Hawaii. And I’m sure it’s been written before by some cultural critic who wants to remind you that coconut bras and piña coladas are not, in fact, facets of Hawaii’s rich cultural history.

Why knowing this invokes feelings of uncertainty or insecurity in me, I really don’t know. Maybe it’s this internal conflict of knowing something is fake but still liking it. These are feelings I’ve tried to write my way through many times and I’m still not sure I’ve hit home, but I’m working on it.

Hopefully you find the fruits of those efforts interesting, or entertaining, or thought-provoking, or whatever.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Why Do All Coffee Shops Look Alike?

Since being in Amsterdam, I’ve felt out of place, which must be karmic justice for all the times I’ve laughed at tourists in San Francisco. 

There’s something mesmerizing about watching waves of them wash over the kitschy, knickknack-driven economy of Fisherman’s Wharf or up winding, brick-laden Lombard street, past homes no one’s ever seen anyone walk out of. When I see those tourists, I feel compelled to get out of the car, shake them, and say, “No, not there. Literally anywhere but there.”

Now I wonder if I’ve taken their place. Am I doing the same in Amsterdam, sitting in a café whose authenticity I doubt less than Fisherman’s Wharf’s, but nonetheless displays the classic signals of an establishment bowed to the wants of the market, like a tree to wind?

As with most cafés, the wood on my table is dark and ridged and reclaimed, and the sugar in the sealable Ball jars on top of it is brown and raw and granular, like a handful of a young Sahara. The heart drawn on my latte begs for an iPhone and an Instagram filter like an urban center mural or a flower-headdressed Coachella-goer.

I see only one person with anything other than a MacBook, but even more telling: Everyone’s headphones are white. Books rest just out of reach on sagging shelving made of the same particleboard my dad and I used to outfit my sixth-grade locker, light and cheap. But the books on it look heavy and dusty, so it’s doing its job and has been for a while.

I find myself hoping that someone’s read those books, or at least intended to, because that would mean they’re here for a reason other than the aesthetic. But they look bone-dry and dusty like the top of the dresser in the spare room of my grandparents’ house, and they’re in a café, not a library. Next to those books are speakers from a different era that might still work but probably don’t. They certainly aren’t responsible for the music echoing softly off the walls — the same music, in fact, that plays not so gently in Apple’s AirPods spot and probably at least a thousand other cafés at this exact moment: “Down,” by Marian Hill.

Above it all, lamps clamped to frames rest askew, their cords scattered helter-skelter along the ceiling among bits of exposed ductwork, functionally functional but practically useless. There’s a skylight above and a garden out back and the light from both is more than enough for the entire place.

As you walk into the shop, there’s a sign to the right that says: “A day without coffee is like… just kidding, we have no idea,” which is clever, because it means they haven’t had a day without coffee in so long that they can’t remember what a day without coffee is like.

The two baristas — one man, one woman — look like this could be true for them (they work in a café, after all), and they’re pleasant, wearing neon watches and black everything else, tattoos on their arms and white Reeboks on their feet.

And the woman is beautiful—porcelain skin, white hair, icy blue eyes. Her English is flawless, too; if it weren’t enough that those who grow up here actually do learn English in school—as opposed to sleepwalking through foreign language classes because of an implicit understanding that the ability to speak any language aside from English is, more than anything, a resume line—she no doubt speaks a fair bit of it. I am far from the only American in here, after all, and can’t be the only one who has ever sat down, unsure if this is a local haunt or a tourist trap or a place for trapped tourists to escape and feel like locals. 

And it’s places like the last one that have gardens in the back with fountains or benches that people have been photographed on to look authentic, pictures laden with words strung into captions that, once posted, elicit public gasps and private groans while failing to calm the poster’s anxiety that this trip wasn’t living up to their projections of everyone else’s expectations of what the trip would be. 

Because that’s what matters, of course.

AsI sit, I can feel the shop wondering why I sit here judging it, unwilling to admit that a café might just be a café, or that this chair might just be a chair. 

And as I enter minute 100 or so, sniffing around for inauthenticity, it occurs to me that I’ve been doing this the whole trip, and perhaps my whole life, so intent on finding the hypocrisy or hidden agendas in everyone and everything that I neglect to simply take things as they are.

As a child, I would avoid recommendations from waiters and waitresses because I was convinced what they were recommending was either relatively more lucrative for them or close to going bad so they needed to unload it. (See: Anthony Bourdain’s cameo in The Big Short.) Now I’m doing the same: analyzing the lamps and the chairs and the wood and the jars in an effort to make sure I’m not being played. Maybe growing up in a touristy area conditioned me, but then again, not everyone who grows up where I did does this.

As people filter in and out, I realize that they may be doing it not because they’re trying to look a certain way or fulfill a certain aesthetic, but because maybe they’re just hungry or tired, and I realize I have no idea what’s authentic and what’s not and I’m not sure anyone else does either. I know when something feels authentic. This café, after all, “feels authentic,” but in labeling it as such, I’ve begun the process of rendering it decidedly not. Something can be labeled “authentic” and remain so for a time, but only as long as the characteristics that make it so (reclaimed wood) are not then repurposed to sell more stuff or hire more people (exposed ductwork, Ping-Pong tables, etc.).

And of course, the cases of that happening are fewer and farther between with each passing day; the preservation of an authentically-forged trait, after all, would mean fewer flat whites Starbucks could sell, or a lower star rating on Airbnb. (God forbid.)

We appear to have reached a point where authenticity has become so marketable that the delay between a trait existing authentically and being identified and reclaimed by the markets is so small that it may as well not exist. It did not take long, after all, for large corporations to adopt the “exposed ductwork” aesthetic, a characteristic of startups not because it was cool or because it appealed to employees, but rather because the opportunity cost of covering up the ductwork would’ve been a month’s worth of runway.

The idea of authenticity, then—at once a result of availability and affordability, of budget constraints and relative scarcity—is eroded by the mechanism hailed as one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the mechanism that pits traits and ideas and aesthetics against one another and determines what works and what doesn’t, and sits at the heart of economics: markets.

Authenticity exists now only momentarily, swept up in hashtags and photographs that alert everyone else to what works so they might profit—until it no longer does, at which point there will be something else.

My question, then, is this: Is this shop’s aesthetic a response to the market, or did it originate here? 

And if it’s the latter, was someone else led serendipitously to this table, where they photographed it and shared it under some hashtag, like #LiveAuthentic, which—like a student council position, or high school diploma—probably used to mean something?

I am left wondering, too, if I am that person, or just another in a long line of them; if this essay is nothing more than a written version of the same aesthetic I observe in this café, a response to the market’s demand for pieces critical of the decided lack of authenticity in coffee shops the world over. (Prospective subscribers: Is this resonating enough to make you want to subscribe?! Simply click below!)

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And I may be. I am the only one in here taking photographs of the interior with a mind for how they’ll look in a post that will echo the other posts about the “post-authenticity era.”

But I’m taking the photos ironically, of course. I am not trying to share my “authentic” experience; rather, I am trying to show just how aware I am that I might not be having one. That way, no one can call me out on social media for not being “woke” or unaware that the café I thought I’d stumbled upon serendipitously was actually trending on Instagram back at the end of 2017 when Kim Kardashian came here and took selfies and then went and got high at a “coffee” shop down the street that is apparently “over” now. (In Amsterdam, “coffee shops” are shops that sell marijuana. Actual coffee shops are cafés.)

I am optimizing for insulation from criticism in the same way an Airbnb host or an Uber driver would optimize for five-star ratings: Don’t take risks. Play to the median. And, of course, a five-star rating is, for all intents and purposes, the median.

For Airbnbers: put out fruit bowls, have coffee available, and put reclaimed wood somewhere. As for Uber drivers, God forbid you try to strike up a conversation without first being spoken to or roll down the windows unsolicited. The nerve. The audacity. But this is reality of living a life dictated by the authenticity antidote: the market.

After sitting for a several hours, I decide to walk out to the garden behind the café to stretch my legs, the last of the caffeine and alcohol from the night prior stuck in traffic on the highways of my system. I duck under the doorway on my way out, careful not to trip on any of the bricks, between which creep grasses and weeds and bugs and dirt.

As I walk out into scattered sunlight, I notice a pile of wood, reclaimed, probably to supplement the sagging shelves up front. And I look around for a bench but don’t see one, just heaps of wood left out in the rain for too long and bushes that have been hacked back to give people a view of what isn’t really a view—or at least not one worth photographing. But I do anyway.

And as I do, I am suddenly conscious of just how bad all of this would look on Instagram, and am left to wonder if this coffee shop is bowed to wants of the market or determining them; if this coffee shop is a tree, bowed to the wind, or the wind, bowing the tree.

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Amidst the pandemic, I embraced communism.

At the risk of losing readers immediately, I’ll clarify that I am not referring to the communism that has “failed every time it’s been tried,” but rather the communism that the late anthropologist David Graeber proposes is the basis for human social life in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

He calls it “baseline communism,” defining it as:

“[The] understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ will be assumed to apply.”

Everything from holding the door for a stranger to pressing an elevator for someone illustrates the human tendency to come to each other’s aid if, as Graeber says, “the need is considered great enough, or cost considered reasonable enough.”

That said, we have a tendency to act more “communistically” with some people than with others. If a friend asked me to help them move, I would. If a stranger asked, though, I probably wouldn’t. (More likely is that a stranger wouldn’t ask, which is exactly the point.) The same holds true for picking up a tab.

Elaborating on the assumptions that give way to communistic relations, Graeber writes:

What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will. [What] makes this possible [is] that such relations are based on a presumption of eternity. This is why no accounts need to be taken.

In certain contexts—like, say, romantic relationships—that eternity is presumed is undeniably true. I’m not married, but can see that in the context of “‘til death do us part,” squaring up makes little sense. (It is telling, of course, that when couples divorce, this is exactly what they try to do.) I’d argue eternity is also presumed among especially close friends, who, even if they spend years apart, would always find it strange to conceive of their relationship in terms of debt.

Still, outside of these contexts, and especially today, debt is often how we see ourselves in relation to each other. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than our tendency to want to square up—say, via Venmo.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber explains why:

“Squaring accounts means that the two parties have the ability to walk away from each other.”

Crucially, this doesn’t mean that we get square with people because we want to walk away from them;1 it means we get square with people because we don’t know when—or even, if—we’ll see them again.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this, or with interactions like this, but I imagine it would be exceedingly lonely if they were the only ones people had. Loneliness isn’t simply a result of not being around people; it’s also a symptom of feeling as if life is a series of transactions, and that everyone in your life is someone you could walk away from.

These interactions were a hallmark of what I’ll call the Venmo Generation: individuals afloat amidst a sea of group chats, waiting for the text letting them know where brunch was on Saturday, or the cost of next weekend’s party bus. It’s possible that real friendships were born from these situations, but it more often felt that they were just rituals of convenience; parties that would ebb and flow as people came and went, as opposed to anything that would forge any real, lasting connection.

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Early in the pandemic, though, I couldn’t help but romanticize them. What I wouldn’t give, I’d think, to Venmo a stranger $30 to spend two hours on a party bus to nowhere. Cooped up in my apartment, I found myself longing for the Venmo Generation; for a collection of friends and strangers brought together by an app.

Still, it isn’t enough to say that Venmo was purely responsible; the app made squaring up easier, sure, but offered no means of actually enforcing the debts someone might owe you. Perhaps most surprising, then, was that people did actually pay them. If we were the Venmo Generation, call this the Venmo Effect: that by eliminating the friction inherent in paying a debt—think: “I don’t have cash on me,” etc.—Venmo raises the social stigma of failing to square up with someone.

Still, it isn’t enough to say that the only reason we pay debts is because of the stigma associated with those who don’t. I have thus far spoken only of financial debts, but we tend to avoid carrying any sort of debt to strangers, even as it’s not clear we’d face any external costs for doing so.

I use the word “external” here deliberately, because the cost we face if we fail to acknowledge a kindness isn’t one imposed upon us, but rather one we impose upon ourselves: guilt.

Consider what you’re actually doing when you say the words “thank you,” or the old fashioned version, “much obliged.”

Here’s Graeber:

“Much obliged” […] actually does mean, ‘I am in your debt.’ The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from “mercy,” as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor’s power—since a debtor is, after all, a criminal.”

By this reading, failing to thank someone for doing you a favor is synonymous with failing to pay a debt. This explains why such a failure invokes the feeling that would motivate you to pay it: guilt. 

Graeber notes that in the earliest writings on debt, the word is synonymous with guilt. I find it more accurate to view guilt as interest on a debt. It is not the guilt you owe, after all, but rather the effort; guilt is what accumulates, much like interest, the longer the loan remains outstanding.2

By this reading, when someone does you a favor, assuming you don’t find some way to reciprocate, you’ll feel guilty. There are clearly situations, though, in which this isn’t the case.

When friends’ parents would visit in college, they’d usually take us all out to dinner.

This meant paying for our meal, which could’ve been thought to have created a debt. Still, it never felt as if there was an expectation that we’d reciprocate. We could’ve—say, via Venmo. But looking back on it, it feels like doing so would’ve been inappropriate.

If I had to explain why, I’d start by pointing out that if you’re a parent visiting your kid in college, you probably feel immense pride at seeing your kid thriving in an unfamiliar environment. There are many reasons for this, but suffice it to say that the pride you feel doubles as validation; as knowledge that your 50+ years on this earth have produced a human being who is capable not only of providing for themselves, but of providing value to others.3

By this viewing, when parents buy their kid and his friends dinner, or a round of drinks, it is actually they who are paying off a debt—that is, the joy they receive from realizing all their hard work—the nights up changing diapers, or treating poison oak, or muddling through times tables—was worth it.

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It’s telling that when I’d say, “thank you” to my friend’s dad for buying us drinks, he’d reply with, “my pleasure.”

As Graeber notes, when he says this, he is literally saying that I did him a favor by allowing him to pay for drinks. This explains why any effort to pay him back would make no sense, because prior to purchasing the drinks, it was he who perceived himself to be in our debt.4

This offers a neat explanation for why parents might offer to take their kid’s friends out to dinner the first time they visit—say, freshman year. Still, it doesn’t explain why they might continue to do so, even as anecdotal evidence says this is exactly what happens.

Here, Graeber offers an explanation via the logic of hierarchy and precedent. He writes:

“Whenever the lines of superiority and inferiority are clearly drawn and accepted by all parties as the framework of a relationship, and relations are sufficiently ongoing that we are no longer dealing with arbitrary force, then relations will be seen as being regulated by a web of habit or custom.”

So there you have it: like the cool aunt who brings candy every time she visits,5 parents continue to take their kid and his friends out to dinner via logic of precedent.

I was lucky enough to be a beneficiary of this precedent in college. Worth noting, though, is how a situation might play out in which someone wanted to ensure that although the lines of superiority and inferiority were clearly drawn, that relations would remain neither “sufficiently ongoing,” nor give way to “habit” or “custom.”

To do this, consider another example. Imagine a single parent and their three kids stuffed in a corner booth at a diner, the parent explaining to their kids that they can’t get what they want from the menu because it's too expensive. It’s not hard to imagine that someone within earshot of this conversation might casually get up, walk over to the waitress, and cover the family’s tab.6

In the most likely version of this scenario, the “benefactor” would probably want to remain anonymous. The reason should be obvious: their anonymity is the only thing preserving plausible deniability for the recipient that this gesture could be thought to have created a debt, and thus reciprocated. (As Graeber notes, this is why some argue the only true charity is anonymous.) In some situations, though, it might be clear to the parent who paid for their meal. Surprising about this latter situation is just how uncomfortable it would be for both parties, to the point where the benefactor might not even want to make eye contact with the parent.

Of course, there are exceptions, which take us back to Graeber’s theory of hierarchy and precedent. These are the examples in which the benefactor is known, but it’s clear that paying them back is neither possible nor expected. (Presentations of “big checks” come to mind, as does Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.) In situations where there is a baseline presumption of equality between strangers, though—like the one I’m proposing in the diner example—the “lines of superiority and inferiority” are not clearly drawn—that is, until someone covers a tab for someone else and fails to remain anonymous.

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There is something about existing in “middle class society,” as Graeber puts it, that makes us averse to drawing these lines. We avoid doing so where we possibly can; in fact, I’d argue that one of the best things about being amongst strangers is that for a moment, you can forget they even exist, avoiding the baggage that comes with the loss of anonymity.

This baggage is exactly what is rediscovered either when someone covers someone else’s tab, or has their tab covered by someone else. This happens regardless of whether the benefactor remains anonymous, to be clear, but it is somehow easier if anonymity is preserved, almost like we don’t want to face ourselves in the context of people who so clearly exist in a class different from our own.

Perhaps no situation illustrates this more clearly than when a homeless person attempts to engage with us on the street. When this happens, most of us avert our eyes.

If I had to explain why, I’d start by pointing out that even a brief moment of eye contact has the power to make strangers familiar to each other. Still, this doesn’t explain why making eye contact with a homeless person is uncomfortable; we make eye contact with all kinds of people all the time without issue.

With someone who is so explicitly below us on the social hierarchy, however, the calculus is different. Meeting their eyes forces us to face the immense power we have over them, which explains why it’s hard not to offer something once you’ve done so. Even if we do, though, it’s never enough to threaten the underlying power dynamic. This leads to guilt, which is hard to see as anything other than interest on the power loaned to us, clear as this encounter makes it that said power is anything but a guarantee.

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Of course, the way we most commonly absolve ourselves of this guilt is not by offering something, but by rationalizing their situation to ourselves.

“They’ll just use the money to buy booze,” we say to ourselves. What is so ridiculous about this rationalization isn’t that it’s necessarily false—though much of the time, it probably is—but that alcohol is exactly what many of us turn to in an effort to absolve ourselves, at least temporarily, of guilt. We often find ourselves more comfortable with a clear discrepancy in power if we’re drunk, if only because we’re less likely to notice it.

Other drugs help us achieve the same end in the opposite way, altering our states of mind such that the power feels good. (Think: “Say hello to my little friend!”) If nothing else, bars are case studies in how people behave with such senses; in fact, I think a good argument could be made that this is often what people go to bars to find. It’s not surprising, then, that in a bar, people—even acquaintances—will make grand gestures they never otherwise would, like buying shots for the entire table, and thus putting everyone in their debt, even if they’re only loosely acquainted with everyone there.

Worth noting is that though it’s fun to get a drink from a friend, it can be off-putting to be given a drink by someone you don’t really know, or like. Why are we quick to accept a drink from the former, but not the latter?

This is a weird one, especially from the perspective of economics. Economists view human life as a series of business transactions, whereby individuals try to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs. Assuming the financial value of the drink is the same, it shouldn’t matter who we’re receiving it from. And yet, clearly, it does.

To understand why, consider a slightly different scenario: a man approaching a woman alone at a bar.

“Can I buy you a drink?” He might ask. This seems normal almost to the point of not being worth mentioning. Still, if the point is purchasing the drink—not a hard leap to make, given the only three things referenced in the phrase are “me,” “you,” and the “drink”—why do we bother asking permission?

“Because it’s polite!” You might insist. That, though, doesn’t answer the actual question—that is, why is it polite? Answering this requires recognizing that the gesture has nothing to do with the drink, and everything to do with the debt being created—that is, if the recipient accepts.7 Thus, we ask permission because it gives the recipient the option to decline, and thus avoid perceiving themselves as in our debt—even if putting them there was never our intent.8

When someone you have no interest in speaking to insists on buying a round, this is exactly the option they aren’t giving you.

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It’s worth acknowledging that there is another way to look at the “can I buy you a drink?” gesture. 

In the same way many of the indigenous peoples encountered by European explorers would, upon encountering the explorers, offer them everything they had,9 the willingness of a stranger to seemingly offer something for nothing could be seen as a gesture meant to establish a baseline on which peaceful relations—i.e., a conversation, and potential relationship—could be built.

When people bring a plate of baked goods to new neighbors, this is exactly what’s happening. The implicit presumption of eternity between such people is what makes this make sense—that is, “we’ll always be neighbors.” Given this presumption, the best possible scenario for both parties is a relationship in which debt simply isn’t a factor. Good neighbors aren’t constantly keeping accounts;10 they simply help one another if, as Graeber notes, “the cost is considered reasonable enough, or need considered great enough.”

Amidst a presumption of eternity, it is abnormal, or even rude, to decline a gift; at a bar, though, where eternity is almost by definition not the presumption, it is quite normal. With the latter, there is at least the presumption that the person being offered the drink could decline it, in order to avoid the feeling—even if it’s not what the buyer intends!—of being in debt to them.

I bring all of this up only because I think it provides the necessary context to understand how empty life is amidst the Venmo Generation, in which relationships are conceived of only in terms of debt. 

The silver lining of the pandemic has been escaping from it, and rediscovering myself in the context of relationships in which debt simply isn’t a factor.

If you’ve lived with close friends, say, in college, you might’ve experienced this: a communistic, “no accounts taken” attitude—yes, because it can be a nightmare to even try, but also because in these types of situations, there is often a willful ignorance on everyone’s part that this situation will end after graduation.

The same is often true of romantic relationships; the vast, vast majority of those that don’t lead to marriage end in breakups (as opposed to death), and even 50% of those that do lead to marriage end in divorce.11 Still, that doesn’t stop most of us from treating our partners like they’ll always exist—at least in the sense that we don’t pull out our phones and open Venmo after dinner to make sure we’re “square.”

I’ve found the same to be true with a friend from college who has been my roommate for the past year. After a year of doing literally everything together, it’s easy to imagine things will always be this way. This “baseline assumption of eternity” is what Graeber proposes is the basis for relationships in which no accounts need to be taken. I can confidently say this is the case; our friendship is such that if something needs to be done, one of us just does it. That is, if the cost is reasonable enough, or need great enough, baseline communism is just assumed to apply.

He’ll make dinner a few times a week, as will I. We’ll trade off getting paper towels, or toilet paper, or coffee filters, along with grocery pickups, beer runs, or buckets of range balls. Venmo would, in theory, give us the opportunity to always be square with one another, but under this presumption that things will always be this way, there’s no point. “Squaring up” opens the door to everything that can be imagined as a transaction becoming one, and inevitable attempts to determine how many grocery runs are equal to one cleaning of a litter box.

Admittedly, I’ve been lucky enough to spend the pandemic with a roommate I actually like. Things won’t always be this way. The pandemic will end. He—or I—might move out.

As the pandemic wanes, though, and the Venmo Generation rises once again from its ashes, we might do well to remember the communistic relationships it gave way to, if only because in the real world—pandemic or not—they might just be the only relationships worth having.12

I am back in Chicago as of Monday, having spent the last week in California with my mom. It was beautiful out there. It usually is.

Before I left, I picked up The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich. The book is a contrarian effort to explain humanity’s ecological success, and it’s fantastic. I’ve read parts of it before, but wanted to give it a second look. I find that I can make more connections between the real world and what I read after I’ve read it a second time.

Writing this essay helped me grapple with Henrich’s argument. I open the essay pulling heavily from Henrich to outline it.1 Writing the essay also made me realize that this essay ends up asking more questions than it answers.

The main one: How does the way in which a platform like YouTube allows information to flow affect the people who consume it?

I hope you enjoy it.

Cultural Knowledge Explains Humanity's Ecological Success

“Evolution is cleverer than you are.”

—Leslie Orgel

In The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich argues that our species’ unprecedented ecological success cannot be explained by our individual intelligence.

Instead, he argues, our success is a result of our ability to learn from one another.

This refutes the hypothesis that our species’ success is a result of our individual abilities to adapt to our often hostile environments. Though having once pitched a tent in the rain might have you think otherwise, it turns out we—and, by extension, you—are not very good at this.

The first case study Henrich offers is that of Sir John Franklin.

In 1845, the British tasked Franklin—a seasoned Arctic explorer—with finding the Northwest passage. Doing so would supercharge global trade by connecting Western Europe and East Asia. Franklin and his 105 men set out in the summer of 1845, outfitted with two ice-breaking ships—the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—and five years worth of provisions.

Things went as planned until the summer of 1847. The ice, which had trapped them in the winter of 1845 and melted in the summer of 1846, froze again in the winter of 1846, but didn’t melt in the summer of 1847. Around the time Franklin realized they’d be stuck at least until the summer of 1848, he died. This left an experienced Arctic officer named Crozier in charge. In the spring of 1848, after just shy of two years stuck on ice, Crozier ordered his 105 men to abandon ship and set up camp on nearby King William Island. 

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The record of what happened next is fuzzy, which makes it only slightly less ugly. Inuit reported encountering a band of the men and attempting to offer help before noticing that they were transporting human limbs.2 Crozier, Henrich notes, is rumored to have encountered an Inuit tribe and lived out his remaining days hiding from the shame of association with cannibalism. He is the only one suspected to have survived.

Of course, while cannibalism is deplorable, maybe it’s not surprising that Crozier’s men ended up resorting to it. It isn’t like the Arctic is a hospitable climate, after all. That said, the Inuit have thrived there for tens of thousands of years. If they could do it, Henrich asks, why couldn’t Franklin’s men?

Henrich’s answer to this is that Franklin’s men didn’t possess the necessary cultural knowledge accumulated by the Inuit. He writes:

“None of [Franklin’s men] figured out how to use driftwood, which was available on King William Island’s west coast where they camped, to make the recurve composite bows, which the Inuit used when stalking caribou. They further lacked the vast body of culture know-how about building snow houses, creating fresh water, hunting seals, making kayaks, spearing salmon and tailoring cold-weather clothing.”

Henrich dives deeper into the complexity of these techniques later in the chapter. Suffice it to say we shouldn’t be surprised that Franklin’s men failed to develop them. It likely took the Inuit generations to perfect them; the idea that Franklin’s men could do the same in a matter of months is absurd.

Years later, the British sent another expedition to find the Northwest Passage. 

Henrich explains how this group, led by a man named John Ross, ran into a similar problem as Franklin’s. They, too, set up camp on King William Island. Unlike Franklin’s 105 men, though, all of who are assumed to have perished, Ross’s survived for three years on the island.

The secret to their success was simple. They befriended the Inuit.

This allowed them to take advantage of the Inuit’s accumulated cultural knowledge. This included methods of hunting, sealing, and sledding, among many others, all of which the Inuit honed over tens of thousands of years amidst the seemingly inhospitable Arctic terrain.

This is nothing ground-breaking here; that a crew friendly with locals in a hostile environment would do better than one that wasn’t should surprise no one. What is notable, then, is not how Ross’s group survived the Arctic, but how the Inuit did.

The answer is the same mechanism that Henrich proposes has given way to humanity’s unprecedented ecological dominance: “cultural evolution.”

He writes:

“We can survive because, across generations, the selective processes of cultural evolution have assembled packages of cultural adaptations—including tools, practices, and techniques—that cannot be devised in a few years, even by a group of highly motivated and cooperative individuals.”

To understand exactly what “cultural evolution” means, it’s worth understanding how evolution works. 

For years, I believed—incorrectly—that evolution happened “to” us, like growing or aging. This is wrong. Evolution does not happen to us. Evolution happens slowly, constantly, all around us—and we are not as much a part of it as we think.

When we reproduce, our offspring are born with genetic mutations. These mutations are best understood as symptoms of our bodies failing to make perfect copies of themselves during reproduction.

Sometimes, mutations do nothing. Other times, they give way to slight changes in our physiques, or our behavior. These traits are then tested. If they make it easier for us to survive long enough to reproduce, they’re more likely to be passed down to the next generation, and become more common throughout the human gene pool. If they make it harder, they’re less likely to be passed down.

Henrich argues that this same mechanism is at work within cultures.

Take something like a chocolate chip cookie recipe that’s been passed down through generations. One day, while following it, you accidentally double the amount of butter in the recipe. The cookies emerge from the oven as hard as rocks. Your addition of butter is a “mutation,” but the “trait” it birthed would guarantee you’d never share it, because the cookies you just made are inedible.

You try again, though, and this time, you follow the recipe perfectly. The cookies emerge from the oven looking and smelling like they always do. Wishing they were sweeter, though, your daughter takes what she thinks is sugar from the counter and sprinkles it over them. You watch, thinking it might improve them. As she finishes, though, you realize she wasn’t actually sprinkling sugar over them, but salt. You rush over to brush it off, but the cookies are hot, and the salt is melting. Oh well, you think, I’ll just make another batch. Before you can toss them, though, your son walks into the kitchen. 

“What’d you make?” He asks, eyeing the cookies. Before you can answer, though, he’s tossed one in his mouth.

“Mmmmm…” He says. “What did you add to these? They’re insane!”

Though a bit of a cartoon version, this is not far from how cultural evolution happens. A random event occurs and tweaks the normal way of doing something. If that method is worse, it’s discarded, forgotten. If it’s better, though, it’s passed on, and may come to dominate, whether it’s within a family, a community, or a company.3 

Still, while this example gets at how natural selection improves how we do things, it doesn’t explain why we are so good at learning from one another. Fortunately, this is Henrich’s main argument.

He writes:

“The central argument of [the] book is that relatively early in our species’ evolutionary history, perhaps around the origins of our genus (Homo) about 2 million years ago, we first crossed this evolutionary Rubicon, at which point cultural evolution became the primary driver of our species’ genetic evolution.”

Several million years ago, Henrich proposes, mutations that improved our abilities to learn from one another suddenly became more evolutionarily useful than those that made us bigger, or stronger. This created a sort of flywheel effect.

As groups of humans collected more and more cultural knowledge, natural selection was forced to select for brains that could acquire, process and iterate on that knowledge. This led to an acceleration in the accumulation of said cultural knowledge, which would’ve further caused natural selection to select for mutations that would make it easier for us to acquire and make use of knowledge, ad infinitum. 

Today, we see the results of this flywheel effect in everyone—even infants.

One particular study out of Seoul National University is telling. In the study, researchers brought in a group of mothers and their infants. The researchers selected three categories of toys to which infants typically reacted in one of three ways: positively, negatively, or with uncertain curiosity. Once the infants had gotten comfortable in the laboratory setting, they were shown the toys from each category with their mother in the room. The results were what you might expect. Infants looked at adults four times more often when they were presented with an unfamiliar toy than when they were presented with a familiar one, approaching the toy positively if the adult showed happiness, but backing off if they showed fear. 

Put another way, under uncertainty, infants used social learning. 

There is plenty of other data supporting our species’ use of social learning, but almost more compelling is the plethora of anecdotal evidence. When babies fall—say, out of a high chair—parents are often told to smile or clap, instead of rushing to their child’s aid with a concerned look on their face. The same logic at play in the lab is at play here; the joke is that humans figured this out likely centuries before the lab did. Under uncertainty, babies take cues from their parents. If parents don’t appear frightened, their baby might not, either.

As we get older, our use of social learning becomes more and more sophisticated.

By the age of three, Henrich notes, we are not only able to use social learning to make decisions, but are able to decide who to learn from. That is, by the age of three, we are able to judge adults’ competence, and adjust our attention accordingly. We retain this ability into adulthood and beyond, leveraging it in all kinds of contexts. Aspiring salespeople will often seek out the high performers at their company to learn what made them successful. Athletes do the same.

This sheds more light on what allows humans to make use of serendipity, like adding salt to finished cookies. Critically, realizing that adding salt to a finished cookie makes it taste better doesn’t happen in a vacuum; said knowledge might well be used later to improve another dish, or otherwise diversify the tools at some chef’s disposal.

As a species, then, it is not just our ability to learn from one another is unparalleled—it is our ability to establish a baseline of cultural knowledge, then iterate on it.

Each iteration that gives way to a method less useful than the original is discarded; each that gives way to one that’s more useful is embraced.4 Over a generation or two, a culture’s progress via this method might seem at worst sluggish, and at best incremental. But give it 30,000 years, and a mere baseline of cultural knowledge can evolve into a de facto encyclopedia.

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This, of course, is what happened with the Inuit. Ross’s group survived on King William Island because they took advantage; Crozier’s died because they didn’t. It’s that simple.

When most of us think of collected cultural knowledge now, we don’t think of fashioning fish hooks, or using polar bear fur to stay warm through the winter. Most of the cultural knowledge we possess doesn’t even seem like knowledge, to the point that it can be difficult to even see what another culture might identify as our “cultural knowledge.”

Still, although it is fascinating to compare the knowledge accumulated by different cultures throughout history, it is arguably more interesting to think about the ways in which cultures transmit the knowledge they possess.

This, of course, is what I started thinking about when I went out in search of a piece of “cultural knowledge” a week or so ago, and found myself on YouTube.

The day after I moved into my condo in Logan Square, my cat knocked the gate remote off the top of my refrigerator and onto the hardwood, where it exploded.

I found the remote in pieces, its motherboard and drop switches exposed. Having received the remote with no instructions other than the implicit “press the button,” I didn’t take a second glance at the drop switches. I simply snapped the pieces of plastic back together, figuring I’d fixed it.

An hour or so later, needing to open the gate, I walked outside with the remote and pressed the button. The gate didn’t budge. I pressed it again, and again. Nothing. Exasperated, I did what anyone my age would probably do: I pulled out my phone and typed “how to fix gate remote” into Google.

This led me to YouTube.

Now, YouTube is a lot of things: a home for stupid cat videos, a repository of strange conspiracies, a collection of music videos. But above all, what I’ve found it to be, at least for the past several years, is a home for all of these bits of information that you might only ever need once, but that when you need them, you really need them. Videos on how to change your tire, say, when you get a flat in a rough neighborhood. Videos on how to fix your refrigerator which went out after you loaded it up with trays of catering for your daughter’s baby shower tomorrow. Videos explaining the IS-LM model to a college senior who has a comprehensive exam on it in six hours and hasn’t given it a second thought in two years.5

I’ve landed on YouTube countless times seeking information I’d have traded an arm and a leg for. And it’s hard to escape the conclusion that there are likely a lot of other people who would’ve, at some point, been in a position like this, too, not least among them the second-in-command-turned-captain Crozier, whose mission to find the Northwest Passage culminated in organized cannibalism, all because he never figured out a way to take advantage of the cultural knowledge accumulated and honed by the Inuit.

Now, of course, there’s YouTube.

To be clear, I don’t really mean to say that the cultural knowledge the Inuit honed over 30,000 years could simply be uploaded to YouTube, then fully absorbed by a foreigner. (It couldn’t.) Still, the broader truth is worth noting: that is, YouTube has become a de facto collection of cultural knowledge that I’m not convinced has a modern equivalent, or at least not one that’s even close to as searchable and user-friendly.

Consider that videos on YouTube with some variation of the word “beginner” in the title got more than 9 billion views in 2020.6 Globally, 82% of people used YouTube to learn to do something themselves.7 For a more tangible statistic, early on in the pandemic, there was a 458% increase in daily views of videos on how to make sourdough bread. What is worth noting about this figure, however, isn’t so much that it’s so high, but rather that it’s so low. It seemed like everyone kicked off 2020 preserving their sanity with sourdough. It’s thus a commentary on how relevant YouTube already was as a place people went to learn to make bread that even when the pandemic began in earnest, and everyone else fled there to learn, it was **only** ~4.5x as many people as normally would’ve.

And it’s not like YouTube is a “hub of online manuals,” either. What I find so incredibly frustrating about manuals and FAQs is that the questions they answer are almost never the questions I actually have. YouTube is different, because it’s driven by an algorithm. I won’t try to outline the technical details (because I don’t know them), other than to say that the algorithm knows what someone has clicked on, watched, and perhaps “liked” after searching for something similar to what you’re searching for. It’s not hard to see why this does a better job than, say, a manual, at helping you solve whatever problem you have. Further, even if the video in question doesn’t answer your question, the comments sections might actually contain useful insights (i.e., “if this video didn’t answer your question, try this one,” etc.).

On cooking tutorials, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that comments—“I substituted olive oil for butter!”—are, themselves, mutations, which can then be tested by readers and either embraced or discarded. If someone aggregates all the tweaks to the recipe, they might end up with a completely new one, which they could then post in a new YouTube video. 

If that video blows up, then that is, well, cultural evolution.

Of course, there’s plenty to decry about YouTube. As a hub of cultural knowledge, though, I’m not sure it has an equivalent. Here, it’s worth returning to Henrich.

Millions of years ago, Henrich proposes, natural selection did a sort of “fork,” whereby it began selecting for cognitive power over physical strength. This led to the flywheel effect he outlines: natural selection chose brains with more cognitive power, which led to humans that could better process, store, and iterate on information. This created more information, which raised the premium again on cognitive power, ad infinitum.

If this did happen; if, millions of years ago, the “fork” Henrich proposes did actually occur, YouTube and its contemporaries—and, perhaps, the internet more broadly—would appear to be another one.

Like a book, YouTube functions as a sort of cloud storage for our cultural knowledge. It could be that this frees us up to focus on higher-order pursuits; in theory, it seems to make sense that if I don’t have to remember how to program a gate remote, I can focus on other, more interesting things. Still, I’m not entirely convinced that’s the case. Humans are not iPhones. Knowledge compounds, and it’s possible that offloading a meaningful portion of it will have some as-of-yet unseen effect on us.

The more pressing question, of course, is whether we’re willing to admit just how extensive humanity’s cultural knowledge actually is. The reason for this is simple: if society’s cultural knowledge is uploaded to YouTube, it isn’t just tutorials and funny videos. It’s ugliness. It’s pain. And the friction inherent in accessing it is zero.

Here, it’s worth returning one final time to Henrich.

There is a bitter root native to the tropical regions of the Americas called manioc.8

Manioc contains cyanide, a deadly poison. Eating too much of it causes cyanide poisoning. And yet, there is no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning among those who first domesticated manioc. 

The reason for this, Henrich points out, is the lengthy and labor-intensive process of preparing manioc, developed by societies such as the Tukanoan in the Amazon. This process takes several days, and involves scraping, grating, and washing the roots. This separates the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once done, the liquid is boiled, but the fiber and starch must sit out for two more days, after which they can be baked and eaten. 

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Like many traditions, the original reason for the process’s difficulty might not be readily clear, even to the Tukanoan.9 This, Henrich notes, might lead a younger member of the society to question the whole ritual, and wonder if there might be a better, more efficient way to go about it. That younger member, after all, would never have seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because—as Henrich is keen to note—the lengthly, labor-intensive process of removing it works.

Attempting to shorten the process, though—say, by boiling the manioc—would remove the bitter taste, but it would also leave a non-trivial amount of cyanide in the manioc. Assuming you didn’t revert to the old method, in subsequent years, this cyanide would build up in people’s bloodstreams, eventually poisoning them.

As it turns out, something like this did happen happen. In the 17th century, Henrich notes, the Portuguese brought manioc to West Africa. What they didn’t bring was the method of preparing it. Because manioc was easy to plant and provided robust yields, even amidst infertile soil, it spread rapidly.

To this day, cyanide poisoning remains a health problem in Africa.

Now, YouTube and its contemporaries could end up being nothing more than blips. The way information flows via the platform, though, does bear a certain resemblance to the manioc the Portuguese brought to West Africa.

Free of the constraints that once governed it—or, put another way, the way it was once “prepared”—information can now travel virtually anywhere, instantaneously. We tend to ignore how a platform like YouTube enables information to move in favor of noticing what information is moving, even as the former is more profound than the latter.

On YouTube, people get answers to their questions faster, but they can also confirm their own biases faster, or access false and misleading information faster. This isn’t to say YouTube is a net bad for society, but it is to say wonder out loud if we are perhaps too focused on finding new and better ways of doing things, and not focused enough on understanding why we’ve always done things a certain way.

“Evolution,” as evolutionary biologist Leslie Orgel is quoted saying, “is cleverer than you are.” Admitting this will inevitably bring up questions, but if we fail to ask them, it’ll take more than a YouTube tutorial to solve the problem.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, please share it. You can forward this email to friends, family, whoever. You can also subscribe below.

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By the way—my gate’s closed. I fixed the remote using YouTube. The floodgates, though… well, those are wide open.

It’s a balmy 37 degrees Fahrenheit (three degrees celsius) and sleeting here in Chicago today. Call it end of winter purgatory; Chicago likes to give us a taste of spring, then bring back winter for a few weeks. And every year, we talk about it like it doesn’t happen…every year.

As always, Anything Different remains free to read. That said, if you’d like to support me financially, you can do so below. Whatever you choose, I appreciate you being here.

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Now, onto the essay…

How Sexual Selection — Not Natural Selection — Explains Opulence in Nature and Society

To use the analogy of the needle in the haystack, more data does increase the number of needles, but it also increases the volume of hay, as well as the frequency of false needles — things we will believe are significant when really they aren’t. The risk of spurious correlations, ephemeral correlations, confounding variables, or confirmation bias can lead to more dumb decisions than insightful ones, with the data giving us a confidence in these decisions that is simply not warranted.

Excerpt from Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather

Towards the end of 2017, I published an essay titled: “The Death of Advertising.” The article’s premise was obscured by its title; I didn’t set out to say that advertising would ever truly die. Rather I argued that in a world dominated by data-driven platforms like Facebook and Google, advertising would become less a means of convincing someone to purchase something, and more a means of presenting them with what algorithms already knew they’d need.

Since publishing the essay, that very basic prediction has come to pass. Facebook and Google — both of whom have business models that rely on doing exactly what I outlined above — have grown significantly. Amazon, too, has seen significant growth in its digital advertising revenue. Most of that growth has come as of result of ad dollars pouring from traditional advertising avenues — TV, radio, billboards — back into their pockets.

I made another prediction in the essay, however, that hasn’t aged as well. I wrote:

The perfection of data will, eventually, give rise to a world in which every consumer can be paired up with goods that meet his or her biological, rather than consumptive, tendencies. This world will also be devoid of branding, because in a world that relies on perfect information, there will be no need for branded trust.

This was a shaky assertion at best, and my thinking has since evolved. There are two main reasons why.

First, “perfect information,” an idea I made almost no effort to flesh out in that essay, is a myth; a convenient way to assume away the nuance that would’ve eroded the point I was trying to make. Second, because perfect information is impossible, branding will not die.

Let’s take each in turn.

Assuming a static world, “perfect information” would be possible. But our world is not static. Things change constantly. Even if a computer could index not only everything happening, but everything that has happened, that “perfect information” would be useful only to analyze the past — not to predict the future.

As Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Rory Sutherland notes in his book Alchemy, this is a fundamental problem with big data. All of it comes from the past. Part of the reason people study history is to understand how many different ways things could’ve gone, and how much context matters when understanding why an innovation did or didn’t work. (Uber, for instance, could never have worked in a pre-mobile phone era.)

Put another way, it’s easy to use data on what has happened to tell a compelling story about what will, but it’s rare that those stories end up being right.1 As Sutherland notes, “[All] the behavioral data in 1993 would’ve predicted a great future for the fax machine.”

Even when there is good data on our behavior, too, all it tells us is that we did something — it can’t tell us why. The natural reaction to this would be to combine data with information from actual people — that is, take a purchase they made, then ask them why they made it. This seems like it should work, but again, there’s an evolutionary reason why it doesn’t: we are awful at understanding what motivates us.

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To understand why this is, imagine you’re a small animal — Sutherland uses the example of a hare — trying to escape a predator. As you’re being chased, you zig-zag instinctually — and thus, randomly — with no conscious understanding of your own behavior. This lack of consciousness may seem like it would hurt your chances of survival, but in fact, the opposite is true: it is only because your zig-zagging is occurring unconsciously that it’s reliable over an evolutionarily significant time period (read: tens of thousands of years) as an evasive maneuver.

If you, as the hare, became conscious of what exactly it was about your specific type of zig-zagging that made it effective, you’d no longer be able to evade predators in random — and thus, unpredictable — ways. This would make you both slower and more predictable, and thus easier to kill.

As Sutherland notes:

[Humans] may be descended from our ancestors who were better at the concealment of their true motives. It is not enough to conceal them from others — to be really convincing, you also have to conceal them from yourself.

Thus, even if we had perfect data on what we were doing, it would be hard to figure out why. It should be clear why this would make it hard to understand what we might do in the future.

Here’s another quote, generally attributed to David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy & Mather:

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”

You could argue that this quote sums up why marketing and advertising exist. This isn’t to say that big data isn’t useful; it’s just to say that my initial proposition — that data could ever become “perfect” — is wrong.

It follows that branding is here to stay.

To understand why branding is so important, it’s necessary to understand that it occurs not only in the context of products, but nature, too.

Take the relationship between bees and flowers. Bees are constantly searching for sources of nectar, and flowers have evolved to be excellent sources of it. Bees thus seek out flowers for their nectar and pollinate them in return — a textbook example of mutualism in nature.

Unsurprisingly, bees gravitate towards colorful blossoms that smell good. (“A flower,” as Sutherland astutely notes, “is simply a weed with an advertising budget.”) Once bees reach the blossom, they pollinate it. Assuming the flower contains nectar, the bee knows that when it’s searching for nectar in the future, flowers resembling the one it just visited will be excellent sources of it. This is a textbook example of branding, albeit one that uses insects and flowers instead of people and products.

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An interesting counterexample to this, and one that illustrates the darker side of branding, is the orchid. Sutherland notes that many species of orchid are considered nature’s frauds. This is because while they’re both beautiful and sweet-smelling, they’re poor sources of nectar.

This begs the question: Shouldn’t bees have figured this out? And if so, why do orchids still exist?

The answer, as Sutherland notes, is found in asking not why they exist, but when: that is, at the beginning of spring. Every year, bees early to the pollination party are fooled into pollinating orchids, sacrificing time and energy for meager rewards. They quickly wise up, however — hence why orchids bloom at the beginning of spring, and not year round.

There are businesses that operate this way, too: tourist traps.

Unlike establishments playing the long game, tourist traps know people will likely only visit once. Thus, their best strategy is to extract as much money from tourists as they can while they’re there. 

Like tourists flocking to San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf for the first (and probably only) time, bees without the necessary experience pollinate orchids at the beginning of spring before deciding not to return.

This, again, is a textbook example of branding, albeit one that illustrates both the benefits and consequences of doing it poorly (read: misleadingly).

The surface appeal of Fisherman’s Wharf, like that of the orchid to a bee, disappears after visiting.

The success of these examples can be explained by a vital — albeit distinct, and often overlooked — counterpart to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection: sexual selection.

Unlike natural selection, which says species better fit for their environments are more likely to survive long enough to procreate (and thus pass along their genetic material), sexual selection says species that have an easier time finding mates will be more likely to reproduce than those who don’t.

If this sounds similar to natural selection, it’s because it is; the two are similar and often confused. But natural selection is about the survival that leads to reproduction — you could be an unappealing animal, for instance, but if you’re strong and fast, you’ll likely find a mate somewhere, and pass along your genetic material.

Sexual selection, on the other hand, is about reproduction itself. There are certain species that are unfit from the perspective of natural selection (read: attacking prey or evading predators), but immensely fit from the perspective of sexual selection (read: attracting mates). 

The classic example is the peacock, whose bright plumage makes it nearly impossible to miss—both for prospective mates as well as predators. This should make it clear that natural selection and sexual selection, while linked, are still quite different.

Perhaps appropriately, both successful species and successful businesses often employ a combination of both.

Consider Big Star, Chicago’s premier outdoor taco spot.

Big Star routinely tops the list of Chicago patios, and is an institution in Wicker Park, helped by its immediate proximity to the Damen stop along Chicago’s Blue Line “El” train. And even if you don’t know it’s there, you’ll smell the meat and hear the patio buzzing when you get off the train at Damen.

This patio is Big Star’s claim to fame. It seats roughly 100 people, but there are tables inside when it’s packed, along with a full bar and endless supply of waitstaff. On a summer day in Chicago, it’s where you want to be.

Most noticeable about the restaurant, though — and the reason I’m mentioning it — is its general decor, including its color. There is yellow everywhere — on the umbrellas, the chairs, all of it. There are knick-knacks and assorted art scattered along the walls, too, along with neon signs like you’d find at any other Instagram-friendly establishment in Chicago.

Knowing how good Big Star is, it’s easy to ask the question: Why would a restaurant with such a great product and such a great place to serve it — its patio is one of the best in Chicago — spend such an absurd amount of time and money on seemingly needless decor?

The answer goes back to sexual selection.

Imagine Big Star had just opened, you hadn’t tried it, and neither had anyone you knew. What would signal to you that it was worth visiting? The answer would be the same as what would attract a bee to a flower they’d never encountered: its appearance (read: visual aesthetic, smell).

Crucially, Big Star’s massive investment into the appearance of its restaurant doesn’t guarantee a quality product, but it does indicate they were confident enough in said product’s eventual success to have invested heavily into its frame — that is, the restaurant’s appearance.

Being in even close proximity to Big Star proves this strategy has worked. Even during the pandemic, every day, like bees to a flower, hordes of people flock to it, “pollinating” it with cash. Every good experience, too, reminds them that Big Star is an excellent source of “nectar” (read: margaritas, al pastor, vibes), and that it, unlike the orchid, can be trusted.

Perhaps the reason I’m opposed to my initial proposition about big data, then — aside from it simply being wrong — is that there’s comfort in understanding that beauty does have a functional purpose in both nature and society.

There is a respect to be had for the businesses and species who, by nature of certain traits, are adept at either survival via evasion or confrontation. But there should be a similar appreciation for those whose beauty signals that they’re worthy destinations for those whose repeat visits determine their success.

Some might look at the opulence of restaurants like Big Star — or species like the peacock — and shake their heads. But those people are failing to consider how a world in which said opulence was pointless would actually look. It would be a world of perfect information, yes, but it would also be a world devoid of all the beauty we’ve come to know.

Branding, then, isn’t just a signal; it’s a symptom of a world in which things are dynamic, and thus evolve and improve. A world in which this isn’t the case — a static world of perfect information, in which branding would, in fact, die — would be quite dreary indeed.

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Earlier this week, David Perell—my best friend from high school, and the face of the “write online” movement—linked to my Substack in his Monday Musings newsletter.

Many of you subscribed to me from that link. Some of you asked if my Medium archive would be available on Substack, or if you’d have to subscribe to Medium separately to access it. The answer is… complicated. I will be republishing articles from my archive (that remain relevant) every few weeks alongside my new content.

So you won’t have to subscribe to Medium separately to access my archives—unless you want to read everything I’ve ever written, now.

The first article I am republishing is the one David linked to in Monday Musings: “People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves.”

This essay focuses on the history of the Pepsi Generation advertising campaign, which was the first notable effort by a brand to focus a campaign not on a product, but on the type of person that purchased it.

I’m sharing “People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves” with you today. Next week, I’ll share the follow-up I wrote to it, which I actually liked more (though it received less attention). It focuses on the social mechanics that define “better versions of ourselves.”

In the meantime, among other projects, I’m working on a synthesis of the two essays. It will go deeper into society’s role in determining what it means to patronize not just brands, but people, ideas, etc.

Stay tuned, and thank you, as always, for your support!

As a reminder, Anything Different is completely free to read. That said, if you’d like to support my work financially, you can do so by clicking “Subscribe now” below.

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Now, onto the essay…

People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves

The year was 1957, and Pepsi — like many of the youth at that time — was dealing with an identity crisis. Despite efforts from marketers, Pepsi was being outsold by its biggest competitor and perpetual market leader — Coke — by a factor just shy of six to one, even as it was selling at half of Coke’s price. It wasn’t the product that was lacking, it was that Pepsi’s brand ethos — indecisive and directionless — was a fragmented shell of what it would need to become to take on Coke.

At the time, Coke was unrivaled, having succeeded in convincing the American public that they’d captured everything good and wholesome about American life within the murky confines of a glass bottle. This clear transcendence of the competition was not unlike Apple’s; like devotees react viscerally to a green speech bubble in iMessage, so too was it that, to anyone who embraced the deeply American traits of exceptionalism, community-mindedness, and of course, Santa Claus, consuming anything other than Coke would’ve been considered heresy.

In 1963, Pepsi hired a young advertising executive named Alan Pottasch to address the issue.1 Pottasch’s task was, to put it gently, difficult. He was to reinvigorate a brand competing against one of the most successful of all time, a product that not only outclassed Pepsi in every consumer-driven category, but was also — chemically — nearly identical. And so Pottasch made a decision that would later become iconic — as he put it, “…to stop talking about the product, and start talking about the user.” Here is Tim Wu in his book, The Attention Merchants, on the decision:

[Pottasch] thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its inherent qualities, focusing instead on an image of the people who bought it, or should be buying it.

For the first time in history, a brand decided to promote the type of user that purchased a product as opposed to the product itself. Beyond that, Pepsi promoted the idea of an entirely new generation, one free from the manipulative, consumerist messages being perpetuated by the mass media. (It was, after all, the 1960s.) This group would come to be known as “The Pepsi Generation.”

The Pepsi Generation was revolutionary because it was the first time a brand convinced people to purchase their product by focusing on the type of person that doing so made them. No generation before had ever so vocally longed to transcend themselves — to escape the consumerist mindset and achieve truly independent thought — and thus Pepsi’s message, drink our product and do exactly that, reached the perfect group at the perfect moment.

Here’s Wu quoting Pottasch on the success of the campaign:

“For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing,” Pottasch would later remember, “that we weren’t sure would take off.” But his intuition would prove correct. “What you drank said something about who you were. We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital, and young at heart.”

Over the next decade, Pepsi — as a result of the Pepsi Generation campaign — gained significant market share on Coke. And while the campaign was revolutionary, the recipe for its success was simple. As Wu points out, “Desire’s most natural endpoint is consumption.” In other words, the campaign simply reimagined what people desired. This generation longed to escape consumerism, and the fact that Pepsi convinced them to do so by embracing it — purchasing a Pepsi, after all, is about as consumerist as it gets — is a testament to the genius of the campaign. Those who bought in and became a part of the Pepsi generation were searching for a new way to feel, rather than a new beverage to drink. Pepsi’s genius was in finding a way to be both.

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The profundity of the Pepsi Generation campaign is twofold. First, its success reinvigorated a brand on the verge of being knocked out in an early round by one of the greatest competitors of the 20th century — Coke. Second, even decades later, it is nearly impossible to find a brand that has not used the strategy Pepsi pioneered: selling not a product, but a better version of ourselves.

Consider Apple. To be an Apple user — at least in the era of Jobs — was to “think different.” Critics might laugh at that characterization of an Apple user now, given the homogeneity and ubiquity of Apple products, especially among the wealthy. But those critics would miss what Apple didn’t: people don’t buy products because of what those products do, they buy products because of what they can do — or what they imagine they can do — with them. This idea even permeates Apple’s retail strategy. Apple employees will never show you how a product works, rather they will let you use it, forcing you to familiarize yourself with the product, yes, but more importantly, yourself in its presence. A diverse range of product options to choose from, after all, will never be as captivating as a homogenous product that turns you into a superhero — and Apple has the latter in spades.

Samsung learned this the hard way, dogmatically focusing as they did for the longest time on promoting the features of their products, as opposed to the person you could be by using them. Now they avoid talking about the speed of their processors or the depth of the blacks in their screens because 99% of people don’t care; what they do care about — selfishly — is what they will become — “makers, directors, creators,” in the words of Casey Neistat — if they use a Samsung product. The message? Be like us. The solution? Buy a Samsung.

Samsung even reworked Pepsi’s initial genius, realizing that it is as powerful to portray the person people aspire to be as it is to portray the person they aspire not to be — in Samsung’s case, the brainwashed Apple user who never makes the switch. The consumer who finally does is the one Samsung shows in their commercial, “Growing Up,” the better version of the “Apple Sheep,” portrayed leaving behind those who foolishly opt for the iPhone, the clearest among them a scowling man with the iPhone X’s trademark “notch” etched into his hairline. The message? Don’t be him. The solution? Buy a Samsung.

It’s far from just tech companies, though. Adidas and Nike both do it, the former with a similar line of thinking to Samsung’s, and a similar list of influencers. Starbucks does it by crafting beverages like the Unicorn Frappuccino, a drink that famously and unsurprisingly “looks better than it tastes.” While a poorly-flavored but photogenic drink wouldn’t have sold in prior generations, to this generation — our generation — it does. Why?

Similar to how Pepsi understood they would never compete with Coke on product alone, Starbucks understands that it is less about the drink itself than it is about who the drink makes you — on Instagram, and thus in real life. And regardless of what you think about us millennials — narcissistic, outspoken — one thing is abundantly clear: as a result of social media and the Internet, our generation is more conscious of how we are perceived — by friends, family, colleges, jobs, hell, even people we’ve never met — than any other generation, ever.

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Social media is well-understood to be contributing to identity politics, but I’d argue it’s contributing to something deeper: identity paralysis. This condition is one in which we have a forced awareness of how everything we say and do — even the seemingly inconsequential, like the shoes we wear, or the airline we fly — reflects on us. It follows that our generation would also be uniquely drawn to brands that make us feel how we want to feel about ourselves, even as how we want to feel about ourselves is often nothing more than how we want to be perceived externally. Like Starbucks with the Unicorn Frappuccino, we prioritize external perception over just about everything else. The social media market, where we live now, demands a focus on visible characteristics — which are, by their very nature, external — from designer drinks, yes, but from individuals, too.

Given all of this, I propose that analysts routinely overlook how people feel in the context of a brand when considering the value of a company.

This “statistic” isn’t discussed on earnings calls and there is no way to measure it on a balance sheet. But perhaps that’s because it has only begun to matter; Pepsi, after all, was the first company in history to market itself by promoting the image of consumer that drank it, as opposed to the product itself — and that was only 50 years ago.

Since then, consumers, aided by social media, have become far more conscious of who they are in the context of the products they use than even Pepsi could’ve imagined. In this society of ultra-conscious consumers, successful brands will be those that make consumers feel the way they want to feel about themselves.

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“Mmm…kind of an oaky afterbirth.”

— Michael Scott, referring to a bottle of red wine in “Dinner Party”

“Dinner Party”—one of the best, albeit cringiest, episodes of The Office—finds Jim and Pam tricked into a dinner party at Michael and Jan’s condo.

The whole episode is worth watching, but for the sake of this essay, I’m going to focus on one scene. (Note that prior knowledge of The Office is not necessary to read this essay, though ardent fans will be more familiar with the scene in question. That said, if you want to watch it, I’ve linked to it below. The scene in question starts at 2:10.)

An hour or so into the party, after an unimaginably awkward tour of the apartment, the cameras capture Jim in the bathroom.

“Michael and Jan seem to be playing their own separate game,” he begins, “And it’s called ‘Let’s See How Uncomfortable We Can Make Our Guests.’ And they’re both winning. So I am going to make a run for it.” The next time we see him, he’s emerging from the bathroom. 

“So you’ll never believe this,” Jim begins, speaking to the room. “My landlord just called. Apparently my apartment flooded. Something with the sprinkler. Pam, we should probably get going and see the damage.” Pam’s look as she realizes what Jim is up to is classic—this slow smile, followed by a measured, concessive shrug, which she executes flawlessly as she eases off the couch to join him.

“Okay...” she says, trying—and failing—not to betray her eagerness to leave. Michael, though, isn’t giving up so easily. 

“You don’t need two of you to do that!” He exclaims.

“That’s…true…” Jim says, trailing off. Because Jim is now thought to have a flooded apartment, though, he continues towards the door.

“Dinner sounded delicious,” Jim says, feigning regret. “Pam — I’ll see you at home?” Pam, realizing she’s about to be left alone at the party, takes action.

“Oh, Jim, I don’t think you’re going to abandon this party here all by itself,” she says.

“I don’t know, because everything I own is there,” Jim says.

“You can buy new stuff,” Pam begins, “but you can’t buy a new party.”

“That is a great point!” Michael says to Jim, who we catch looking at Pam, almost impressed, as Michael ushers him back into the living room.

Of course, this is a TV show — not real life. It’s hard to imagine any host pushing back on their guests’ leaving to address a flooded apartment,1 not to mention that Jim — who worships Pam — would ever actually leave her at a dinner party with Michael and Jan. 

And yet, the back and forth in the scene—however unrealistic it might seem—illustrates an important truth about the human condition.

That is, how we use reason, and why.

For most of history, psychologists have analyzed reason as a tool we use to make good decisions.

Given how we use the word, this makes sense. We “reason” our way out of tricky situations. We refer to good decisions as “reasonable.” We beg people who are disagreeing with us to “see reason.” Even the Enlightenment is associated with the “sovereignty of reason.”2

And yet, analyzing reason as a tool we use to make good decisions reveals all sorts of problems with it. The main one is confirmation bias — the cognitive “error” of seeking out information, or “reasons,” that confirm what you already believe. 

Perhaps nothing has shown our susceptibility to confirmation bias like the pandemic.3 Those against wearing masks seek out evidence that says they don’t work; those for wearing masks find evidence saying they do. This is not the use of reason to arrive at the right decision — although you can be sure that both parties believe they’ve arrived at it — rather, it’s the use of reason to confirm what you already believe. In the case of masks, this bias can be deadly.

The existence of confirmation bias is more than enough to make us question that reason evolved to help us make good decisions — the hypothesis that, up until recently, dominated academic thought.

So, we’re left to wonder — what hypothesis does its existence support?

In a 2011 paper titled: “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that humans use reason not to make decisions, but to win arguments.

Evolutionary biology supports this idea. Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors would’ve collaborated in all sorts of ways, to make all sorts of decisions. This collaboration would’ve required communication. But there is a problem here, noted by Mercier — that is, communication opens the door to manipulation. 

If you and I are having a conversation, and I accept everything you tell me, you might realize that you can manipulate me into doing things that benefit you, and more importantly, might not benefit me. This could explain why we evolved some bit of skepticism — Mercier uses the technical term “epistemic vigilance” — in order to evaluate what we’re told. The tricky part emerges when you tell me something that contradicts something I already believe. As we’ve seen with social media, people don’t always like having their beliefs challenged. It’s uncomfortable because it makes us feel vulnerable. Naturally, our reaction to being told something that contradicts something we already believe is to reject it.

Now, this is all well and good on social media — or at least “well and good” from the perspective of actual, physical risk. Parties arguing on Facebook are not risking life and limb if they fail to reach an agreement.4 Our ancestors, though, weren’t so lucky. Say you tell me that an opposing clan is coming to murder us. You know you’re right, but I don’t believe you—say, because I think you have some ulterior motive.5 Suddenly, the incentive for you to convince me is incredibly powerful. This, Sperber proposes, is why reason evolved.

Of course, our world is different than our ancestors’. Arguments with life and death consequences still happen, but they’re more likely to be relegated to places most of us aren’t. The arguments I’m used to are less about trying to convince someone that someone’s coming to murder them, and more about trying to figure what golf course to play this weekend, or what to eat for dinner.6 

We all know how these arguments tend to go. Someone asks where people want to eat, and you throw out an option. 

“Chipotle,” you say. 

“Eh, why Chipotle?” Someone says back. 

“Yeah, I feel like we always go there,” someone else says. 

So you start you pulling evidence out of thin air to explain why you want to eat at Chipotle — “It’s close,” or “It’s cheap,” or “It’ll be quick,” etc. 

Your friend might either refute what you’re saying — “It’s not that close,” or “There’s a pork shortage, so the prices are up,” or “It’s Halloween, so everyone and their mother will be there in costume trying to get a free burrito” — or start giving reasons why another place might be better.

“Panera is healthier and closer, and I have a gift card,” they might say. And this might go on for a while. The next thing you know, it’s devolved into an actual fight, and you’re going back and forth about which chain’s carbon emissions are more deplorable, and renouncing each other’s politics over something as simple as where to eat for dinner.

This is a bit of a cartoon version, but it should be at least vaguely familiar to anyone who has ever found themselves in an argument — especially one that gets heated, as arguments often do. In those situations, it’s easy to find yourself unconsciously pulling evidence from wherever you can to support your argument.

It’s here that the existence of confirmation bias begins to look a lot more like a feature, and a lot less like a bug.

Think about it: If my goal is to convince you that Chipotle is where we should eat for dinner, a tool that generates arguments both for Chipotle and against alternatives would be pretty damn useful.

Of course, the stakes are low here, but in other cases, they might not be. Our ancestors’ confirmation biases would’ve made it easier for them to find evidence to support whatever case it was that they were trying to make — like, say, that everyone should turn tail and run, because an opposing clan was actually coming to murder everyone.7

It’s unlikely that we’d be presented with the same hypothetical today, but that doesn’t make what we’ve inherited from our ancestors any less useful.

Let’s return, for a moment, to The Office.

It’s clear that neither Pam nor Jim — nor Michael, for that matter — were in any mortal danger throughout the course of “Dinner Party.” Still, it’s fascinating to watch the interplay of their reason and confirmation biases work to help them achieve their desired ends throughout the episode—perhaps even more so because the stakes are so low.

When the scene begins, both Jim and Pam have the same end in mind: escaping the party. Jim’s confirmation bias provides him with the “flooded apartment” story. Pam’s confirmation bias then kicks in immediately, albeit implicitly, as she realizes this story aligns with her desired end, too.

Michael’s desired end, of course, is preserving the evening. His confirmation bias kicks in as he realizes he’s at risk of failing to achieve it.

“You don’t need two of you to do that!” He exclaims—“that” being leaving the party to address Jim’s flooded apartment. As Jim concedes Michael is right  and says goodbye to Pam, her desired end shifts from leaving with Jim—no longer an option, given Michael’s quick thinking—to keeping Jim at the party.

“Oh, Jim, I don’t think you’re going to abandon this party here all by itself,” she says. It’s a weak reason, but a reason nonetheless—her confirmation bias buying her time, and maybe the support of others at the party.

Jim  exercises the same bias, albeit to achieve his desired end, which is still leaving the party.

“I don’t know, because everything I own is there,” he says, which would be a fair reason to leave, if he weren’t lying about apartment being flooded. Add to this that Pam knows he’s lying, and suddenly, her confirmation bias kicks into overdrive. She presses him, knowing her actual reason for keeping him there trumps his reason for wanting to leave. 

“You can buy new stuff,” she says to Jim. “But you can’t buy a new party.” With that, Jim gives up, allowing Michael to usher him back into the living room.

What makes Pam’s behavior in this episode such a compelling use of reason and confirmation bias is that we see her using the tools two separate times in two different ways to achieve two entirely different ends. 

And though Pam is a fictional character, she is also all of us. Our motivations, like hers, change constantly and without warning. Confirmation bias, far from being a bug in our cognition, is, in fact, a feature — one of the best tools in our toolkit to help us win arguments, and thus systematically derive the most value from our circumstances.

In some cases, this might mean escaping a dinner party. 

In others, it might mean making sure you’re not left alone at one.

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You might’ve read something I wrote—perhaps “People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves,” or “We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death”—and wanted to receive more.

You might’ve responded to my solicitation on Instagram earlier this week with your email address.

You might’ve given your email to a friend of mine after he mentioned I was trying to go “full author mode” after being let go from my previous job.

Regardless, I’m excited you’re here. That said, if you don’t remember signing up and would like to be removed, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take you off the list.

That said, this will mean you won’t receive the first essay in the _Anything Different_ series, which I’m pretty excited about. It’s a contrarian take on why humans reason (hint: not to make us help better decisions), illustrated by both personal, anecdotal experience, and an episode of The Office. It’s my favorite thing I’ve written in a long time, and I’m excited to share it with you.

Full transparency: I’m moving to Substack to see if I have the chops to write full time. This means getting readers to pay for what I write. (I managed to do this on Medium, but Substack lends itself better to direct relationships with readers and recurring revenue.) I’ve created two subscription options below—$5/month or $50/year. You can also click the “founding member” option and donate what you’d like (again, per year). It’s set to prompt you for $250, but you can do less or more… up to you.

Your support would mean everything to me. That said, I’ll take each subscription as an indicator that I’m doing good work—so please only subscribe if you think so! If I see subscription numbers tick up, I’d like to be confident that it’s because I’m providing you with value—not because we’re friends, and $5/month is the cost of a beer at some bar you haven’t been back to since February of 2020.

A quick summary of essays that are in the pipeline:

1. “Reason Didn’t Evolve to Help Us Make Better Decisions; It Evolved to Help Us Win Arguments.” The title gives away the gist of the essay here. A 2011 paper by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier argues that reason evolved to help us win arguments. I like this take a lot. I back it with anecdotal evidence, along with a scene from my favorite episode of The Office: “Dinner Party.”

2. “The Pandemic Reminded Us We Are All Communists.” This is likely not at all the take you think it will be. Using evidence from Debt by David Graeber, I propose that COVID’s disruption of our social lives can be especially well-understood by analyzing our relationships with one another as inherently “communist.” This has nothing to say about the political system, per se—just about the communistic nature of our social lives.

3. On Failing to Heed David Foster Wallace’s Warning in “This is Water.” A few weeks ago, I had a totally shit day. David Foster Wallace’s point in “This is Water”—his iconic commencement address given at my alma mater, Kenyon, in 2005—is that the liberal arts education should be about giving students the ability to exercise some restraint over our very human tendency to think of ourselves as victims when bad things happen. (This is an oversimplification; I’ll elaborate in the essay.) I failed, but I learned something.

For now, all of the essays I publish will be available WITHOUT paying to subscribe. This will not always be the case, but I’m doing this to try and build up a following on Substack.

So yes, if you’re asking the question “Well, why should I pay you?” The answer isn’t quite “charity,” but it’s somewhere along the lines of “you’ll be giving me faith in my own future as a writer.” If that’s something that appeals to you—which it probably only will if you have enjoyed work from me in the past, or find value in what I publish going forward—please consider clicking “Subscribe now” below.

Clicking below will take you to a landing page where you can select a tier—“monthly,” “annual,” or “founding member”—and add your credit card information. You can always come back in and unsubscribe later.

Subscribe now

Also, Substack requires that you stick to a fixed amount per month or year. If you’d like to support me with less (or more!), you can visit my Patreon by clicking here. Once there, simply click “Become a patron” and follow the prompts.

Finally, one of the best things I ever did for myself was adding a line on my Wordpress blog suggesting people reach out to me to grab a beer, or a coffee. If you’re in Chicago or the Bay Area, or anywhere, really—I love visiting new places and meeting new people—feel free to reach out and suggest we grab either one.

Okay—that was kind of a lot! Regardless of what you decide, thank you for being here. I’m excited to be writing again and look forward to what the future holds.

-Zander