"I remember one of the first things my parents would say about Americans when we immigrated to America, was that they always seemed so unhappy..."

"... despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government cheese for a time, and my parents and other Russians would say: Oni ot zhira besyatsa. Which translates very vaguely as: They’re wild with their own fat. They’re so juicy and fat, and yet they don’t know what to do with it. Just enjoy the fat. But sometimes this greater meaning combines with this egotistical impulse to have more and more and more. And to not die is one of those almost Protestant extensions of everything. And striving. Why should the striving ever end?"

Said Gary Shteyngart, in his interview with Ezra Klein, the "I" in the headline "I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel" (NYT). The novel is Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story" (commission earned).

Moving to Australia (from the UK) "makes you more attractive. At least that’s what young expats who moved down under claim as 'the Australia effect.'"

I'm reading "Moving to Australia made my fiancé more attractive/Young adults find travelling down under does wonders for their self-esteem and sex appeal. It’s what happens when you live life without stress, one says" (London Times).

Among the scores of travellers showing off their “glow-ups” is Abigail Phillips, 29, who posted on Instagram her fiancé’s transformation from pale and formal to a surfer boy with a golden tan, mullet and trendy moustache. “I really do like the ’tache and the curly hair,” said Phillips

"When did we all decide that sweats and pajama pants were the appropriate attire for air travel?"

"What incentive do we have in such a demoralizing environment?"

We were just talking about the "microvacation."

Remember that guy who "flew to Athens for 8 hours, where he toured the Parthenon... then hopped on a flight to Egypt, saw the pyramids, rode a camel and visited the Grand Egyptian Museum, all before returning to San Francisco in time for Sunday dinner."

I thought there needed to be some decent proportion between the time on planes and the time used to good effect at the destination. But check out this guy, flying all the way from NYC to Tokyo and back with just a single day in Tokyo. No hotel, no packing, just dropping in, hitting a few sights and eateries, and getting the hell back out. He landed in Tokyo in the morning and flew back out that same night:

"But [Rob Reiner's] films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay."

So writes David Thompson in "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," read out loud on the New York Times "Daily" podcast today by the NYT critic Wesley Morris.

Morris uses that book to try to get to an honest assessment of the career of the recently murdered film director. I don't know if I'm getting the punctuation right, but from the transcript of the podcast, Thompson seems to have written:

"As a director, [Rob Reiner] seemed more struck — or poleaxed — by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a petty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky with good and bad all too clearly labeled. He's carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play. But his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay. This is not true. Life is more interesting."

More interesting and, at times, far far more horrible. 

But Thompson's words are left to speak for themselves as Wesley Morris makes a quick turn to a happy ending. He says: 

"If a human being did not exist then the absence of bad would be good... but the absence of good would not be bad because nobody was deprived."

Said David Benatar, quoted in "Antinatalist philosopher: The Palm Springs bomber proves my point/We should stop having children, says David Benatar — whose beliefs were reflected in Guy Edward Bartkus’s manifesto written before he blew up an IVF clinic" (London Times).

He firmly rejected the notion that painful experiences offer perspective or meaning, or that life’s fleeting pleasures make its fundamental wretchedness worthwhile. He said nothing would be lost if babies stopped being born.... He writes in his book that “while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.” His advice to those who do exist is to do no harm to other human beings or animals, and to “get the joy you can and give the joy that you can give.”

"I got off at the city center and walked to Helsinki’s main library, which looks like a ship made of carrot cake. It is called Oodi...."

"On the ground floor of the library was a cinema, a cafeteria serving beet lasagna and carrot soup and 22 children playing games of chess.... [T]he second floor... featured a 3-D printing station, a laser cutter, a large-format printer, an engraving machine, conference rooms... rocking chairs... electric and acoustic guitars — nice ones — to borrow, as well as a drum kit and multiple zithers. A podcast studio, an electronic-music studio, classrooms.... In the course of a text conversation with a friend... I rambled about my sorrow at watching the Finnish children rove and play, and told her about how mothers of all ages gathered spontaneously in the library to chat or rest or idly massage their feet. I explained that one of these mothers had placed her baby, a child of no more than 9 months, in a highchair at a library cafe table and handed him a vegetable purée to consider, then left for 20 minutes to fetch books. When she came back we exchanged smiles.... We talked about children and libraries and the relative safety of our nations. 'Every few years there’s a crisis where a baby is stolen but then it is returned or found 15 minutes later,' she said...."

From "My Miserable Week in the 'Happiest Country on Earth'/For eight years running, Finland has topped the World Happiness Report — but what exactly does it measure?" (NYT).

Here, I found this:

That video says a lot about why Finns may be the happiest people in the world. That man is warmly pleased with small things. The chess boards are credited with "keeping people smart and educated," the ceiling calls to mind the ceiling in a particular Rolls Royce you might remember.

"I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done."

"I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant."

Said Daniel Kahneman, on March 19, quoted in "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death" (NYT). On March 27th, he followed through with his plan to die by assisted suicide.

Another quote: "I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go."

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in "behavioral" economics. You may know his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

"Toys are a scam."

It's a great headline: "Toys are a scam. Kids keep asking for them. We keep buying them. And no one is playing with them" (WaPo).

But to say "toys are a scam" is to blame the manufacturers and sellers of toys. They're out to trick parents into buying things that are not needed and might be actively bad. But this puts the blame/"blame" with the parents:

Suzanne Gaskins, a cultural developmental psychologist, says it’s only in the past 50 years that we’ve started accumulating piles of toys. As she compared families in America with those in other societies, a couple of observations stood out. One is that our kids are less engaged in the adult world — regularly helping prepare food, say, or care for a household — and more focused on the kid-centric universe we’ve constructed to “maximize their development.” 

“The first goal for American parents is to let their kids be happy,” Gaskins says. “And not just happy in a contented sense, but happy in an active, almost hysterically happy sense.” 

For Mayan parents, by contrast, the “primary goal is that the kid is even-keeled — not particularly happy, not particularly sad.” 

Hysterically happy — that's something that can only persist for a moment, perhaps on Christmas morning. But one must revert to feeling normal. The keel will even. Imagine if your kids stayed Christmas-happy for months — gaga over new toys for days on end. You wouldn't think, great, they are maximizing their development.

They say it's the "season to be jolly" and Santa is praised as a "jolly old elf," but I've known a couple people who were jolly...

... and I think people found it annoying and wish they'd settle down.

I presented my musing to Grok and received this distinctly non-jolly response: 

The notion of "jolliness" during the holiday season, particularly around figures like Santa Claus, is indeed a cultural expectation that doesn't always align with personal experiences or preferences.... The idea of being "jolly" during the holiday season is deeply ingrained in many cultures, especially those influenced by Western Christmas traditions.... This image has been perpetuated through various media and commercial representations, setting a somewhat unrealistic standard for holiday cheer.... 

Your experience of knowing people whose jolliness was perceived as annoying might reflect a broader sentiment where excessive cheerfulness can seem forced or out of touch with one's actual mood or the realities others might be facing.

Don't say "Christmas." Don't even say "joy."

A Grok summary, at X:

During a recent event at the White House, Jill Biden mentioned the need for 'joy' during the holiday season, a comment which some interpreted as a subtle mockery of Kamala Harris's previous campaign slogan 'sense of joy.' Jill Biden later clarified that her remarks were not meant to be taken as an insult, emphasizing that the audience was reading too much into her statement. The incident has sparked discussions about the dynamics within the Biden administration. This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time. Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.

Here's the relevant video clip.

🚨 JUST IN: Jill Biden is now OPENLY MOCKING Kamala Harris’ “joy” line

The audience even knows what’s going on, and breaks out into laughter 😂

Anybody still think Jill Biden DIDN’T vote for Trump? 🤣 pic.twitter.com/8ePBuLQVKD

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 11, 2024

"Joy" is a Christmas word: "Joy to the World/The Lord is come"/"Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." It's a word that might be selected by someone who wants to avoid limiting her message to Christians. It seems more general, even as Christians hear it as specific to the Christian religion.

Jill also says "peace" and "light": "I hope that you all feel that sense of, you know, peace and light." 

"Peace" and "light" are also words that, for Christians, call to mind Jesus Christ. Jesus is "the light of the world" — "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Jesus is the "Prince of Peace" — "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

But Jill's audience, hearing "joy," thinks not of Jesus Christ but of a worldly power-seeker who used "joy" as a political brand that worked for a couple weeks and then was recognized as idiotic emptiness. Now, it's a laugh line.

Jill hears the laughing and flaps her arms about. Instead of holding steady and conveying the beauty and seriousness of the hope for peace and light and joy at Christmas, she emits a scoffing laugh and acknowledges that she too can hear what they hear, a reference to Kamala Harris.

"Harris’s stint as vice president has often been pretty unremarkable, but it has provided a rich vein of memes, in part because she can be an awkward communicator...."

"It’s part of what fueled critical media coverage of her during the first year of her tenure, and which led the White House to largely sideline her during the first half of the Biden presidency.... As the first female, Black, and South Asian vice president, Harris was always doomed to receive an extraordinary amount of scrutiny and bias — and emphasized her persona as a 'joyful warrior' in part to combat some of those stereotypes. The joyful warrior, it seems, is sometimes a goofy one too. Harris delivers many of these lines in a genuinely funny way, with an affect unlike many politicians (described sometimes as just vibing along).... Plenty of people are... meme-ing their way to a new celebration of Harris — unburdened by what has been."

I'm reading "Why is everyone talking about Kamala Harris and coconut trees? Ironic Kamala Harris meme-ing isn’t so ironic anymore," a Vox article from July 3rd, when KH was just coasting along in the background, shielded by the seeming candidate, Joe Biden. I don't really understand what was ever "ironic" about any of this.

There are various embedded tweets at that link, including, "How are you supposed to exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you AND be, unburdened by what has been at the same time? Waiting for her 3rd great revelation that synthesizes these two." That's a reaction to this:

Four straight minutes of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” It’s incredible. I had no idea she used it this much. pic.twitter.com/TClfC1EyH6

— John Cooper (@thejcoop) June 29, 2024

I can understand her interest in being "unburdened by what has been," but she's stepping into the candidacy without having had to fight off rivals who offered new visions or even needing to present anything of her own.

ADDED: I didn't know people had taken to calling Kamala Harris a "joyful warrior," but this year is a lot like 1968 — President withdraws, VP steps into candidacy, convention in Chicago — and the candidate, Hubert Humphrey was famously called "The Happy Warrior."

ALSO: Gretchen Whitmer has called herself "The Happy Warrior." From a July 9th article in the NYT, "Whitmer Talks Tequila, Pearl Jam and Debates in New Book/The Michigan governor will not talk about running for president. But her new book, 'True Gretch,' is full of details keeping the chatter alive":

"The benefits of face-to-face interactions may be related to smell. When our noses pick..."

"... up the body odor of other people, for example, we tend to pick up their emotions, too: from anxiety and fear to happiness. In one experiment, researchers applied electrodes to the faces of volunteers and asked them to sniff samples of sweat of people who had previously watched either happy video ('The Jungle Book') or neutral videos (the weather forecast.) After inhaling the body odor of cheerful people, the volunteers’ facial muscles twitched in a way that suggested they felt happier, too.... This role of scents in feeling the emotions of others, he says, may help explain why people with more sensitive noses tend to have larger circles of friends and suffer less loneliness — both important predictors of health and longevity.... Smelling the body odor of a loved one can help reduce stress. When European researchers submitted a group of volunteers to weak electric shocks, those who could sniff T-shirts previously worn by their romantic partners stayed calmer...."

From "Why in-person friendships are better for health than virtual pals/Simply having good friends isn’t enough. Research suggests that to truly thrive, we need to physically meet with our friends on a regular basis" (WaPo).

1. I have almost complete anosmia so does that make other people less useful to me? I guess I would have more friends if the potential to smell them was part of the allure. 

2. Apparently, you have to go to Europe to find people who volunteer to take electric shocks and attempt to succor themselves with smelly T-shirts.

3. We're not hearing about experiments that made people smell the sweat of unhappy people, but wouldn't that change the inferences? If you can smell and you go out and about where you can smell people in person, then, presumably, the smell affects you, but the effect could be negative or positive, depending whether the smellees are happy or unhappy.

4. On the internet, nobody knows you're a smelly dog....

"[His mother] said he had no interest in small talk but would 'engage passionately and relentlessly with ideas to the point that can exasperate and exhaust others.'"

"In middle school Bankman-Fried became interested in utilitarianism and began to wrestle 'systematically and globally' with the question of how to alleviate the suffering of others, she said. It caused him to become vegetarian and then vegan. He battled with depression and they later learnt that he suffered from 'anhedonia' — an inability to experience pleasure — she said. 'He has never felt happiness or pleasure in his life and does not think he is capable of feeling it,' she said. When she questioned him on this, asking him about a photograph she had up on the mantelpiece showing him grinning broadly, he replied that he was not happy at the time but had 'learnt how to pretend for the sake of others.'... 'He told us he didn’t care about himself,' she wrote. 'All he cared about was living long enough to make a significant difference in the world.'"

From "Sam Bankman-Fried: ‘awkward nerd’ lied at trial, judge tells sentencing/Crypto investors lost $8 billion and prosecutors call it one of the biggest financial cons in history. His defenders — especially his lawyer parents — see it differently" (London Times)

UPDATE: Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years, the NYT reports. He'd faced a maximum of 110 years. Prosecutors had recommended 40 to 50 years, and defense lawyers asked for 6 1/2 years. 

"She said that her boss once asked her to wear something sexier to work, but that she had ignored his request."

"In addition, she has for the first time started to turn down work assignments she doesn’t want to do. After going through years of unpredictable lockdowns, quarantines and the fears of getting sick during the pandemic, Ms. Chen said all she wanted now was to live in the moment with a stable job and a peaceful life. She is not worried about promotions or getting ahead. 'Just be happy every day and don’t impose things on yourself,' she said."

From "Furry Slippers and Sweatpants: Young Chinese Embrace ‘Gross Outfits’ at Work/The social media movement is the latest sign that some of China’s young people are resisting the compulsion to strive" (NYT).

"Too much choice is not a good thing. The anxious person is the one who doesn’t know what to do because..."

"... she can do so many things. The neurotic individual is paralysed by the sense that he can’t make the right decision because another one is always available to him. The apparently limitless options afforded to us by dating apps and social media has not made us more content; it has merely intensified our longing."

From "Make coffee. Shower. Clean the loo. In an age of choice, rituals are the key to happiness/Wim Wenders’ film Perfect Days is on to something with its depiction of main character Hirayama’s calm, habitual life" (The Guardian).

From The Guardian review of the movie:

"A new form of protest against the government is rocking Iran: a viral dance craze set to an upbeat folk song where crowds clap and chant the rhythmic chorus, 'oh, oh, oh, oh.'"

"In cities across Iran men and women of all ages are gyrating their hips, swirling their arms in the air, and chanting the song’s catchy lines, according to videos posted on social media, television news channels like BBC Persian and Iranians interviewed. People are dancing on the streets, in shops, at sport stadiums, in classrooms, malls, restaurants, gyms, parties and everywhere else they congregate. In Tehran traffic was stopped in a major highway tunnel for an impromptu dance party to the song. Young women,hair uncovered and flowing, dance in parks and young men performed a choreographed hip-hop dance.... It all started with an old man at a fish market in the northern city of Rasht in late November. Dressed in a white suit the man, Sadegh Bana Motejaded, 70, who owns a small market stall energetically swayed and bopped...."

From "A Viral Dance and ‘Happiness Campaign’ Frustrates Iran’s Clerics/It all started when a 70-year-old fish market stall owner nicknamed 'Booghy' was grooving in public, in violation of Iranian law" (NYT).

"... music, dancing, gigs, parties, festivals, films, TV, sport, fashion, fame, brightly coloured plastic things, sex, food, kissing, singing, YouTube, social media, talent shows, online hook-ups...."

"These are the things that over the past hundred-odd years have been increasingly invested with importance by a cultural superstructure bent on working the population to death in miserable jobs, by fooling us into thinking that the rest of the time we are having 'fun.'... These are the activities that, because I do not enjoy them, have always led me to believe that I am not having a fun life myself. For I do not dance and will not dance and have never been to a gig or festival. I don’t like parties and I can’t watch films and the company of other people is mostly disappointing to me. And fashion and fast food and casual sex, although I’ve dabbled, have only ever depressed me. With the result, of course, that I tend to feel I have missed out terribly. That I 'haven’t had much fun in my life.'"

Writes Giles Coren, in "If Barbra Streisand hasn’t had fun, who has?/Sad truth is that parties, festivals and casual sex are passports to misery, and true happiness lies in the mundane" (London Times)(addressing Barbra Streisand's statement, as she promotes her memoir, "I haven’t had much fun in my life").

"I would talk to you differently knowing no right-wing conservatives could run with what I say. I shut down sometimes..."

"I was such a good little kid and I had so much love and I trusted everyone I met.... [My parents] are trying to learn how to be parents to a daughter while also watching their child get reamed.... As a parent, you’re trying to protect your child, and if transness is the thing that is being used against me, they have a hard time sometimes seeing that it’s actually a beautiful thing.... I think hopefully years from now we’ll look back on this time period and be like, What the fuck was that?... I don’t want to be the one that’s scared, the one who’s controversial — that word, controversial, drives me fucking insane. What really makes me controversial? That I’m trans? That I’m hyperfeminine? That I make jokes? That I overshare? Because I actually like being myself or that, God forbid, I’m happy? Maybe that’s what makes me controversial. I don’t think I’ve actually fucked up majorly. I think that the world is fucked up. Cheers to that."

Said Dylan Mulvaney, quoted in "Girlhood, Interrupted/Dylan Mulvaney is pretty sure she can win everyone over. Well, most everyone" (NY Magazine).

"I walk in the forest. I try to count 10,000 steps to be healthy at 77 years old. I don’t do many interviews anymore..."

Said Matthieu Ricard, asked “Why do you have an Apple Watch?," quoted in "The ‘World’s Happiest Man’ Shares His Three Rules for Life" (NYT).

ADDED: This post was garbled most of the day. And linkless. Sorry. Fixed. I was without a connection the whole time.