Author: jaylazzo

The power to negotiate happiness

| jaylazzo

Three habits that have been proved useful, not necessarily by me.

  1. The habit of not giving a f**k, or of not being concerned about how others react to one’s performance.
  2. The habit of counting 5-4-3-2-1, or decisiveness.
  3. The habit of asking: What If This Actually Works? Or the habit of taking the stance of one who will gain happiness by negotiating it, not by depending only on what others say.

Another set of tips from Jordan Peterson about how to succeed:

  1. Exercise. It will slow down the decay in IQ with time.
  2. Conscientiousness. You don’t even have to be awesome: getting one thing done today beats getting nothing done. You do need to ask the 2-sec question: what do I want the output to look like? This saves time, and it’s more fun because that is what makes an accomplishment an accomplishment instead of an accident. Although there is such a thing as a happy accident, one should not rely on accidents for survival. Besides, serendipity more likely takes place when one works a lot.
  3. Social networks. You don’t have to be an extrovert either. But be the guy who says, “Boss, we have a problem, and this is my proposed solution.” Bring the solution to everyone you meet. Avoid losers, and don’t be one yourself by always complaining. Friends? They celebrate with you when things go well, and they listen when to your bad news.
  4. Skills. Get as much as opportunity allows. My friend from Iloilo chose to do her postdoc in a field very different from her training. She knew it would take more time, but she was after the skills. Man, did the money flow in after that.
  5. Attitude: basically, have faith that work works.

Life is a rat’s nest of miseries; don’t make it worse. If the only thing you have managed to do is not to have done bad, you’ve done a lot. How do we make things worse? By thinking only about ourselves, which ups our social awkwardness, making it also hard for others to deal with us.

The solution to social awkwardness begins with observing people like miners observe ore. Pay attention to status relationships, and strive to be slightly higher OR lower status before the other person, but making the gap minimal. This is a powerful teaching, because it says that the most natural conversations are between “slight unequals”. Such interactions build on emotional goodwill that comes with affirming status. For example, a lower guy who is made to feel higher respects the higher guy. So, could I cultivate a high status persona, and then habitually do things that slightly lower my status? Seems.

The enemy is ego: ego always seeks the higher status, treats the lowering of status as an evil always, and makes observing people boring. The wise man thinks differently. He lowers his own status to gain respect, and this is what happens often in a group. The bad move is to defend a high status for it sets you up for attack and humiliation. But a wise man knows humiliation does not mean everyone will see you in a bad light. A large number will in fact respect you more when you show you chill with being vulnerable.

The big takeaway here is that nothing is embarrassing if you’re not embarrassed. One action that’s so revealing about embarrassment is making excuses. Never make them.

It’s more realistic for me to think I’m living in a rat’s nest, and so I agree with Schopenhauer that happiness is the absence of pain. St Teresa also said that life is like a bad night in a bad inn. This is not to devalue worldly achievements; I’m just recognizing that happiness is chosen. And when it comes to happiness from social interaction, the way to choose it is to negotiate. Hence, happiness in social setting is negotiating power. The alternative is to depend entirely on what others dish out to you.

Every social interaction is an opportunity, a toss up between getting what you want or resigning yourself to what you’re given. The happiest are neither optimists nor pessimists but realists.

Negotiators.

(Iloilo City, 230126)

The 5-Second Rule and the Shadow

| jaylazzo

I wake up at 5:00 a.m., the files I would be working on already opened the night before. I just start working.

I do not have a similar system for many other tasks that do not have a clear structure. Yet managing them boils down to a simple hack. Create a structure, one simple, clear and reproducible.

According to Mel Robbins, the brain is designed to keep us safe. HESITATION signals to the brain that there is a problem, and it will set up neurological and hormonal defenses to tha end. HESITATION will also make it harder for one to act on the matter being hesitated upon. Mel’s solution: the 5 SECOND RULE. If you decide you want to do something, count down: “5-4-3-2-1”, then at 0, do it. The Rule has such a simple structure.

But other than making easy to use, why does it work? It seems that hesitation is “emotional”, counting is “rational”. Apparently it is hard for one to be both rational and emotional at the same time. It doesn’t matter so much whether what you want to do is good or bad or feasible. The only point is that there’s this something you want to do but you hesitate, so you kill the hesitation with a countdown.

The technique has a problem though: hesitation invents reasons, thus, it must be rational. Even if the invented reasons are BS they are still thought out. What makes the reasoning fallacious is that we hide the true reasons. Decisions based on the wrong reasons are from the beginning weak.

One can find candidate “true” reasons through multiple “levels of why”:

“Why do you want to buy the iPhone?”

“Because it has all these cool features.”

“Why do you want those features?”

“Because all my friends have them.”

“Why is that so important to you?”

“Because I don’t want to look poor.”

How many will admit to that last one? So we invent. Some story about “advanced features” makes us sound sophisticated.

But the biggest insight in all this is that we act out of emotion most of the time, whether this is conscious or not. We even seem to think we are acting freely, that we are acting for the good, and that we are acting intelligently — when in fact, most of it is really emotion masquerading as something else.

The point I’m making is not that reason excludes emotion, but that reason can choose to act thoughtfully in spite of the emotions and even with their help. Emotions point to some truth, not without error, and reason uses the signals as clues.

The power of the 5 SECOND RULE is not that it substitutes emotion with reason, but gives reason space — 5 seconds — to prepare for action instead of against it, even in a background of intense emotion. You see a person is drowning. You’re afraid of drowning. You see no one is moving, but odds are you will succeed. If you don’t apply the 5-Second Rule you will invent a thousand reasons for not jumping in then, and a thousand more after the person has drowned.

The technique applies when one has already decided it would be good to act. That is, a clear case. Not always a clear scientific case, or a clear legal case, but many situations where the 5-Second Rule is most useful are in moral cases, where the decision is to do good, or to avoid doing it. Such decisions are clear if our principles are clear, but prone to hesitation otherwise. The Rule helps to act when there should be no moral reason to hesitate.

The Rule also prevents one from inventing too many reasons. Stop fantasizing! Wake up.

So, the 5 SECOND RULE is not about deciding, but about EXECUTING. It isn’t a substitute for due diligence, or for making model scenarios.

Here’s another application: The Rule Integrates the Shadow. What is the Shadow? It is the darkness in one’s soul. The capacity for violence in one who is meek. The depth of cruelty in one so gentle. The perverse naughtiness in one so prim and proper.

Yet the Shadow is in itself amoral. It is a tendency that makes it easier for us to act in certain ways under certain conditions. It can be considered a power. The 5-Second Rule gives a chance for the Shadow to show its power.

The Shadow is almost like another person living inside our body, so different it may be from our better-known self. In check most of the time, the Shadow’s part in our character means it can enrich that character; its power can only denied by telling ourselves a lie.

Since the 5-Second Rule is not a substitute for reason, reason itself would have to supply a reason for one so meek to explode in anger. Jesus Christ fashioned a whip out of some cord and drove out the merchants from the Temple out of righteous anger. I am sure, however, that he did this rarely — perhaps just once, to illustrate a point.

There’s no point going to war every time.

But if you find going to war to be expedient, count 5-4-3-2-1 and draw out your sword. Hopefully, that should suffice.

(Cebu City, 230126)

Quiet Quitters

| jaylazzo

I learned about Quiet Quitters browsing Youtube today.

Quiet Quitters will not open emails after 3 pm. There may be good reasons for that, but in their case they do not read emails because they are afraid to confront what’s might be there.

Doctors, who usually don’t have a clue anyway, wish that the symptoms will disappear by themselves; we all wish our problems will just disappear on their own. It is right to postpone deciding if a decision is not needed right now (Falkland’s Law).

Quiet Quitters, however, procrastinate. They discover that an “urgent” task needs doing, or they find a reason to browse Youtube, as an excuse. Yet it’s just so much better to be over with the d**n thing, in whole or in part, delegate if needed.

Decisive action requires accepting the pain, not fighting it.

Steve Magness in Do Hard Things describes an experiment. Subjects (athletic coaches) were paired and pairs were seated facing each other, knees almost touching. The researchers instructed them to stare into each others’ eyes for a minute. To cope with the discomfort people looked at foreheads, giggled, fidgeted. As one minute turned to two, the unease became even more unbearable. However, as the minutes turned from two to three and three to four, subjects became more and more relaxed as they accepted their condition. The experiment ended in five minutes with a heightened sense of camaraderie.

Magness describes a similar experiment with male and female pairs. The researchers got the same results, and a bonus: some of the couples fell in love and married! Magness then described his personal attempt to replicate these results during a date but failed.

The experiments show that we can get enormous control over ourselves if we accept pain rather than fight it. Pain, in many ways an emotion like any other, is not compatible with action. If AFRAID, you SPEAK LOUDER. When in pain, act, don’t procrastinate. Open that email. Make that phone call. Say sorry.

Quiet Quitting can be unethical. You cheat others, you cheat yourself. And for what? A temporary reprieve from pain, which only returns for the issue that caused it remains unresolved.

Quiet Quitting makes you less useful to others. A mindset fixed on avoiding pain ends by avoiding service. A Quiet Quitter might look intense at work, but in reality may just be going through the motions. He will not have many ideas about how to improve the work place, though he might have detailed options about where to eat that night. Facebook, Instagram and cell phones make it possible to do a lot without doing anything.

Understand that many people have become Quiet Quitters during the pandemic and may be in a worse mental or emotional state than it appears. If you can help them now with firm, gentle reminders, just do it, now, don’t procrastinate.

(QC, 230122)

Most People will fail on the Internet

| jaylazzo

Sophie Howard (Blue Sky Amazon), Internet entrepreneur, claims that you can make up to $200,000.00 a year selling your books on Kindle Direct Publishing.

This is how she says it works. You put on KDP books on popular topics (e.g., how to potty train your dog), topics you may know nothing about. How? Hire ghostwriters. It’s not that simple; the details are available in her course and her books. If you work hard you will create a source of passive income that can last you for as long as your books are for sale.

She probably earns that much, and she has other Amazon businesses aside from the books. But, the truth is only a minuscule fraction of people will earn anything close to Howard’s income; 99% will perform poorly or fail.

People may have bought a lot of e-books during the pandemic, and may continue to do so. But recession and the war in Ukraine will temper economic activity in general. Furthermore, ChatGPT will likely overturn the way on-line entrepreneurs work today. But Howard is intelligent and hard working; she will find a way out. One way, I guess, is to sell her secrets.

Why would she do that? Most people do not have her intelligence or work ethic. She knows she is not going to create significant competition. In fact, like several Chinese stores of the same kind locating on the same street, more businesses means more money for everyone, the lion’s share going to a few like Howard.

“Listen, I found a great way to get rich on the Internet!” There is always a catch, and it is this: only 1 in 10,000 readers will replicate the experiences gurus describe in their books.

I respect the value of Howard’s experiences and how that shaped her. But no reader will replicate her failures. They WILL fail all right, but most will quit before hitting the sweet spot.

No one should be so impressed. The tricks of a guru’s trade can be memorized. What’s hard is execution; what makes execution hard is a genetic quirk that makes most quit when they feel fear.

Fear allowed our ancestors to survive. Fear made them band together, strategize, innovate, whatever was appropriate. But these are thoughtful actions, not usually what come first. Instead, the first reaction to fear is to stay in the cave rather than go out in the dark. A hunter had to train to control his thoughts. He had to learn to reflect on strategy, on priorities, and to delay the gratification of returning to the cave until he had the bacon in both hands and not just just in the remaining hand.

There’s no shame in wanting to quit. The most successful among us feel it, too. What makes the successful different is the thinking that happens between fear and action.

Something else happens between fear and action: conversation. Humans are very social. Socialization serves to optimize our thoughts, by sharing knowledge, encouragement, validation and material resources. Reality checks. Our ancestors gathered around camp fires to tell stories, get feedback, and whatever help was appropriate. We do the same through Zoom.

Whether people react positively or negatively to each others’ stories is not as important as telling them. A NO in today’s meeting could become a YES in tomorrow’s; what happens in between is dinner.

And the thought that happens during dinner. Dinner — a game of pool, a sit-down, etc. — puts conversation between feeling and acting. Stephen Covey gave a name to this time. He called it “response ability”.

We learn response ability and conversation as children on a playground. We learned that if chose not to put up a tantrum immediately a knee scrape we can continue playing. Even if we may have cried a little. With or without the tears, we learned to choose, which may well mean quitting. The point is that we learned to choose our “response”, not just “react” to pain or fear.

As children, we also learned that criticism is painful. The shame that accompanies it may also be a genetic trait to avoid being cast off from one’s lifeline in society. Even then, shame is just a feeling. We can choose how to respond to it rather than just react to it.

The problem with response ability is that it can take time and effort. The impatient who have decided against suicide may try to pretend the pain or shame were nothing. A tough person will treat any feeling, however, as a SIGNAL that points to some fact about one’s situation. The feeling is not the truth itself, and in many ways can be made to mean what we decide we want it to mean.

The shame from criticism thus points to a real matter where we can make progress.

Not everyone appreciates feedback, though. Perhaps, self improvement will require effort, the thought alone of which might be scary. They call them comfort zones for a reason. We might withhold criticism for fear of hurting another. In a way, however, we can’t avoid hurting people from time to time. Tough people will listen to you, though.

I also read that psycopaths can be very successful. Psycopaths are expert at reading emotion, yet they themselves feel none. Thoughtful action is their expertise, and that’s why they can manipulate people so well. Although one has to be born with the condition, normal people can learn from psychopaths the skill of inserting thought between feeling and action.

I don’t think Sophie Howard is a psychopath, though. She’s just smarter than most of us.

(QC, 230121)

Dams and dikes

| jaylazzo

An explorer once left his country in search of land to colonize. With him came a small band of family and friends. One was a mason, another was an excavator, his wife was a baker, and so on.

The band came upon a beautiful valley that no one else had ever lived in. Good meat was plentiful. There was a wide stream and the water was delicious. They decided to settle.

A month after building their provisional log houses, dark clouds formed around the top of a mountain: a storm. Soon, their stream turned into a violent torrent that flooded the camp, killed a dozen animals and destroyed a third of the houses.

But it did not destroy the toolhouse. The explorer took stock, brought together his mason and excavator. Soon they had built a dike. At a strategic point they built a dam and a mill.

The following month another storm struck. This time the dikes and the dam held and channeled the raging waters. In addition, the colony had enough water dammed up to power the mill for months.

The colony had no control either over the timing of the rains nor of its quantity. They had little control of the nature of the soil, the diversity of the wildlife, the nature of the seasons, diseases. They had more control over where to settle, but once that decision was made, the rest was to channel the forces of nature. In this, their ingenuity and skill, the most important of their tools, stayed intact and became more sharp.

I told this to a friend who had recently been struggling with a deluge of concerns. These had to do with family properties, problems with clients, and work deliverables. Thinking about them kept him awake at night, especially the property issues. He got little sleep, which made it even harder for him to think and organize during the day, causing physical distress as well. I suggested that he put dikes and dams around his day.

I suggested that he first describe how he would like every concern end. A concern that could take years to resolve completely can always be cut into day-sized fragments. At the start of every day he should describe how an issue would end FOR THAT DAY. He might say, for instance, that he will have negotiated a contract for tenant, phone client B to reset an appointment, and submit a proposal to C with the modified line item budget.

Then work to get the day’s output, and only that. When done, it’s done for the day. When unfinished, set a new output for the following day. Then think no more about it. What’s the use of a leaking dam? Sometimes leaks may be tolerated and release of extra water allowed. But in general, no leaks, better sleep.

The colony thrived for another hundred and fifty years, until it folded up from falling birth rates.

(QC, 230119)

The Diderot Effect

| jaylazzo

Once upon a time in the kingdom of France there lived a man named Diderot. He was a philosopher. For most of his life he lived in poverty. Figures.

He was mostly carrying out well in spite of his lack of means. But when Diderot was 52 years old his daughter was about to be married, but he could not afford to provide a dowry. The Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, heard about it. Because of Diderot’s fame as a co-founder and editor of the French Encyclopédie, she offered to buy his library for $50,000 USD in 2015 dollars. Suddenly, Diderot had money to spare.

Shortly after this lucky sale, Diderot bought a new scarlet robe. The scarlet robe was very beautiful. It was so beautiful that Diderot immediately noticed how out of place it seemed when surrounded by the rest of his common possessions. There was no more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty between his robe and the rest of his items. Diderot soon bought new things to match the beauty of his robe.

He replaced his old rug with a new one from Damascus. He decorated his home with beautiful sculptures and a better kitchen table. He bought a new mirror to place above the mantle and his “straw chair was relegated to the antechamber by a leather chair.

But within three months, Diderot lost all his money. He said to himself: “I don’t cry, I don’t sigh, but every moment I say: Cursed be he who invented the art of putting a price on common material by tinting it scarlet. Cursed be the precious garment that I revere. Where is my old, my humble, my comfortable rag of common cloth?

“My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.”

Fortunately, the Empress of Russia Catherine the Great had also offered him the job of personal librarian, which came with an annual salary to last the rest of his life. Diderot was saved. In 1769 he wrote an essay entitled “Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown, or A warning to those who have more taste than fortune”. Some years later, in 1773, he visited Russia to personally thank the Empress. After five months he returned to Paris and lived in relative simplicity, happiness, and productivity until he died in 1784 of a pulmonary embolism while having lunch.

The behavior he described has been called the Diderot Effect.

The Diderot Effect has nothing to do with dying while having lunch. Rather, it is primarily a social behavior related to consumer goods. It states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads one to acquire more new things. As a result, we end up buying things that our previous selves never needed to feel happy or fulfilled.

For example, you buy a new car. You follow this up by purchasing all sorts of accessories to go inside it. You buy a tire pressure gauge, a charger for the cell phone, an extra umbrella, a first aid kit, a pocket knife, a flashlight, emergency blankets, and even a seatbelt cutting tool. At this point, you have already forgotten about your trusty old car of nearly 10 years during which you felt that none of those items were worth purchasing. Or you buy a CrossFit membership and soon you’re paying for foam rollers, knee sleeves, wrist wraps, and paleo meal plans. You buy a lazy boy and suddenly you’re questioning the layout of your entire living room. Those chairs? That coffee table? That rug? They all gotta go man.

The Diderot Effect is based on two ideas. First, goods purchased by consumers will align with one’s sense of identity and as a result goods and identity will complement one another. And second, the introduction of a new possession that deviates from the consumer’s current complementary goods can result in a process of spiraling consumption. The emotional driver is a sense that a purchase or gift creates dissatisfaction with existing possessions and environment, provoking a potentially spiraling pattern of consumption with negative environmental, psychological, and social impacts.

Another way of putting it is that we become what we buy and buy what we want to become. Consumerism, simply. Consumerism is a style of life directed towards “having” rather than “being” — because in fact having and being become one. Consumerism creates a “web of false and superficial gratifications”, wrote St. John Paul II. It leads to “attitudes and life styles… which are objectively improper and often damaging to [our] physical and spiritual health”, said the same Pope. It weakens the development and stability of personal relationships, said Pope Francis, prevents man’s growth as a human being (St Paul VI); prevents us from cherishing each thing and each moment and distorts family bonds (Pope Francis); leads us to shut others out (St Paul VI); and we become not the lords and masters but the slaves of material wealth (Pope Pius XII).

Consumerism brings many social ills as well.

Catholic social teaching is clear: “It is not wrong to want to live better, what is wrong is a style of life… which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself.” (Pope St. John Paul II, 36). For a person who is concerned solely or primarily with possessing and enjoying – who can no longer subordinate his instincts, cannot be free.

Here are a number of suggestions for overcoming the Diderot Effect.

Reduce exposure. Nearly every habit is initiated by a trigger. A quick way to reduce the power of the Diderot Effect is to avoid the habit triggers that cause it in the first place. Unsubscribe from commercial emails. Meet friends at the park rather than the mall. Be productive at work.

Buy items that fit your current system. You don’t have to start from scratch each time you buy something new. When you purchase new clothes, look for items that work well with your current wardrobe. When you upgrade to new electronics, get things that play nicely with your current pieces so you can avoid buying new chargers, adapters, or cables.

Set self-imposed limits. Put limits for you to operate within. For example, put a cap on your ordinary expenses, and consult extraordinary expenses. Set a limit to social media time, which also limits your exposure to ads.

Buy One, Give One. Each time you make a new purchase, give something away. The idea is to prevent your number of items from growing. Said Maria Kondo, always be curating your life to include only the things that bring you joy.

Go one month without buying something new. Don’t allow yourself to buy any new items for one month. Instead of buying, rent. If you need a new shirt at this time, get it from ukay ukay. Constraint is the mother of resourcefulness.

Let go of wanting things. There is always something to upgrade to. Do you really need the specs of that new cellphone?

Cultivate good taste. Notice how the nouveau riche acquire so many things AND have little taste? A person with good taste tends to have a good handle on limits; exceeding those limits causes disgust, a powerful emotion. Good taste also brings intellectual conviction such that one doesn’t need to feel disgust — one just won’t buy, period. Good taste does not correlate with degrees or diplomas, is hard to acquire, and will require more treatment than is allowed in this piece.

And just because an acquisition will not involve any out-of-pocket money does not mean you can ignore these suggestions. We can still go astray by downloading hundreds of free ebooks and saving thousands of art photos, most of which we will never study or read. And it’s not just about downloading: some people love to UPLOAD photos of their food and vacations in order to acquire LIKES. I think likes are a novel form of wealth, which some can monetize even. But for most, LIKES are worthless. Again, it’s not wrong to have SOME of these.

The goal, I think, is not to reduce life to the fewest amount of things, but to fill it with the optimal amount of things. In Diderot’s words, “Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.”

Trivia: Diderot was funny. The entry he wrote for the Aguaxima plant goes: “Aguaxima, a plant growing in Brazil and on the islands of South America. This is all that we are told about it; and I would like to know for whom such descriptions are made. It cannot be for the natives of the countries concerned, who are likely to know more about the aguaxima than is contained in this description, and who do not need to learn that the aguaxima grows in their country. It is as if you said to a Frenchman that the pear tree is a tree that grows in France, in Germany, etc . It is not meant for us either, for what do we care that there is a tree in Brazil named aguaxima, if all we know about it is its name? What is the point of giving the name? It leaves the ignorant just as they were and teaches the rest of us nothing. If all the same I mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something stupid than to find no article at all.”

Is there a third eye?

| jaylazzo

I had a conversation with a colleague who claimed he could see people in a room who no one else can see. I did a little research on the question: “Is there scientific proof ghosts exist?” An article that appeared in the Voice of America News, “Neuroscientists awaken ‘ghosts’ in brain” (https://www.voanews.com/a/neuroscientists-awaken-ghosts-in-brain/2510807.html) suggests that the feeling of presence (FoP) may be a neurological phenomenon.

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne studied the brains of patients who regularly feel a ‘presence’. Using MRI, they found interferences in three areas of the brain involved in self-awareness, movement, and position in space. They hypothesized that the FoP resulted from an interference between our sense of movement and our position in space.

To test the idea, they seated healthy, blindfolded participants alone in a room. The researchers instructed the subjects to move a lever in front of them. A robot reproduced the subject’s movements exactly by touching the subject’s back. The subjects then felt that they were touching their own backs.

Then the researchers introduced a time delay between the subject’s and the robot’s movements. Even a slight delay caused a subject to feel that someone else was touching his back. Subjects felt the presence of up to four ‘ghosts’ in the room. Some felt it so strongly they asked to stop the experiment.

The FoP can be explained as a brain activity.

But what about ‘seeing’ ghosts? It has been shown that visions can be caused by slight vibrations of the eyeball when exposed to low frequency sounds at 18 khz; or by the cellular arrangements that make our peripheral vision very sensitive to motion; or by the tendency of the mind to see patterns where there are none (e.g., bunnies in clouds, face of Jesus on a toast, etc.); to neuronal sensitivity to electromagnetic fields from electronic devices. When a Ghostbuster detects an electromagnetic disturbance, it is the latter that causes the ghost, not the other way around.

We can also conjure ghostly visions to cope with stress or grief. Or we have a brain lesion.

As to hearing voices, this is another phenomenon with a scientific basis, which I will write about later.

These studies do not prove spirits do not exist, only that most of what we think are spirits are not. Some phenomena for which we have indisputable eyewitness accounts and recordings have no medical or physical explanation. I think that many sensible people like St. Bernadette of Lourdes and the Children of Fatima saw something, someone. The Catholic Church rigorously tests these accounts, and even where the Church says they are legitimate spiritual phenomena, she does not require the faithful to believe in them.

‘Demonic’ possessions for which there are no scientific explanations, are another example; they are relatively rare, too. Also hard to explain are demonic infestations, e.g., ‘poltergeists’, and demonic obsessions. I believe the devil is real. But, I think he does his best work in the shadows, where he is not seen, preferring to destroy us by temptation. He works less on fear, more on weaknesses of character, preferring especially those who are gloomy, vengeful, hateful, lustful. Also those depressed and bored. He does not mind if mental disease is credited instead of him.

I do not think there is a third eye. But I will listen for insight. No pun intended.

i met old friends at a wake

| jaylazzo

A friend of the family passed away Christmas of 2022.

He was my dad’s friend and father to 7 children who were also our buddies. We one by one went our different ways as we graduated university. Some went to the US, others stayed, some married, had kids. One from our side briefly dated one of theirs, and my brother is a neighbor to two of them in the US. But, on the whole, I haven’t seen most of those kids in over 30 years.

Until the wake of their dad.

I got to see all of the 7 back home, in the Philippines. The middle boy, M.V., was one of my best friends in college although we were from different universities. I got to meet his him, his wife and one of his daughters in 2015 in the US. Seven years later, today, I got to see the full extent of what my “nephews” and “nieces” have become, thanks to the hard work of their dad.

This is how his kids turned out. They all went to the best schools: Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, all on full scholarship. The two oldest girls, newly married, are employed as software experts in Google and Disney, one of whom is credited with a published VR technology. The oldest boy was offered scholarships in several top schools and chose Harvard.

M.V. though very intelligent was not what we call “academic”, but he in an extremely hard worker. He also had a little something to prove: middle children often do. I recall him telling me that he solved all the problems in one of his engineering textbooks and shared the answer sheet to his classmates. He married young right after college and migrated to the US, where he worked for a software company before founding his own consulting firm.

They never had a lot of money and they still live in a rented apartment. To raise 6 kids and give them good education they had nothing but hard work to rely on. It was not easy.

Education in the US is very expensive. The yearly tuition of just one kid could nearly wipe out one’s yearly salary. The only way his kids could get the education he wanted for them was through full scholarships. This is hell to process.

Aside from showing exceptional scholastic performance, there are tons of documents to fill out. This grueling chore has to be repeated every year. And every year, M.V. is audited by the universities, a process requiring even more paperwork. It was so hard that M.V. has closed his business in order to work full time administering the scholarships for the kids who are still studying.

The boy, M., in particular, is something. His SAT scores are perfect in math and nearly perfect in verbal, stratospheric enough to be offered full scholarships by several top schools including Harvard and Princeton. One question on the application form for Harvard asked “What did you in the summer, and what did you learn?”

M. could have done a regular summer job like most kids. But instead, the dad suggested that 1) his son design and build a product; and 2) that he shadow his dad in his consulting work. For the product part, M. designed and programmed an educational app that used virtual reality technology, with the help of his sister. For the shadowing part, he wrote that he spent the summer dusting the innards of computers.

For someone in high school to design and build a virtual reality app is impressive. But what I found more impressive was what he said he learned from shadowing his dad. M. wrote on his essay that he learned the value of preventive maintenance.

There’s a management adage called the 1-10-100 Rule. It says that it costs $1 to verify your work, $10 to repair a mistake, and $100 to control damage from use of the product. Preventive maintenance is that job, least glamorous, but that makes all function efficiently and effectively. It’s a minuscule investment all things considered.

Preventive maintenance summarizes the whole of M.V.’s strategy. He invested in the unglamorous job of filling out the tortured paperwork, but by doing so he also demonstrated what great work really involves. Work is grind, grind pays.

As to not having a house? “What does a house add to all this?,” M.V. asked me. “Nothing”. You don’t own a house until it is fully paid for, and until then it is a liability, not an asset. Grant Cardone, wealth consultant and author of The 10X Rule, has never owned his own house either.

Today their eldest daughter’s family lives in their own house. On Lake Tahoe, of all places. That’s very expensive, but it’s also very Google if you’re a top performer.

I’m so glad to have met M.V. again.

Then my phone rings; it’s his brother. M.V.’s siblings were downstairs in a shop called Marketplace, and were about to go to a karaoke bar. Could I drive M.V. there? I said, “Sure,” but changed my mind. “We’ll be done in about 15 minutes. Could you guys wait?”

They did. So M.V. and I went down to the ground floor, passing for cheese rolls first chez Mary Grace, which does not exist in the US, and I was able to say goodbye to the whole gang: Some of the Best Friends I’ve Ever Known.

Humor and Professor Dadufalza

| jaylazzo

Prof. Concepcion Dadufalza (1922-2004) is considered by many graduates of the University of the Philippines as one of the best professors who ever lived. She is the author of several books on undergraduate English, and an award is given in this University in her honor.

Prof. Concepcion Dadufalza (1922-2004). Downloaded from https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000221365983-8uyrom-t500x500.jpg

I was one of those undergraduates who took up English under her.

Prof. Dadufalza didn’t have many students because she was reputed to be tough. But she had two gifts worth every drop of undergrad sweat. One was that she could remember the name of every student she ever had since she started teaching in 1950.

Her second gift was her sense of humor.

One day she began the class holding up what looked like a jewelry box. Small, fit the palm of the hand. Before opening it she asked us: Who do you think is the world’s greatest comic? Silence. She opened the box. Inside was a figurine of the Child Jesus. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “is the Greatest Comic in the History of the World.” Silence.

She explained.

Greek drama, she said, consisted of two kinds of stories: tragedy and comedy. In tragedy, the protagonist faces a fate he could not escape. Death just happens to be the most dramatic example, but any kind of inescapable fate is tragedy. But in comedy, no one expects what happens next. Comedy is paradox.

“Jesus is the Greatest Comic in the History of the World”, she continued, “because His life was a series of cosmic paradoxes. He is God, and He became Man. He ruled the Universe, and lived poor. He died, and he rose again.”

I just said it: Prof. Dadufalza was tough. But let me make another distinction we owed to her: the difference between comedy and farce. Farce is the guy walking on a sidewalk, sees a banana peel, steps over the peel, and lands into a manhole. Farce wants you to laugh.

Comedy does not have to make you laugh but it will often make you smile. Only humans smile, by the way. The human mind is able to take any idea, including ideas that clash. The clash makes you smile. Or laugh.

Comedy and farce are sides of the sense of humor. People like Prof. Dadufalza who have a sense of humor are very serious thinkers. Only serious thinkers are comfortable with clashes; they even thrive in it. The rest of us detest crooked lines, imperfect plans, Manila because it’s not Paris, the present because it’s worse than the past.

But clash is essential to creation. The creative power of humor lies in its contrast with tragedy. Logic leads to the inevitable, that 2 is the sum of 1 and 1. The logic of progress says that tomorrow will be worse than today. The logic of creation says it can be better in other ways. The humor of the matter is, there’s no formula for creating.

There may be no formula, but is the creative mindset a gift you’re born with?

About 6 years after I took her class, we bumped into each other in the cafeteria. She remembered me by name. We said hello, then sat down for snacks. She then proceeded to recall a long list of my classmates, plus other famous people stretching back to the 1950’s and 1960’s, including some friends from the 80’s. A friend of hers happened to pass by. “Jay,” she said, “this is Prof. So and So. She teaches metaphysics through dance!” I’ve never heard a more humorous introduction, and the three of us enjoyed our snacks immensely.

As Prof. Metaphysics left, and we ourselves were about to part, Prof. Dadufalza told me: “Jay, let me tell you something. Promise never to forget it.”

“Yes, Ma’m,” I said. “I promise. What is it?”

She answered, “Boredom is a choice.”

I thought: Here is one of the greatest Professors I ever had, and she herself has to make this choice, which I bet she does everyday. The creative mindset is not a given. It is the by-product of a choice.

Prof. Dadufalza died 10 days after her 82nd birthday, and just before Christmas of 2004.