The 2024 Super Bowl Ads Totally Missed America

February 27, 2024 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

One of the conclusions that might be drawn from last week’s post is that Americans aren’t nearly as generous as they used to be. Why? Because we’re no longer able to muster “a celebrity soup” of sponsors behind well-meaning causes like “famine relief in the horn of Africa.”

These days, if the recent Super-Bowl ads are any indication, we’d rather deploy the likes of Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez to sell stuff like Verizon plans, Dunkin’ Donuts (and themselves, of course)—while we’re presumably basking in the stun-guns of their celebrity. I suppose the theory is that we’ll feel better about ourselves eating a donut because a goddess like J-Lo eats them too. (Yeah, right) But since a minority of viewers are susceptible to delusions like this, they keep serving them up to the rest of us.

“Viewer identification” with products like these should be making the Super Bowl the most powerful sales vehicles of the year. But beyond the faux “feel like a celebrity too” experience, shouldn’t marketing success depend on how many of us are actually buying more donuts or wireless plans because of them? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this year’s Super-Bowl ads totally failed to boost consumption if “more” was actually their mission.

But it might have been otherwise if advertisers had plugged into the far deeper currents that are running through Americans these days.

In this country I remember when there were social institutions (other than the National Football League) competing for our allegiance and attention.

But we already know that fewer of us are going to churches and other houses of worship every weekend. And beyond the social justice warriors and conspiracy theorists, the vast political middle no longer affiliates very strongly with either political party, whatever the draw of a marquee huckster and his supposed foil. Local organizations formed around shared work, heritage or region are struggling for members when they’re surviving at all. On the other hand, American sports—which always appealed to some—have gained near-monopoly status when it comes to belonging to something bigger and (so we’re told) more important than ourselves. That means an event like the Super Bowl becomes a kind of national ritual with its own priests, altars and a stadium full of true believers that get trotted out for us to share in on an annual basis.

These days when considering the faces that we use in public, it looks like a lot of Americans might be fans before we’re anything else. And if your team happens to melt-down after early signs of greatness (like my team in Philly did this year) well, then our fandom easily shifts to, say, the incumbent Super Bowl champions or this game’s underdogs, as well as to the famous faces that dot the stands, the half-time spectacle, and the ads that hold us captive in our seats for 3+ hours.

With 120 million pairs of eyes glued to their Super Bowl screens on February 11, it’s fairly easy to make the case that National League football (and its Big Game in particular) provides the town square or national house of worship where the greatest share of Americans gather during the fall and winter months, culminating in a kind of High Holy Day when February finally rolls around.

So for the marketers—convincing their clients to pay $7m for every half-minute of product promotion—the ads themselves provide a kind of “read” or “diagnosis” about Who (exactly) the ad creators Think We Are these days, and therefore, How Best to Reach Into Our Hearts as well as Our Wallets before we’re on to the next riviting visual.

Sadly this year, neither the viewer diagnosis nor the sad parade of ads that it spawned hit their intended mark.

_{Ben Affleck crashes Jennifer Lopez’s party, but only Matt Damon seems embarrassed by the ridiculousness in what, we’ve been told, was one of the Super Bowl’s most beloved ads.}

In an op-ed she wrote around 2023’s Super Bowl, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan described her view of its advertisements this way.

I have been watching these ads closely for 40 years, for fun but also to hear the inner dialogue, the sound of a nation talking to itself as it sells things to itself, which, in America, has always been about as intimate an act as there is. [emphasis mine]

Indeed, even more so than sex.

Noonan knows this because she’s been a kind of marketer herself, first deploying her skill with words and their particular heartstrings to build affiliation with her former boss (the already kindly-sounding Ronald Reagan) when he was president and she was one of his speech-writers.

What the marketer in Noonan saw last year was a Super Bowl audience made up mostly of Americans still suffering a pandemic hang-over, experiencing new assaults from inflation at the grocery store and gas pump, and increasingly worried about the arc of their day-to-day lives. So why, she wondered, were the ads she’d just seen “jittery, rather cruel and cynical—Super Bowl ads for a nation of losers.” She thought “the ad makers must have asked themselves: What does America want? And answered: dumb, loud, depthless and broken.”

It wasn’t at all the audience she was seeing last year, and certainly not what she thought any of us needed as a sales pitch. Noonan began, rather grandly, with how she knows that the stupid and cynical approach “for an intimate act” like an ad pitch doesn’t work:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is ‘Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.’

To those who made the commercials and pay for them: Advertising is a great and honorable craft, at its best even an art. But you can’t do it well if you have no regard for and barely even know your audience, which is your country. Why don’t you go into another line of work? Why not go to a nonprofit and dislike America from there? Or go into politics. [again, the italics are mine]

That’s not to say that some percentage of Super Bowl viewers aren’t dumb, loud, depthless” and maybe even “broken;” they surely are. But Noonan’s sympathies were going towards that “silent majority” that no one ever seems to be listening to or trying to meet where they live—the folks that Reagan (and even Bill Clinton after him) kept zeroing in on with their political-animal instincts.

We were worried last year, in need of assurance and a genuine sense of solidarity with our fellow Americans instead of some juvenile, celebrity-driven kind.

So did this year’s Super Bowl ad creators similarly miss the audience mark?

Yes they did: and even more spectacularly than they did last year.

_{Beyonce, trying to be inoffensive as Bar-bey, in her self-promoting ad for Verizon.}

According to a quick post-mortem I saw called “Super Bowl Ads Launch Celebrity Blitz with Goal of Playing It Safe”:

The Super Bowl ads on Sunday variously appealed to America’s sweet tooth, pleaded for tolerance and sought redemption for Bud Light [after its transgender promoter led to a customer boycott]. But most shared one thing: marketers’ even deeper-than-usual desire to avoid offending anyone.

It certainly seemed true given “the safety” of the humor in last weekend’s ads. According to a marketing prof at the Kellogg School of Management, nobody was “pushing the edge of these jokes” or “hinting at anything remotely controversial.”

A related story about the Uber Eats’ ad we eventually saw demonstrated how thin-skinned (as well as simple-minded) the advertising industry thinks we’ve become. This food delivery service was apparently:

chastised for a joke in its commercial, which it [had] released online before the game, that showed a man asking, ‘There’s peanuts in peanut butter?’ while breaking out in an allergic reaction. [Well] food allergy advocacy group FARE criticized the ad, saying it featured ‘inappropriate use of humor depicting food allergies.’ FARE said Uber Easts had told the group that the commercial would run without the allergy reference [and] by Sunday, Uber Easts had posted a version of its ad on YouTube with the joke removed.

What Uber Eats attempted wasn’t even that funny. But all of the ad humor in the game was reduced to the kindergarten level, where everyone who is at least 4 years old can get the jokes and nobody would go home crying to mom or dad over what they’d just heard or seen.

The same pablum and hyper-sensitivity also seemed evident in the mild suggestions of the “He Gets Us” campaign, making its second Super-Bowl appearance this year. Over pictures of individuals “who looked different than us(?)” it encouraged viewers to love their neighbors as they say that Jesus once did. Asking “Why can’t we all be friends?” a couple of times between J-Lo and Beyonce certainly wasn’t worth their million dollar price tags when the aforementioned extremists are regularly at one another’s throats and the vast Middle-of-America is afraid of where all the gnashing of teeth, automatic weapons, and purported saviors on both ends of the political spectrum are leading them.

The 2024 Super Bowl ads treated us like we’re over-protected children who can’t handle any more dissonance or discomfort. So have Americans really exchanged “want-to-get-smarter” for “just-plain-stupid,” “resilient (in the face of challenges)” for “fragile (at the suggestion of anything unsettling”)?

Again, for that vast middle of America, I don’t think so. The Americans I know—and I’ve met some too—want to be approached like adults and to become stronger instead of weaker “in the face of it all.” By refusing to treat us the way that most of us want to be treated, the Super Bowl advertisers have (once again) failed to hear the TRUE sound of our nation “talking to itself” while “it sells things to itself,” which for those of us who’ve grown accustomed to it, “has always been about as intimate an act as there is” around here.

_{These days, we’re far more “rooted” than the advertisers ever imagined.}

Why aren’t today’s Super Bowl ads speaking to:

our spirit of enterprise (or our MacGiverish ability to be practical problem-solvers)?
our commitment to fairness on every playing field (instead of wanting to treat every player like they’re equal or the same or that we’d ever want them to be)?
our desire to win (as opposed to giving everyone who shows up to play a trophy)?
our capability for wonder and awe (not only before the jaw-dropping beauty of our country, but also given the brightness—instead of darkness—of the unknowable future that we’re building, even now)?

Instead these ads have become one stupid dog trick after another, although substituting our favorite celebrities for the dogs of yore, because anything more demanding than this might offend somebody’s sensibilities.

I’m reminded of a post I wrote in April of 2021 when the pandemic was already somewhat “long in the tooth” called Higher Winds Are Coming. It spoke to the kinds of reserves we’d be needing because the buffeting we’d been experiencing still wasn’t over. Today, almost 3 years later, we need some of the wisdom that I tried to summon there even more.

For example, I cited Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2012 book, tellingly called Antifragile, which he nearly summarized in 3 of his book’s best lines:

Trial and error is freedom.

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

I quoted Barry Lopez, a particular hero of mine, who asked us to remember the people that we used to be:

How much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly ‘throttled’ world?

And finally, I recalled Buddhist teacher Pima Chodron’s urging us to be more curious about the fears that make us so fragile—to bring these secret worries into the sun’s bright glare so we’re no longer as frightened by their shadowy unknowns. As I went on to explain:

With true hope, she says, there is always fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass. Accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear—so that you are as curious about your fear as you are about your hope—can liberate you from your own constraints.

These observations actually add-up to a pretty short list of things that are great and laudable and TRUE about most of us today:

Our spirit of enterprise, or how difficulty “wakes up” our genius.

Our commitment to a level playing field where every player has a fair chance to win.

Our capacity for wonder and even awe.

Remembering our natural resilience and our willingness to rely upon one another, maybe by consulting our personal and collective histories.

Being curious about our fears so they can never inhibit our hopes.

In a national event that claims to champion our competitive drive towards excellence, it seems natural and even necessary to further elevate The Big Game with marketing that appeals to each and every one of these capabilities, commitments and emotions.

And because they would speak not only to “who we are” but also to “the people that we want to be,” marketing to an audience that’s framed like that would sell a hell-of-a-lot more (of whatever it is that we’re selling) than the fragile and stupid ads that were on parade last weekend.

This post was adapted from my February 18, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Will We Domesticate AI in Time?

February 9, 2024 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As you know from holiday post-cards, I spent time recently with Emily and Joe in Salt Lake City. They were full, rich, activating days and I’m still sorting through the many gifts I received.

The immensity of the mountains in their corner of Utah was impossible to ignore, though I wasn’t there to ski them as much as to gaze-up in wonder at their snow-spattered crowns for the first time. Endless, low-level suburbs also extend to their foothills in every direction, and while everyone says “It’s beautiful here” they surely mean “the looking up” and not “the looking down.”

Throughout my visit, SLC’s sprawl was a reminder of how far our built-environments fall short of our natural ones in a freedom-loving America that disdains anyone’s guidance on what to build and where. Those who settled here have filled this impossibly majestic valley with an aimless, carmel-and-rosy low-rise jumble that from any elevation has a fog-topping of exhaust in the winter and (most likely) a mirage-y shimmer of vaporous particulates the rest of the year.

So much for Luke 12:48 (“To whom much has been given….”)

Why not extrapolations of the original frontier towns I wondered instead of this undulating wave of discount centers, strip malls, and low-slung industrial and residential parking lots that have taken them over in every direction?

I suppose they’re the tangible manifestation of resistance to governmental guidance (or really any kind of collective deliberation) on what we can or can’t, should or shouldn’t be doing when we create our homelands—leaving it to “the quick buck” instead of any consciously-developed, long-term vision to determine what surrounds us.

Unfortunately I fear that this same deference to freedom (or perhaps more aptly, to its “free-market forces”) may be just as inevitable when it comes to artificial intelligence (or AI). So I have to ask: Instead of making far far less than we could from AI’s similarly awesome possibilities, why not commit to harnessing (and then nurturing) this breathtaking technology so we can achieve the fullest measure of its human-serving potential?

Unfortunately, my wider days beneath a dazzle of mountain ranges showed me how impoverished this end game could also become.

_{Boris Eldagsen submitted this image, called “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician” to a recent, Sony world photography competition. When he won in the contest’s “creative open” category, he revealed that his image was AI-generated, going on to donate his prize money to charity. As Eldagsen said at the time: “Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter—or would that be a mistake? With my refusal of the award, I hope to speed up this debate” about what is “real” and “acceptable” in the art world and what is not.}

The debate over that and similar questions should probably begin with a summary appreciation of AI’s nearly-miraculous as well as fearsomely-catastrophic possibilities. Both were given a preview in a short interview with the so-called “Godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, on the 60 Minutes TV-newsmagazine a couple of months ago.

Looking a bit like Dobby from the Harry Potter films, Hinton’s sense of calm and perspective offered as compelling a story as I’ve heard about the potential up- and down-sides of “the artificial neural networks” that he first helped to assemble five decades ago. Here are a few of its highlights:

after the inevitable rise of AI, humans will become the second most intelligent beings on Earth. For instance, in 5 years Hinton expects “that ChatGPT might well be able to reason better than us”;
AI systems can already understand. For example, even with the autocomplete features that interrupt us whenever we’re texting and emailing, the artificial intelligence that drives them has to “understand” what we’ve already typed as well as what we’re likely to add in order to offer up its suggestions;
Through trial and error, AI systems learn as they go (i.e. machine learning) so that the system’s “next” guess or recommendation is likely to be more accurate (or closer to what the user is looking for) than its “last” response. That means AI systems can improve their functioning without additional human intervention. Among other things, this capacity gives rise to fears that AI systems could gain certain advantages over or even come to dominate their human creators more generally as they continue to get smarter.
Hinton is proud of his contributions to AI-system development, especially the opportunities it opens in health care and in developing new drug-treatment protocols. But in addition to AI’s dominating its creators, he also fears for the millions of workers “who will no longer be valued” when AI systems take over their jobs, the even broader dissemination of “fake news” that will be turbo-charged by AI, as well as the use of AI-enabled warriors on tomorrow’s battlefields. Because of the speed of system advancements, he urges global leaders to face these challenges sooner rather than later.

Finally, Hinton argues for broader experimentation and regulation of AI outside of the tech giants (like Microsoft, Meta and Google). Why? Because these companies’ primary interest is in monetizing a world-changing technology instead of maximizing its potential benefits for the sake of humanity. As you undoubtedly know, over the past two years many in the scientific-research, public-policy and governance communities have echoed Hinton’s concerns in widely-publicized “open letters” raising alarm over AI’s commercialization today.

Hinton’s to-do list is daunting, particularly at a time when many societies (including ours) are becoming more polarized over what constitutes “our common goods.” Maybe identifying a lodestar we could all aim for eagerly–like capitalizing on the known and (as yet unknown) promises of AI that can benefit us most–might help us to find some agreement as the bounty begins to materialize and we begin to wonder how to “spend” it. Seeing a bold and vivid future ahead of us (instead of merely the slog that comes from risk mitigation) might give us the momentum we lack today to start making more out of AI’s spectacular frontier instead of less.

So what are the most thoughtful among us recommending in these regards? Because, once again, it will be easier to limit some of our freedoms around a new technology with tools like government regulation and oversight if we can also envision something that truly dazzles us at the end of the long, domesticating road.

Over the past several months, I’ve been following the conversation—alarm bells, recommended next steps, more alarm bells—pretty closely and it’s easy to get lost in the emotional appeals and conflicting agendas. So I was drawn this week to the call-to-action in a short essay entitled “Why the U.S. Needs a Moonshot Mentality for AI—Led by the Public Sector.” Its engaging appeal, co-authored by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, is the most succinct and persuasive one I’ve encountered on what we should be doing now (and encouraging others with influence to be doing) if we want to shower ourselves with the full range of AI’s benefits while minimizing its risks.

Their essay begins with a review of the nascent legislative efforts that are currently underway in Congress to place reasonable guardrails around the most apparent of AI’s misguided uses. A democratic government’s most essential function is to protect its citizens from those things (like foreign enemies during wartime) that only it can protect us from. AI poses that category of individual and national threat in terms of spreading disinformation, and the authors urge quick action on some combination of the pending legislative proposals.

Li and Etchemendy then talk about the parties that are largely missing from the research labs where AI is currently being developed.

As we’ve done this work, we have seen firsthand the growing gap in the capabilities of, and investment in, the public compared with private sectors when it comes to AI. As it stands now, academia and the public sector lack the computing power and resources necessary to achieve cutting edge breakthroughs in the application of AI.

This leaves the frontiers of AI solely in the hands of the most resourced players—industry and, in particular, Big Tech—and risks a brain drain from academia. Last year alone, less than 4o% of new Ph.D.s in AI went into academia and only 1% went into government jobs.

The authors are also justifiably concerned by the fact that policy makers in Washington have been listening, almost exclusively, to commercial AI developers like Sam Altman and Elon Musk and not enough to leaders from the academy and civil society. They are, if anything, even more outraged by the fact that “America’s longstanding history of creating public goods through science and technology” (think of innovations like the internet, GPS, MRIs) will be drowned out by the “increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric” that’s been coming out of the mouths of some “celebrity Silicon Valley CEOs” in recent memory.

They readily admit that “there’s nothing wrong with” corporations seeking profits from AI. The central problem is that those who might approach the technology “from a different [non-commercial] angle [simply] don’t have the [massive] computing power and resources to pursue their visions” that the profit-driven have today. It’s almost as if Li and Etchemendy want to level the playing field and introduce some competition between Big Tech and those who are interested (but currently at a disadvantage) in the academy and the public sector over who will be the first to produce the most significant “public goods” from AI.

Toward that end:

We also encourage an investment in human capital to bring more talent to the U.S. to work in the field of AI within academia and the government.

[W]hy does this matter? Because this technology isn’t just good for optimizing ad revenue for technology companies, but can fuel the next generation of scientific discovery, ranging from nuclear fusion to curing cancer.

Furthermore, to truly understand this technology, including its sometimes unpredictable emergent capabilities and behaviors, public-sector researchers urgently need to replicate and examine the under-the-hood architecture of these models. That’s why government research labs need to take a larger role in AI.

And last (but not least), government agencies (such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and academic institutions should play a leading role in providing trustworthy assessments and benchmarking of these advanced technologies, so the American public has a trusted source to learn what they can and can’t do. Big tech companies can’t be left to govern themselves, and it’s critical there is an outside body checking their progress.

Only the federal government can “galvanize the broad investment in AI” that produces a level-playing field where researchers within our academies and governmental bodies can compete with the brain trusts within our tech companies to produce the full harvest of public goods from a field like AI. In their eyes it will take competitive juices (like those unleashed by Sputnik which took America to the moon a little more than a decade later) to achieve AI’s true promise.

If their argument peaks your interest like it did mine, there is a great deal of additional information on the Stanford Institute site where the authors profile their work and that of their colleagues. It includes a three-week, on-line program called AI4ALL where those who are eager to learn more can immerse themselves in lectures, hands-on research projects and mentoring activities; a description of the “Congressional bootcamp,” offered to representatives and their staffs last August and likely to be offered again; and the Institute’s white paper on building “a national AI resource” that will provide academic and non-profit researchers with the computing power and government datasets needed for both education and research.

To similar effect, I also recommend this June 12, 2023 essay in Foreign Policy. It covers some of the same territory as these Stanford researchers and similarly urges legislators to begin to “reframe the AI debate from one about public regulation to one about public development.”

_{It doesn’t take much to create a viral sensation, but when they were published these AI-generated images certainly created one. Here’s the short story behind “Alligator-Pow” and “-Pizza.” At some point in the future, we could look back to the olden days when AI’s primary contributions were to make us laugh or to help us to finish our text messages.}

Because we’ll (hopefully) be reminiscing in a future when AI’s bounty has already changed us in far more profound and life-affirming ways.

If the waves of settlers in Salt Lake City had believed that they could build something that aspired to the grandeur of the mountains around them—like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages or even some continuation of the lovely and livable villages that many of them had left behind in Northern Europe—they might not have “paved Paradise and put up a parking lot” (as one of their California neighbors once sang).

In similar ways, having a worthy vision today, and one that’s realized by the right gathering of competitors, could make the necessary difference when it comes to artificial intelligence?

So will we domesticate AI in time?

Only if we can gain enough vision to take us over the “risk” and “opportunity” hurdles that are inhibiting us today.

This post was adapted from my January 7, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Restoration After Another Hard Year

December 13, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The past month has been challenging here, so a more meditative post today: a retreat into relative quiet after what has felt like too much noise.

Wally has been sick since I travelled to New England for a grade school class reunion more than a month ago, and multiple trips to the vet weren’t getting to the bottom of it.

It’s a constant burden when a pet or a child who’s living with you is ailing. They tell you how sick they are by how little they seem like themselves, or by how worried they look when they see your worry. Sick family members are also a lot of work.

“He looks pale to me,” said Dr. Niggemaier even though I’d never heard that said about a dog. Well the treatments (a lot of mine and several of hers) seem to be working—the burden of prior weeks released like a sigh—and I want to write about the break that I feel like having now that my insides are freed up again.

I want to pay attention to something that makes no demands for a change, that begins with relief and flows from there into a wider current that has been moving along-side the whole time but whose unfolding had become little more than a backdrop. What I mean is how week-by-week the Fall, this season we’re in had been slowly sliding into Winter without my even noticing.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Quiet, seasonal steps have weekly features, like the different expressions of a familiar face, their “right now” smells and sounds too, but I’d missed all of this (I wonder, did Wally miss them too?) and all I want to do right now is drift along in the inner-tube of that parallel flow. To advance the scenes that came just before today, and remember from prior years what might be coming up next. To feel the reboot of a deeper movement carrying me through to the end of the year.

It took me until February last winter, to write my first post of the year about rebooting and recharging. Today, I want to revisit that post (A Time for Repair, for Wintering), to consider whether “a Japanese calendar” that breaks the seasons into weeks can help with that kind of restoration, and finally, to take a stab at re-constructing the five weeks I just “missed” along with the three that are coming up before the new year in a bid to slow things down and return to better health.

_{Nestled in sod.}

For insulation or because they like the way it looks or maybe because it’s so deeply rooted in the ways they’ve always done it, Norwegians love their sod roofs—some so much that they’ve created their own human+natural landscapes.

Both like and unlike them, English writer Katherine May has brought a variation on that composite landscape inside. She discusses what the seasons have to tell us about the need to stop and recuperate from all the usual challenges. Her 2020 book, and the springboard for last Feburary’s post, is called “Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.”

For May, “to winter” is to learn how to flourish when times are lean, when we no longer have the spring’s freshness, the summer’s warmth, or the autumn’s harvest to fall back on—when we’ve been stripped down to the basics and our batteries have been drained of their juice. As she tells it:

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting….”

Too bad then that we seem to lack the evolutionary roadmaps to make ourselves stronger and more resilient by “wintering” in ways that the rest of Nature does. Perhaps that’s why her accumulated wisdom about time for rest and repair came not from preference but from necessity.

“‘However it arrives,’ May writes, ‘wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.’ In her own life, she needed to learn how to cope and then recover after waves of disruption roiled the core of her existence. (Her husband fell ill and nearly died. Her own health declined to the point that she could no longer work. Her 6-year old son became too anxious to go to school. Many of the things that May had counted on as a partner, as a professional and as a mother now felt “provisional and unsettled.”) In this ‘fallow season’ for her, May had to learn to admit the extent of her disorientation and unhappiness, and that validating these feelings neither encouraged them nor made them worse. Instead, by making a place for her desolation she began to learn how ‘to winter’ through it, something that the natural world already knows instinctively.”

For me, it’s not just Wally’s challenges that call for wintering. It’s the barrage of “bad news,” economic uncertainties, an annihilating 24/7 war, alarming politics, how much it sometimes seems that “the good times” are behind us. And as all of it has sanded me down, new demands arrive.

So when do I admit that it’s time for the repair shop?

When will I accept that my batteries only work intermittently, and one day may not work at al?

When do I: Stop, look, listen, (smell, taste, absorb and reboot) before crossing the tracks again?

_{My favorite thing about this picture: the two inward facing chairs.}

As a mindful reset to what can feel “like the fury of everyday life,” the Japanese (and the Chinese before them) thought they could slow the rush of time in a beneficial way if they broke down their annual calendars into microseasons. During the 16^th Century, some Japanese contemplatives broke the year down into 72 of these “5-day long seasons” in order (as they described it) to “soothe your passage” through the calendar “in a journey that draws your focus to subtle shifts of the natural world.”

They called these microseasons kō and instead of having names, each is described “in a mellifluous phrase” that aims to capture what is happening on the ground or in the sky outside in each 5-day stretch. “Bush Warblers Start Singing in the Mountains.” “Damp earth, Humid Heat.” “The Maple and the Ivy Turn Yellow.” “Dew Glistens White on Grass.” You get the idea. As described in a short (4-minute long) video, these mindfulness masters “found patterns in the cycles” within the seasons and “ways to recall them” so that when you finally slow down, life becomes a more satisfying journey “taken with much smaller steps.”

If this journey seems to have your name on it, you can take it exactly the way that the Japanese do via a free mobile app (for both iOS and Android devices). But just like the Japanese adapted what the Chinese had done before them, I’ve been thinking about my own house-in-nature adaptation this weekend, starting with the 5 weeks in November and December that I just “missed” and the 3 that are left before New Years—thinking that someday I might be able to conjure the mental images for all 52 of them.

Because I do a lot of my work from home, a place where my senses could be filled with the seasons (both outside and in) if I bothered to pay attention, I began with the role that its doors and windows play in this “slower parade of time.” With light pouring in from the East and the West as each day comes and goes, my work and living spaces function a bit like sundials, particularly as the leaves fall from the trees and new blades of light can angle in when clouds don’t get in their way.

Moreover, without the dampening effect of the leaves, sounds are different too—sometimes more grating (I get to hear a surprising amount of bad music blaring from passing cars) but not always. Sometimes it’s bird song, a distant dog, or gust of wind.

There are also environment changes inside when the heat comes on. Cooking smells linger a bit longer. Winter holidays bring visitors, with their new smells, sounds and feelings, and year-end transitions beckon.

So here’s what I’m “contemplating” today as I go back in time (to those “missed” weeks) and then try to recall what it was like here in prior years for those weeks just ahead of me. In doing so, I won’t even attempt to be as “mellifluous” in my phrasing as they are in Japan, except for that one week where their words instead of mine seemed like the perfect fit.

November 1-6

V’s of Canadian guess honk their ways through the mottled gray sky and, once in awhile, through the blinding sunshine as they depart the reservoir nearby, always aiming north by north-west.

November 7-13

This is the first week where the sun comes up on the same axis as our driveway, making the experience of walking down it (for Wally’s walk each morning) a little like being at Stonehenge. Fewer leaves interrupt the light at this point in the calendar, lengthening the shadows that seem to stretch behind us for 20 feet or more. I often close my eyes and let the sun warm my face when it’s damp and cold while trying not to trip as he pulls me along.

November 14-20

Dew Glistens White on Grass. (The first frost date in Philadelphia this year was on November 17.) We also don’t get much fog here, but when we do, this is when it first shrouds everything outside in a cloud before burning off later in the day.

November 21-27

The air inside is softened by small tubs of evaporating water that we put out to counter the drying effects when the heat “comes on.” At this time every year, our noses breathe easier with more moisture in the air.

November 28-December 4

The house next door has a ground crew regularly cleaning the leaves from their lawn, which makes it a verdant base for the golds and rusts of almost everything else. The walkway to their front door is flanked by two, twenty-foot, ornamental trees that are shaped a bit like tulip vases. This is the week that their leaves always fall down in a rush (like our gingko did after the first frost) leaving round skirts of yellow and red on a sea of impossible green.

December 5-11

Sun’s rising fills the top floor with light that glows so brightly that it bounces down the staircase, lighting the family pictures, certificates and pictures of friends lining the walls. It’s their week to shine down on the still sleepy floor.

December 12-19

With wreaths up inside, the house smells like pine—something that can last for weeks by misting them with water every once in awhile. It’s also when a little Christmas tree I made as a kid, our tin ornaments from Mexico, and the lights that look like chili peppers come back out like old friends.

December 20-27

One of the best things about living in these few blocks is that the bell tower of the school near-by tolls, sonorously, every hour, like it would in a small village before watches and phones told you “the time.” I listen for these bells all year long, but this is the week that another bell tower, in a neighborhood that’s somewhere to the east of us, plays short phrases that remind me of Christmas with its 5 or 6 church bells. Somebody in that tower keeps this over-heard tradition every year and I realize that I always look forward to hearing from them in this particular week of it.

So see how the light is streaming through your front door in a way it couldn’t manage for the past 42 weeks, or how the shadows play across your office at 3 p.m., or how chestnuts fill your house with fragrance when you roast them each year during the week of Thanksgiving.

They’re sensations that can return for as long as you want them to: details to mark the passing of time and to maybe “get lost in” as everything slows and has the space to repair.

This post was adapted from my December 11, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

When Neither of the Captains Picking Their Teams Wanted You

November 6, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been another week of bad news.

I got to watch the Phillies lose to the Diamond Backs in the last two games of the National League Championship Series and it had me re-living my own years playing baseball and, more soulfully, about what it had been like being picked (often from the bottom of the barrel) for the team I’d be playing on.

But even before these misty memories, I was thinking about the men (in particular) who watch sports on TV but never played the game they’re watching despite their baseball caps and enthusiasm. They always strike me as having “no real skin in the game” while living vicariously through a bunch of thoroughbreds who don’t even spend enough hours in their home town to pay a wage tax.

The “never played part” seems hopelessly arms-length to me, while the players who make up the Phillies (or any professional sports team for that matter) fly in the face of every tribal instinct that adds up to “local” as far as I’m concerned. Most of the showboats out on the field don’t care enough about this place to actually live and raise their kids here. So watching this week re-connected me to the sensation of bat-meeting-ball and “that impossible catch” way-back-when, but also somewhat less so because those protean skills were being demonstrated by the best out-of-towners-that-money-can-buy who were pretending to be my home team.

Back when I could do a credible run around the bases, baseball to me was so local that I could almost hit the roof of my house with a homer if the wind was right.

We had two sports seasons back then—Spring and Fall—which roughly coincided with baseball and football. There were several, multiple-kid families near-by and one of them (across the street) had the right-sized backyard and the properly-motivated oldest brother to organize a game almost every afternoon in those swollen hours when exiting the school bus melted towards dinner time.

With winning in each captain’s mind, the biggest hurdle before starting a game was getting picked for your team.

It was more or less the same random sample of players each day so our pluses and minuses were pretty well known, but my memory is that the draft picks were always reduced to the kids that each captain either wanted or didn’t want (until the last rounds gave them only the bad choices) which was where I regularly fell. That meant you were literally in a meat parade every afternoon if you were brave enough to show up for the selection process, and some of the easily-wounded who also lived near-by skipped it altogether, got an early start on their homework, or sat around feeling sorry about being a klutz, a spaz or a cry-baby.

It felt Darwinian because it was.

As one commentator with similar memories—who may also have been watching the end of the same baseball season on TV— noted:

_{“you see yourself, maybe for the first time, through the cold eyes of an appraiser. You are no more than a body in the mind of this person, an object with too many deficiencies to catalog: chubby, knock-kneed, weak-armed, timid, poorly coordinated, scared of the ball, slow.”}

Because every game promised camaraderie, excitement and a fast clock towards nightfall, I always showed up (despite the pain of it) even though I hadn’t yet discovered that I might be able to do something to improve my “low-value status,” or even become “an athlete” someday.

We’ll return to this commentator (and his suspicions that the trauma of this experience can cause permanent scarring) in a minute, but somewhat like him I devised my own “work-around” to this miserable situation, having neither an older brother nor a father who was around enough to show me what I needed to do.

Because the neighborhood draft-pickers already knew my inabilities too well for me to ever game them, I practiced turning myself into something more desirable at school during recess, where a similar winnowing out process for the games we played took place nearly every day. Kick-ball, dodge-ball, whatever it was, I’d focus (in advance) on how to make some kind of indelible impression every single time I got the chance: kicking the ball harder and farther than the last dope, throwing the ball hard enough to smack some asshole who needed impressing, looking at how the “first picks” moved around the field compared to me, stumbling around and seemingly out-of-place.

I didn’t realize how much I was teaching myself about playing a sport, being on a team, becoming “the kind of man” that other men wanted on their team. Sure, I was trying out conformity instead of forging my own singular path, but it was also about getting better at something, and maybe something as worthwhile as self-mastery.

While I was re-living these early, tooth-and-claw chapters of my team-playing evolution, I remembered a New Yorker essay that’s never left me about a remarkable coach (who also happened to be a world-famous art curator) and how he turned a gaggle of 9-year old boys from Manhattan into the Metrozoid’s football team. Among many other things, he had the boys break “that mystical game” down into its component parts so that they could “get good at” each part before getting good at the whole. A few years ago, I wrote here about Kirk Varnedoe’s game mechanics and general wizardry in Who We Go-ToTo Learn How To Get There.

Similarly, I worked at each part of my baseball game and at the-putting-it altogether-part and never stopped until I slowly started inching up the pecking order– or at least high enough to know that I didn’t have to be a passive victim of a selection process that was going to repeat itself for decades and through entire careers.

Somebody else is always going to pick or reject me. So what am I going to do about it?

Some rejects spend the rest of their lives fleeing those first rejections in a kind of “safe harbor” they’ve built for themselves.

Instead of rising to positions somewhere beyond their capabilities (a phenomenon once called “The Peter Principle”) because higher-ups kept falling for these individuals’ confident self-promotion, there is also (in my observation) a category of under-achievers who only go as far as their easiest successes because the risk of being rejected when putting yourself out there is simply too painful to ever attempt again.

The aforementioned commentator (Rich Cohen writing in the Wall Street Journal), sees this kind of pain as plausibly originating at team selections in the course of childhood games and grade-school gym classes, those earliest and, for some, indelible brushes with “natural selection.” He also explains why this might be so:

_{“the feeling of randomness, being misunderstood, underestimated and judged for all the wrong reasons. We will never get rid of it because it’s a pure expression of the human condition.”}

To be judged unfairly. Or maybe (because you really do suck as a ball-player) to be judged fairly, and then to feel badly about it because in its harsh light, somebody else’s judgment has revealed something about you and how you’re viewed by others.

Of course, it’s what you do (or don’t do) next that matters. While he never says anything as matter-of-fact as “just try to get better at taking the test you just failed,” Cohen does seem to see the benefit in working through your suffering somehow.

_{“Maybe it’s better to face [a draft, selection process like this one] and learn to overcome it in the same years that you are learning about the Declaration of Independence and human reproduction [that is, while you’re young]. After all, you only learn to disregard the draft—and, better still, turn it to your advantage—once you’ve suffered it.”}

But the lack of specificity of his thinking here—for example, he never exactly says how one can turn this situation into an “advantage”—made me wonder whether Cohen really thought his way through the traumatizing quandary and out the other end, particularly when he wonders out loud:

_{“Were these [meat-market] auctions the source of all my problems, the insecurities and panics, the angers and paranoia, that still haunt me? Were they the cause of the occasional drinking-binge, meditation retreat and need to write?”}

Could all of that possibly be happening to this day if he’d truly found a way to leave his particular meat-markets stronger instead of weaker?

I can only speak to my years being assessed in these ways. It seems to me that the only way to gain some measure of damage-control over selection processes like these is to first off, be clear-eyed about your weaknesses, and then to do whatever you can to mitigate their impact in whatever game you want to be playing in. Then, even if you’re the last one picked—or not picked at all—you’ll have the empowering satisfaction of pushing yourself to the point of improvement.

Of course, this is not just a boys-to-men phenomenon. And, to the extent it is still “a man’s world of business” out there (but one with far more women in it), the girls-to-women cohort needs to deal with these selection processes too—just as endlessly and ad nauseam but also the only way you can deal with them effectively. (It’s one reason I’m a proponent of girls playing team sports: so they too can get familiar with and learn how to triumph over these gruesome dynamics.)

Which was why I was taken aback by Cohen’s citing and then providing his own rationale for a growing opposition to the playground/gym-class draft picking process. Apparently for some time now, the practice is being phased out, and at least part of Cohen seems to approve.

_{“As long ago as 1993, the New York Times headlined a story, ‘New Gym Class: No More Choosing Up Sides.’ Because it traumatizes kids, separates them, leaves a mark on their psyche.”}

(At this point I wondered: Is this what happened to those wimpy, TV sports-team fanboys who shied away from team sports themselves because they couldn’t “live with the rejections that came with it”? Are they seeking a jolt of toughness or even of “masculinity” by watching a team of mercenaries pursue what they never had the fortitude and resilience to pursue on a competitive playing field?

These will have to be questions for another day.)

All I can speak to is my experience once again, and how glad I am that no one was protecting me before I got the chance to prove what I needed to prove to myself.

Because one day, long ago, on the Burn’s family’s Spring-Season baseball field, I actually got picked first by one of the opposing captains. Some other player may have been sick or on vacation that day, providing an opening for the top spot (my memory is a tad hazy about that), but about the moment when I was picked there is nothing but clarity.

One of the captains (maybe Walter) must have remembered my recent hitting, catching and sliding into third-base before he had a chance to recall his earlier impressions of me. And because he wanted to be on the winning side when the game was done, he went for the best player that was available in the first round.

I still remember how proud I felt that day.

I had already felt the empowerment of those prior games, when I’d seen myself improving in all those ways.

Now, when somebody else was finally noticing, I got the first-hand opportunity to view them side-by-side and realized (in some ways, once-and-for-all) that getting your own shit together was the better of the two..

This post was adapted from my October 29, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Consolations of Boredom

October 9, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about some of the better escapes I’ve been enjoying in posts about “shoe gaze” music and “gourmet cheeseburger” TV, but after having these experiences and telling others about them, I always return to the same place I briefly left behind.

It’s the every-day-to-day where we spend most of our lives—because even when we’re trying to escape it’s routines and foregone conclusions, its mono-tones and tastes, we still carry its most troubling baggage with us. (Have you ever noticed how little you can truly “get away” on vacation?)

So I’ve been wondering for years now about ways to eke more sustenance out of the familiar places we want to escape from while reducing their uneasiness.

The question gained greater-than-normal urgency when we sheltered in place during the pandemic. At the time I argued for establishing everyday rituals to conjure more satisfaction, even meaning, out of a meal or how we get up in the morning (Extra From the Ordinary). I also drew some comfort from seeing how others—like comedian Bo Burnham—not only coped but almost thrived during the isolation because he knew, from being a kind of outsider as a child, “how to turn an uncomfortable situation into comedy” (Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do).

Moreover, the bankrupting aspects of everyday life don’t have to be a problem we solve on our own or just with the aid of our immediate families. By expressing our intention to face a common fate together, so-called “intentional communities” that share religious or social convictions can elevate some of the day’s opportunities and relieve some of its burdens by enabling their adherents to approach them together (The Re-Purposing of Ancient Wisdoms).

That time my example was of a kind a modern, Benedictine-Rule-based monasticism. But even then, its high level of commitment to any community made its solution wobble a bit (particularly here in America) where we keep saying we value our freedom and independence far too much to subordinate ourselves to the tyranny of any group. Like Groucho Marx, I feared too many of us would rather be alone than join any club that would be willing to have us.

So if we can’t imagine the long-term community benefits that might come with sacrificing some of our short-term personal preferences, what else might offer a consistent path to less stressful “living and working” on a regular basis? This week—yet another one I found difficult to weather “with my chin up”—I’ve been wondering out loud about the following:

Is it possible to experience a blissful relief within the boring intervals between our occasional escapes?

_{Pictured here (and up top) are different views of an “action sculpture” from 1999’s Wasser[or Water] installation Series by Swiss artist Roman Signer. As a boy, Signer dreamed of navigating white-water rivers and as an adult embarked on kayaking trips in remote mountainous areas until, one day, a companion of his failed to return with him. The kayak has been a recurring element in his work ever since. According to one commentator,“Wasserinstallation creates a vacuum where the beginning and the end of an imaginary journey converge.” You can explore more of Signer’s lifetime of visual artistry here.}

When Robert Signer lost his kayaking companion, he tried to make sense of it, but when he found that he couldn’t he started creating what he called “action sculptures” to help him (along with those viewing them) go inside themselves, into a kind of meditative place, where instead of providing answers to impossible questions “meanings flow into one another effortlessly, without ever taking definite shape,” thereby offering a semblance of peace.

It’s akin to the facility that science-fiction writer and all-around-sage Ursula K. Le Guin was describing when she said once:

_{“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”}

—in other words, in times like we’re in today.

Why has another child needlessly been killed in a refugee boat, border war or neglectful home?

Why did the flood sweep away this family or that village?

Why do the venal and wicked always seem to triumph over the honest and virtuous?

Why did my kayaking companion fail to return, but I did?

Then I asked:

How can we learn to sit with questions like these without sadness or remorse, anxiety or recrimination?

Where in our lives and work would finding relief from these gnawing discomforts be possible?

Could it be within our least engaging and most boring activities every day?

Well, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel wanted me to believe. He’s the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and (to my surprise) he’s been thinking and teaching others about the liberating effects of boredom for more than 20 years. McDaniel talked about the theory and his own experience testing it out on a podcast that I listened to this week.

I wouldn’t have thought of boredom—and in particular doing the kinds of things that we associate with it—as an escape hatch “from stress and darkness,” but for some reason I started playing closer attention as he started to explore the linguistic roots of the word “boring.”

The word’s root is “to bore,” of course, like putting a hole in a container and (by doing so) “rendering it useless” because it can no longer hold what it was intended to hold. In other words, it’s still a vessel, just not one that can also do something else, like hold water. In much the same way, many of our daily activities are similarly without much broader “use,” particularly when we refuse to fill them with some higher agenda, like “being more productive.”

When simply done “for their own sake” with no broader purpose, boring activities can be “incredibly liberating” according to McDaniel, allowing us to find simple relief in the task itself and not in what we’re getting done or producing. As a result, activities that are “boring” and effectively “useless” in this positive sense can trigger “a new beginning, a reset,” as he calls it, from the negativity that regularly weighs us down.

It’s a principle that’s been institutionalized for centuries by Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia where McDaniel studied as a student. Their days (and his) were consumed with tasks, repeated daily (like sweeping the same path or washing the day’s fruits and vegetables) that allowed them to empty their minds of everything beyond the task itself—like “boring a hole in yourself” and letting the extraneous out. Instead of aiming to do more, the point of boring/repetitive activities is actually to do less. In essence, McDaniel and the monks he was learning from found escape in boredom, or the repetitive monotony that characterizes many of our days too–at least when we refuse to compound the monotony with worry.

To somebody like me, who often feels overwhelmed by a 24/7 overload of “bad news” and my inability to absorb (let alone respond to) even a portion of it, hearing about an escape into boredom sounded like Relief. It was then that McDaniel started talking about how our brains “crave nothingness, crave non-productivity.” Stepping back from his remarks, I recalled making a similar point in a post from a couple years back called We Don’t Have to be Productive All the Time. But what McDaniel gestured towards was something that had been more elusive back then, namely, the potential cure that was offered by the non-productive activities that I perform all the time in the course of living and working.

It’s the every-day boredom of tasks at home: the cleaning, dressing, washing, eating, shopping, mowing the lawn, taking the dog out. It’s the daily boredom of tasks at work: research, writing, emailing, calling, meeting, promoting, monitoring information flows. All of these tasks have a repetitive monotony in them. To find their relief, I just need to strip them of their larger goals, objectives, the anxieties that I’m (somehow) not meeting them, and everything else I might be worrying about.

It really is like turning all the charging switches off while leaving the boring one on.

During his podcast appearance, McDaniel gave a beautiful illustration of this healing kind of boredom, and as he recounted it I realized he was talking about something he clearly does himself.

As a chaired professor at a prestigious university, his book-filled office likely hosts many “highly charged” but also “anxiety inducing” activities that could benefit greatly from the relief of a little boredom. For example, the students who visit it may want an “A” in his course, his endorsement for an internship, or a letter of recommendation that will flatter them when the time comes. As a professor, he might be hosting an ambitious colleague seeking tenure, a rival being competitive, or the professional pressure to do more impactful research himself. What all of these purposeful acts have in common, said McDaniel, is “do, do, do.”

But at that point in the podcast, he tried to offer us the same view that he simultaneously has of the books on his office’s bookshelves. “Who cares what’s in them,” he exclaimed (without the reverence I might have expected from a scholar.) What I do sometimes is “just look at them, and all the variety of the colors on their covers.” At that point I realized, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel can be found doing in his office sometimes, particularly when his brain “craves non-productivity” and all the “do, do, do” that’s around him needs “a reset.” In these intervals, hiis books don’t have the higher purpose of scholarship or greater wisdom but simply the boredom of covers with many colors.

To me, this everyday and always-available peace is not unlike what Roman Signer is also offering in another one of his kayak-related installations.

Good luck with the boredom this week! I’ll see you next Sunday.

This post was adapted from my October 8, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.