Category: Living

Some are born rich, some achieve riches, others have riches thrust upon them.  Last week, the owner of a lottery ticket purchased in Illinois won a prize worth up to $1.34bn.  The ticket holder will have to decide whether to take an immediate cash prize of $780.5m, or to take the full amount in instalments over a period of 29 years.  Making this choice will, I assume, depend in part on the life expectancy of the winner, and in part on the way they would respond to Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test.

Before I think about what I would do with a billion dollars, I feel the need for a short digression.  When I was a child, the pound was worth roughly two-and-a-half dollars. The rate varied, month-by-month and year-by-year, but the simple rule of conversion was that one dollar was worth about 40p.  In those days, winning $1.34bn in a US lottery would equate to around £536m, which is a very healthy sum for sure, but only just over halfway to a billion pounds.  Nowadays, the pound is trading at around 1.20 to the dollar, which means that the lucky lottery ticket holder from Illinois is a billionaire in both dollars and pounds. In my lifetime, the pound has lost half its value against the dollar, which makes UK assets – houses, land, companies, and leading football teams – more vulnerable to foreign takeover, and which makes it increasingly hard for British citizens to move to the US without a significant short-term reduction in living standards.  The dollar benefits from the privilège exorbitant of being the leading global reserve currency, but its comparative strength relative to the pound over the past fifty years also reflects the higher calibre of economic policy making in the US.  If there were a marshmallow test for nations, I think we all know that today the UK would make no attempt to defer gratification.

Continue reading “Who wants to be a billionaire?”

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.

Start spreading the news: after two years of pandemic restrictions, for the past six months it has been possible to travel once again.  I have been taking advantage and getting onto planes and trains to enjoy the capital pleasures of Europe.  Top of the list was Lisbon, which I visited over Christmas, followed by Paris in February, Athens in May, and then Berlin and Edinburgh in June.  I will be in Belfast briefly this month, before a trip to Vienna in August, on my way to a friend’s wedding in Transylvania.  Having grown-up in a monochrome commuter town, I count myself lucky to have escaped suburbia for the multi-coloured metropolis.   Now, I live in the centre of London and when I go on holiday, I want to wake up in a city. 

That’s not to say that the countryside does not have its pleasures.  I enjoy spending time on the west coast of Ireland, which I visit regularly.  I like the silence of the moors, save for the sound of water cascading down mountain streams, and the challenge of climbing the steep local summits, to enjoy views of the Atlantic and the sea breeze in my face.  It’s easy to find that I’m king of the hill after walking for hours without another person in sight.  And later, in the evenings, to sit and read with only the sound of the wind for company.  There is comfort to be found in the solitude of the wild places of the earth, and a sense of rejuvenation right through the very heart of it. 

Continue reading “Small town blues”

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.