My 150th Issue!

How cheap information is like cheap calories, thoughts on the value of boredom, and thanks to all for reading.

It's hard to believe that I've now been writing The Dispatch for three years.

Thank you to everyone who has read a single issue, and my unending gratitude to the regular readers and the folks who write me to tell me what they think. Special thanks to Rishad Tobaccowala, who, at a key moment, walked me through the reasons he started his own excellent "The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past" newsletter, which you should immediately subscribe to and read if you don't already.

Before we get to today's main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…

Ear Worms are a puzzler. Just this morning, I've had these random songs caroming through my brain for no reason that I can deduce:

• 7:45am: "America" by Neil Diamond (from The Jazz Singer soundtrack)

• 8:15am "Just What I Needed" by The Cars

• 9:50am: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria" from The Sound of Music

• 10:00am: "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen

Why does this happen? It's not like the moments when, say, I see a word that sounds like "Evita" and then hear "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" in my head. That makes sense. But there were no stimuli of which I was aware for the previous four. I think both that this is similar to how dreams work (The Dreaming Brain by J. Allan Hobson influenced my thinking on this) and that if we figured out why or how this happens it would tell us useful things about human intelligence. Unless it's just me. Does this happen to other people?

R.I.P. David Lodge, the British novelist who satirized life in English Departments with such savage compassion. He died at 89. See this NYT ($) obit.

R.I.P. Olivia Hussey, at 73. She played Juliet in the 1968 Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet that captured the youthful passion of the protagonists, the heat of Verona in summer, and how quickly the whole story happens. I saw this movie in high school when I was first learning to love Shakespeare. I had trouble forgiving how much Zeffirelli took away from the words (especially for Mercutio), but the film grew on me. Judi Dench in her book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, discusses the theatrical production of the play that was the seed for the film. See this NYT ($) obit for Hussey.

An episode of Simon Sinek's "A Bit of Optimism" podcast featured Trevor Noah. The two friends ranged around many topics and also helpfully dug into why many people are more sympathetic to the assassin who killed the UnitedHealth CEO than to the victim. (H/T Raman.)

Mandatory Tips? Here's a bizarre one: at the Austin airport, a self-checkout machine that dispenses water bottles demands a tip of at least a penny, although it suggests 20% or 25%. If tips happen when somebody else serves you, then how does this work with self-checkout? (H/T Jeffrey Cole.)

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On to our top story...

Image created using Adobe Firefly.*

Last week, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a peculiar op-ed in The New York Times about the value of boredom that's a promo for his new book, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. (H/T Peter Horan.)

Why peculiar? Hayes seems more interested in impressing his readers—name dropping Pascal, Kierkegaard, obscure anthropological articles about the Walpiri aborigines in Australia, and a well-known psychology study where people preferred to shock themselves than be alone with their own thoughts—than in making clear points.

I confess that I went into the article skeptical of Hayes because he is the lowest-rated MSNBC host on the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart—basically a left-wing counterpart to Bill O'Reilly on the right—whose program features hyper-partisan propaganda.

So, I was a bit uncomfortable to find myself agreeing with Hayes, albeit in a less histrionic way.

Then, I remembered that I wrote a similar piece back in 2019 (long before launching The Dispatch) in which I coined "B.L.U.E." as a way of discussing the value of boredom: "B.L.U.E." stands for "Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable... Ever."

After rereading my piece, I think it holds up enough to reprint below. If I were writing it today, I might have added how alarming I find it when parents hand their children smartphones or tablets to pacify the kids at any moment when they might be bored. I'd work to connect B.L.U.E. with our polarized society. I also don't think my comparison to dating apps made enough sense (see for yourself). Finally, I was amused to see a line about how medical science might someday make it easy for people to crave less food, anticipating my own journey (and those of millions of others) with Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs.

Here, then, is my piece from 2019. Please let me know what you think.

Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable... Ever)

One reason there’s an obesity epidemic is that humans evolved in a world of caloric scarcity: getting enough food wasn’t easy for most of the population for most of human history. It still isn’t easy for many, many food-insecure people.

However, the people who are food secure find themselves in an evolutionary conundrum: our instincts tell us to eat a lot whenever we can because there may not be food later. If we follow our instincts, we get fat. To stay fit, we have to make an unnatural choice: stop eating even though there are still calories available.

This conundrum is relatively new. We’ve had decades to get used to calorie-convenient things like supermarkets, fast food, frozen food, microwaves, and food delivery. We’ve also had decades of fitness gurus telling us to exercise (the first one I remember was Jack LaLanne) and diet after diet, all trying to help us fight our instincts.

Someday, medical science may develop ways to tweak our metabolisms to crave less food as easily as we use glasses to tweak our vision: wouldn’t that be nifty?

The second paradox of choice

Unlike cheap calories, we haven’t had all that long to get used to cheap information. The commercially available internet has only existed since the 1990s. Social Media became popular with Myspace 15 years ago. Smartphones, which made cheap information available everywhere, started with the iPhone just 12 years ago.

Today, we have to choose to be B.L.U.E.—bored, lonely, or uncomfortable... ever. Those are unnatural choices! However, choosing to be B.L.U.E. is just as important as choosing to eat less so as not to get fat and die prematurely.

It’s a paradox of choice: we evolved to seek stimulation, social contact, and comfort, but today having those things can be bad for us.

This is not the same as the paradox of choice explored in Barry Schwartz’s celebrated and brilliant book of the same name. Schwartz talks about having so many options that the pleasure you get from making a choice, any choice, is lower than it should be: you have to subtract what economists call opportunity costs from the satisfaction of making the choice.

Schwartz’s paradigmatic example involves him going to buy new blue jeans and becoming despondent when he has to navigate among skinny, easy fit, relaxed fit, stone-washed, pre-distressed, et cetera… when earlier is his life there were just, y’know, jeans.

Having to figure out which pants to buy is a homework assignment for a class that Schwartz never signed up to take. However, he did start with the goal of buying pants. His frustration came after goal setting, when the proliferation of options made achieving that goal difficult.

In contrast, the second paradox of choice (the choice to be bored, lonely, or uncomfortable) involves having to choose something that both a) goes against our instincts, and b) doesn’t explicitly connect to a goal we have established (like buying pants).

For most of human history, boredom, loneliness, and discomfort have been inescapable features of our environments rather than things we need to seek out. If this sounds counter-intuitive, then the distinction to make is, for example, between choosing to be alone and choosing to be lonely. People have craved solitude for longer than there have been people (animals like it too), but people don’t elect to feel bad because of a lack of companionship.

We may be over-stimulated and need quiet, but that’s different than boredom, which is, per Merriam-Webster, “the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest.”

Discomfort is harder to get after because humans have always embraced challenges and hard work to achieve their goals, but that’s not the kind of discomfort I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking about being in a situation that you did not select (like when parents drag their kids somewhere) and that you don’t enjoy.

How does this connect to the digital revolution?

As I’ve written many times before, digital technologies, and particularly smartphones, are great at dissolving old containers (cameras, notebooks, flashlights) and turning them into apps. Smartphones also dissolve another container: geography. With a smartphone, you aren’t trapped by your environment because you have options that are new to us as a species and as difficult to handle as cheap calories.

Put simply, with a smartphone in your pocket, you need never feel bored, lonely, or uncomfortable again.

Why this is a problem

Although boredom, loneliness, and discomfort are all unpleasant states, they all have benefits to our lives and happiness.

The smartphone in your pocket comes with an infinite supply of articles, books, music, cat videos, and games. You never have to be bored again! But most great advances in human history came out of somebody’s daydream, and without boredom who needs to daydream?

Once you leave school, you’re unlikely to walk up to a stranger and introduce yourself if you aren’t a bit lonely. But with your smartphone, you never need to be lonely because you can endlessly connect with distant people via email, text, and social media.

And with dating apps like Tinder, you already know the other person is at least open to meeting you because he or she swiped right. That raises the stakes for putting yourself at risk of rejection in a face-to-face encounter (it takes practice).

When your parents dragged you somewhere as a kid, it might have made you uncomfortable, but how else would you ever have learned to like anything new? With no other option, you sat through that boring concert or play or movie or family dinner, and in the process of doing perhaps you were surprised to discover that you liked jazz or Shakespeare or foreign film or your Great Aunt Ida.

Today, you have another option: the moment you feel discomfort you can retreat to your smartphone.

Eli Pariser talked about the political implications of this discomfort with discomfort in his book The Filter Bubble, but the problem extends far beyond politics.

This, I believe, is one reason why trigger warnings have become a big deal on college campuses. As people (particularly younger people for whom smartphones have been a part of their lives for larger percentages of their lives) either lose or never developed the ability to sit with discomfort, they become less and less willing to experience it, to the dismay of college professors trying to challenge their students’ thinking.

A 2014 Buzzfeed article says that trigger warnings started to “take over the internet” around 2006 or 2007, and argues that the phrase proliferated because of the rapid growth of Twitter and Tumblr. That may be true, but I think the reason people began to demand trigger warnings in the first place was because of the decline of naturally occurring discomfort that would get them used to being uncomfortable and surviving the experience.

Smartphones, search, social media, YouTube, videogames, email, texting, and more are all highly addictive by design, and we have become addicts. That’s not news.

The part that is news, however, is that another implication of our inability to have our smartphones out of our immediate reach is that we have engineered boredom, loneliness, and discomfort out of existence.

And we need those things to succeed.

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Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.

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* Image Prompt: "The number '150' made of light and lit up in a night sky with fireworks going off behind it."