Kyle's Files: A Desire Edition, Part 2 (+ A Comedy Lesson)

Wanting Desire, Comedy, Ryan Gosling, Christmas

British Columbia, reddit

Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on all around you

-Bob Dylan, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) [Talking about thin desires, maybe]

Merry Christmas!

Today is the second part of this Desire Edition. It doesn’t necessarily build on part one, I just think this is such a good time of year to think about what we want to want: for ourselves, our relationships, and life more generally.

First, a quick detour: a while ago I promised to talk about the reason I started sending these weekly letters again. Details on that are in section zero.

0. I Won The Bet (And The Habit-Making Trick I’m Glad I Finally Tried)

On October 23, I sent the first edition of this letter in over a year. I had been trying to get the habit of publishing regularly going again for years and wasn’t able to. My writing and “saying-things-in-public” muscles had atrophied and I couldn’t get them going again. So I made a bet with my wife:

I had to send an email once a week for the rest of the year or, I failed, I had to buy her this big expensive mirror that I really did not want to buy.

It was our version of a commitment device suggested by all sorts of habit people: put up a stomach-turning amount of money that will be given to a stomach-turning cause if you don’t follow through on a commitment. There are even services built on this idea. I couldn’t bring myself to risk donating money to bad people, so I settled on a big, expensive mirror that my wife would kinda like, but not be purely happy about. We’ll get more about this in the next letter, which will be new-yearsy.

A few notes on how this has gone and what to expect going forward:

1. I won the bet! (Sorry, Steph.)

2. Forcing myself to spend time synthesizing and connecting ideas has done wonders for my brain.

3. Breakinging the paralysis that stopped me from thinking in ~public for years has had an even better psychological impact than I expected.

4. These letters aren’t as good as I want them to be. They’re not as tight as they should be. The bar for ideas hasn’t been quite where I want it. The connections and flow can get sloppy—the result, I think, of writing too long too intensely to make the weekly deadlines.

5. To make them better, I’m likely going send them less frequently (unless I find a way to make a short version of these that I actually like).

6. The format and focus will continue to shift a bit.

7. I’m amazed how many of you continue to read these, many since 2017. Thank you for reading, I say it often, but it really is an honor to be in your inbox.

1. Tweets’n’Things™

“And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.”
-Malvina Reynolds, Little Boxes (YouTube)

“[W]e go to far less trouble about making ourselves happy than about appearing to be so.” – La Rochefoucauld

“So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness…” Robert Bly

“The ultimate word is I Like. It lies beneath philosophy, and is twined about the heart of life. When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, “I Like,” and does something else…” - Jack London

"Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am." Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

“A man sets out to discover a treasure he believes is hidden under a stone… He turns over stone after stone but finds nothing. He grows tired of such a futile undertaking but the treasure is too precious for him to give up. So he begins  to look for a stone which is too heavy to lift—he places all his hopes in that stone and he will waste all his remaining strength on it.” Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel

“Changing habits: Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it. Plan a sustainable path.” - Naval Ravikant, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

“Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.” - Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book II

“Look at the minds of those who seek fame, observe what they are, and what kind of things they avoid, and what kind of things they pursue. And consider that as the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands, so in life the events which go before are soon covered by those which come after.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” – Marcel Proust

2. Wanting: Tactics For Shaping Desire

Mimetic desire is the idea that a primary driver of our desires are the desires of those around us. Peter Thiel popularized the idea, which originated with one of his college professors, René Girard. Girard’s books are mostly tough to get into, so the idea only went so far. Then Luke Burgis wrote Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, which made the theory more accessible and useable to more people. It’s tough to appreciate the degree to which our desires are defined by those around us, but this section from Wanting does a good job at showing how deeply ingrained in us mimetic desire is: 

René Girard uses the example of a handshake gone wrong to illustrate how deep-rooted mimesis is—and how it explains things we usually ascribe to simply being "reactionary." There's nothing trivial about a handshake. Say that you extend your hand to me, and I leave you hanging. I don't imitate your ritual gesture. What happens? You become inhibited and withdrawn probably equally as much, and probably more, than you sensed I did to you.

"We suppose that there is nothing more normal, more natural than this  reaction, and yet a moment's reflection will reveal its paradoxical character, writes Girard. "If I decline to shake your hand, if, in short, I refuse to imitate you, then you are now the one who imitates me, by reproducing my refusal, by copying me instead. Imitation, which usually expresses agreement in this case, now serves to confirm and strengthen disagreement.”

Some of our desires (the desire to support a loved one) lead us to reliably positive places in the long run, while others… don’t (the desire to drink a whole lot of booze). The desires for achievement and immediate gratification are here called “thin” desires while desires for helping others and the ultimate good could be called “thick” desires. Once we begin to experience the downsides of living strictly according to our thin desires, we may begin to try to move more and more into thick desires.

A force as automatic as mimetic desire is difficult to work with. It’s part of the water we swim in. Because of this, mimesis can run huge chunks of our lives without us being aware of it at all. We may find ourselves wasting our lives chasing objects of desire we only care about because we grew up with people who cared about those things. Or we may find our ability to discern reality from bullshit as we get sucked further into some political tribe. The general advice is that we should 1) become as aware as we can be of our own mimetic desires and 2) actively shape our desires using more robust values and models. Mimetic desire isn’t something we completely transcend, but we can learn to use it in some instances and bypass it in others. To do this, Burgis includes 12 tactics throughout the book. I’ve given a super short introduction to each below: 

A summary of Burgis tactics for becoming “antimemetic”:

• Name your models. “Naming anything—whether it's emotions, problems, or talents—gives us more control. The same is true for models.Who are your models at work? At home? Who are the people influencing your buying decisions, your career path, your politics?” A personal trainer may be a positive model for our health as “she wants something for you that you do not yet want for yourself enough to do what you need to do.” 

• Find sources of wisdom that withstand mimesis. “It's critical to cut through mimesis and find sources of knowledge that are less subject to mimesis.
  Find sources that have stood the test of time.”

• Create boundaries with unhealthy models. He suggests unfollowing any unhealthy sources of mimetic desire on social media.

• Start positive flywheels of desire. “Desire is a path-dependent process. The choices we make today affect the things we'll want tomorrow. That's why it's important to map out, the best we can, the consequences of our actions on our future desires.”

• Establish and communicate a clear hierarchy of values. “It's not enough to name values. They need to be ranked. When all values are the same, nothing is being valued at all. It's like highlighting every single word in a book. …. Map it out on paper.”

• Arrive at judgments in anti-memetics ways. “If you’re taking a poll or  a vote in a public place, it's essential that people cannot If you're taking a poll see how other people are voting-if you want anything resembling a true, premimetic reflection of what people think, that is.”

• Map out the systems of desire in your world. “Naming the mimetic forces at work in the systems in which we operate is an important first step toward making more intentional choices.” Here he’s referring to incentives coming from culture, the market, the government, etc.

• Put desires to the test. “Sit with competing desires and project them into the future.”

• Share stories of deeply fulfilling action. “The exercise of telling, listening to, and documenting these stories opens up new windows of empathy and the discovery of thick desires.”

• Invest in deep silence. “Set aside at least three consecutive days every year for a personal silent retreat.”

Burgis believes these tactics can help us shape our own desires for the better. Even more importantly, they can help us improve the desires of those around us: 

Each one of us has a responsibility to shape the desires of others, just as they shape ours. Each encounter we have with another person enables them, and us, to want more, to want less, or to want differently.

In the final analysis, two questions are critical. What do you want? What have you helped others want? One question helps answer the other.

And if you're not satisfied with the answers you find today, that's okay.

The most important questions concern what we will want tomorrow.

And:

What we'll want in the future depends on the choices we make today.

Economic and cultural stagnation can be partly explained by the stagnation of desire to build a better world for those who will come after us. Irresponsible spending and chasing the wrong person can be explained by the blinders of thin desires.

What are the people who you’re spending time with doing to your desires? What are your content consumption habits doing to your desires? How are your so-far-unobserved desires and self-judgments impacting the desires of your loved ones?

3. Desire Is Constant, Until It’s Not

Last year we looked at William Irvine’s idea of the Biological Incentive System (BIS), how it shapes our desires, and how some Buddhists and Christians work with that system. Continuing with his book On Desire, we’ll look at changing, conflicting, and disappearing desires. Let’s start with change:

Usually in life our desires change with the passage of time, as one desire displaces another. Compare your fondest desires when you were ten years old with your fondest desires today. There should be a difference. What has happened is that slowly with the passage of time, some of your earlier desires were fulfilled and you went on to form new desires, while other desires seemed impossible to fulfill and you abandoned them in favor of new desires. This is the natural state of man: a head full of desires, but with the desires in question changing from year to year and even from minute to minute, like the water in a river. 

But many times desire isn’t so clean. Desires can conflict:

Conflicts of desire are specific: one particular desire or clusters of desires causes us trouble by interfering with our other desires. Thus, the drug addict may complain that his desire for drugs keeps him from accomplishing his other desires—say, to be a good husband and father. We deal with a conflict of desires by dealing with the troubling desire. In the case of drug addiction, we might undergo treatment or join a twelve-step program.

A crisis of desire is different:

In a crisis of desire, on the other hand, it isn’t some one desire that is giving us trouble, it is our whole set of desires. Or perhaps it is our ability to desire, or the loss of this ability, that is giving us trouble.

Irvine describes three types of desire crises:

Crises of desire, in the sense I have in mind, are of three sorts. In the first you suddenly lose your ability to desire. In the second you retain your ability to desire but experience a sudden disgust, not with respect to a single desire—that would be a conflict of desires—but with respect to your whole collection of desires. In the third you experience a meaning-of-life crisis in which you retain the ability to desire but can no longer see any point in desiring. 

I think the popularization of certain understandings of Buddhism and Stoicism have given many us an antagonistic relationship to our desires. But maybe the only thing more scary than how completely our desires determine our lives is what happens when they goes away.

Rather than trying to transcend desire altogether, I think most of us are much better served by cultivating ever thicker desires. Those for our spouses, children, families, communities, causes, and whatever Ultimate we can touch.

(Bonus: I’m currently reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and it’s the only novel I’ve ever read that actually made me mad it wasn’t required reading in high school. In On Desire, Irvine describes McMurtry’s crisis of desire in a couple of pages. You can read that in my Evernote page here.)

4. Miscellany

Ryan Gosling hosted SNL a couple of times and still has some of my favorite skits. Santa Baby is a Tarantino-inspired short. Levi’s Wokes remains my favorite encapsulation of wokeness. Papyrus is… I don’t know it’s just the perfect thing to watch with Avatar 2 in theaters.

I’m listening to Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders, which is a strangely inspirational look at the deep disagreements, fears, and pessimistic predictions of the founding fathers throughout their lives. It seems that dire calls for the end of America are part of our founding story, and maybe even a vital part of our DNA. At times, some didn’t expect our Constitution, or sometimes even our country, to last more than a couple of decades.

5. The Best Of “Millenial Normie Irreverent Humor” According To A Connoisseur

My brother-in-law explores comedy at the ends of the internet. For years he has shared videos which I never saw anywhere else, but that made me cry laughing. I’ve thought of them as deep-cuts from sometimes bizarre, out-of-the-way corners of culture. I asked him to send some of his all-time favorites. He’s described the theme as “millennial normie irreverent humor.” Besides making us laugh, they’re historical reminders of what internet culture looked like during different periods.

For those who could use some context, Why Is Gen Z Humor So Weird? is a helpful place to start. It’s a Gen Z comedy—and understanding their humor gives us a peek into how they’re coping with some of the most serious issues they face. It also somehow helps frame the videos below.

Fair warning: you’ve got to have some appreciation for mega-weirdness and cringe to enjoy most of these.

In the spirit of Christmas, a 16-year old performance (2+ min): My name is John Daker

Dubbed G.I. Joe PSAs became a whole genre for a while, a great compilation (10+ min): Best of G.I. Joe PSAs

Have you ever had a dream like this? (22sec)

An alternate Star Wars where Uncle Owen becomes a cynical drunk who is bad a choosing droids. (5+ min) Sand Planet

A mysterious collection that looked like commercial auditions (1+ min): you could stop at five or six stores (spoiler, these are acting exercises filmed by Ted Sarantos—explained here)

Look at all those… (31sec)

A classic Derrick Comedy sketch (where Donald Glover first became known). (2+ min) Celebrity

One for those who’ve played Skyrim (3+ min)L Ultimate Skyrim

And one from my wife, who has my favorite sense of humor ever (1+ min): the “apparently” kid