Getting Lost in the Labyrinth of Medical Bills

Like most patients and their families, the ailing man’s wife — who didn’t want to be identified because of concern her husband’s care could be compromised — simply wanted to figure out how much she really owed. That simple question has no simple answer, as an increasing number of consumers are finding out now that they are shouldering a greater share of their health care costs — whether they have a high-deductible plan, coinsurance or because they’re underinsured (or not insured at all). How did the hospital or doctor arrive at these charges? Are the charges reasonable? And are the charges for services actually rendered?

Hospital care tends to be the most confounding, and experts say the charges you see on your bill are usually completely unrelated to the cost of providing the services (at hospitals, these list prices are called the “charge master file”). “The charges have no rhyme or reason at all,” Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Why is 30 minutes in the operating room $2,000 and not $1,500? There is absolutely no basis for setting that charge. It is not based upon the cost, and it’s not based upon the market forces, other than the whim of the C.F.O. of the hospital.”

And those charges don’t really have any connection to what a hospital or medical provider will accept for payment, either. “If you line up five patients in their beds and they all have gall bladders removed and they get the same exact medication and services, if they have insurance or if they don’t have insurance, the hospital will get five different reimbursements, and none of it is based on cost,” said Holly Wallack, a medical billing advocate in Miami Beach. “The insurers negotiate a different rate, and if you are uninsured, underinsured or out of network, you are asked to pay full fare.”

With the exception of Medicare and Medicaid, experts say, the amount paid for services — or the price your insurers pay — is based on the market power of the insurance company on the one side and the hospitals and providers on the other, and the reimbursement agreements they ultimately reach. So large insurers that command a lot of market power may be able to negotiate lower rates than smaller companies with less influence. Or, insurers can place hospitals or providers on a preferred list, which may help bolster their business, in exchange for a lower reimbursement rate. On the other hand, well-regarded hospitals may command higher prices from insurers.

by Tara Siegel Bernard, NY Times |  Read more:

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Please RT

It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not on it. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization. Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention span crumbling like a Roman aqueduct. The endless favoriting and retweeting of other people’s tweets? Sounds like a digital circle jerk. Birds were born to make the repetitive, pleasant, meaningless sounds called twittering. Wasn’t the whole thing about us featherless bipeds that we could give connected intelligible sounds a cumulative sense?

The signed-up user is apt to have more mixed feelings. At its best, Twitter delights and instructs. Somebody, often somebody you wouldn’t expect, condenses the World-Spirit into a great joke, epigram, or aperçu. What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed, you think, and favorite the tweet. Or: So funny, and you retweet. Pretty nice, also, when the ricocheting retweets say that the witty one is you! As for instruction, you can learn a lot from Twitter. Your Facebook or face-to-face friends may let you know what they think you should read, hear, watch. But are you friends with the famous environmentalist who, live-tweeting the apocalypse, tells you each time a new locality sets an April heat record in March? Or with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose ghost had a feed? It’s an education to follow an experimental poet in Calgary obsessed with the digitization of art; a lefty Keynesian who’s crunched the numbers on student debt; an Occupier who reports whenever one of her comrades gets attacked by the NYPD. A tweet’s a narrow window, but nothing says that one of those can’t disclose — or, by way of URL compressers, link to — a big terrain.

Look at your Twitter feed at the wrong moment, however, or send a dumb tweet yourself, and a bad infinity opens up onto the narcissistical sublime. What tweet is that, flashing, subliminally, behind the others? In exactly 140 characters: “I need to be noticed so badly that I can’t pay attention to you except inasmuch as it calls attention to me. I know for you it’s the same.” In this way, a huge crowd of people — 40 percent more users since last year — devalue one another through mutual self-importance. The much-tweeted-about Lena Dunham has said her father finds Twitter “infinitely unrelatable”: “He’s like, ‘Why would I want to tell anybody what I had for a snack, it’s private?!’ And I’m like, ‘Why would you even have a snack if you didn’t tell anybody? Why bother eating?’” (...)

The Rise of the Tweet takes place amid an internet-induced cheapening of language, in both good and bad senses.

The economic cheapness of digital publication democratizes expression and gives a necessary public to writers, and types of writing, that otherwise would be confined to the hard drive or the desk drawer. And yet the supreme ease of putting words online has opened up vast new space for carelessness, confusion, whateverism. Outside of Twitter, a coercive blogginess, a paradoxically de rigueur relaxation, menaces a whole generation’s prose (no, yeah, ours too). You won’t sound contemporary and for real unless it sounds like you’re writing off the top of your head. Thus: “In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno went bonkers with rage, and took off after Heidegger and the existentialists with a buzz saw, loudly condemning the sloppy word that these dumb existentialists sloppily use to brag about how they know what is real and what isn’t.” This appeared on a blog (The Awl), so its blogginess shouldn’t be held too much against it. But all contemporary publications tend toward the condition of blogs, and soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.

The accidental progenitor of the blogorrheic style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as — in an opposite way — the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. But an individual style, terse or wordy, can breed a generalized mannerism, and the path once cleared to saying things truly and well is now an obstacle course. In the case of the blogorrheic style, institutional and technological pressures coincided with Wallace’s example. Bloggers (which more and more is just to say writers) had little or no editing to deal with, and if they blogged for money they needed to produce, produce. The combination discouraged the stylistic virtues of concision, selectivity, and impersonality.

by The Editors, N+1 |  Read more:
Image: Bluebirds at Moraine State Park. From livingroomtunes.com

The Ahh-ness of Things

[ed. Cherry blossoms are thought to be particularly symbolic of the concept of mono no aware. The transience of the blossoms, the extreme beauty and quick death, has often been associated with mortality and the ephemeral nature of life.]

The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "thing", and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos", "poignancy", "deep feeling", or "sensitivity". Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things", life, and love. Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing.

via: Wikipedia

Greatest Wipeouts: Best of 2011

My Father’s Voice

My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was—old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College King’s English. You heard it and it could only be him.

So it was that George Plimpton’s accent could not be imitated. On “Saturday Night Live,” even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldn’t get it quite right. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of “Paper Lion” (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didn’t bother with his voice at all. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Alda’s version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charm—much of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professor’s voice.

Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including “Reds” and “Good Will Hunting.” Fortunately, in the upcoming film “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. Premièring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) As Poling puts it, “George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.”

If you didn’t know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. I mean, if George Plimpton wasn’t my father and I’d never met him, and I heard that voice emerge from his lips and matched it with his severe Roman features and his usual blue blazer, oxford shirt, and tie, I might have assumed that he was a little pompous or snooty or affected.

Actually, that’s not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. She was having lunch at P. J. Clarke’s with the publisher Bennet Cerf and his son Chris, and my dad swooped over to the table (he was wearing a cape) and introduced himself in that ridiculously gallant voice: “Bennet, Chris, what a pleasant surprise! …And what have we here?” My mom’s initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toity—“I mean, who did this guy think he was?”

But the second time they met, it was, in fact, my father’s voice that won her over. She’d wandered out to the balcony of a lonely Manhattan cocktail party, and was standing out there, smoking a cigarette and looking down mournfully at the street far below, when from behind her she heard a voice: “I know a better way down.”

by Taylor Plimpton, The New Yorker |  Read more:
Photo: Taylor Plimpton.

Luca Giordano, Picus and Circe, c. 1655-60
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Photo buff
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Sleeping Separately by Amy Bennett
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What Kind of Father Am I?

[ed. Reprinted for Father's Day.]

One evening—not long after my family moved to the old country farmhouse where my wife and I have lived for 45 years—our youngest son (my namesake, Jim, then three-year-old Jimmy) came into the woodshed, while I was there putting away some tools. “Look,” he said proudly, cradling in his arms the largest rat I had ever seen.

Instinctively, in what no doubt would be a genetic response of any parent, I tried to grab the rat from his arms before it bit him; but, as I reached toward it, the rat tightened its body, menacing me with its sharp teeth. At once, I stepped back: that, too, was an instinctive response, though rational thought immediately followed it. Was the rat rabid? Whether that was so or not, it was clear that the rat trusted Jimmy but not me, and yet it might bite both of us if I threatened it further.

“Where did you find it?” I asked my son.

“In the barn.”

“Which barn? The one with all the hay?”

“Yes.”

“It was just lying there, on the hay?”

“Yes, and he likes me.”

“I can see that it does.”

With the possible exception of the difference in our use of pronouns (which just now came to me without conscious intent; could it have risen from some submerged level of my memory?), that little dialogue isn’t an exact transcription—not only because it happened decades ago, but because while I was talking, my mind was elsewhere. I was looking at the garden tools I’d just returned to the wall behind Jimmy, thinking I might ask him to put the rat on the floor so that I could kill it with a whack of a shovel or some other implement. But my son trusted me, just as the rat apparently trusted him; and what kind of traumatic shock would I be visiting upon Jimmy if I smashed the skull of an animal he considered his friend?

The woodshed is in a wing of the house connected to the kitchen, where my wife, Jean, had been preparing dinner. She surprised me by coming quietly to my side; apparently she had overheard our conversation through the screen door and now was offering a solution to the dilemma. She said, “We need to find something to put your pet in, Jimmy.”

“A box,” I said. “Just keep holding it while I find one.” For I remembered at that moment a stout box I had seen while rummaging among all the agricultural items that had collected over the years in the carriage barn across the road—items that fell into disuse after the fields had been cleared, the house and barns constructed, and finally after tractors and cars had replaced horses. Amid the jumble of old harnesses, horse-drawn plow parts, scythes, and two-man saws was a small oblong box that might have contained dynamite fuses or explosives for removing stumps. It had been sawed and sanded from a plank about two inches thick. Like the house itself, it was made of wood far more durable than anything available since the virgin forests were harvested, and all of its edges were covered in metal. Though I felt guilty for leaving Jimmy and Jean with the rat, I was glad to have remembered the box I had admired for its craftsmanship, and I ran in search of it. For the longest time, I couldn’t find it and thought (as I often did later, whenever I found myself unable to resolve a crisis besetting one of our adolescent sons), What kind of father am I? I was close to panic before I finally found the box, more valuable to me at that moment than our recently purchased Greek-revival farmhouse—the kind of family home I’d long dreamed of owning.

A film of these events still runs through my mind, but I will summarize the rest of it here. Jimmy was initially the director of this movie, with Jean and me the actors obedient to his command: that is to say, he obstinately refused to put the rat into the box until a suitable bed was made for it—old rags wouldn’t do, for it had to be as soft as his favorite blanket. The rat gave him his authority, for it trusted Jean no more than it trusted me; it remained unperturbed in his embrace for a few minutes more, while Jean searched for and then cut several sections from a tattered blanket. Our son was satisfied with that bed, and the rat—whose trust in a three-year-old seemed infinite—seemed equally pleased, permitting Jimmy to place it on the soft strips. As soon as we put the lid on the box, I called the county health department, only to be told that the office had closed; I was to take in the rat first thing in the morning so that its brain could be dissected.

In response to Jean’s immediate question, “Did the rat bite you?” Jimmy said, “No, he kissed me.” Could any parent have believed an answer like that? My response was simply to put the box outside. Before giving our son a bath, we scrutinized every part of his body, finding no scratches anywhere on it. During the night the rat gnawed a hole through the wood, and by dawn it had disappeared.

Forty-odd years ago, rabies vaccination involved a lengthy series of shots, each of them painful, and occasionally the process itself was fatal. Neither the health department nor our pediatrician would tell us what to do. Once again we searched Jimmy’s body for the slightest scratch and again found nothing; so we decided to withhold the vaccination—though Jean and I slept poorly for several nights. Long after it had become apparent that our son had not contracted a fatal disease, I kept thinking—as I again do, in remembering the event—of the errors I had made, of what I should have done instead, of how helpless I had felt following my discovery that the rat had escaped.

While reading a recent biography of William James by Robert D. Richardson Jr., I found myself recalling those suspenseful and seemingly never-ending hours. As Richardson demonstrates, James was aware of the extent that circumstance and random events (like the one that led my young son to a particular rat so long ago) can alter the course of history as well as the lives of individuals, making the future unpredictable. James, like my favorite writer, Chekhov, was trained as a medical doctor and became an author—though not of stories and plays (his younger brother Henry was the fiction writer) but of books and articles on philosophical, psychological, and spiritual matters. One of the founders of American pragmatism, James rejected European reliance on Platonic absolutes or on religious and philosophical doctrines that declared the historical necessity of certain future events. Despite his realization that much lies beyond our present and future control, James still believed in the independence of individual will, a view essential to the long-lasting but often precarious freedom underlying our democratic system.

by James McConkey, The American Scholar |  Read more:
Photo: Julien Denoyer

Yusuf Islam

king of fools. jack barnosky
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“Back Home” (by Stricher Gerard)
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Happily Ever, After We Split

My husband and I started talking divorce at my friend Sara’s wedding. It was May in the Hamptons. Standing before the crashing Atlantic in her strapless gown, my friend looked vulnerable yet serene, as if she knew this man would always hold back the tide. Sara’s bridegroom read his vows, shivering a little as he promised to always listen, to make her goals his goals, to constantly improve his mind to remain interesting to her.

I sat on a folding chair, huddled under my husband’s suit jacket, looking from the marrying couple to the man I had married. We didn’t write our own vows, but if we had, my husband wouldn’t have made those promises.

I wasn’t really comparing my marriage to my friends’ wedding. A wedding is the cherry atop the dreamy early days. Marriage combined with work and parenthood can be a romance-eroding machine, especially if you have a rambunctious toddler who climbs every refrigerator, parking meter and child-safety gate he sees.

I was comparing the gap between what my husband and I want from marriage and the compatibility of my friends’ expectations. Because having a shared vision for marriage does matter.

After the ceremony, I slumped against one of the dunes along the shore. My husband sat down next to me. “You know,” I said, kicking off my sandals and staring toward the distant sun. “What are we doing? Why are we still doing this?”

He gazed toward the water. He wasn’t expecting me to suggest divorce during our romantic wedding weekend, but he wasn’t shocked, either.

We had been discussing our incompatibilities for years. We met at a book party in 2000 and were immediately attracted to each other and to certain aspects of each other’s personality. But while I yearn for a deeply united, soul-mate-style connection, he wants something looser, more independent, less enmeshed.

This difference created friction almost immediately; still, we wanted our romance to last. We took a Calvinist approach to our union, as if “hard work” could yield a better match. Or he did. I was probably channeling the sculptor Rodin. As if by constantly chipping away at each other, we would reveal an edifice of perfect love. Other times, I felt we were erecting a scaffolding of a life — beautiful home, nice parties — and hoping the snug interior would fill itself in.

My husband is a good person: hard-working, committed to social justice. But I’ve come to a startling truth about myself: I might be happier with a less ambitious partner, someone less focused on his career and curing the ills of the world and more focused on me, actually, and the piddling details of our family life.

We rose from the sand and shuffled to the reception. The next day, driving around the North Fork, my husband said: “I met a guy last night with a great custody arrangement. He takes his daughter to school and plays with her afterward until the mom gets home. It made me feel hopeful.”

I looked at him, driving responsibly, hands at 10 and 2, as always. I felt hopeful, too. I want my husband in my life, and certainly in our son’s. But I did not see why this meant we had to remain married.

by Wendy Paris, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Brian Rea

The Ways We Don’t Talk About Wealth

By the end of 2012, I will most likely have made just shy of a million dollars in three years. It’s not pure profit, but for a girl who felt dizzy when she first made $40,000 in a year, it’s a staggering realization.

The “how” of this benchmark is salacious enough to distract from any other aspects of its achievement, so best to dispatch it immediately: I work as an escort. And while there are women who charge more than I do and who have surely made more than me, financial success in this field must always be disclaimed as extraordinary lest one glamorize such a base profession. I also pay taxes, contrary to popular assumptions about sex workers, and the reality of taxes tends to detract from the glitz of cash — everyone pays more than they want to, particularly the people who pay the least, those who often preface confessions of prosperity with, “I’m not rich, but…” This is something only rich people say or ever think to say. I had never heard it before I started spending time with the wealthy.

Numbers, independent of tone, seem to indicate bragging, an assertion imbibed with smugness, callousness, and a sense of superiority. Only in rarified circles will “I made a million dollars” be interpreted as an inoffensive statement of fact. And plenty of people would laugh heartily at my identifying myself as rich with so “little” money to my name. (Recall CEO Gary Kremen telling The New York Times that, with his worth of $10 million, he’s “nobody.”) This is not to say that living with my economic reality is hard. But given the sociopolitical climate of the past four years, my income has confounded how I think of myself. It has created dissonance in spite of the fact that I don’t believe my work is wrong or creates oppression or deprives others of resources or rights. Having a lot of money creates a sense of responsibility — or at least, it should — as well as vulnerability. The knee-jerk “I’m not rich” refrain is fundamentally a denial of that responsibility, a deflection: I’m not the problem, though I may be implicated in a problematic system. There are people of far greater worth who are far more culpable.

Witnessing richness usually means witnessing a profound loss of perspective. An infamous study in early 2011 found that 42 percent of American millionaires didn’t “feel” rich. In 2009, it was 46 percent. Back in my 40k days, a friend (also a sex worker) commented to me that she was running out of things to buy. I was too, but that’s because we were both operating on our former 12k-a-year, minimum wage appetites, and those would soon morph into a hunger to match the harvest. Years ago, someone told me once that if he were to pursue his passion, he would be a physics professor. I asked him why he wasn’t. He replied that professors only made $90k a year to start, maybe $110,000, and “you can’t live on that.” The average American household income at the time was $50,000.

It’s well established that as families ascend through income brackets, so too do their tastes and spending habits, meaning that one’s lifestyle always feels more average than extravagant. As wealth accrues, it creates a new normal, again and again as required. My current annual income brings a pleasant blindness; I don’t have to actively worry about my finances, and I can be impulsive and carefree in how I spend. While in some respects I remain resolutely frugal, even downright cheap, it’s mostly a matter of principle (or neuroses.) I’ve been good about saving from the beginning, so when I sit down to check my bank statements and I see the numbers of what sits in my account, I’m always surprised. Aside from fraud-check sessions, I never bother to look at my balance. When a bank rep asked me last year if I was planning to buy a house with my savings, it took me at least a full minute to digest his question.

Speaking honestly about money is among the last remaining taboos in contemporary American discourse. Politics, religion, assaultive crimes, sexual proclivities, family secrets, and even health problems (including those involving bowel movements) will all be more warmly received into a conversation than the topic of what everyone in the conversation earns. It’s shockingly bad manners to bring it up. But even social censure isn’t trusted as a powerful enough deterrent: some companies contractually forbid employees to disclose their compensation to colleagues. (It’s obvious how this benefits employers, most notably when gender discrimination is at play.)

I largely rely on my own estimates to plot the incomes of my clients, who range in net worth from hundreds of millions to, I suspect, a paltry one or two. Several have salaries listed on Forbes.com, and a handful have told me what they make. (Admittedly, there are considerations encouraging them to tamper with that figure, in one direction or another.) Location plays a large role in how rich they feel or will acknowledge that they are. New Yorkers in particular are simultaneously expansive and beleaguered when it comes to cash flow, which is no surprise given that Manhattan is our country’s most expensive place to live. Many are fussy about my rates even as they share stories of vacation homes, art purchases, long international trips, children’s trust funds, and politicians whose friendships they purchased at a rate far higher than mine. If their wealth is a source of social distress, if it weighs on them as being unfair or unwarranted, none of them have ever disclosed that to me. They are afflicted instead with a paradoxical abundance that barely suffices — or fails to.

by Charlotte Shane, The New Inquiry |  Read more:
Illustration by Maximus Chatsky

Ikenaga Yasunari
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Ikenaga Yasunari
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Better Off Without You: Apple’s Slow-motion Divorce from Google

Apple's latest announcements for iOS 6 and Mac OS X highlight the company's sustained animosity for Google. How and why is Apple cutting the search giant out of its ecosystem?

Just a few years ago, Apple and Google were the darling couple of the technology industry, with Apple igniting a revolution in smartphone design and Google showing the power of its Web-based services transitioned to the mobile realm. However, with Apple’s forthcoming iOS 6 and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple is continuing to erode Google’s presence in its desktop and (particularly) mobile operating systems, rolling out its own cloud services, search, and now mapping technologies that Apple wants to not only replace Google’s technology, but outshine it too.

How is Apple cutting Google out of its ecosystem, where did the rancor come from, and who has the most to lose: Apple, for not including Google’s widely used and (arguably) best-in-class services, or Google, for being cut out of one of the most visible (and most lucrative) platforms in the industry?

Siri, Maps, and iOS 6

Apple’s public assault on Google began in earnest in iOS 5 with two key technologies. The first is the very visible Siri voice-activated personal assistant that Apple unveiled with the iPhone 4S — for many people it’s the sole feature that distinguishes the iPhone 4S from its predecessors. However, the second was that Apple rolled its own geocoder into iOS 5. Briefly, a geocoder is a service that translates the location data supplied by GPS (and, sometimes, augmented by Wi-Fi or cell tower data) to a usable street address. Neither technology totally slammed the door for Google on iOS, but — like the sword of Damocles — they should have made Google sweat.

Siri is a threat to Google because it inserts itself between iPhone users and their mobile searches — and, if it’s effective enough, it can become the preferred method for conducting searches with an iOS device. Siri doesn’t just use speech recognition technology to understand what people say and translate it into a Web search — whether powered by Google, Bing, or another search engine. When possible, Siri tries to answer users queries directly. Of course, behind the scenes, Siri is tapping into semantic search technologies powered by the likes of Wolfram Alpha (for facts and figures) and Yelp (for location-based information). The bottom line: Any question Siri can answer successfully without resorting to a Web search is a search query that Google (or another search engine) does not receive. With iOS 6, Apple is bringing Siri to the iPad 2 — which means even more searches diverted from Google. (...)

Facebook integration

Another potentially major feature coming to iOS 6 is Facebook integration, enabling users to share and update photos, locations, events, and contact info via Facebook without having to jump out to a separate Facebook application — much like iOS 5′s integration with Twitter.

How is this a shot across Google’s bow? Bluntly: it’s not Google+.

by Geoff Duncan, Digital Trends |  Read more:
Illustration: courtesy of zentilia/Shutterstock

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Happiness is a Glass Half Empty

In an unremarkable business park outside the city of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, stands a poignant memorial to humanity's shattered dreams. It doesn't look like that from the outside, though. Even when you get inside – which members of the public rarely do – it takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to what you're seeing. It appears to be a vast and haphazardly organised supermarket; along every aisle, grey metal shelves are crammed with thousands of packages of food and household products. There is something unusually cacophonous about the displays, and soon enough you work out the reason: unlike in a real supermarket, there is only one of each item. And you won't find many of them in a real supermarket anyway: they are failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted to buy them. In the product-design business, the storehouse – operated by a company called GfK Custom Research North America – has acquired a nickname: the Museum of Failed Products.

This is consumer capitalism's graveyard – the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing. Or to put it less grandly: it's almost certainly the only place on the planet where you'll find Clairol's A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside Gillette's equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only, a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; to self-heating soup cans that had a regrettable tendency to explode in customers' faces; and to packets of breath mints that had to be withdrawn from sale because they looked like the tiny packages of crack cocaine dispensed by America's street drug dealers. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs – pre-scrambled and sold in a cardboard tube with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car – go to die.

There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates roughly as "the pathos of things": it captures a kind of bittersweet melancholy at life's impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, say, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on Earth. It's only stretching the concept slightly to suggest that this is how the museum's proprietor, an understatedly stylish GfK employee named Carol Sherry, feels about the cartons of Morning Banana Juice in her care, or about Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs. Every failure, the way she sees it, embodies its own sad story on the part of designers, marketers and salespeople. It is never far from her mind that real people had their mortgages, their car payments and their family holidays riding on the success of products such as A Touch of Yogurt.

"I feel really sorry for the developer on this one," Sherry says, indicating the breath mints that inadvertently resembled crack. "I mean, I've met the guy. Why would he ever have spent any time on the streets, in the drug culture?" She shakes her head. "These are real people who sincerely want to do their best, and then, well, things happen." The Museum of Failed Products – consumer capitalism’s very own graveyard.

The Museum of Failed Products was itself a kind of accident, albeit a happier one. Its creator, a now-retired marketing man named Robert McMath, merely intended to accumulate a "reference library" of consumer products, not failures per se. And so, starting in the 1960s, he began purchasing and preserving a sample of every new item he could find. Soon, the collection outgrew his office in upstate New York and he was forced to move into a converted granary to accommodate it; later, GfK bought him out, moving the whole lot to Michigan. What McMath hadn't taken into account was the three-word truth that was to prove the making of his career: "Most products fail." According to some estimates, the failure rate is as high as 90%. Simply by collecting new products indiscriminately, McMath had ensured that his hoard would come to consist overwhelmingly of unsuccessful ones.

By far the most striking thing about the museum, though, is that it should exist as a viable, profit-making business in the first place. You might have assumed that any consumer product manufacturer worthy of the name would have its own such collection – a carefully stewarded resource to help it avoid making errors its rivals had already made. Yet the executives who arrive every week at Sherry's door are evidence of how rarely this happens. Product developers are so focused on their next hoped-for success – so unwilling to invest time or energy thinking about their industry's past failures – that they only belatedly realise how much they need to access GfK's collection. Most surprising of all is that many of the designers who have found their way to the museum have come there to examine – or been surprised to discover – products that their own companies had created, then abandoned. They were apparently so averse to dwelling on the unpleasant business of failure that they had neglected even to keep samples of their own disasters.

Failure is everywhere. It's just that most of the time we'd rather avoid confronting that fact.

Behind all of the most popular modern approaches to happiness and success is the simple philosophy of focusing on things going right. But ever since the first philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, a dissenting perspective has proposed the opposite: that it's our relentless effort to feel happy, or to achieve certain goals, that is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans. And that it is our constant quest to eliminate or to ignore the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, sadness – that causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy in the first place.

Yet this conclusion does not have to be depressing. Instead, it points to an alternative approach: a "negative path" to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.

by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Aaron Tilley