Stock buybacks shattered records in 2018

Stock buybacks shattered records in 2018 (Axios):

Over the past few years the fire beneath Apple's red-hot stock price has largely been stock buybacks. The company has dwarfed other companies in terms of the number and amount of buybacks last year and for the past decade.

Driving the news: S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Monday that companies bought back $806.4 billion worth of their own shares, including $223 billion in just the fourth quarter in 2018. It was short of the $1 trillion Goldman Sachs predicted in August, but still an all-time record.

Of that record total, Apple bought back $10.1 billion worth of its own stock in Q4 and $74.2 billion for the year, more than a third of the entire S&P 500 total. The closest company to that total was Oracle, which spent $29.3 billion.

• Over the past decade, Apple has bought back more than $260.4 billion of its own shares. The No. 2 company on the buybacks list is Microsoft, which has bought back less than half that amount, $118.5 billion.

Between the lines: Companies have shown a very clear preference for buybacks over dividends so far this decade, with a major uptick in this trend in 2018 after the passage of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act.

by Dion Rabouin, Axios | Read more:

Image: Data: S&P Dow Jones Indices; Chart: Naema Ahmed/Axios

[ed. See also: here, here and here.]

A Blizzard of Prescriptions

In 1996, a company called Purdue Pharmaceutical launched a new opiate painkiller called OxyContin. At a party celebrating its release to the public, Richard Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the company and its senior vice president of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’

The active ingredient of OxyContin is oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, including Percocet (where it is mixed with paracetamol), Percodan (where it is mixed with aspirin) and Roxycodone (where it is dispensed pure in small doses of 15 to 30 milligrams). Other kinds of opiate painkillers, like the hydrocodone-based Vicodin, were also mixed with aspirin and came in small doses. While people did become addicted to these pills, the low doses of opiates they contained made it hard to overdose on them, and the paracetamol and aspirin would cause liver damage if the drugs were taken for a long time.

OxyContin distinguished itself from these medications, and received a patent, on the basis of an extended-release technology, the ‘contin’ of the drug’s suffix. Purdue developed OxyContin not to serve an urgent public health need but because the patent was expiring on its most profitable drug, a time-release morphine pill called MS Contin. Pharmaceutical patents, which last twenty years, allow pharmaceutical companies to maintain a monopoly on a drug and avoid competition from generic manufacturers. When a patent on a popular drug expires, its price can drop by as much as 90 per cent. To maintain monopolies, the industry often makes small adjustments to existing medications in order to patent and market them as new. OxyContin was one such drug.

OxyContin dissolves slowly in the digestive system, titrating the oxycodone into the body. Instead of taking a conventional painkiller like Vicodin or Percocet every few hours, the manufacturers claimed a patient could take OxyContin once in the morning and once at night and experience long-lasting pain relief. The slower-acting nature of OxyContin justified the manufacture of pills that contained much higher quantities of oxycodone than had ever been available in a single dose: up to 80 milligrams at first; 160 milligrams a few years later.

‘It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met,’ the artist Nan Goldin wrote in a column for Artforum describing the addiction she developed to OxyContin after an operation. Goldin writes that she took 40 mg doses and was addicted ‘overnight’. She went from taking three pills a day to as many as 18 of them. Not everyone is partial to the feeling produced by morphine derivatives, but for the people who like it, OxyContin seems to represent an apex. (...)

The horror of a video showing a toddler tugging at her mother’s unconscious form in a supermarket conveys more easily the horror of the corruption, avarice, poverty and stupidity that created the problem in the first place. How this happened – how the number of deaths from opiate overdoses increased by a factor of six in the US between 1999 and 2017 – is the subject of several recent books. Dopesick, by Beth Macy, describes the effects of opiate use in Appalachia, where she worked as a newspaper reporter. Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, describes the rise of a super-efficient network of dealers of Mexican black tar heroin in the US and its effects on one particular town in Ohio. American Overdose, by Chris McGreal, a correspondent for the Guardian, offers a more detailed view of the corruption that enabled the spread of opiates to go unchecked by the healthcare industry, government or law enforcement.

Each of these books devotes chapters to the history of OxyContin, a so-called blockbuster drug whose lamentable success was owed to a confluence of factors particular to the US. They include, but are not limited to: the country’s dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can’t in the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to the industry it was tasked with regulating; a punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only approach to treating drug addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what ‘drugs’ are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed to look like. These factors converged in such a way as to unleash hundreds of millions of potent pills out into the world in the late 1990s and 2000s, which in turn prepared a consumer market for heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, each one of them a world. (...)

McGreal, Macy and Quinones all document the rise in the late 1990s of pill mills, where in some instances doctors dispensed as many as 200,000 prescriptions for painkillers over the course of a few years. Complicit with the doctors were pharmacies, drug distribution companies, sales representatives and, of course, Purdue itself, whose executives knew very well they were flooding the market with a highly addictive substance. Young people used to pilfering a Xanax from their parents’ medicine cabinet or sharing out an Adderall prescription at a party were now taking a much more dangerous drug. People who had occasionally taken a stray Percocet or Vicodin from a friend who had had her wisdom teeth taken out had no reason to suspect that OxyContin would affect them differently. A common theme in interviews in these books reveals how little scepticism there is towards pills – many people had no idea what they were taking until they were deep into their habit. A generation raised on televised ‘this is your brain on drugs’ propaganda and pop cultural depictions of addicts had no warning system in place for prescription drugs. It is common in the US for people who would never dabble in cocaine or LSD to take psychoactive pills without shame or suspicion. (...)

Macy is the author of another book, Factory Man (2014), about the effects of globalisation, automation and the decline of coal in Virginia, which once had thriving textile and furniture industries. Dopesick could be read, in part, as a sequel to that book. ‘The federal disability programme was becoming a de facto safety net for the formerly employed,’ she writes, ‘a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous way of incentivising poor people to stay sick with mental illness and chronic pain.’ In both the Ohio towns Quinones writes about, as well as the Appalachian towns described by Macy, pills became currency. Elderly people or those on disability who received government-funded health insurance through Medicare or Medicaid would get prescriptions for pain pills that were paid for by the government. At a going rate of $1 per milligram on the black market, thousands of dollars could be made from a 30-day OxyContin prescription. ‘Peddling pills was now the modern-day moonshining,’ Macy writes. In small towns where independent commerce had disappeared, addicts would shoplift goods from under the noses of unmotivated, underpaid Walmart employees and trade them for pills. Pill dealers would keep stores of stolen goods, where pills could buy everything from stolen televisions to nappies to laundry detergent – all at a discount. ‘Some large though immeasurable amount of the merchandise supporting addiction, as the opiates settled on heartland America, was mined from the aisles of Walmart, where Main Streets had gone to die,’ Quinones writes. ‘The opiate scourge might never have spread as quickly had these rural areas where it all started possessed a diversity of small retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood ready to defend against them.’

In 2010, Purdue introduced an ‘abuse deterrent’ to the drug which caused it to congeal when crushed, making snorting or injecting impossible. Conveniently, this also allowed Purdue to renew OxyContin’s patent, which was on the verge of expiring. (Through minor tweaks and reformulations, Purdue has re-patented OxyContin 13 times. Under its original patent the company would have lost exclusive rights to the drug in 2013. Now it maintains them until 2030.) It was in part the 2010 reformulation that provoked many users of OxyContin to try heroin and realise that it could also sate their cravings. By 2010 most of the pill mills had finally been shut down. Heroin was also significantly cheaper, especially for people who had built up tolerance to Oxy and required multiple pills a day to avoid the debilitating symptoms of withdrawal.

As the market for opiates expanded, heroin dealers stepped in to supplement the pharmaceutical supply. Of all the books available about the epidemic, Dreamland is by far the best account of how heroin dealers quickly came to understand the market opened up for them by prescription opiate painkillers. Quinones was a reporter for the LA Times when he first wrote about a network of heroin dealers who came from a small city in Mexico called Xalisco, in the state of Nayarit, where a sticky kind of heroin known as black tar is made from poppies that grow in the hills. The Xalisco boys, as Quinones calls them, were no Medellin cartel. They ran efficient, low-profile businesses, averse to violence and with a premium placed on customer service.

by Emily Witt, LRB |  Read more:

Image: CBS via
[ed. See also: Opioid Overreaction (NY Times).]

Robert Doisneau, Bike lesson, 1961
via:

Ernst Haas, Reflection, Revolving Door, NY 1975
via:

The Matrix at 20

When The Matrix came out 20 years ago, the internet was still in its infancy, confined by the limits of dial-up modems, Netscape browsers and the startup discs that EarthLink and AOL tucked in mailboxes across the country. If you wanted to use the internet, you usually had to sacrifice your phone line, and those with constant busy signals were regarded as hopeless shut-ins, like a flannel-swathed Sandra Bullock ordering a pie from Pizza-dot-net. To the extent that films were thinking about the possibilities of online life, they were usually defined by suspicion and terror, such as the VR corporate sabotage of Disclosure or sick allure of a chatroom sadist in Dee Snider’s StrangeLand. The landscape was changing, but all they could think to do was freak out and disconnect.

The Matrix wasn’t about the internet per se – it takes place in a dystopian future, approximately 200 years from the present – but it understood where things were headed far better than any film did at the time. Back in 1999, the mind-expanding adventures of Neo, Trinity and Morpheus in a world ruled by machines felt more like a technical revolution than a cultural one, an ultra-stylish Hollywood thriller that wedded the balletic cool of Hong Kong action cinema with the stunning elasticity of CGI. Its influence was felt most immediately in the look of summer blockbusters that followed, which mimicked its gothic sheen and made a cliche of its “bullet-time” effects.

Yet objects tend to shift during flight, and in the year 2019, The Matrix has endured as both touchstone and Rorschach blot, a way for people of vastly different ideologies to make sense of the world around them. The effects are still a marvel, but the film’s ideas have taken root in a destabilized culture where conspiracy theories flourish and individuals are defining for themselves what is and isn’t real, and what constitutes freedom in a heavily monitored, highly synthetic technological space. Neo may “follow the white rabbit” into a Wonderland of personal discovery, but we’re citizens of Wonderland now, having made a second home for ourselves where the laws of gravity don’t apply. (...)

It’s clear to anyone who watches The Matrix who the heroes and villains are – there are no “the Galactic Empire is right” counter-theories floating around – yet the takeaways have diverged to opposing ends of the political spectrum. The film advocates for freedom, but different people have different ideas of what that means, which makes it possible for the film to be embraced by the far right and the transgender community, and both can get what they need out of it. Its malleability is its defining quality – “there is no spoon,” Neo learns, it is yourself that bends – and so naturally it can accommodate many different readings at once.

There are essentially two ways of looking at the film: 1. The world as you know it is a lie. 2. The world as you know it is changeable. The first way is narrow and pessimistic, but it explains why the notion of “red-pilling” has become so popular in the far right, which seeks to recruit new members by showing them the ugly truth about their environment. When you can persuade someone that their assumptions and perceptions are wrong – that everything they know is sanitized propaganda – they can then see things through an entirely new lens, one helpfully provided by the red-piller. This is how grand unifying theories like QAnon take root.

Yet the idea of the world as changeable seems far closer to what the film’s creators, the Wachowskis, had in mind. In the time between then and now, the Wachowskis have both gender transitioned and The Matrix seems at least a subconscious reference to the evolution to come. Much has been written about the film as trans allegory, and the reading bears out in the possibility for humans to define themselves however they like, outside the fixed identities enforced by the machines. Whenever Agent Smith snarls “Mr Anderson”, it feels like a menacing taunt, his refusal to allow Neo to untether himself from the matrix and discover who he actually is. That goes beyond red-pilling, which is about the authoritarian business of telling someone how things really are, and grants them the latitude to figure it out on their own.

by Scott Tobias, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
[ed. Umm...not sure about the trans interpretation but interesting anyway. See also: Did We Take the Blue Pill? (Forbes) and The Matrix 20 Years On: How a Sci-fi Film Tackled Big Philosophical Questions (The Conversation).]

Push to Nullify Health Law

The Trump administration’s surprise decision to press for a court-ordered demolition of the Affordable Care Act came after a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Monday, where the president’s acting chief of staff and others convinced him that he could do through the courts what he could not do through Congress: repeal his predecessor’s signature achievement.

Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff and former South Carolina congressman, had spent years in the House saying that the health law should be repealed, and his handpicked head of the Domestic Policy Council, Joe Grogan, supported the idea of joining a Republican attorneys general lawsuit to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act.

That suit, and the Justice Department, initially pressed to nullify only the part of the law that forces insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions as well as a suite of health benefits deemed “essential,” such as pregnancy and maternal health, mental health and prescription drugs.

But a district judge in Texas ruled that the entire law was rendered unconstitutional when President Trump’s tax law brought the tax penalty for not having health insurance to zero, and the administration faced a choice: stick with its more limited intervention or back the judge’s decision.

by Maggie Haberman and Robert Pear, NY Times | Read more:
[ed. Third paragraph (but read on, there's more!). See also: Bad Times in Trumpville and What Happens if Obamacare Is Struck Down? (NY Times).]

The 7-Eleven of the Future

A trip to 7-Eleven, the country’s most recognizable convenience store, is not an experience that most would describe as aspirational. Influencers don’t flock there in search of the perfect selfie moment; no chic, strikingly lit Instagrams of perfectly arranged spreads of hot dogs and Slurpees populate social media. 7-Eleven exists largely to feed people who need to eat cheaply and quickly if they want to eat at all.

Countless words have been written about how to make convenience store meals, snuck in between double work shifts or on lengthy road trips, more nutritionally virtuous. Skip the sugar-laden candy aisle and grab one of those sad oranges from the cooler, they implore. Avoid chips and crunch on water-logged celery slices instead. But in these moments of pure, desperate hunger, nothing is more deeply satisfying than greasy, gas station goodness chased down with a giant, radioactive green Slurpee.

But 7-Eleven plans to shed its identity as a junk food staple. As America’s obsession with wellness and “clean eating” shows no signs of slowing down, the chain wants to figure out how to change customers’ perceptions that convenience food doesn’t always have to be deep-fried or nutritionally sketchy. In early March, the chain debuted its first “lab store,” a real-time testing ground for new, bougie conveniences, next to a busy Dallas highway, just a stone’s throw away from a tony Italian market and one of the city’s most popular ramen joints. Outside, the store looks largely like any other 7-Eleven, with the familiar signage and gas pumps — until you notice the giant selfie-friendly mural painted by a local artist. Inside, it looks a lot like a Whole Foods or any other sleek modern grocer, with natural wood accents and towers of trail mix ingredients sold in bulk.

Unlike most other 7-Eleven stores, this outpost offers a range of hot and prepared food items that goes far beyond the typical roller-grill hot dogs that have been the chain’s bread and butter for decades. Right next to the roller grill sit warmers full of soups like vegetarian tomato basil and gluten-free chili. Across the aisle awaits what press releases call the “better for you” refrigerator case, filled with grab-and-go lunch items: sandwiches, salads, and plastic bowls filled with a “seasonal blend” of mushy kiwi, grapes, cantaloupe, strawberries, and a single pineapple spear. Thanks to the current dominance of the keto trend, hard boiled eggs; portion-controlled packets of cured meats; cheeses; and cured meats wrapped around cheeses are abundant.

There is also a small restaurant, complete with a sit-down cafe and small patio off to the side of the store, arguably the best place to find food in the place. It’s the first Dallas outpost of Laredo Taco Company, a South Texas mainstay that has been selling serviceable breakfast tacos on freshly made tortillas to working people for years. Laredo Taco was part of the Stripes convenience store chain, which 7-Eleven acquired in 2018. With that came Laredo Taco Company, which has scored praise from Anthony Bourdain.

In the aisles, this 7-Eleven is stocked with enough gluten-free, paleo, vegan, organic, and naturally sweetened options to feed an entire army of wellness-obsessed snackers, with just enough “normal” food to resemble a small grocery store. (...)

And then, of course, there is the Slurpee, both an American icon and an engineering marvel. The fluffy, frozen beverage is a sweet-tooth staple; the lab store’s innovation is the organic Slurpee, made with “farm to fountain” flavors like coconut, blood orange, and cucumber from Idaho’s Tractor Beverage Company, which boasts that its syrups are USDA certified organic, GMO-free, and “entirely” natural. In the organic Slurpees, buzzy superfoods like celery and turmeric are ingredients in the cucumber flavor; allegedly stomach-soothing licorice root adds an extra veneer of health to the cherry cream flavor; the blood orange flavor also features turmeric, along with black carrot. Unlike most of the original flavors, the organic options are not carbonated, which means they lack the fluffy, smooth texture of a typical cherry Slurpee. Instead, they’re packed with crunchy ice crystals that always seem to find their way to the most sensitive parts of your teeth.

It’s not surprising that even the Slurpee, much maligned for its hefty sugar content and the presence of preservatives like sodium benzoate, is getting the organic treatment. 7-Eleven is a corporation interested in making profits, and the organic food market is currently worth upwards of $45 billion. But there is something deeply unsettling about seeing the Slurpee stripped of its vibrant colors and cloyingly sweet flavors. It’s depressing to think that, someday, the Slurpee won’t represent a decadently sweet treat, but just another way to get in your daily dose of superfoods. It’s like if all the milkshakes in the future were Soylent, and every Red Bull was replaced with 7-Eleven’s locally-sourced “Yerbucha,” a mix of kombucha and yerba mate. (...)

It is this bizarre juxtaposition of the organic and the chemical-laden, the sacred and the profane, that makes 7-Eleven’s “lab store” such a fascinating — and disorienting — concept. In attempting to please literally everyone — gentrifiers, working-class families, young professionals, and kids looking for after-school snacks — it’s possible that they’re going to alienate everyone. No one on a tight budget wants to accidentally pay $2 more for organic tomatoes when they meant to grab the cheap ones, and no one wants to be tempted by the allure of a quick Velveeta and Rotel queso served with fried tortilla chips when they’re trying to eat “virtuously” and choose the gluten-free granola instead. Being guilt-tripped into buying fruit and hard-boiled eggs is particularly dehumanizing when you can only afford nachos.

Between its fancy coffee machines that grind beans to order, a dessert bar serving soft-serve gelato and non-fat frozen yogurt, and counters serving kombucha, nitrogen-infused hibiscus tea, and cold brew made with fair-trade, organic coffee beans, this store is also a panic attack in four walls. While browsing for more than an hour, I actually longed for a regular 7-Eleven, one where the cashiers would definitely look at me like a lunatic for asking where to find the cold brew coffee on tap, a place where it’s perfectly normal to buy three different types of gummy candy.

by Amy McCarthy, Eater | Read more:
Image: Seika Chujo/Shutterstock

Let's Call a Truce in the Helmet Wars

Maybe five or ten years ago, the tweet would’ve passed unnoticed. Denver surgery resident (and cyclist) Jason Samuels mused:

The comment thread promptly turned into a pro-con debate about whether wearing helmets is helpful or may actually worsen safety for cyclists. It’s a fairly regular topic these days.

The argument against Samuels’s position unfolded more or less like this: Cycling’s not an inherently dangerous activity; drivers and motor vehicles are the problem. So don’t pin the safety responsibility on cyclists by telling them to wear helmets. Put it on motorists, and build better infrastructure that keeps riders out of harm’s way. (This is entirely rational.)

The counterargument, from the pro-helmet crowd: Great idea, but it’s fantasy. The vast majority of U.S. cities don’t have large networks of safe riding routes and won’t for some time, but cars and bad drivers exist now and will for a long time. So wear a helmet anyway. (Also valid.)

Ah, said the pro-barehead contingent: If helmets help when riding, we should also wear them—or maybe even personal airbags!—for walking, driving, and showering. (Fair point.) Also, helmets don’t protect against all urban bike crashes. (Also fair, although benefit estimates vary widely across studies.) Finally, some even argue that merely wearing a helmet makes cycling seem like a dangerous activity, which means fewer people ride. So don’t wear one. (Wait, what?)

Pro-helmet shamers have been around for decades; what’s new is the rise of anti-helmet scolding. And I’m wary of the debate, because the whole argument over whether you should or shouldn’t wear a lid is beside the point. It’s time and energy not spent speaking with a unified voice about changes that have a larger effect on safe cycling, like protected bike lanes and driver awareness.

Often the debate over wearing or not wearing a helmet turns on familiar studies that purport to show that helmets do—or don’t—protect against crash impacts. Broadly speaking, the pro-helmet crowd’s territory here is shrinking. Reviews have challenged earlier studies that championed helmets as overwhelmingly effective. Actual protective benefits in a crash are likely lower than initially assumed, perhaps by a lot. And some innovative research—like Ian Walker’s famous observational study from 2007 that found drivers pass helmeted cyclists slightly more closely than they do unhelmeted riders—suggests that helmet wearing may have some collateral drawbacks.

Even taking Walker’s work into account, though, no scientific evidence has emerged showing that in a crash you’re more likely to be hurt wearing a modern bike helmet than not. (Emphasis in honor of the dude I saw last weekend wearing an eighties-era soft shell.) The knock, if you’ll pardon the pun, is that bike helmets were simply never designed to protect against the violent impact of a rider getting hit by a car, because they’re tested only at lower levels of force. That provides a false sense of safety, to say nothing of the fact that many cyclists hit by cars suffer grievous and sometimes fatal injury to other parts of their bodies. After decades of research of varying quality, the verdict on how well helmets work is unclear. (Virginia Tech’s recent work is a welcome advance in testing, at least.) The result: each side is dug in deeply enough that even new research is discounted if it comes from a sourceone group considers suspect. (Not that the author of said study helps his case much with comments like this.)

I understand where the helmet backlash comes from. For decades cyclists have been told that wearing a helmet is both our personal and social responsibility. Helmet effectiveness was overstated, which helped lead to mandatory helmet laws that are thought to reduce rates of cycling. Safety campaigns like this demon-weed-style PSA from Phoenix routinely put the onus on cyclists to wear protective gear and pay attention, even while often failing to tell drivers to slow the fuck down and pay attention. News stories about cyclists hit and killed by drivers often use victim-blaming language, like mentioning whether the rider was wearing a helmet even in cases where they’re crushed by multi-ton vehicles. It’s quaint by current presidential scandals, but when then President Obama skipped the helmet during a 2009 ride on Martha’s Vineyard, it was covered by Politico, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Daily News, among other outlets.

All that was highly effective at turning cyclists into arguably the most vigilant helmet enforcers. But in the past decade, cyclists have broadly started to wake up to the fact that helmet shaming is itself some pretty shameless gaslighting that might well be slowing bike-safety efforts. The backlash against wearing helmets is a collective fuck you to decades of societal guilt-tripping that we’re at fault for our injuries if we aren’t wearing a helmet and get hit.

The irony is that pretty much everyone arguing about helmets is A) a cyclist, and B) wants more cyclists to be able to ride more safely. We know that ridership increases (sometimes dramatically) when protected bike lanes are put in. And we know instances of crashes with riders drop as well. Given how clear that is, and how ambiguous helmet-safety data is, it suggests we’re all arguing amongst ourselves about something that may be a rounding error in the grand scheme of improving public safety. We’d be better served focusing our energies on what we all want: more bike lanes (especially protected ones), and a hard stop to victim-blaming cyclists when they’re hit by drivers.

by Joe Lindsey, Outside |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Let people manage their own risks. See also: here, here, here and here.]

Does Life Have to Have a Purpose?

An acquaintance recently theorized that my main problem in life is that I have no purpose. It was weird to hear but also welcome.

What is a life purpose? It sounds good, but what does it mean? Helping others, raising a family, creating beauty, making money, working with plants, solving addiction, going to space? Do most people feel like they have a purpose? How often does it change? Do people without a purpose want one? And if you do have a purpose, can you take a break? (And if so, for how long? Two days, 20 years? Does any of this matter?) I Googled “do most people …” and the first auto-prompts were funny, at least: have herpes / have hpv / dream in color / have presidents day off.

In case anyone else is ever feeling concerned or confused about life purpose — or life passion — two recent stories sort of alleviate the pressure. Briefly, anyway. Purpose and passion seem similar, but one distinction suggests that purpose involves reason while passion involves emotion, although both are engines and maybe the line between them is not so important.

In a short essay for Outside, author Brad Stulberg writes about the “lies” we’re often told about the concept of “finding” your passion. Number one is, “You don’t find it. You cultivate it.” Change your expectations of coming across something “perfect” to developing something “interesting,” he suggests, and work from there. (Stulberg also has a new book out on the topic — The Passion Paradox.)

The idea of demoting passion is sort of sad but also funny. I don’t have to dream of becoming an amazing artist; it’s enough to enjoy using these pleasant pens. Where did this belief in passion come from, anyway? Is “find your passion” a cousin to “happily ever after”? Maybe passion appears at certain points in life and not at others, and the ebb and flow is natural. Or maybe it appears in one life arena in one season, and another arena in a different season. Is my former passion for finding funny YouTube videos my current passion for eating fiber? It could be.

Meanwhile, in an especially calming story on one of my favorite knitting blogs, Mason Dixon Knitting, writer Max Daniels makes a compelling case for swiping the whole concept of “Discovering Your Life’s Purpose” off the table, gently. “What if there is no predefined life purpose?” she writes. “What if you don’t need to spend your precious life searching for one, because there isn’t one to discover?” Daniels suggests, instead, doing things that sustain one’s “physical situation,” like cleaning, working, and paying bills; activities that have “no purpose other than pleasure,” like watching Netflix and spending time with friends; and, whenever possible, activities that “cover both bases.” Maybe the concept of purpose also comes and goes, like passion, and forcing it to emerge when it’s not obvious is similarly unnecessary.

For what it’s worth, I used to think my life purpose and passion were the same: to make certain kinds of jokes. But that no longer seems right, and now I think mostly about having a baby and a family. And knitting. And, like, three other things that I’m keeping to myself. Okay, maybe life purpose is a rope with a series of knots in it, and the space in between the knots is how long it takes to feel your way to the new ones?

by Edith Zimmerman, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Ismail Sadiron/Getty Images/EyeEm

Steely Dan

[I'm working on gospel time these days (Summer, the summer. This could be the cool part of the summer). The sloe-eyed creature in the reckless room, she's so severe. A wise child walks right out of here. I'm so excited I can barely cope. I'm sizzling like an isotope. I'm on fire, so cut me some slack. First she's way gone, then she comes back. She's all business, then she's ready to play. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. This house of desire is built foursquare. (City, the city. The cleanest kitten in the city). When she speaks, it's like the slickest song I've ever heard. I'm hanging on her every word. As if I'm not already blazed enough. She hits me with the cryptic stuff. That's her style, to jerk me around. First she's all feel, then she cools down. She's pure science with a splash of black cat. She's almost Gothic and I like it like that. This dark place, so thrilling and new. It's kind of like the opposite of an aerial view. Unless I'm totally wrong. I hear her rap, and, brother, it's strong. I'm pretty sure that what she's telling me is mostly lies. But I just stand there hypnotized. I'll just have to make it work somehow. I'm in the amen corner now. It's called love, I spell L-U-V. First she's all buzz, then she's noise-free. She's bubbling over, then there's nothing to say. She's almost Gothic in a natural way. She's old school, then she's, like, young. Little Eva meets the Bleecker Street brat. She's almost Gothic, but it's better than that.     ~ Almost Gothic]

Roy Lichtenstein
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Forgotten, Not Gone

As the population surges into young old age and old old age, the number of books wrestling with that question has grown from a trickle to a tsunami. Today the field of gerontology is, dare I say, older and wiser and I am older and warier. “Old age” has crept up a decade or two, reflecting the steady rise of people living into their nineties and, the fastest-growing category, into their hundreds. Many are living well, without mental or physical incapacitation, but anywhere between a quarter and a half of the population will show signs of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia by the age of eighty-five. The cost of care – emotionally and financially – is already immense. Understanding the social, physiological and economic consequences of this massive demographic change has thus become more pressing. So has the need to help people cope psychologically, now that old age can arrive almost without warning. People may go along feeling youthful and vigorous, but pain or infirmity caused by injury, bone deterioration, illness, arthritis, stenosis, or any other condition, can alter that overnight. A seventy-four-year-old friend who has spent a decade hiking in exotic places abruptly developed excruciating back pain, forcing her to curtail her adventures. “I suddenly feel old”, she said.

Apart from the science journals and science-fiction novels debating whether is it possible or desirable to prolong the lifespan by fifty or a hundred years, or (might as well go for it) eternally, books designed to help readers navigate the treacheries of ageing fall roughly into three categories: the scientific, the personal and the political.

Books in the first category may provide empirical research on all aspects of the ageing boom, from biology to demographics. Sue Armstrong, the author of Borrowed Time: The science of how and why we age, is an appealing guide through the evidence and the controversies. She is a woman in her late sixties, “still swimming happily in the mainstream of life”, who watched her mother “lose her sight, her hearing, her beloved life partner and most of her friends, and finally her mind, across her ninth and tenth decades of life”. (This also describes my mother, who lived to be ninety-seven.) Armstrong goes right to the crucial issue: “what will life be like for us as we reach these venerable ages? No matter how positive and philosophical one’s general disposition, one cannot ignore the evidence that for too many of us old age is nasty, brutish and long”. A five-year-old child in the UK today can expect to live to be about eighty years old, but, for many, around twenty of those years, she observes, “will likely be dogged by ill health” – a fact that has generated immense research and argument. Is ageing (and its attendant cellular damage and decline in immune function) an inevitable result of normal wear and tear, in which case might it possibly be delayed or repaired, or is it a result of genetic programming, over which we have no control? The controversy is especially pressing today given that, in the words of one gerontologist she quotes, “health care hasn’t slowed the ageing process so much as it has slowed the dying process”. (...)

Michelle Pannor Silver’s Retirement and Its Discontents: Why we won’t stop working, even if we can provides a thoughtful investigation of a specific transition of ageing – retirement “For many people,” Silver begins, “retirement is a much-awaited and enjoyable time in life. This book is not about those people.” It’s also not about people who retire because of health issues or who have financial struggles. Silver’s research focuses on a narrower constituency, five groups of people – doctors, CEOs, elite athletes, professors and homemakers – who were discontented in retirement because they loved what they used to do and because that work was woven into their identities. What happens now that it’s over, and over not by choice but because they felt forced to leave, or because circumstances dictated it? How do they decide what to do next? How do they structure activities, in ways that provide the social connection, fulfilment and meaning that they enjoyed throughout their careers?

These are crucial questions now that people are living longer, in many cases well beyond official “retirement” age. The answers do not necessarily come through travelling, volunteering, learning a language, or taking up art lessons – activities that can certainly be enjoyable but which for many people do not provide meaning, deep satisfaction or a new identity. I recently met a man in his seventies, a radiologist, who, once retired, spent all his time carving wood pieces of exceptional artistry. “When did you begin to develop your skill in this hobby?” I asked, expecting to hear that he was sixty or so. “At sixteen”, he said. “And my hobby was being a radiologist.” In my experience, friends and colleagues who retired with glowing fantasies of learning to play the lute, becoming a woodcarver, or acquiring another skill that takes years to master, often discover that it will take too long to make performing or creating intrinsically enjoyable. Silver’s interviewees concur, leading Silver to explore “the larger structural problems that society must grapple with as individuals confront the mismatch between an idealized retirement and the reality of giving up identity, income and status”: becoming invisible where once they were centres of attention, the person others went to for advice, help and wisdom; feeling unneeded where once they were essential. The heart of the dilemma, she writes, is that retirement, a life without the “burdens” of work, can be a burden itself: “Herein lies the irony of retirement’s lack of boundaries and lauded freedoms, which can feel like a forced rupture from our core identity”. That irony captures the bittersweet feelings that people may have at their retirement parties: “Sure, thanks for your tributes – but now what? Tomorrow you’ll have forgotten me”. (As George S. Kaufman famously noted when he saw his fellow playwright S. N. Behrman in his office the morning after the latter’s farewell party, “Ah, forgotten but not gone, eh?”) While some of the retirees Silver interviewed enjoyed a honeymoon phase – time, at last, for lute playing – most went directly to the disenchantment phase, followed by efforts to forge new identities and satisfactions. Some succeeded. Some still struggle.

by Carol Tavris, TLS |  Read more:

Image: Same Old Future” by Darren Smith, 2019

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iPhone X With See-Through Wallpaper (Ultralinx)

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The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation

Interview with Jonathan Haidt on: "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure", co-authored with Greg Lukianoff.

Has something gone wrong with our conception of social justice?

Social justice has many meanings. I think the term was used [to refer to] a Catholic social justice in the 19th century. Some people, on the right especially, claim that the term is meaningless, that there’s only justice. I think that’s not right. I think that there are certain conceptions of justice that are about groups in society; and especially when groups are shut out or treated with lack of dignity, then I think talking about social justice as a particular subset of justice is useful.

What I’ve observed on campus—and what Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in our book—is that there’s an increasing tendency to define, to look at any place where there’s not numerical parity, where any group is underrepresented relative to the population and to say, “that is unjust.” And any social scientist who’s thinking in any other domain would say, “well, no, wait a second. You have to know the pipeline. You have to know how many people were trying to get in, were people treated differently because of their group membership?”

In fact, just today, The New York Times announced that it’s going to commit to publishing an equal number of letters from men and women, even though 75 percent of the letter writers are men. Men like to put themselves out in public and show off. But The New York Times has committed to this equal outcomes social justice, which says we’re gonna treat people unequally in order to attain equal outcomes.

That I think is unfair. Most Americans think it’s unfair. Most Americans think that you should treat people as individuals and not discriminate against anyone because of their race or gender. So yes, we are in the middle of a time in which many people who call themselves social justice activists are trying to achieve policies that most people think will treat individuals unfairly.

How should we understand the concept of intersectionality?

Intersectionality is a very important concept on campus these days and it starts with an insight that I think is important and absolutely right. Which is that the experience of any person is not just the sum of the experiences of the various identities. So to be a black woman in American today is not just the sum of what it’s like to be a woman added on to what it’s like to be black. So Kimberle Crenshaw, the woman who popularized the concept and developed it, makes the point that there are distinctive indignities that black women would face that might not be faced by women or by black men let’s say.

So if the point is just that identities intersect or interact, it’s absolutely right. You can’t argue that. Where it’s gone wrong I believe is that it has become such a part of teaching on campus, it becomes wedded to a notion of society as a matrix of oppression in which young people learn to see society as being composed of all kinds of binary distinctions where the people on top are powerful and therefore bad. They are oppressors so they are morally bad. People on the bottom are the victims and therefore morally good.

Now of course oppression is bad, but to teach young people whose minds are ... human minds evolved to do tribalism. We evolved to do us versus them, binary thinking, black and white thinking, good versus evil. To take 18-year-olds, and rather than try to turn that down and say “okay hold on, don’t be so moralistic. Let’s try to give people a chance. Let’s judge people as individuals.” That was the great achievement of the 20th century—to make progress there. Instead in the 21st century to say, “okay welcome to campus. Here are five or six dimensions; we’re going to teach you to see men, maleness, masculinity as bad, everyone else is good. White is bad, everyone else is good. Straight is bad, everyone else is good.” This is Manicheism. This is ramping up our tendency to dualistic thinking.

How did this sort of dualistic thinking that students are learning gain purchase in the academy?

Within each school, there are discrete departments that have a lot of autonomy. Deans and presidents can’t really tell departments what to teach or who to hire. So each department, each field in the academy evolves over the course of decades according to its own logic and the logic of its broader field outside of the university.

So I think that there are certain fields that are colloquially called the grievance studies departments. Fields that are not focused on doing basic research or on understanding social dynamics, but on activism, on changing social dynamics. In general, trying to change things and trying to understand them don’t go well together. The mission of a university I believe should be to understand. And if you do a great job of research, that can be the basis for all kinds of activism later. But if you start with a commitment to a certain way of seeing the world, and you start with a belief that some people are good and some people are bad, I think it makes it very hard to understand real social systems.

I think that there are certain areas, certain departments, certain majors that have more of an activist flavor than a research flavor. Students who major in those departments—I mean students get a lot of different experiences—but those who major in those departments and tend to socialize with people who think that way may come out of the university less wise than when they went in.

How should students leaving college think about trying to advance social justice?

Many students come to college with a dream or desire or goal of making the world a better place. This is an aspect of post-materialist societies: Prosperity, and general peace lead people to care more about women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, the environment. This is a trend that happens all over the world. It’s happening in Asia as well. So increasingly students want to make a different in the world in a certain way in terms of social justice-type concerns. And that would be great if they were to commit to understanding first. If they would commit to understanding institutions first before they try to change them, then they’d have some success.

Unfortunately, social institutions are incredibly complicated and difficult to change. If you get a group of 20 top experts to study poverty let’s say, or child abuse or anything else, it’s often very difficult to really find a solution. It can take years of study. We then roll out programs, and it often turns out that the programs backfire. So I think that college students, if they really want to make a difference in the world, they should not become activists in their freshman year. They should devote themselves to studying and learning, and maybe by senior year, if they’re really expert in something, maybe they could get behind it.

Now there is one nice exception. The students at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, they did a wonderful job of reviewing the research on gun control. Because, it’s a much harder problem than many people think. They really researched it, they came up with a set of recommendations that I read and I thought, “wow, this is really well informed. This is great.” And then they went to the legislature and tried to put pressure on them to pass those reforms. That’s the way to do it.

Unfortunately, what we have on campus often is certain popular ideas that have no empirical support: mandatory diversity training, more ethnic identity centers, bias response teams so that anybody can report anybody else anonymously. These might sound good to some people, but there’s no evidence that they’ll make a more inclusive, open, trusting environment. And there’s sometimes evidence that they’ll make things worse. So I believe that if you really want to make a difference in the world, you need to commit to really studying the world. Don’t get caught up in a group that is so passionate and so committed that it’s going to basically be blind to counter evidence.

Tell us the six explanatory threads that make up your book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

So in The Coddling of the American Mind, my co-author Greg Lukianoff and I are trying to figure out why campus culture changed so rapidly. Not everywhere—not even at most schools—but at most of the elite schools in the northeast and the west coast and elsewhere. Why was there suddenly this huge influx of these new ideas about safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, speech is violent, protect us from this violent speaker. Greg runs the foundation for individual rights in education. He’s always been trying to protect student free speech rights. And suddenly in 2014, students themselves were saying ban this, protect us from that, that’s violent, shut that down. And they were talking about safety. And they meant emotional safety. Where did this come from?

So Greg and I dug into it for several years, and what we came up with in our book—we’re very proud of—is a kind of social science detective story. We don’t say, “oh it’s all social media. Or oh it’s …”—it’s no one thing. So in the book, we show that there are at least six intersecting or interacting threads.

The rise in polarization of the country, as left and right hate each other more and more every year since the 1990s. There’s much more of an impetus to yell and scream, become passionate, and shut down speech that in any way seems to give comfort to the other side. That’s a huge one. The nastiness of our culture war. And related to that, the 2016 election and the inauguration of Trump. Right around then is when we see most of the actual violence. There hasn’t been a lot of violence on campus, but what there was especially happened right after the inauguration.

Another intersecting thread is the huge rise in depression and anxiety that began around 2012. Students who were born after 1995 are not millennials—they are Gen Z. Gen Z has much higher rates of anxiety and depression. And when you bring that cognitive style onto campus—there’s research we talk about in the book—there’s research showing that depressed and anxious people are more prone to put the worst possible reading on things. If there’s ambiguity, they’ll see the most threatening, negative version possible and it’s very difficult to change their minds about it. So that makes it very hard to have a seminar class. It makes it very hard to have a discussion about complex topics. So rise in mental illness.

Third is paranoid parenting. We started telling kids in the 1990s, and especially after 9/11 and Columbine: The world is dangerous. If you’re outside, you’ll be kidnapped. Now, this was never true. The world’s getting safer and safer. I grew up in the ’70s during a gigantic crime wave. Just as the crime wave was ending in the 1990s, we freaked out and thought the world too dangerous to let kids out.

Related to that then, the fourth thread, is that in addition to telling the world is scary, we said “you don’t get to play anymore. You don’t get unsupervised playtime.” Lots of soccer practice, lots of organized activities after school. But we’re never gonna give you the chance to just be outside on your own, exploring the woods, going to town, buying a candy bar with your friends. Not until you’re 14, or 12, something like that. So we took the most important experiences of childhood away from kids in the 1990s. That’s the fourth one.

Fifth one is bureaucratic changes driven in part by fear of liability that led university administrators to crack down on speech more and to implement reforms that put us all on eggshells. So, for example, in every bathroom at NYU, there are signs telling students how to report me anonymously if I say something that they find offensive. That means I can’t take chances, I can’t tell jokes, I can’t trust them, even though most of them are great. But if one student in the class takes offense to one thing I say it could mire me in weeks and weeks of bureaucratic difficulty. So I don’t take chances.

And then, the last one is new ideas about social justice. Everybody agrees that people should have equal opportunity. That, there’s widespread agreement about. But when some groups are now arguing that nothing is fair until it’s exactly proportional, 50 percent female, 15 percent African American, that might be a desirable endpoint, but if you treat every institution as corrupt and evil until it achieves that, you’re misunderstanding institutions and you’re committing yourself to kinds of activism that will never be successful. If you won’t look at the pipeline, if you won’t look at the preconditions, you cannot understand how an institution works. So you put those all together and I think we have the package of almost like fuses that sort of all came together and came to a single point around 2014, 2015. (...)

What advice do you have for new fathers like myself?

So my book... began as a book about what’s going on on campus—but it quickly became a book on child rearing and parenting. Originally, when we wrote our Atlantic article in 2015, Greg and I thought that the problems—the fragility, the claims about emotional safety—we thought those originated on some college campuses. But we very quickly learned: no, the problems are baked in by the time students get to college. What we didn’t understand back then is that the social world for kids born in 1995 and later is really different from the world of kids born before then.

Before the 1990s, kids had a lot of independence. They went out to play. They had time unsupervised. That’s crucial for child development. Kids are anti-fragile, they need to fall down, they need to get in fights, they need to get lost and find their way back. In doing so, in facing risk and facing challenges, we get stronger, stronger, stronger, stronger until we’re ready to go off to college and live independently. But in the 1990s, we decided: no more of that, the world’s too dangerous, no more practice being independent until you go off to college—and then you’re not independent. The cost has been devastating. The rates of anxiety and depression are skyrocketing, especially for girls. And so I think the most important lessons that we can take for child rearing now are that we have grossly overdone the protection and the academic pressures in elementary school.

by Brian Gallagher, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Charles Mostoller/Reuters via
[ed. Linked below but expanded for broader viewing. See also: Judith Rich Harris: Children Don't Do Things Half Way (Edge).]

The Helicopter Bunny

Once there was an overprotected little bunny who wanted some space, so he said to his mother, “I am running away.”

“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you with a stainless steel container of organic strawberries, for you are my exceptional little bunny.”

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will go to the playground — the one you call the ‘trashy playground’ — and play with kids you don’t like the look of.”

“If you play with the kids in the trashy playground,” said his mother, “I will follow you around and offer to help you with anything that seems too tricky.”

“If you follow me around,” said the bunny, “I’ll run into the field and hide behind a tree.”

“If you hide behind a tree,” said his mother, “I will organize all the other parents into a search party and find you, then put you on a leash next time.”

“If you put me on a leash,” said the little bunny, “I’ll refuse to leave the house with it on.”

“If you refuse to leave the house with your leash on,” said the mother bunny, “I’ll strap you into a giant stroller that you’re clearly too old for.”

“If you strap me in a giant stroller,” said the little bunny, “I’ll start school early with the neighbor kid.”

“If you start school early with the neighbor kid,” said his mother, “I’ll volunteer in your class twice a week, just to make sure everything is being handled optimally for your development.”

“If you volunteer in my class twice a week,” said the little bunny, “I’ll pretend I can’t hear you when you try to help me with stuff.”

“If you pretend you can’t hear me when I try to help you with stuff,” said the mother bunny, “I’ll have you referred for a speech and language assessment.”

“If you have me referred for a speech and language assessment,” said the bunny, “I’ll pass with flying colors and make you look paranoid.”

“If you pass with flying colors and make me look paranoid,” said his mother, “I’ll put you in a school for gifted children.”

“If you put me in a school for gifted children,” said the bunny, “I’ll fail on purpose so I can go back to regular school with my friends.”

“If you try to fail on purpose,” said the mother bunny, “I’ll check your grades and do your homework for you when you’re asleep.”

“If you check my grades and do my homework when I’m asleep,” said the little bunny, “I’ll change my login.”

“If you change your school login,” said his mother, “I’ll contact the dean and get the password reset. I’m SURE she’ll believe me when I tell her that you forgot it again.”

“If you contact the dean and change my password,” said the bunny, “I’ll only apply to colleges on the other coast.”

“If you only apply to colleges on the other coast,” said his mother, “I’ll buy a condo near the one you choose and spend long weekends there checking up on you.”

“If you buy a condo near my college and come visit all the time,” said the little bunny, “I’ll change my phone number and hide out in my friends’ dorm rooms.”

“If you change your phone number and hide out in your friends’ dorm rooms,” said the mother bunny, “I’ll know the new one because I still pay your phone bill. I’ll locate you on Find My Friends, and I’ll bang the freaking door down and that won’t make you look very cool, will it?”

by Elizabeth Hoey, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: via
[ed. See also: The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation (Nautilus).]

Free Shipping

We are increasingly surrounded by boxes. A new online purchase arrives on the doorsteps of one-third of American consumers each week. The volume of packages express-shipped by Amazon (more than 5 billion deliveries in 2017) shares an order of magnitude with the earth’s population (approximately 7.4 billion people). Look around your immediate surroundings and you might see the curved logo from one of the company’s boxes smiling at you now.

This tide of packages is unlikely to recede. Technology giants with multibillion-dollar research budgets are working to further embed our everyday lives within an ecosystem of accumulation, assuring that those packages will keep coming. Amazon engineers, hoping to use robots to address the “last mile problem” of transporting packages between warehouses and individual consumers, have contemplated such solutions as parachuting boxes from drones. A company called Starship has already begun testing small sidewalk-traveling delivery robots in some urban areas. But robots won’t just be on the road or in the sky. As boxes pile up beyond the anticipated capacities of apartment-building mail rooms, a few high-end properties are now experimenting with robotic systems to shuttle incoming deliveries to residents or store an owner’s existing possessions. Amazon has imagined a system that sends a robot out from each house to meet a delivery truck. Industry predictions suggest that robots could eventually be able to grasp and move objects within a household — one potential example, a towel-folding robot, has already been exhibited as a prototype. By the time that delivery robots begin arriving at your home, your residence might already be operating as an automated warehouse in its own right.

Automated vehicles for freight have not yet garnered the scrutiny that those for human passengers have, but their influence on everyday life could be just as dramatic. Given that robots can move through space in uniquely nonhuman ways, they wouldn’t necessarily be subject to boundaries between private and public spaces that constrain delivery people, allowing them to move goods in and out of homes in a constant flow. Amazon already has its “smart” lock system allow human carriers to enter a home briefly to drop off packages, and Wal-Mart is testing a similar system that lets its workers deliver groceries to a home’s refrigerator. But fully automated robots could travel deeper into homes without compromising privacy. You wouldn’t need to get dressed to greet a robot, if you noticed its arrival at all. It might unobtrusively enter and leave through an opening the size of a pet door.

Capitalist markets have long compelled consumers to buy as isolated households and fill their homes with new cycles of disposable goods. But emergent online shopping behavior suggests a latent consumer desire to circulate goods out of as well as into homes. E-commerce initially grew on the promise of easy returns of merchandise purchased sight-unseen, and it has become common to order multiple items at once under the assumption that some will be returned. Mainstream classified ad and auction websites are nearly as old as those selling new goods, and new improvised alternatives to the traditional garage sale are still emerging; some eBay sellers offer “mystery boxes” to get rid of unwanted goods, and websites and apps for reselling clothing are also growing rapidly. Facebook recently introduced a dedicated Marketplace platform to accommodate the 450 million users who had unofficially repurposed the site to sell and exchange items on their own. The TV revival of decluttering guru Marie Kondo, too, points to a widespread desire to reduce hoarding and continually re-evaluate which goods we consider essential.

The tendency for more boxes to enter our homes than to leave, then, may be caused in part by technical constraints rather than an endless desire to accumulate more stuff. Returning items remains relatively cumbersome, and a delivery can’t be undone with the same single button-push that brought it there. The additional labor involved creates a noticeable disincentive: 55 percent of online shoppers in an NPR survey reported keeping an unwanted purchase because of the inconveniences involved in returning it. Current “smart” door locks allow delivery workers to deposit packages directly inside homes, but their software does not yet facilitate picking up returns.

If the arrival of automated delivery robots could lower the effort to sell or return goods to the minimal amount it now takes to buy them, users might exchange products through a new kind of logistical network that would make the process of acquiring and trading physical objects as frictionless as that of downloading and deleting digital files. Users might trade products among themselves through new kinds of logistical networks — a kind of peer-to-peer sharing for physical objects.

Just as Airbnb was launched with the initial promise (if not always the lasting result) of transforming underutilized apartments and homes into decentralized competition for hotel rooms, a robot delivery system could turn every home effectively into a warehouse of objects offered for rent or sale. Items robotically transferred from one home to another might not need to pass through any central distribution facility; the system could potentially resemble a torrenting network, only one that was not reliant on “pirated” materials. The ability to request the express arrival of any object missing from your life with a minimum of effort could make it increasingly possible to live as though you already own everything. That is to say, ownership might become an irrelevant consideration in comparison to the availability of abundant options for short-term consumption like those already offered by media streaming services. Once the home becomes seamlessly integrated as an appendage of fulfillment infrastructure, the activity of making shopping decisions might recede from our consciousness altogether.

by Chenoe Hart, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Animal Farm (2014) by Chou Ching-Hui

Why You Should Use Fish Sauce For More Than Just Stir-Frys

Why you should use fish sauce for more than just stir-frys (The Takeout)

Image: Supersmario (Getty Images)
[ed. A little goes a long way.]

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