Author: Peter Freilinger

It’s been an odd year, no two ways about it. Here in the states, the pandemic has been quietly but no less officially declared to be over: either you have your booster shots, and you’ll be as fine as anyone can make you, or you haven’t, and you’ll get sick soon enough to prevent you from voting Republican in the next election, and that’s all fine, as the midterm results proved out. On the home front, the boy is doing beyond great in fifth grade despite his mom moving to Maine. All other systems are go.

But I haven’t been writing, and it’s been bothering me because I haven’t quite known why. It’s not the day drinking – hell, that’s been here since I started the blog more than five years ago – and it’s not the general amount of spare time I have on my hands, which also hasn’t changed much since I stopped travelling around the world on a weekly basis for Barclays Group Treasury (and yes, for those who know me, that means that the amount of actual time required to run Barclays Restructuring Group was roughly twenty hours a week).

I think I’ve figured it out, and I have to thank Stuart Kirk, the former editor of the Lex column for the FT, for helping me. He wrote a savagely idiotic essay in this weekend’s edition which is wrenching me back to a reality in which it’s worthwhile to talk about the moral consequences of one’s daily choices – which, after all, is the whole point of this blog, and the whole point (to me, at least) of all intellectual and aesthetic choices.

Mr Kirk’s thesis, essentially, is that the only thing that matters is the now. He presents a straw man of what he claims preoccupies the world, the improvement of some future space – which we must prevent from being 1.7C warmer than today, with not too many people who will be potentially harmed – and posits an imaginary future state of today in which potholes exist, where real people who we could know (if we got on a plane and went to find them) are dying, which is far more – 100% certain, to use his verbiage – reliably existent as moral cases to be solved.

That’s not it at all, though.

It’s not to say that Kirk is wrong about the existence of immediate, tangible examples of horror against which we should be railing. He’s right in that sense: there is a high percentage chance that New Delhi will be uninhabitably hot in 50 years, but there is a 100% certainty that a decent greater than 25% ish proportion of its population is living in indecently horrid conditions today. If we focus on the future non-100%-but-close-to-95% likelihood of New Delhi’s future complete failure at the expense of today’s 100% certain failure to help somewhere between 25% and 50% of its population live at a base standard of hygiene and health and education, we are in essence privileging the future potential humans of earth at the expense of the actual current citizens. He’s right to point that out.

Mr Kirk, interestingly, is “former head of responsible investment at HSBC Asset Management and previous editor of Lex“, Lex being the premium column discussing corporate doings in the FT. In other words, it’s not like he’s just coming out of nowhere: this is the kind of thing that bubbles within someone who’s otherwise churning out pablum for institutional investors and occasional columns on random company quarterly earnings. This is his columnist cri du coeur.

But he is guilty of exactly the problem that I think is preventing us from being able to move out of the Enlightenment trap, which is to say, he fails to see human culture as a continuum. The Enlightenment – from Voltaire to Smith to Ricardo to Marx – see the human landscape as a series of set pieces, a series of time scapes, transitioning from one to another. Even Darwin does this: his tree of life concept allows for – indeed depends upon – the idea that you can take a slice of the tree at any moment across the aeons and see “what is”. Darwin does the best of the bunch in that he doesn’t pretend to predict the next step, but the rest of his age are more arrogant, and assert in various ways what must occur, the predictable linear path that must be drawn given the snapshot we capture of today and the strings of the past we observe behind us.

Kirk doesn’t fall for this but he does fall for a related intellectual rabbit hole, the notion that the inherent randomness that impacts our ability to predict the future from the combination of our past “certainties” and our current snapshot ensures that efforts to steer towards future good states or avoid future bad states has too much volatility to bother with, so let’s simply focus on today. He’s inching closer to a better solution, but he’s still caught up in a dangerous separation of the past – which in both his view and in the classical Enlightenment view is “known” – and the present, which is a photographic image, somehow imagined as being complete and precise – and the future, which is a collection of linear extensions of the current state process which vary only by degrees, because they are still just processes.

That view, though – that we live on a process surface, and simply choose between different pathways via the intersection of our choices with those of others – while at the core of most of post-Enlightenment thinking (be it east, west, or post-colonial – there isn’t a real differentiation any more if we’re honest with ourselves), is false. We do not live on a process surface; we are embedded processes, acting both individually, acting within agglomerations of others, acting as part of a species with certain consumptive and reproductive imperatives, acting in the broader drama of life as a process on a mineral and gaseous and aqueous planet, acting in the broader drama of stellar evolution, acting on the background of quantum processes which are (to all intents and purposes to us) infinitely constant and yet wholly unpredictable in the background. Our perception of history as a timeline is false – the timeline seen by someone in Botswana is unrecognisable to me in Maine, let alone how stunningly beautiful and incomprehensible the historical timeline of a Metis in northern Quebec would look to me – but Kirk and others still live and, indeed, their lives depend on positing that simple differentiation of time past, known; time today; knowable; and time future, uncertain.

Accuracy, meanwhile, would hold that the past is knowable, but diverse and irreconcilable. It would hold that the present is no where measurable because there exists a lag in communication even in having my brain know what my toes experience in the moment. And the future is not a process from the past and the present; it is a both perfectly unknowable, and at the same time, we exist as sentient beings on a certain level to sort and compare and choose what future we will construct. That is to say, the future isn’t a process drawn from us: it is a constant choice, made instantaneously by an effectively infinite number of actors – subatomic, mineral, living, sentient – and crunched, waveform-collapsed, and reinitiated every single moment, and since every moment is across space, occurring with effects that also require the time movement of events as they ripple across the cosmos.

The potholes and the indigent and the sickly that Kirk points out are all deserving of our individual concern – but that isn’t to downplay or ignore the future generations who will be crying out from thirst or disease or heat on a warming Earth. And it’s not to ignore or move past those who came before us and were enslaved or ignored or oppressed or kept in silence. Thinking holistically as a moral individual requires thinking not just across spaces – not just being concerned locally – but also to be aware of the dynamics of time and space in motion, and to avoid the easy privileging of any one frame of either time or space.

Does this make it simple? Of course not. Does this give any of us individually the opportunity or hope to effect real change? Of course not. Does this excuse any of us from the effort of doing our best, given the tools and opportunities that come to hand? No, of course not.

We don’t get to focus on the potholes and congratulate ourselves, which is effectively what Kirk tells us. We get to fix the potholes and realise the inadequacy of our efforts, and we get to view the whole and give ourselves only the damning certainty that our efforts will always be in vain. We get to step away from the concept of glamorous self-congratulatory virtue, and step into the shoes of Sisyphean effort which has no end. In a universe which is, essentially to us within it, infinite, we have only the promise and the reward of infinitesimal improvement. There is no solace, and yet, the opportunity to be part of the adventure is what we have – all we have.

Ms Mary Elizabeth Truss is now the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, and godspeed to her in that role; it will not be a simple one. She has many challenges, of course, but all of them are coloured by the fact that she has less than two years before she is required, by a law passed by her predecessor David Cameron, to call a general election in 2024, just less than two years from her own elevation to the post. Along with her new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, who introduced on her government’s behalf an anything but mini-budget last week at the Commons, she’s going to ride a very interesting, and very quick, ride in macroeconomics. Meanwhile, Andrew Bailey, of the Bank of England, has unhelpfully said that their supply-side stimulus plans will lead to higher interest rates: an observation which academically is uninteresting, but from a PR perspective, seems to indicate Bailey wants to be a jerk.

President Biden is riding a similar roller coaster, although he has the advantage of having been in office for a little less than two years. He continued the now-long-forgotten fiscal stimulus bills of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and managed to get a capital expenditure bill through Congress which – unlike the spending giveaways of the early days of the pandemic – just pay for long-deferred maintenance of US infrastructure. But with inflation now at 8% (depending on the metric), he’s also hanging on for dear life.

There’s an entertaining game on the Federal Reserve website which allows people to see how good they are at changing base rates. You start in (interestingly) an interest rate environment which is completely foreign to anyone who has been an adult in the last thirty years; this is a Laffer Curve game, so you would need to ask your parents or grandparents for help, and even then, if they don’t know who Arthur Burns was, you should just give up and go back to tracking the Kardashians on Instagram. In any event, the game starts with a random inflation rate and a random Fed Funds rate, and you – as the omnipotent Fed chair – change the Fed Funds rate in response to macroeconomic data (unemployment – remember, the Fed has to minimise that!) and fiscal spending and exchange rates and blah blah blah… I’ve played it multiple times, and the point of the game seems to be to convince you that the Fed governors have a really tough job and you, sad citizen, will never be up to the task. They never ask whether the Fed governors are up to it either, but hey, I get it, this is their website.

I’ll bring up one last item before getting to the point. I am a willing victim of the Wikipedia default mainpage, at en.wikipedia.org for those of us who are most comfortable in English. Today, there was a link for a climate scientist named Chip Fletcher, who makes the blindingly obvious observation that “our communities are scaled and built for a climate that no longer exists”. But the observation clearly is interesting because it made the front page of Wikipedia’s daily update: someone on their staff thought “wow, people out there probably haven’t made this connection before, this might be interesting.” And of course it is interesting, but only because so few people understand time dynamics in complex systems.

I cut my teeth in macroeconomics a long time ago, but one of the fundamental observations of Volcker, Friedman, et al was that any given change in base rate policy by a central bank – that is, any fundamental change in the cost and carry of a fiat currency set by the institution designated to grant access to said currency – has at least an eighteen month lag before the broad economic impact is fully absorbed. I also learned ecology – oddly – for the first time at the hands of a slightly crazy biology teacher at Cape Elizabeth High School, who used to throw small black balls representing hydrogen atoms at us when we failed to properly model organic molecules. He used to say that environmental systems never change overnight – they change over decades, or centuries, and he brought up as an example our local Presumpscot River, which was not much different than an open sewer in the early 80s, but was getting better, because the Clean Water Act in the 1970s was almost fifteen years old, and every year, the river was getting better. He told us that maybe our kids would be able to fish or swim there (he probably missed it by a decade, but hey, that’s prediction), but he also said that just because it would take 50 years to make up for 300 years of waste and ignorance, we shouldn’t turn back.

So now I’m at my point.

Climate change is happening, and yes, it’s human caused – even though the timing of our human intervention over the past three centuries of industrialisation may be coincident with other astronomical rhythms of sun activity etc. that serve to emphasise the effects. But humanity has caused much, if not all, of the change in our climate of late, and we’ve spent centuries creating it, and while we’re decelerating the pace of change, we’re still not actually reversing it. That means we’ll have centuries – at least – of reacting to the impact. Bill McKibbon, who keeps saying “we have No Choice but to stop our behaviour or else the world will change irrevocably” is thus an idiot, and ignorant of systems behaviour. He is roughly as old as my father, born in the late 1930s; even when he was born, the planet had long since passed the point of no return for being burdened by the impact of human actions on climate. What we can do now is be responsible – reduce our carbon output, optimize our energy consumption where possible, think carefully about consumption and materialism – but what we can’t do is reverse what had started when England, France, Germany, Japan – hell everyone – started burning coal and oil and natural gas back 200 years ago. And it would be deeply hypocritical of us to tell India and China and Africa “hey, you guys have to stay poor, because we already harmed the atmosphere with the carbon we burned to get good stuff” when we already know we have a couple of centuries of downstream impact which haven’t been felt yet.

Climate change is hard because frankly, we’ve already cursed our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and we’re now relying on us – who grew up enjoying hydrocarbons – to somehow curtail our addiction, and to develop a picture of rational chemical energy consumption (while we’re still trying to perfect fusion and solar power) for our children and their children that will make the future maybe, possibly, sustainable. In the interim, though, get over it: get used to the forest fires, and the smoke infecting cities on the West Coast, and the floods in Pakistan, and the step function in tropical storms affecting Canada, and the droughts everywhere, and the floods everywhere else. It’s over, people: the world has changed and it’s our fault and no one alive today, even if we do everything right, will enjoy an optimized planet in their lifetimes, because even if humans might possibly live to be 150 years old if narcissists like Elon Musk pull off their pipe dreams, the environment as a complex system is going to take at least the 300 years it took for us to carbonise it to resume normal operations, and more likely, will take a factor multiple of those 300 years to truly work out the impacts we’ve created.

And so we get to the economy, which is no different. In the US – which issues the numeraire currency of all human societies, having replaced gold and its semi-humorous proxy, the pound sterling, back in the 1940s as the core representation of temporal and instantaneous value among individuals independently choosing to engage in trade to take advantage of the differences in productivity, access to primary inputs, and possibilities of creation that exist across all however many billion of us there are on this planet – the Federal Reserve from time to time changes both the quantity of central bank money, and the price paid for that money. But because all seven or eight billion of us transact, at a basic level, in dollars, and we create our personal and corporate value over longer time spans than the instantaneous rate at which the Fed changes interest rates or ceases or starts creating central bank money, it takes awhile for those changes to take place. Paul Samuelson gave me the rule of thumb in, I think , the seventh edition of his classic textbook of economics, of eighteen months lag being a good assumption. That is, the Fed changes rates (or reserve requirements), and roughly eighteen months later the impact fully is absorbed by the broad economy through credit creation or destruction and the impact that has on economic activity. Friedman didn’t seem to disagree with him when I read his and Anne’s treatise in high school.

The economy is complex, and while we endow certain players with outsized power, their power is not instantaneous. Inflation in the US will be here for awhile, no matter how fast Powell and his ilk observe the lessons of Volcker. At least he has a term of office that outlasts the president in office; Liz Truss has barely two years to see if her fiscal policies can reverse the international trade insanity that was Brexit and the monetary expansion that Bailey and others knee-jerk installed in response to a small virus that made all of us go temporarily insane. All complex systems respond with various degrees of delay – no matter what we observe in the Dow, or the cable exchange rate.

And that should give us pause when thinking about the most complex system of all in which we live, that of our planet. We’ve spent 300 years polluting it – but not so much intentionally as unconsciously, as we’ve experimented with this marvellous thing we have which is our own capacity for exploration. We’re actually quite lucky that within only 300 years – maybe eight or ten generations – we’ve realized the self-reflective capability to think hey, maybe what we’re doing is really bad for water, and for soils, and – holy crap – maybe for the entire planet’s atmosphere and weather structure. Maybe we should dial back – but because our impact took awhile without our being conscious of it, we built into our society structures which now depend on pollution, and destruction, and bad things, just to make sure we have food on shelves at the Aldi on the A13 in Southend-on-Sea that sustains thousands of people who never, ever, could have lived there in 1722, when there was a farm there that barely sustained a village of ten or fifteen people. Those structures cannot be deconstructed in a day, regardless of Bill McKibbon’s exhortations – but even if they could, it still wouldn’t affect the world of our children.

My son, and his friends, will live in a world that’s already locked into place. It’s warmer, harsher, more complex, and probably harder to work with. But there’s nothing we can do about it now, at least for their direct benefit, except to help them get ready for the task which will be at their hands to manage, which is simply to survive this new and crueler world which we, and our ancestors, have gifted to them. We can use resources better today, sure, but we need to be blunt and honest: our kids, and their kids, and probably their grandkids, are going to suffer through an Outward Bound exercise the likes of which we never had to contemplate.

Delayed responses are the reality of complex systems. For those who would deny the long term consequences of our actions, I have no patience: their ignorance and stupid attraction to linear consequences is demonstrably worthy of contempt. For those who would somehow claim what we can “make a difference for our kids”, though, I share a similar contempt. My job is to help my son, and his friends, prepare for a bruised and cratered world that wasn’t my own at his age, and to help him think beyond an election cycle, or the time until he’s middle aged, or the time until his children are middle aged. Our job as human beings – members of the first species on earth that seemingly combines sentience, with self-awareness, and with the capacity to project forward the consequences of our choices – is to arm our children with the knowledge that their event horizon is beyond their own lifetime. Eternity is not for the blessed; it is for the as-yet unborn who will choose their path on a planet we cannot imagine.

For a long while, I didn’t have a television, and I truly enjoyed it; I listened to music, spent a lot of time reading, and Gordy the dog kept me occupied with keeping him occupied. Moving to Maine changed that: the house I bought basically came furnished, which was perfect for me as I was moving from the equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment, with a few hundred square feet, to a modest but still fully detached 1940 cottage, with around 1500 square feet. The prior owners, an elderly couple moving to be closer to grandkids, were making the reverse size move, so it worked out for everyone. And one of the things they left behind was a large, wall mounted television set, and thus, TV reentered my day to day life.

Since the cheapest way to get phone and internet service in the US is to bundle it with cable TV and your cellphone, that’s what I did, gaining access to 1 gigabit download speeds but also to approximately 1200 channels of television. Having lived without TV for a number of years, and before that having had only basic terrestrial service in the UK for four years and then before that living in Alberta (Canadian television is worthy of a completely different essay), but also being a proper Gen-X kid who was partially raised by a cathode ray tube, it was a bit mind-blowing, and I will admit that I lost it for awhile, surfing channels aimlessly, a bit overwhelmed for choices but also overwhelmed by how little quality was out there, and how difficult it was to find anything enjoyable to watch. My mind was being flooded with endorphins as long as the tube was on, a mechanism wired from growing up, but I wasn’t really enjoying myself – until I settled into a kind of routine, finding what I like and screening out (mostly) the rest.

I’m better at limiting myself now: evenings and weekends are all about live sports (I’ll watch pretty much any live sporting event except for fight sports), and during the morning, in the background as I get emails and work updates out of the way, I’ll watch Have Gun Will Travel, followed by a Perry Mason episode, followed by a Matlock episode, followed by In the Heat of the Night, a race-charged local police procedural from the 1980s. I don’t stream anything – I don’t subscribe to Netflix or Hulu or even HBO; the boy has Disney+ courtesy of his mother but I leave that to him – and since all of these syndicated reruns have long since stopped producing new shows, after somewhere between six and nine months, you’ve seen the entire run of each series, and you start over again. The murder mysteries are no longer at all surprising; the moral arc of Richard Boone restoring order via a high body count to the West is known in great detail.

Every now and again, though, I find something interesting. Yesterday I got up way too early – a hazard of Maine in the summer, when short nights end with sunrise just after 4am and civil twilight starting much earlier – and flipped on the television and saw an old episode of Maverick, James Garner’s first really big role and an example of what network television could do back before Norman Mailer strangled the joy out of it. Garner plays Bret Maverick, a wiseacre poker player who occasionally points a gun but rarely shoots straight, traveling across the fictional Wild West operating various levels of card sharping, each episode resulting usually in the loss and regain of his savings or the gain and subsequent loss of a small ill-deserved fortune. Maverick then leaves town at the end of the episode, and the credits roll to the playing of a jaunty western theme song – like The Littlest Hobo, but not quite as melancholy and also Maverick is James Garner and plays poker, not a German shepherd who solves mysteries.

This particular episode involved Maverick getting stuck on a jury deciding the fate of an innocent cowhand that the people of this week’s town wanted to hang, and Maverick’s sense of justice was offended. He manages to convince his fellow jurors of the injustice – and inaccuracy – of a guilty verdict, all but one. Pike, the juror in question, is convinced that the coincidences cited by the accused that he says proves his innocence are simply too outlandish, too improbable, to be simultaneously true. And Maverick then strikes upon an idea – and also figures out a way to earn back the money that had been swindled from him at the beginning of the episode to set up the whole jury thing in the first place.

Maverick says well, Pike, I think you might have too much confidence in calculating the odds of the man’s story being false. And I think I can prove to you that people shouldn’t trust their ability to calculate the odds on a linked set of events like that. Let me show you, he says, and takes out a deck of cards and gives them to Pike. Shuffle them, cut them, shuffle them again, he says; I won’t touch them, and the deck is clean, but verify that yourself.

Pike does so, and agrees the deck is clean.

Now, says Maverick, what are the odds that the first five cards I draw will be a “pat hand”, do you think? A pat hand, mind you, is five cards that do not need a draw to improve – a flush, a straight, four of a kind, and a full house.

Pike thinks a moment and says, oh, maybe 1 in 10.

And what do you think the odds of doing that again, on the next five cards?

Same again, says Pike – 1 in 10. Pike is a good businessman, his fellow jurors agree, and he’s the best with numbers in town.

So, asks Maverick, that’d be what, 1 in 100 odds that you’d do that twice in a row, right?

Pike thinks and says, yes, exactly.

So, asks Maverick, five times in a row would be, oh, 100,000 to 1, right?

Pike thinks for a moment and says he supposes so.

What do you think the odds would be to put together five pat hands out of the first 25 cards you draw? Now think, says Maverick: it’s not five in a row, just that out of those 25 cards, I can put together 5 pat hands – not in a row, but in aggregate, using all the cards?

Pike thinks for a moment; it’s not quite 100,000 to 1, he says, but I doubt you’ll be able to do it in a day’s worth of shuffling and dealing.

Great, says Maverick – that’s one way of considering the odds, a lot like you thinking about the odds of the man being innocent. But I’ll bet you that if you draw 25 cards, we’ll get those five pat hands – and if I’m right, you’ll admit that your using your odds to suppose the man into guilt (and of course a noose) are similarly wrong, and you’ll vote Not Guilty. And to make it really interesting, if you lose, I get $500. And if I lose, I’ll bow to your judgment, and we’ll all agree in the man’s guilt, and I’ll pay you $500. Deal?

Pike thinks. He asks to reshuffle the deck, worried that he’s being conned by the professional card player. But he agrees, and draws 25 cards.

Of course, Maverick wins the bet. Pike wants to find a reason for being wrong, but admits he lost, duly votes not guilty, the terrified boy escapes the gallows, and Pike reluctantly pays up.

As the episode ends, Pike asks whether Maverick what the odds were to lose that bet. Maverick said, oh, I’m not sure of the exact odds, but he tries the trick for fun and has never lost. He calls it Maverick Solitaire, now a semi-official term in probability – and the 25 card draw wins almost every time (simulations done by bored stats majors pegs the odds at 98.1% of winning on any given draw from a 52 card deck). What I was actually betting, says Maverick, was that you, Pike, were an honest and honourable businessman who would settle a bet even when he lost – and the odds on that bet, for both of us and for the accused, were very good as well.

Great episode, great story, but what made it so interesting was the obvious lesson being given not just within the story, but to the viewing audience in general, in probability, and more specifically, in our intuitional failure in being able to assess probabilities in reality and apply those to our decisions. Maverick doesn’t even try to say he’s particularly good at probability; he describes his understanding to simple repeated experiences of playing a game, which indeed is how most card players get better at card games over time. He knows enough probability to be able to spot how other people miscalculate it, but makes no claims for his own immunity to being similarly dense. As he states at the end, he wasn’t taking a particular chance, or even calculating any mathematical odds: his bet was on the integrity of his opponent, and on the likelihood he would make good when he lost a fair bet. Indeed, in so doing, he really simply acts as an advocate of human justice: he doesn’t want a young man to lose his life because of a jury’s ability to stumble blindly based on bad probability, instead of focusing on the facts.

It reminded me, interestingly, of how Mark and I originally bonded, early in our working relationship at Barclays Global Investors. I was in London and we went out for lunch, and he was on a bit of a rant about exactly this topic – how human minds seem to be wired to not understand probability – and it became a long conversation about the role of probability in markets versus the role of behaviour and the psychology of market participants. Of course, that isn’t an either-or discussion, and markets don’t consist of individuals solely reliant on intuition in calculating odds: teamwork and the evolution of readily programmable simulations allow us to overcome (or at least, become aware of) the failings we have as individuals, and human psychology is not a constant. But that’s what made for a good conversation, and our willingness to play with the ideas, listen to new ideas, challenge them in the spirit of mutual improvement instead of an ambition to win, and a ready reliance on our sense of humour (however difficult to merge American and British notions of such things) proved to be a solid foundation for a friendship which has now, with fits and starts, spanned more than two decades.

What were the odds of that happening? A teacher I knew in high school used a great phrase in these sorts of situations – “odds are slim to none and slim just left town” – and of course that’s correct, but one of the particular challenges for human beings is making sense of chains of improbable events. All events are improbable, really, when viewed in isolation; but when you chain events, certain outcomes become more likely, even as they remain elusive to direct prediction. The inability to understand that “paradox” – it isn’t really a paradox but to most people it is – that is, the paradox of apparent causality really being simply the most likely outcome out of a set of still variously probable potential outcomes, and the paradox of highly unlikely outcomes being realized not invalidating the overall trend or relative likelihood of other events in the future – sits at the heart of the crisis we seem to collectively feel exists in the 2020s.

In fact, it’s at the heart of how we observe the universe and how it seems to operate. Quantum mechanics is, really, just a highly formalised way of describing the sometimes independent, sometimes chained probabilities of events occurring at subatomic scales – that is, it’s just a highly specialised way of describing the human condition. It bothers people, physicists included, that causality appears to break down, indeed that even the directionality of time seems to break down in the formalised calculus in which we express those physical events, but it’s fascinating to me that it is so bothersome when we see the same in our own interpersonal interactions. Climate modelling has the same bother for most people: why can’t we find discrete reasons for global warming, so we can do something about them? Well, simple: because the reasons are not discrete, and changing our behaviour will change the outcome but in ways which aren’t directly predictable, even if we can make a pretty good guess. So we take actions based on the pretty good guess, the biggest action of which should be humility in the face of a global physical level of complexity that nevertheless we as humans seem to have some influence (but not control) over, and we marvel at the complexity – but instead of doing that, the species-level equivalent of going to lunch and listening and reflecting and laughing, we are bothered by it.

I think I understand the why of that bother, though, even though it speaks volumes about how immature we remain. We are afraid of leaving this life, of leaving to others our works and our memories, knowing intuitively (and we’re right on this one) that the use of our works and memories after we are gone have nothing to do with us, but only to do with the needs and fears of those who come later. Just like in markets, the probabilities and the mathematical relationships are hard to intuit, but the psychology of fear, of desire, and the ongoing simple hard work of reminding ourselves to be humble and willing to admit being wrong, is at the heart of the challenge.

Perhaps that’s the most remarkable element of the Maverick episode: at the end, Pike admits he was wrong, and buys Bret a friendly “no harm no foul” drink at the town saloon. That was no more realistic today than it would have been in 1964, when the episode was produced, or in 1875, the age in which it was set. The smart money bets on human beings refusing to admit when they are wrong – election fraud conspiracy theorists and human climate change deniers being perhaps today’s laughable but all too real object examples, but that’s just today, and even those of us who can comfortably acknowledge these obvious factors of modern life are simultaneously being wilfully or even violently ignorant of other forces to which we’ve overemphasised our lousy intuition for probability and chains of interaction.

Maverick took a chance on Pike being not just an honourable loser in a bet, but on his being willing to acknowledge that the bet revealed him to be susceptible to failure, not just on a deck of cards, but on a verdict in which a man’s life hung in the balance. Because he had a good screenwriter, and because all of it was just for play, James Garner won the bet and sold the performance. Unfortunately, the odds aren’t as good for the rest of us in real life. But being humble, and being human, requires us to draw the next card, and to make our bets, no matter what.

There’s a series of television advertisements funded by the US Marine Corps for recruiting purposes which have been running for awhile – for at least a few years, anyway. They involve a young man – always a man, despite changes in Marine Corps recruiting directives – moving through a post-modern urban landscape, and facing a series of dystopic illusions: emojis run wild, computer-generated versions of himself as a shill for popular material goods, being tempted by luxury goods spinning in a vacuum as is often done online. The young man, growing frustrated, accompanied by narration describing the soulless inadequacy of being alive in the modern world, resolves the situation by quite violently attacking the illusionary images, with the narrator shifting to a script of finding meaning, being called, and when the young man bursts through the illusions we see him diving, in full battle gear, into a military obstacle course, emerging from the swampy water and barbed wire as a determined, scarred, but no longer uncertain Marine.

Whenever the ad pops up – for some reason recently during “Jeopardy!”, the game show where every answer is in the form of a question, and for which I’m doing an online audition on Thursday – I’m struck by how deeply existential the ads are. I mean, they could have been storyboarded by Albert Camus: you are faced by the essential meaningless of a commercialised and dehumanised world, but you have a way out. Camus would have been more my speed and argued for taking that objective meaningless and transforming its energy into helping others and fighting existential injustice, but had he been hired by the US Marine Corps as an advertising artistic director, he would have easily done the exact same thing except use the abstract notion of “homeland threats” in place of “existential injustice” and voila, the ad I see every now and again would have come to life.

The counterpoint for the ad is a separate campaign – also oddly often shown during the nightly “Jeopardy!” viewing that I enjoy with my son, as his knowledge of the world is rapidly increasing and his ability to solve the answers keeps accelerating – that interestingly shows a slightly older young man, who crosses a road only to see an illusion of himself, who attacks him and the two of them engage in man-to-man combat until one – and we don’t really know which one – is defeated, at which point the camera pulls back and reveals the battle was all in his head, that the other people in the street with him are confused by what’s just occurred – which was an attack of post-traumatic stress triggered by his service in the military. The branch of the military isn’t stated – the point of the ad is to encourage veterans who are in emotional or mental distress to seek out the resources available to them.

Both ads – point and counterpoint, as it were – rely for their effect on the knowledge we all have, that the materialist world is essentially meaningless, that we all know that the world as presented to us normally by the advertisements that inevitably bookend the US Marine Corp recruiting spot and the veteran’s mental health spot is irredeemably horrid and corrupting. But as a story arc, the two ads taken together are really quite stunning: you, young man, can find meaning in becoming a warrior – because that is the message of the US Marine Corps, the tapping into the deep human vein of belief that war is one of the true and real callings of man – but in today’s world, once you do so, you’ll either die, or the likelihood is that calling to war will permanently scar you in a world which otherwise no longer sees any real glamour, or even valour, in putting on the kit and fighting the enemy.

My strong desire as a moral philosopher is for the ad buyers behind both of these ads get together over lunchtime cocktails and the superb butter-basted steaks at Wolfgang’s on 34th Street and Park (why Wolfgang’s? I want to encourage midday drinking among midtown executives, and the steaks will kill them off faster) and coordinate their ad buys so as often as possible, they are run during the same program, ideally National Football League and English Premier League and National Basketball Association games or even better, their endless pre-, post-, and between game commentary shows, the ones which mostly attract the young men because live sports is immediate, real, and thus totally different than the materialist hellscape we all normally live in but young men confront most directly.

I don’t want them to step over themselves – in fact, ideally, the meeting shouldn’t be at Wolfgang’s bar, but at one of the six-person semi-private booths the restaurant have under one of the old subway arches that make up the below-grade, almost ideally designed steakhouse. The other people there should be a couple of network guys – one from ABC, which also owns ESPN and has a close relationship with the NBA; one from NBC, which has the EPL US contract; and one from Fox, which has half the NFL broadcast rights but also has overlap with European and Asian athletics contracts – so that the two ad buyers (US Marine and PTSD veterans’ benefits guys, respectively) and make sure that there’s always an ad that falls between the two existential ads. The best effect would be to run the Marine ad, then run an ad for Applebee’s or one of the increasingly annoying ads for Lexus or BMW or maybe an ad for new network reality or singing competition show, and then run the PTSD ad. That cozy booth, smelling of high quality gin and even better steaks and maybe a bit of personalised existential anger of the type exuded by liberal arts graduates, who read Aristotle and Camus but ended up on Madison Avenue and as network advertising schedulers for lack of anything better to do and out of their screaming inadequacy when thinking about their earning power compared to that of their parents, could thus be a place where, through basic propaganda techniques, a generation of young people could realise that meaning can be found on a battlefield and through violence, but it comes with a cost that can never be fully paid in the form of crippling, endless emotional devastation.

What would be missing from that group, of course, would be the positive side of things. I can actually easily imagine that booth coming together, and even them deciding amongst themselves to craft a season or two long subconscious campaign to install a sense of complete existential inadequacy among viewers of sports programs. What would be lacking would be the alternative – and oddly, that’s been the question humanity has been wrestling with for thousands of years. War seems oddly compelling until you think about the consequences – but being base economic creatures, as farmers or industrial workers or cube farm data analysts, is utterly without meaning. And the only other choice seems to be to either enter the bloodsport ring of trying to be of the ruling class – that is to say, to direct the warriors and skim the cream off the efforts of the economic creatures – or to create intellectual pipe dreams.

The positive ad I’d envision would suck – but then again, I’m not a Madison Avenue copy guy. What I’m trying to envision is the ad to convince young people – hell, convince people in general – that there is no way of life which is simple, no calling which will solve the existential crisis. The ad would show up randomly, not paired with anything, but would show another young man, walking across the street just like the other two, and instead of facing electronica nonsense, would see some litter, and he’d pick it up. Or he’d see a friend across the street, and he’d join her for a coffee. Or he’d see a pigeon rustling up into a tree, and he’d smile, and he’d move on. This being 2022, he’d check his phone, and realise his mom had called, or that he was on his way to see his cousin’s school play, or a text from his roommate reminding him it was his day to water the plants at the apartment but that also there was a great band playing across the street in the evening. Mundane basics but all of them beyond just himself, all of them connecting him to the real world in ways that have no materialist benefit behind them.

It’s the lack of that last category, I think, that’s at the heart of the existential crisis much of the world is facing today. We know there are historical ways to find meaning – the three classes of medieval society in the merchant, the warrior, and the priest; the more modern checkout of the public intellectual; the conflicted life of public service via activism or civil service or augmented volunteering – and of course we can retreat into a materialised domesticity and cultivate plants or cats or model railways. But none of those seem to really apply to the existential challenge of a world of material plenty – and the ancient world seems to fall down when asked about finding such meaning, whether east or west. After all, those who transcended the evils of the past were either of the upper classes (Buddha and his south Asian contemporaries), an endowed god (Christ and the saints), or underemployed intellectuals (Confucius, Mencius, Pu Yi, etc). They offered a message, but not really for the sad sack young men and women who have no or only limited family and wealth advantages, but also are never going to get a PhD. and milk it into a calling.

The ads I’ve described are of young men, which I think makes sense: young men in the past were given meaning by society, but societies have largely stopped doing so, so young men are caught most deeply in the meaning trap. And young women – and, for that matter, young queer men – at least have the meaning that can come from rebelling against past privilege, which young men in general can’t really claim. But everyone faces this eventually, even those who at least for a time are able to insert their perceived victimhood into the slot required for individual meaning.

I do look to the Mad Men to come up with the campaign, though. Today it should cross all platforms – not just live TV sporting events and commentary, but also funded Twitterati, TikTok influencers, and Instagram channels; also purchased messaging placement in Marvel and DC movie franchises; also even old school advertising media like bus sideboards and highway billboards, still some of the finest settings for distilling messages into memes of highest latency in our minds. But right now, the ads are just of the three most challenging types: the ad telling you to search for meaning in a meaningless world; the ad telling you that finding that meaning will come at a tragic cost; and the vast majority of other ads that just insidiously remind you that the materialist world is shallow, horrid, and reinforces your own sense of meaninglessness.

Come on, ad people – the expense accounts can surely support one more big splurge at Wolfgang’s, maybe even with a couple creatives joining the buyers and the schedulers. You can do it. Find the fourth way and advertise it the way America does so phenomenally, so freaking, so fucking well for the kinds of things that only encourage existential despair. I have faith in you. And I’m looking forward to watching “Jeopardy!” and having my head spin. Actually, everyone is.

So tomorrow (today? I’m not sure when I’ll finish this) is Father’s Day in the United States, a completely idiotic holiday which we refer to locally as a “Hallmark holiday”, which is to say that it has no real organic origin but was invented to sell greeting cards. Mother’s Day, for instance, is a maudlin holiday invented by Republican PR specialists to remember and honour the mothers of those killed in the Civil War (and, specifically, those killed for the Union side), and thus really is not a Hallmark holiday. Father’s Day, on the other hand, evolved over time to encourage middle class families to spend more on gin, cigars, neckties, and prime ribeye steaks in mid June, roughly a month after post-Civil War guilt inspired the same middle class families to buy excessive bouquets, an early start to summer vacations, and to risk it all on bets for the Kentucky Derby for mothers.

All this means is that, while there might be some legitimate reason for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is basically a special from the boys in marketing, realising cynically that fathers will take what they can get, and that retailers will reward PR guys with a piece of the vig of whatever they create. And given that both the retailers and the wholesalers of cigars, gin, neckties, and bad cologne, have surprisingly large profit margins, they are reliable supporters of a Sunday in June dedicated to the sale and distribution of their products, even if really it’s just a vaguely disguised guilt trip for mothers, who had their day in May, but now are being forced – in the way that only a deeply engaged patriarchical process can – to feel guilty that their role in giving birth to the cannon fodder of a constitutional war built around the elimination of human bondage entails. I mean, no real guilt should entail, but if you’re shilling prime ribeyes, Cuban cigars, and golf equipment, hell, just run with it.

All of this makes me feel like ignoring Father’s Day except for the fact that it’s the same weekend as the USGA Open Championship in golf, or the US Open. I’ll note the US Open and its position on the calendar predates the Hallmark cult of Father’s Day, so it’s now just kind of a quaint coincidence – the third Sunday in June is the last day of the US Open but it also just happens to celebrate fathers, especially middle to upper middle class fathers who play golf as a means of frantically meeting societal class expectations, mostly, and not because they actually enjoy the outdoors or punching a small hard ball around in the outdoors, because most of them hate doing so, and would rather watch other young adult males playing sports instead of demonstrating their own failure at being able to play sports any more, and while this is a run-on sentence, I think it’s an important one, because Father’s Day is in fact that most interesting of modern phenomenons, a socially agreed upon event which only references social norms which don’t, really, have to exist, and in fact are rooted in things no one wants to perpetuate. Thanksgiving – US or Canadian – involves a falsehood of First Nations / colonial mutual love which, while false, is perfectly wholesome; Father’s Day involves a falsehood of fatherly concern for various material and sporting things which are completely, entirely divorced from the wholesome love of men for their children, and indeed, which material and sporting things are non-wholesome, embarrassingly commercialised distractions from the wholesome love of men for their children.

Which brings me to my day today.

I want to start by apologising to my son. I’m pretty sure all he wanted to do today was do online computer stuff (and by referring to such stuff as “stuff” and not “shit,” I officially earn a George Carlin “family empathy” badge and a well-mixed Beefeater’s Gibson, double, neat) – something involving an online chat service called Discord and its ability to enable simultaneous play in a Minecraft realm (the prior sentence had no meaning 20 years ago, and in 20 years, I have no doubt our ability to parse its historical meaning will have been as lost to the species as our ability to parse the Mayan temple ruins of Yucatan). His good friend came over – another child of a divorce, said divorce being differently messy than what the boy has had to deal with but let’s face it, every divorce sucks to an involved child. His friend is having a rough patch with parental transfers, and moreover, one of his classmates in fifth grade was about to move to Florida with his family. The young man wanted to spend Father’s Day – today or tomorrow, again depending on when I finish writing this – with the friend about to move away, which would mean two things. First, obviously, it would mean not spending the day doing artificially constructed “Father’s Day Approved” activities, most likely a lot of bowling or forcing divorced Dad to make barbecue hot dogs or or forcing Dad to teach a stereotyped male activity like woodworking or five-card stud or gapping spark plugs. And second, it would mean spending Father’s Day night at his divorced mom’s house, instead of spending it at divorced dad’s house, thirty miles away and thus hard to manage while still giving his friend about to move to Florida a proper sending off.

My son’s friend has picked up long ago that divorces, either selfishly, or unconsciously, or simply implicitly, involves scorekeeping, a constant battle to determine on the part of each child which parent is “doing better” or “cares more for the divorced child”. In my experience, this scorekeeping is inevitable within the parents and children for a certain period, but can be overcome with good intentions and lots of conversation. The trouble is, the broader community of any divorce – the friends, the extended families, the new friends who come after the fact at school or work or day care or running for town council – that broader community just wants a celebrity meltdown story. And so the children and the parents – even when they try their damndest to get it right – are constantly navigating a social landscape which wants to assign winners and losers (“your dad is a much shittier parent than your mom” / “your mom is a much more loving parent than your dad”).

I’m going to pause here and point out that both parents of the boy’s friend seem to be acting in an exemplary fashion. Most people – and certainly most trollers of internet things – assume that divorced parents basically default to doing the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child. While I have to admit, in dealing with divorced parents, I’ve seen a decent amount of that, let me state (fully aware of the self-serving nature of what I’m about to say) that it’s not actually true. Parents do a lot of the Worst Possible Thing For Their Child, but interestingly, divorced parents do quite a bit less of it, because the very nature of their divorce – “Hey, I’ve done the Worst Possible Thing For Our Marriage!” – means they no longer have any credibility to be viewed as a reasonable practitioner of “I’m Focused On the Best Possible Thing For The Family I’ve Constructed”. Married parents get to do the Worst Possible Thing for Their Child because hell, they’re married parents – the law and society (except if there’s race or drug use involved) never peel back the curtain. But because divorced parents are already publicly viewed as being incompetent – by everyone except only occasionally their children, who desperately want to think of their parents as being Always Great, just like all kids, but at least divorced kids have that illusion shattered earlier – they can only beg their children to think of them as being halfway decent human beings. But in this case, of the boy’s parents, both of them are truly doing a great job.

What was tough was witnessing how hard the boy’s friend was trying to personally reconcile being both a good friend – to the boy who was moving to Florida in 48 hours and may possibly never be seen again, which to a fifth grader is a trauma equivalent to the unspeakable – while being a great son to a very human and flawed father, while knowing that the actions that would make him be a good friend would possibly be seen by both the father and the mother as a kind of favoritism – of rejecting divorced dad to stay an extra night with divorced mom. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the boy’s friend seems comfortable talking about these quandaries with us – or rather, around us; my son usually zones out, which I completely understand. His divorced parent experience is almost impossible to translate into his friend’s divorced parent experience, because as Tolstoy told us at the beginning of Anna Karenina, family tragedies are all unique; only family pleasantness is similar enough to be able to be translated, and thus also is similar enough to be of no interest to the novelist or, really, even to the individual trying to understand the human experience.

As I say, though, the boy’s friend opens up to us all the time about his challenges navigating his family situation, but pace Tolstoy, the boy and I can only make conversation. Today I talked to him about how the love your parents feel for you – if they’re good people, and I truly believe his parents are good people – has nothing to do with the time of day of the third Sunday in June – either a father demanding sole focus, or a mother lording over the fact that a son chooses her over the father, on a lame Hallmark holiday. The love exists outside of time, outside of space, because that’s what love is. So over the course of a Monopoly game (which I clearly was winning despite constant rule violations and cheating between the two boys to prevent the inevitable), and the course of a lunch at Subway, and the course of a long car ride, I ended up trying to explain my theory of love, which is a theory of total surrender, of where a parent lets a child being selfish because that’s what love is but also a child lets a parent be selfish because that’s what love is the other way, and both see that selfishness over time and atone for their human inability to demonstrate the perfection of love to one another but also pledge – not to the other, but to themselves in honour of the other, to try to be less imperfect, and in so doing, everyone creates the love required to love others even more.

Which isn’t really what you want to do with an eleven year old boy and one’s ten year old son when both are also drinking sugary drinks and while the dog is bouncing around and randomly setting off the seat warmer button.

Eventually I think I convinced the boy’s friend to simply talk to his parents about the quandry: not to tell his father that he wanted to skip out on the pathetic Hallmark third Sunday of June holiday but that he wanted to be a good friend, to tell his mom that he wasn’t choosing her over his day but that he was really choosing to be a great friend and was, actually, using his mom’s house as a convenient base of operations, and that he loved both mom and dad and just wanted their advice and counsel on what the right thing to do was. And he talked to his mom, who talked to his dad, and he’ll spend the day with the friend who is moving to Florida, and his dad will pick him up late after dinner, and the mom will be extra up front about timing and logistics.

My son zoned out on all of this.

Which is okay. I think it’s actually both rational on his part, and the right incentivising behaviour as well. Rational because really, the boy is 10 years old: listening and reflecting on a conversation his 11 year old friend seems to need to have with me, the boy’s dad, is a lot of emotional heavy lifting. The rational thing for him to do is to actually focus on the Van Hagar-era 80s rock coming from the car radio, from 100,000 watts of WBLM POWER! broadcast from the LA Basin (that’s Lewiston-Auburn for you hard rock newbies). He has to process his own divorced parent bullshit every minute of every day, and he and his friend talk about that a lot – but if his friend wants to download to me, one half of the boy’s divorced parent bullshit factory, it’s completely understandable that the boy himself would decide to not listen.

It’s incentivising behaviour, though, in the sense that if the boy’s friend engages me in “what should I do, Mr. Freilinger?” queries, my son probably is listening at least partially to figure out if I’m feeding his friend a line of fatherly bullshit that I clearly don’t deliver to my actual son. I do my best to be a good father, but of course, I suck at it – but when his friend asks for fatherly advice, my son has a chance to compare my intellectually and rhetorically refined fatherly bullshit delivered to his friend, to my actual delivery of parental behaviour in reality. So my son, by letting me dig my own rhetorical grave, is gaining ever more future intellectual ammunition to show me that, despite my best intentions, I was a crap father who didn’t live up to even my own expectations. And, therefore, depending on his maturity level at a given point in time, he deserves a Nintendo Switch, or he deserves getting me to bail him out of jail after he was busted selling eight-balls at the senior prom.

My goal, clearly, is that he won’t simply want material goods for fulfilment, and that he won’t realise that selling drugs to idiots is actually an effective way of making a living as long as you don’t get caught (or, for that matter, ending up too much of an idiot and just inspiring the next Scarface). My goal as a parent is that he’s a moral, good, wonderful individual, with the social skills and ambition and curiosity to make a living in a sustainable way on a planet which is not simply here to fulfil human whims. And oddly, I hope that’s the goal of his friend’s parents, but even if it’s not, my goal for his friend needs to be the same.

Hopefully, my son is holding me to account as a I talk to his friend, and my own self-reflection is making me better as a father than I would be if I weren’t asked to give fatherly advice to another. Hopefully, my advice is helping my son’s friend work his own way through a divorced parent situation which is harder than a “normal” family situation which doesn’t have to navigate the open wounds of post-divorce relationships. And hopefully, my son and his friend both are seeing me as doing my best as an adult – which isn’t to say I’m going it perfectly or even well, just that I’m doing my best, and that if they do their best in an unselfish way – knowing that they’ll still be jerks every now and again – they will be fathers in the future that are good and decent. Not perfect, not even “really good” – just good, just decent.

And tomorrow – it will be tomorrow; I’m going to finish writing this before midnight – it doesn’t matter if the boy is with me or with his mom, or if his friend is with his dad or his mom. If both boys are talking to their parents – and even better, if both have learned that it’s okay to trust good adults, and that they get good adults to help them navigate who aren’t just parents – then it will all be fine. It’ll be fine tomorrow: I have no idea what Monday will hold. But all I’m asking for is for two boys to enjoy a great Father’s Day, and for their parents to breathe more easily knowing that it’s happened.

Monday will be another day. We’ll face that on its own terms.