Epidote (a silicate mineral) from Pakistan. Could pass as (and surpass) a modern sculpture.*
WHERE DOES SUCH TENDERNESS COME FROM?
Where does such tenderness come from?
I’ve wound around my finger—
I’ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
Where does this tenderness come from?
And what will I do with it? Young
stranger, poet, wandering through town,
you and your eyelashes—longer than anyone’s.
~ Marina Tzvetayeva, tr Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine
*
This is a minor poem about a minor relationship — not to be compares with Tzvetayeva’s masterpiece, The Poem of the End (the greatest love poetry seems to be about the loss of love). But it is a charming poem, and yes, it is tender.
It could have been written only by an experienced woman, probably older than her current love object. And Tzvetayeva makes the most of that experience — these are not the first curls she wound around her fingers, these are not the first lips she kissed. And yet — where does this tenderness come from? Because the stranger speaks to her such special words? Or is it his youth and long eyelashes, and simply the warmth of physical contact?
Not that the reader is meant to ponder these matters. We are supposed to be charmed — and I think we are.
Chagall: The bride with white hair
“When
marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be
able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything
else in marriage is transitory.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
My parents had that kind of marriage. Today, August 4, would be my mother's birthday.
Munch, Nietzsche, 1906
My parents had that kind of marriage. Today, August 4, would be my mother's birthday.
Munch, Nietzsche, 1906*
Oriana:
This is so right on, I almost can't believe we don't rush into the arms of strangers just for consolation. Or just to hold someone's hand.
SHAKESPEARE’S CENTRAL PHILOSOPHY
~ “Towards the conclusion of The Tempest, Prospero famously says, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” This sentiment—that our lives are somehow illusory, and that fiction and reality are closely intertwined—could be said to constitute William Shakespeare’s central philosophy. As Colin McGinn, author of Shakespeare and Philosophy puts it, “skepticism is Shakespeare’s main theme,” for “the possibility of error about people and the world… in its many forms” is one of the consistent subjects of his plays. Shakespeare’s work presents life, like theater, as fundamentally a fiction, and the task of the individual as living in light of that realization.
The question of the gulf between appearances and reality is arguably the central project of metaphysics. It motivated Kant, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, the great pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Plato, for whom, to quote Alfred North Whitehead, “all of western philosophy is but a footnote.” If this is true, then Shakespeare wrote some of the most illuminating commentary (and critique) in that collection of annotations. Shakespeare has Imogene in Cymbeline take part in a moment of dark, ironic Platonism when, upon waking next to a decapitated corpse she remarks, “I hope I dream’ / For so I thought I was a cave-keeper.” In her own literal—and perhaps Platonic—cave she mutters, “’Twas but a bolt of nothing, shot at nothing, / Which the brain makes of fumes: our very eyes / Are sometimes like our judgments, blind.”
Chagall: Midsummer's Night Dream Writing about the hallucinatory world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its “rude mechanicals” and its gossamer sensibility, McGinn observes that the play “is all about the difficulty of distinguishing dreaming from wakefulness, illusion from reality, what is merely imagined from what is veridically perceived.” This theme assumes central importance across several of Shakespeare’s works, from the ambiguous ghost in Hamlet to the statue of Hermione at the conclusion of A Winter’s Tale and the enchanted Forest of Arden in As You Like it (whose very title could grant a degree of relativism). In that last play, Jacques declares, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” We can read this as commentary on the social roles we assume, but we can also interpret it more radically. As A.D. Nuttall puts it in his indispensable Shakespeare the Thinker, “An incipient Platonism is at work within the dramaturgical art.”
Yet this is a Platonism that is combined with a particular skepticism (very much in the air at the time of composition). As Macbeth memorably utters, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more.” If Plato worried that literature was but a pale imitation of life, which was in turn but a pale imitation of the world of the Forms, then for Shakespeare the center is even less assured. It is not that theater is similar to our lives, but rather that our lives are similar to theater. There is the rub, for if, as Macbeth says, our lives’ drama signifies nothing, then we the actors have the ability to endow our performances with meaning, even if they mean nothing in and of themselves.
Shakespeare turns Plato’s denunciations of art and poetics on their head to argue that fictional narratives are somehow more true than reality, or, as McGinn writes, “fiction has greater longevity than material things, since Shakespeare’s plays, say, will last longer than any building erected in his time; immortality belongs, if anywhere, to the characters of fiction, not those of real life.” This is the central argument of “Shakespearean Metaphysics,” though the concept originates not with the playwright, even if he provides its fullest dramatic encapsulation. A few decades before the height of Shakespeare’s career, the greatest Elizabethan literary critic Philip Sidney claimed something similar when he wrote, “Now for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lies.”
Antonio says in The Merchant of Venice, “I hold the world but as the world… A stage where every man must play a part.” This is, of course, a metaphor, but it’s a potent one, and one that demonstrates Shakespeare’s investment in the theme of dreams vs. reality, which is expressed more literally in plays like The Tempest. This is, in part, the origin of Shakespeare’s exceptionality. As McGinn explains, Shakespeare was “original in seeing that skepticism is part of life, not just an abstract philosopher’s question” and that this is especially true “concerning other minds.”
For all of the author’s diversity in narrative subject, it is remarkable how consistently he engages with an argument for the illusory nature of observed reality. In that same monologue quoted earlier, Prospero breaks the fourth wall, saying “These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” Drawing attention to the possibly literal location of the play’s performance, the Duke of Milan says that “the great globe itself… shall dissolve” once the enchanted trickery of the drama has ended. Of course, the “great globe” could refer to the world itself.
Shakespeare’s metaphysics echo Picasso’s, who claimed that “art is a lie that reveals the truth.” But for Shakespeare, life itself is a type of lie. The playwright’s Ars Poetica is not just his demonstration of the deep artifice of our reality, but also of his own talent to construct such deeply affecting and powerful fictions that are, nonetheless, fictional. His 36 plays capture the range of human experience and personalities; that Shakespeare constructs these brave new worlds with words alone is a trick worthy of his Prospero. The very existence of his plays serves as the conclusion of his argument about fiction and reality.
https://lithub.com/what-was-shakespeares-central-philosophy
/?fbclid=IwAR2hK5T54fHSQPRZxdE6WrKdSApDlKfWGrYIXmvjy7LKTf10Gok6cgbCF3Q
Prospero and Miranda by William Maw EgleyMary: BY CREATING FICTIONS WE APPROXIMATE THE TRUTH
Ah, Shakespeare, his endless joyous invention, the exuberance of language and the mind at play — nothing else like him! He is a consummate creator of fictions who knows that is also the central human act...to create stories, and that that central human enterprise is both challenge and accomplishment. Indeed the world is a stage, and we are actors who follow scripts, or ad lib, designing the world we inhabit as we go along. The plays are full of lies and illusions, misdirections and fantasies, stratagems to find the truth in a world of shifting shadows, fueled by desire, ambition, greed … and the whole spectrum of human wisdom and foolishness.
The plays demonstrate again and again the slippery, elusive nature of reality — where we can't sort dreams from waking, the difference between loving one person or the other, the difficulty of getting beyond our own assumptions, the inability to see the truth behind another's lies and manipulations...we are not only all actors, we are liars, self-deluded, easily fooled, whether our eyes are open or closed, or missing altogether. These are found across the board: i comedies, tragedies, histories — from Bottom and Titania, Helena and Hermia, through Lear and Glouchester, Iago and Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and even Prospero, who thinks himself master of spells and illusions.
But what is also present everywhere, and certainly in the act of creating these splendid fictions at all, is the fact that in the creation of fictions we approximate truth. That this is the particularly human process of using fiction and fantasy to uncover, reveal, discover, the heart of our own realities. The play's the thing, truly and completely. Fiction is a tool, a powerful and exquisitely beautiful demonstration of what is essentially human. We create art to create ourselves and the world we live in, to reshape what is there in the same way that we reshape the physical world to fit our needs and desires. It is an enterprise of exploration and discovery that reveals our own shape, recreates our own image — not by manipulating physical materials, but by creating stories, dreams, and fictions.
And to do something Shakespeare and his fellows loved, I would point out that plays are essentially play...that wonderful childish creative act continued to its ultimate degree of sophisticated perfection. So what the article defines as skepticism I ultimately see as not a sort of existential negative, but as a triumphant delight..meaning, beauty, ideas, they're not out there waiting like rocks in the road, they are the resplendent, joyous worlds we spin from our own storehouse of invention, shimmering there on the stages we build for them.
Oriana:
“Art is the lie that tells the truth” ~ Pablo Picasso. That’s the condensation of the more complex statement that Picasso made: “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” But don’t we all prefer the short version? That, in itself, says a lot.
*
“Laughing made us invincible. Not like those who always win, but like those who don't give up.” ~ Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo at the Picasso Exhibition, Mexico City, 1944; photo by Manuel Alvarez Bravo*
“There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril, we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.” ~ Book of G’Quan, Babylon Five
Amethyst Geode in Agate from Madagascar*
“You will not know this for some time, but the longing for something— for someone—is vastly superior to possession. The strain of desire is the greatest sensation, the ultimate folly of God. I believe this is why we are always dissatisfied with art and life and people and experience: nothing can compete with our imaginations and our strength of desire. It is wise to always desire something, to keep something of a flame, an energy, to one's life and heart.” ~ Tennessee Williams to James Grissom, Follies of God
Oriana:
“Nothing can compete with our imaginations and our strength of desire” — this just might be true.
“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.” ~ Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Lava Cap Thunderegg, New Mexico. Again: modern art?*
A MINI-MINI REVIEW OF “THE FAREWELL”
“Based on an actual lie” is a wonderful opening of the movie that’s all about that lie and its surprising consequences.
Actually I could have left the movie after this statement is made: “In China we have a saying: It’s not the cancer that kills; it’s the fear.”
There were chuckles and some good scenes after that (especially the visit to the cemetery), but I like movies that make me think. And it was that particular statement: “It’s not the cancer that kills; it’s the fear,” that made the movie worth it to me.
One of the most interesting findings about cancer survival is that being in denial and minimizing are associated with better prognosis.
Some years ago an acquaintance told me that a friend of hers had a mother who came to the US to have colon surgery. Afterwards, as the mother was recovering from anesthesia, the surgeons told the daughter that there was nothing they could do: the cancer was so wide-spread that they decided simply to sew up the mother’s abdomen. When the daughter got to talk to her mother, the mother asked, “Was it cancer?” The daughter said, “Yes.” “But they got it all out, didn’t they, love?” Again the daughter said only, “Yes.” The mother smiled a happy smile. A week later she flew back to England and got to live for another twenty years, dying of an unrelated cause.
I realize that an anecdote is only that, no proof of anything — and yet I never forgot that story. The movie instantly brought it back to me. Being flooded with relief and happiness — “They got it all out” — may or may not have been a factor here. But it’s difficult not to think that if the daughter had not lie, the mother would have been dead within months, if not weeks.
Both the critics and the audiences seem to love The Farewell. I can’t say I loved it — but I wasn’t bored. And the graveyard scene was splendid. Also, if you like Chinese food, there is plenty of it. Every meal is a feast for the eyes.
(Speaking of food, a shameless digression: cancer and diet) Another thing I can’t get out of my head is what I read many years ago: breast cancer used to be practically non-existent in rural Poland, possibly due to the women’s diet, heavy on cabbage and potatoes (that’s boiled potatoes; fried potatoes, like other fried foods and foods prepared at high temperature, are a cancer risk).
Cabbage! Sauerkraut! Now that I know about the suppression of mTOR (“target of rapamycin” — the signaling pathway that promotes cell proliferation), the fact that cabbage-family vegetables suppress mTOR and are regarded as having anti-cancer properties is emblazoned in my mind. Reading that kimchi (cabbage fermented the Korean way) has weight loss and anti-cancer properties only confirmed what I already knew: you have to suppress mTOR. One effective way is fasting — but kimchi tastes so good . . . And, in the movie, the enjoyment of food seems to be as important as family love.
(As for potatoes, they are a rich source of potassium and chlorogenic acid — two nutrients associated with lower cancer risk. Chlorogenic acid, found also in coffee, reduces the uptake of carbohydrates.)
I was also interested in Nai-Nai’s equally fierce “baby sister.” She is the one who invents the lie and is fully committed to the correctness of her conduct. She’s also the superwoman survivor — she instantly has a plan of what to do after Nai-Nai’s death. If only the movie spent less time on the sour-faced Billi (who can’t even cook, as her mother observes) and more on the two sisters with their unbreakable spirit.
Food is super-important in this movie. But I digress: what is mysterious is the role of psychological factors in cancer. A sudden influx of intense positive emotion can affect an illness. And yes, one can die for lack of love.
Only an average, everyday meal (as far as the movie is concerned). No calorie restriction here! Food is love.*
THE CASE FOR A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME AND A 15-HOUR WORKWEEK
Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists, talks to Ezra Klein about the power and purpose of utopian thinking.
~ “Ezra Klein: In Utopia for Realists, you write, “in the past, everything was worse. For roughly 99 percent of the world’s history, 99 percent of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly.”
Rutger Bregman: We know that every milestone of civilization — the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for women — were all utopian fantasies in the past. So the point is to come up with new utopias: visions of a radically better society. It was Oscar Wilde who said, “Progress is the realization of utopias.”
Every utopian vision starts with the injustices of today. For example, nowadays there are millions of people working in jobs that they don’t really care about. They’re writing reports that no one’s ever going to read or building financial products that only destroy wealth.
So then the question is: How would a society look like where people have actually the freedom to decide for themselves what to make of their lives, where work and play become the same thing? And then you can arrive at different things. You can say, well, we need a radically shorter working week. Maybe we need to implement something like a basic income. But it really starts with: What are the problems you’re facing right now? You’re sitting in the office and you’re just depressed.
EK: Could you talk a bit about your idea of human nature and how it differs from what is conventional in politics today?
RB: There’s no one human nature. People change based on how you treat them.
We need to move to a much more hopeful vision of human nature because, otherwise, you become a cynic and a political change becomes impossible. I’ve had lots of debates about guaranteed basic income with lots of people. You always end up discussing human nature. People believe others are just lazy and need to be forced to do work.
I believe that most people are pretty nice — that we’re generally a cooperative species, that we’re creative, that we like to make our own choices, and that we’re quite playful. There are darker sides, but the point is what you assume in other people is also what you get out of them.
Right now we’ve designed so many of our institutions — our schools, our prisons, our democracy — around the idea that people are fundamentally selfish. The American republic is based on the idea that people are selfish. [It’s] the Thomas Hobbes worldview: if you don’t have the system then you have a war of all against all.
I have a very different view. I think there are lots of great examples of companies and countries and organizations around the globe that have moved to a different view of human nature where you actually trust people to make their own choices. And it brings out the best in people.
One of my favorite examples is a Dutch organization called Buurtzorg. It’s a neighborhood care [organization]. Since 2006, they’ve built this organization, now with 15,000 employees, of nurses and they’ve ditched all the managers. So there are no managers in the company anymore. It’s just self-guiding, self-directing teams of around 12, 13 nurses. They manage themselves and it turns out it’s cheaper, it’s more effective, clients are happier, etc. And it’s based on this whole philosophy that if you trust people then you don’t need to manage and control.
And, if you go around the globe, then you see that there are countries, like Scandinavia and Holland, with high levels of social trust.
EK: One of the things that critics will say when you bring up Scandinavian countries is that they have high levels of social trust because they’re very small and homogenous. There’s this idea that as you become a larger, more diverse country people just mistrust each other more. What do you say to those critics?
RB: They have a point, but I think they overplay their hand. Let me give you one example. Since the ’50s and ’60s we’ve seen so much social science about how human beings are “groupish” — [that] we like to live in groups and our empathy is connected with our xenophobia. For example, in the Robber’s Cave experiment from the ’50s there were two groups of kids going to summer camp and they had this immediate war. It’s always used as an example of how groupish people are even when they’re 5 or 6 years old.
But there’s a really interesting new book out by Gina Perry who went into the archives and found that the researchers had already tried this experiment but didn’t publish the first version because the kids became great friends. Same is true for famous experiments like the Stanford prison experiment. The archives have opened up, and it turns out that for 50 years, it was basically a lie. So, I do see the point, but I think that nowadays a lot of people are overplaying that argument. Human beings also have a great capacity for friendship and overcoming group boundaries.
The utopian case for a universal basic income
EK: Let’s dig into to some of the dimensions of your utopia. Make the utopian case for universal basic income (UBI).
RB: Universal basic income is all about freedom. That’s the most important argument for it. It’s about the freedom to make your own choices. It’s about the freedom to say “yes” to the things that you want to do, and it’s about the freedom to say “no” to things you don’t like — a boss that harasses you or a wife or husband that you don’t really like anymore. If we move to the details, most people would say it’s a monthly grant enough to pay for your basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, and it’s absolutely unconditional so you can decide for yourself what you want to do with it.
EK: As you probably know, I’ve lived a lot with the idea of UBI because my wife Annie Lowrey wrote an amazing book on it called Give People Money. So, I’ve thought a lot about UBI, and it has always struck me that the case for it is typically made in dystopian terms, where I think the case is very weak, instead of in utopian terms, where I think it’s quite strong.
This is a disagreement I have, among others, with Andrew Yang. If automation is going to take every job, then UBI doesn’t do all that much for you. If you’re driving a truck making $75,000 a year and the robots took your job and now you get $12,000 or $15,000 UBI, that’s not a good situation.
Whereas, to your point, if the idea is that we should just build society differently — that everybody should have the basics taken care of; that we want people to be able to search for jobs that fit them, and if they can’t find one, you don’t have to work a terrible job in order to eat — that’s always struck me as a much more encouraging vision.
RB: I absolutely agree with you. I think the automation argument is probably the worst argument for basic income out there. We should never underestimate capitalism’s extraordinary ability to come up with new bullshit jobs.
There’s a recent academic study by two Dutch economists where 20,000 people from 40 countries were asked the question, “Do you think your job has anything of value to society?” It turns out that around 25 percent isn’t really sure. So, this is what they call — I think the politically correct term is “socially meaningless jobs.”
Well, nowadays it’s 25 percent, but it could be 50 percent in the future. It could be 75 percent. It could be 100 percent. We could theoretically live in some kind of dystopia where we’re all just pretending to work and sending emails and writing unnecessary reports, and the robots are doing all the real, valuable work.
EK: Have you seen any data on what kinds of jobs tend to get classified by people as meaningless?
RB: The two economists [from this study] have shown that there are actually four times as many bullshit jobs in the private sector as in the public sector. We so often hear the story about the government being wasteful. But if you ask people themselves, those in the private sector are much more likely to see their job as useless.
Now, who are these people? They often have wonderful LinkedIn profiles, went to Ivy League universities, have excellent salaries. They work in marketing, finance, etc. Still, at the end of the day, if you give them a beer or two, they’ll admit that their job is perfectly useless. If we actually rewarded people for the value of the work they do, I think that many bankers would earn a negative salary while many nurses and teachers will be millionaires.
EK: I think this is an important point. I suspect that a lot of what makes a job feel useful or useless to someone is whether or not it involves directly caring for other people. If you’re doing work where you can understand the way it’s making somebody else’s life better, then it is a job of clear utility. The public sector has a lot of care jobs — teachers, sanitation workers, healthcare workers, soldiers. You can really understand what those jobs do, whereas at very high levels of the knowledge economy, sometimes you don’t.
To trace this back to computers, I am very skeptical that computers are going to replace care jobs because I think that we are very good at inventing more care jobs. The analogy I always use here is we have a lot more yoga teachers now than we did a couple of years ago. By the logic of automation, there’s no reason to have all these yoga teachers. You can just go on YouTube and get a video from the best yoga teacher for free. But people go.
Scribe, 15th century. Yes, it was drudgery. Yes, they made mistakes and sometimes committed forgery (always with good intentions; we owe the story of the woman taken in adultery to a scribe who simply liked what another scribe had invented) — and yet I find this image charming. These scribes believed their work was sacred. It could be argued that all useful work is sacred.*
It seems to me that the future of our economy is going to be more deeply in service jobs. The question, then, is whether or not we’re able to value them to the degree that we should. Right now, we have a lot of jobs that do a lot of work for people, but we’ve cleaved them off from a sense of social status and respect and value. And we’ve attached that value to these other jobs that people suspect are not creating anything for anyone. It’s a sick equilibrium.
RB: And if we assume that the more valuable jobs are often in the public sector, and we also assume that as technology advances and our factories become more efficient, then it’s only logical that we’ll start paying more money to nurses and teachers and care workers — because we can actually afford it. So, I think that in any utopian society, it’s only logical that the size of government increases. As the private sector becomes more efficient, we can actually afford to have better health care and a better educational system, etc.
Economists talk about how it’s some kind of problem that government is not efficient enough compared to the private sector, but I think that’s actually the point. The point of the future is that we can have a huge amount of inefficiency because that’s what makes life meaningful. Good care is inefficient. You actually have to talk some to someone to have the meaningful relationship. If you want to make health care more efficient, you usually destroy it.
EK: What you’re saying, I think, is that in your utopia, the way we value things like work will not be based off of direct market contributions and considerations — that there is some other way we are going to assign value to things different than the way we do it now.
RB: I think the market can still help us. This is one of the most important effects of a guaranteed basic income. If you actually give those garbage collectors and nurses and teachers more bargaining power, they can always go on strike. And we know what happens when the garbage collectors go on strike — it’s terrible disaster.
So, in a scenario where we will have a basic income their wages will simply have to go up. This is just standard economics. Then, if all those people who are doing jobs that don’t really matter, say telemarketers, go on strike, then we won’t care, so their wages may go down a little bit. I can imagine that in the long run, in a basic income society, the wages of people will much better reflect the social value that they contribute.
EK: Technology is robbing workers of power at the same time that unions are getting weaker, and those two trends together are really dangerous. But, let me offer the counterarguments. The big one I hear is that if you have a UBI, of say $15,000 a year, people will not work. You will rob the creative energy of the population. Is that true?
RB: What I tried to do in the book is to see this as an empirical question. When you look at experiments that have been done since the 70s you see the same thing over and over again. Sometimes there’s a small reduction in working hours, but it’s never really something to worry about, and it’s always compensated by people doing other useful stuff.
There have been huge [UBI] experiments in the US. One of them was in Seattle where a thousand families received this basic income. What researchers found is that health improves, mental health improves, kids do better in school, etc. At the same time, you had a really nice experiment in a small town called Dauphin in Canada.
For four years, hundreds of families received a basic income. Same results. Crime goes down, kids do much better in school, health improves. In this case, they had a reduction in the hospitalization rate of around 8.8 percent which is quite a lot. Then there’s also the whole literature around cash transfers that you’re probably familiar with. Around the globe, NGOs and governments have been experimenting with just giving the poor money and it turns out the poor are the real experts in their lives.
Sometimes there’s a small reduction in working hours, but it’s never really something to worry about and it’s always compensated by people doing other useful stuff.
EK: When people hear that UBI doesn’t do a lot to change working patterns, it feels counter-intuitive. But I think it shouldn’t be. First, these UBIs tend to be small. You’re talking about $12,000 a year and most people do not want to make $12,000 a year. Second, given people’s work ethics and their work motivations, it’s strange to imagine that some kind of basic living standard would rob people of interest in working.
I can imagine that argument applying to people with really terrible jobs, but maybe people with really terrible jobs either should be paid a lot more or shouldn’t do them. But just look around. People work for status. They work for meaning. They work because they want more money than they have. It’s not clear to me what UBI would do to disrupt that.
The 15-hour workweek, and what Keynes got wrong
EK: Talk to me about the case for 15-hour work week.
RB: This goes back to a very famous essay by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930 titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” In that essay, Keynes makes two predictions. First, he says we’ll probably be four to eight times lot richer in 2030. And it turns out he was actually more or less right.
The second prediction was that we will use that wealth to start working less because that’s what we had been doing since 1850. So again, he extrapolated into the future and said we’ll probably have a working week of about 15 hours. That sounds crazy now, but it was mainstream back then. Up until the ’60s and the ’70s, almost all the sociologists and philosophers were all talking about the real challenge of the future, which was going to be boredom.
I think what Keynes got wrong is that he imagined that this was a force of economics that we would follow, but it’s actually about real political battles that have to be fought. And [starting] in the 1980s, especially in the US, workers started losing those battles.
EK: Political battles [probably] figure into this, but I don’t think that explains all this trend. For example, you and I both work quite a bit more than 15 hours a week, even though we could almost certainly meet our economic needs working less. And people generally work longer hours as they go up the income scale. Keynes thought we’d trade the extra income for time but we trade the extra income for things, we trade it to keep up with each other, we trade it for status.
So, I’m sure there are political choices that are implicated in this, but there also seem to be cultural or even human nature questions here.
RB: It’s really about how you define work. As a writer with a little bit of success, you get the freedom to do whatever you want. You have your basic income and that’s exactly the kind of society I would want for everyone.
It reminds me of a policy that we had in the ’70s and the ’80s in the Netherlands where artists got a basic income, and the only thing they had to do was produce art. The problem with this basic income for artists was that it made artists much too productive. So up until this day, the cities and municipalities have this problem where we have warehouses full of art from the ’70s and the ’80s, and we have no idea what to do with it.
I think that it has become meaningless to look at paid work alone. People have been spending so much more time on their kids nowadays than 20 to 30 years ago. A stay-at-home mom in the 70s spent less time on her kids than a working mother does now. Is that work? Is that leisure?
EK: I hate the idea of defining the time we spend with our children as work. Our categories here aren’t great. There are parts of parenting that I would think of as work. Then, there are parts of parenting that I wish I had all the time in the world to do. It seems to me that the difference here is about things that are meaningful and sustaining versus things that are not. The categories are weaker than I think we give them credit for.
RB: Yeah. And if you look at the ideological history of this thing called work, often what we call work is work that contributes towards GDP. Then if you delve into the history of GDP, you find they obviously could have included unpaid work in GDP. They chose not to because mostly women were doing it. So, [GDP] is a highly ideological definition of work that economists chose [in the 1930s], and up until this day, we still use this indicator of economic progress.
EK: It’s wild how much we undervalue the utterly core labor of keeping the human species going and learning and capable and clothed. In my utopia, where you’re valuing things differently, we would value care work very differently. I would like to see care work treated as a job that is at least at the median wage. How you’d have to structure society to do that as an interesting question. But it is certainly not an impossible thing. It is simply a different thing.
I don’t always get the opportunity to offer this rant, but I am very frustrated by the conversation that emerges around the gender wage gap where people will say that a lot of it has to do with the motherhood penalty, it’s about how many hours mothers can work or what kind of jobs they take after they have a kid, so the gender wage gap is a myth.
That doesn’t explain away the gender wage gap — it just identifies its mechanism. The idea that if, in addition to doing paid work, you are also caring for children, then you should take a wage penalty, is wild. I’m planting my flag on this: If you are working a hard job and caring for a kid, society should not be penalizing you for that — it should be rewarding you for that.
The thing that I like in your book is that it’s about a vision of what society should be. It’s about human dignity. It’s about giving people the platform on which to stand to live a flourishing life. It’s not an investment and its not form of charity. It’s a form of constructing a society that we collectively think is just.” ~
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/7/26/8909436/rutger-bregman-utopia-for-realists-ubi-open-borders
Oriana:
What really caught my attention here was the statement that if garbage collectors go on strike, it’s a disaster. If hedge-funds collectors go on strike, no one would notice. That’s certainly one way to tell whose work is vital to society.
Another striking statement: People change based on how you treat them.
And how much you pay them is an important part of how you treat them. Higher pay means they are valued.
Then there’s the whole “revolutionary” concept that we should look at ordinary people’s well-being, not just try to make the very rich even richer. Matters such as access to safe green spaces, sports and arts-and-crafts facilities, mentoring in useful skills — the list could go on — those could be the new priorities that would create a lot of “care” employment.
Articles of this sort make me fantasize of what I would do with an extra $1,000 a month. For one thing, I’d employ a chauffeur to drive me to places and events that are now too difficult for me to get to. My life would become richer in experience and human connections, with more material to bring to my writing.
My garden would become a Garden of Paradise. But let me not even start on “better homes and gardens” — that’s endless right there.
The benefits not just to the individual but to the economy as a whole would be almost as endless— as would be better physical and mental health.
No one would need to suffer from loneliness. Caretakers would come to the companionless house-bound people to talk to them and take them on little outings. Or to cook healthy meals for them. Again, so many possibilities, once we start caring about well-being rather than strictly wages.
But these are futile fantasies — the US, which doesn't even have a paid maternity leave, will be the last country to adopt Basic Income — if ever.
*
SPIN-OFFS OF SPACE EXPLORATION
Solar Power
The photoelectric effect, when light knocks electrons off of certain types of atoms to create an electrical current, has been known to us for over a century. Early light-sensitive detectors and meters made use of this phenomenon.
But photoelectric technology didn't become advanced enough to produce useful quantities of electrical power until the space age, when the need to power orbital satellites and space probes challenged engineers to action.
Solar cells were first used in space on the United States' Vanguard spacecraft in 1958 to extend the life of the battery-powered satellite.
In 1959, the Explorer 6 satellite was launched, carrying large wing-like arrays of solar panels that enabled it to operate for months.
Today, solar panels are found everywhere, from giant collector arrays on building rooftops to small panels (or cells) powering all manner of gadgets.
Cold-Weather Wearables
In 1992, NASA contracted Aspen Technologies to develop "aerogel" fabrics for thermal insulation material. Aerogel, first invented in 1931, is created by removing the liquid components from a gel and leaving behind the thin skeleton of its solid structure.
The extremely sparse material is a very poor conductor of heat, making it perfect as a lightweight thermal insulator. NASA employed the insulators developed from aerogel in the heat shields of spacecraft and also the swaddling layers of its astronauts' spacesuits.
Professional explorers and serious wilderness enthusiasts on Earth have benefited from commercial spinoffs of these insulators, in the form of glove liners, boot insoles, and even lightweight insulated jackets.
One climber who summited Mount Everest with a pair of "Toasty Feet" insoles inside her boots reported that her feet remained warm and comfortable throughout her climb, despite wearing only a single pair of socks.
Foil Blankets
The silvery-foiled “space blanket” you may have used on camping trips, or keep in the emergency roadside kit in your car, was another product of the Apollo program, developed in 1964.
The multi-layer, aluminized-mylar material was created to address the need for lightweight and compactly stored thermal insulation to protect astronauts from temperature extremes in space.
The scratch resistant coating you may have on your sunglasses, eyeglasses, or ski mask also stems from the development of spacesuit materials.
In the 1980s NASA'S Ames Research Center came up with a material to prevent astronauts' spacesuit helmet visors from becoming scratched — a serious consideration during space walks and other maneuvers where clear vision is essential, and scratch-covered lenses and visors cannot be readily replaced.
Miniature, Inexpensive Digital Cameras
If you have marveled at the detailed, rich, and colorful pictures that tiny little camera on your smart phone takes — or are just glad to have such a small and portable camera with you at all times — you can thank NASA.
An engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed the CMOS sensor in 1995, a photographic chip tailored for the reliability, image quality, and low power consumption required aboard robotic space probes with limited power budgets and the need to take many thousands of pictures each day. CMOS stands for "complementary metal-oxide semiconductor," a solid-state technology previously developed for use in microprocessors and other computer applications.
This space-camera innovation later spun off a family of smaller, cheaper imaging chips for a range of commercial applications, including smart phones, sport cams, web cams, compact digital and DSLR cameras.
Fireproof Clothing
You might not be a firefighter, astronaut, or airplane pilot, but it should comfort you to know that many of society’s professional first responders and other heroic personnel won’t easily catch fire if put into an incendiary situation.
The fatal Apollo 1 training drill fire that killed three astronauts in 1967 pressed NASA engineers to rethink the use of combustible materials in spacesuits and other furnishings on board their spacecraft.
Working with a synthetic fiber called polybenzimidazole, NASA developed a fabric that would not catch fire, especially in the high-oxygen environment of an Apollo space capsule.
This innovation bestowed fire protection not only upon Apollo astronauts of later missions, it also protects post-Apollo astronauts to this day.
The technology quickly branched out into other government and commercial applications, from the outer fire-resistant shells of firefighter gear, to sporting applications such as clothing worn by race car drivers, to uniforms and protective clothing for workers in industrial settings.
Vac-Packed Food
You go to your kitchen’s pantry shelf and select a rigid plastic-wrapped food item, slit the plastic, and hear that little “phhht!” as the package seems to melt into softness. Then, time to cook.
You may appreciate how the vacuum-packaging keeps your food shelf-safe for months (or even years) without refrigeration, but did you know that the technique was developed for use in space by astronauts?
NASA developed a process for freeze-drying and vacuum-packaging food for astronauts in space as early as Gemini missions. It has been used to supply or supplement the food of all human space missions since.
Bacterial contamination and growth is prevented by the hermetic seal and the low-pressure and -oxygen environment inside. Vacuum-sealing also reduces the volume of the package, making for more compact storage.
Out of this space innovation came improvements to the preparation of commercially supplied food on Earth. Extending the shelf-life of food means less waste from spoilage, greater ease of transportation and distribution, and increased food safety and public health.
Memory Foam
Have your running shoes lost their springy step? Does that old mattress welcome you to bed each night with the hug of a permanent body-formed declivity? Do you have a favorite sitting spot on your couch because the rest of it is just too firm and supportive?
Looks like a job for memory foam.
Developed under a contract by NASA/Ames Research Center in 1966 to cushion test pilots pulling high-G maneuvers in jet aircraft, the springy, resilient, always-snaps-back-to-the-same-shape material that we have come to know as memory foam has found many commercial and domestic applications over the last few decades. Your happy feet, good night’s sleep, and general couch-potatoing enjoyment are proof.
Cordless Power Tools
Imagine you are an Apollo astronaut on the moon’s surface, assembling the lunar rover, setting up scientific instruments, and collecting rock specimens. You could really use an electric-powered tool. The problem: you’re on the moon and there are no electrical outlets for a quarter of a million miles. What do you do?
If you were NASA, you teamed up with the Black and Decker company to develop the specialized motors and batteries needed for completely cordless hand-tools that can operate in the airless, sometimes weightless environments of space.
Spinning off the technology for commercial applications, Black and Decker later developed the light-weight, high-speed motor that powered their "Dustbuster" hand-held vacuum cleaner.
https://www.kqed.org/science/1944981/nine-major-innovations-you-can-thank-space-program-for
Apollo rock drill testing at Kennedy Space Center*
IN LOVE, IT’S BETTER NOT TO BE TOO PRECISE
“Through language, humans have become both more visionary and delusional than other organisms. The nature of language makes it so. With language can be precise in our reference but it's optional. We can also handwave and bullshit like no other creature.
Being precise is a source of credibility, so most of us embrace it in theory without having to embrace it in practice. Being precise is dangerous. When a partner asks "do you love me?" one doesn't respond with "yes, down to about 60% today because I had an interesting flirtation yesterday. I'll probably be back up to around 75% tomorrow. That's around where I usually hover.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Magritte: Lovers, 1928*
HUMANS NOT DESIGNED TO BE HAPPY
A huge happiness and positive thinking industry, estimated to be worth US$11 billion a year, has helped to create the fantasy that happiness is a realistic goal. Chasing the happiness dream is a very American concept, exported to the rest of the world through popular culture. Indeed, “the pursuit of happiness” is one of the US’s “unalienable rights”. Unfortunately, this has helped to create an expectation that real-life stubbornly refuses to deliver.
Because even when all our material and biological needs are satisfied, a state of sustained happiness will still remain a theoretical and elusive goal, as Abd-al-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba in the tenth century, discovered. He was one of the most powerful men of his time, who enjoyed military and cultural achievements, as well as the earthly pleasures of his two harems. Towards the end of his life, however, he decided to count the exact number of days during which he had felt happy. They amounted to precisely 14.
Happiness, as the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes put it, is “like a feather flying in the air. It flies light, but not for very long.” Happiness is a human construct, an abstract idea with no equivalent in actual human experience. Positive and negative affects do reside in the brain, but sustained happiness has no biological basis. And – perhaps surprisingly – I reckon this is something to be happy about.
Humans are not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce, like every other creature in the natural world. A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.
The fact that evolution has prioritized the development of a big frontal lobe in our brain (which gives us excellent executive and analytical abilities) over a natural ability to be happy, tells us a lot about nature’s priorities. Different geographical locations and circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological and intellectual functions, but happiness, being a mere construct with no neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue.
In fact, experts in this field argue that nature’s failure to weed out depression in the evolutionary process (despite the obvious disadvantages in terms of survival and reproduction) is due precisely to the fact that depression as an adaptation plays a useful role in times of adversity, by helping the depressed individual disengage from risky and hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win. Depressive ruminations can also have a problem-solving function during difficult times.
The current global happiness industry has some of its roots in Christian morality codes, many of which will tell us that there is a moral reason for any unhappiness we may experience. This, they will often say, is due to our own moral shortcomings, selfishness, and materialism. They preach a state of virtuous psychological balance through renunciation, detachment and holding back desire.
In fact, these strategies merely try to find a remedy for our innate inability to enjoy life consistently, so we should take comfort in the knowledge that unhappiness is not really our fault. It is the fault of our natural design. It is in our blueprint.
Advocates of a morally correct path to happiness also disapprove of taking shortcuts to pleasure with the help of psychotropic drugs. George Bernard Shaw said: “We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.” Well-being apparently needs to be earned, which proves that it is not a natural state.
The inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World live perfectly happy lives with the help of “soma”, the drug that keeps them docile but content. In his novel, Huxley implies that a free human being must inevitably be tormented by difficult emotions. Given the choice between emotional torment and content placidity, I suspect many would prefer the latter.
But “soma” doesn’t exist, so the problem isn’t that accessing reliable and consistent satisfaction by chemical means is illicit; rather that it’s impossible. Chemicals alter the mind (which can be a good thing sometimes), but since happiness is not related to a particular functional brain pattern, we cannot replicate it chemically.
Our emotions are mixed and impure, messy, tangled and at times contradictory, like everything else in our lives. Research has shown that positive and negative emotions and affects can coexist in the brain relatively independently of each other. This model shows that the right hemisphere processes negative emotions preferentially, whereas positive emotions are dealt with by the left-sided brain.
It’s worth remembering, then, that we are not designed to be consistently happy. Instead, we are designed to survive and reproduce. These are difficult tasks, so we are meant to struggle and strive, seek gratification and safety, fight off threats and avoid pain. The model of competing emotions offered by coexisting pleasure and pain fits our reality much better than the unachievable bliss that the happiness industry is trying to sell us. In fact, pretending that any degree of pain is abnormal or pathological will only foster feelings of inadequacy and frustration.
Postulating that there is no such thing as happiness may appear to be a purely negative message, but the silver lining, the consolation, is the knowledge that dissatisfaction is not a personal failure. If you are unhappy at times, this is not a shortcoming that demands urgent repair, as the happiness gurus would have it. Far from it. This fluctuation is, in fact, what makes you human.
https://neurosciencenews.com/human-happiness-14525/?fbclid=IwAR2bUj83QCy1ecM-HEFlT_FB13bHiNzutXmWB_m-FN-FLkhvncuu2ZckCc8
Oriana:
Only moments of happiness seem possible. But we can still speak of contentment.
*
“Probably of all our feelings the only one that is not truly ours is hope. Hope belongs to life, it is life itself defending itself.” ~ Julio Cortazar
Hope by George Watts, 1886*
Oriana:
I wish there had been two flags on the moon: the American flag and the flag that stands for all humanity. Not sure if the UN flag is adequate for that, but perhaps the closest we ever had.
*
WHITE SUPREMACISTS, IT'S OVER. YOU’RE TOO LATE.
~ “There's nothing you can do to make America white again. Minorities will be the majority soon and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. This is now a mixed-race country – legal citizens of all races.
There's no turning back. You can kick, scream, pout, yell "send her back" and pretend you're superior because of the color of your skin but you're kidding yourself. You can pretend you're about to build walls to keep everyone out, but they're already in.
White majority is over. It'll never be like that again. You blew it. Your timing is off. Too many citizens of color are here already for you to purge them to get your country back.
And your belief that other races are subhuman? That turned out to be complete bullshit too. The evidence is in and rock solid. Obviously. There are geniuses and shitheads of all races. We're all human.
I know you're disappointed. Still, your campaign lost. You're just pretending it didn't. Now all your doing is putting your liberty at risk with your silly civil war revival. You lost that war.
If America is going to be great again, it's going to be a different kind of great than the one you're holding out for. It'll be great because we lift everyone up so everyone feels safe and productive on the streets, not because you somehow manage to keep minorities down. That's shithole country behavior.
It will never be great again by you somehow succeeding with your campaign to keep some races down until they prove subhuman. That won't work. You won't be safe on the streets and if you try to take the law into your own hands you're likely to waste away in jail. This little moment of MAGA relived glory is destined to be short-lived. It's a fantasy and you know it.
Grow a pair. Time marches on. Face forward and quit your civil war reenactment. Remember: you lost. The nation slowly integrated to where now it's too late. You reviving dead hopes is a fool's errand. You're making a fool of yourself.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Vladimir Kush: Crusaders. Relates to the various posts by Jeremy Sherman about the futility of ideologies — their inevitable defeat. 
*
NO PSYCHIC COULD GUESS A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE
~ “The idea was that after Eikemo died, psychics from around the world would be given the chance to either remote-view the note via paranormal means, or would somehow get inside the deceased’s head to learn what he had scribbled.
With Eikemo gone, some 2,000 people from around the world participated in the challenge, e-mailing the TV makers with what they thought they’d been able to glean. Many had obviously googled the man and gambled that he’d left a note of consolation to his children (wrong). Others wrote that the secret note said carpe diem or other thoughts and clichés that might pop into a dying person’s head (also wrong).
When the actual Eikemo note was removed from the safe and opened, it turned out that he had written a wonky World War II reference: “Two ME 110 Messerschmitt planes fly over Gandsfjord on April 9, bank west, and fire on Sola Airport.”
Did any of the 2,000 self-described psychics come at all close? Was there at least one person who guessed something about fighter planes, or war, or Gandsfjord, or an airport, or April?
Nope.
Shortly before his death, Eikemo told a TV interviewer that “The illusion that there’s life after death is used to take advantage of the survivors, the loved ones. I would like to show that that’s wrong.”
And he did.
Maybe the episode will put a dent in the number of Norwegians — almost 33 percent of them — who believe there is life is after death.” ~
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2016/10/14/not-a-single-psychic-in-the-world-came-close-to-guessing-a-dead-mans-secret-message/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&utm_content=friendlyatheist&fbclid=IwAR1b28DfbGzBpC9lZYag05GR98cmaVn0ClEuIdwEEvOGoT2IHYtjdD1o4-M
Oriana:
*
WHAT? NO ANIMAL SACRIFICES TO YAHWEH?
“William James opined at the turn of the twentieth century (1902): “Today a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to take seriously.” But a century later, few would agree publicly with Thomas Nagel when he candidly says he would not want such a god to exist. . . . If pressed, many people insist that the anthropomorphic languages used to describe god is metaphorical, not literal.
One might suppose, then, that the curious adjective “God-fearing” would have faded into disuse over the years, a fossil trace of a rather embarrassingly juvenile period in our religious past, but far from it. People want a god who can be loved and feared the way you love or fear another person. “Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in — whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually — agree with each other in recognizing personal calls,” James observed. “Today, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.”
~ Daniel Dennett, “Breaking the Spell”
Another example of why we need to read the bible very selectively:
"I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you. Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods." - Exodus 23:31-32
Oriana:
All the way to the Euphrates? Maybe the Euphrates near its source rather than its mouth.
Still, somehow it's always been about land . . .
By the way, sometimes an important distinction is forgotten. We can respect people's RIGHT to hold various religious beliefs, but we don't have to respect the beliefs themselves. Those beliefs may be very bad ideas, and bad ideas should be criticized.
“I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you.” ~ at least in most Christian churches these statements are politely omitted. Of course we have to cherry-pick.
the Euphrates in Turkey*
CALORIE RESTRICTION AND ITS MIMETICS
~ “Clive McCay designed a low-calorie diet for lab rodents by giving them a measured amount of food to provide all the nutrients they needed to be healthy, but nothing extra. What he found was remarkable: Compared to rats on uninhibited (or what scientists refer to as ad libitum) feeding, the ones on the restricted diet ate about two thirds as much and lived about 33 percent longer.
Thanks to further studies building on this finding, we now know that restricted mice and rats not only live longer, but are much healthier for their entire lives than ad libitum rodents. Diseases that normally take their toll in aging rodents, such as cancer in mice and kidney disease in rats, are held at bay in restricted animals.
Other studies have shown that the response to calorie restriction must be ancient, the result of natural selection for survival during food scarcity, since this regimen also increases longevity in worms, flies, and even yeast.
The most important question, of course, is whether calorie restriction could hold the key to healthier lives for humans.
In 2018, a short-term human study found that participants who cut calories by 15% for two years experienced metabolic changes similar to what we see in rodents and monkeys: lowered blood sugar and cholesterol, and an increase in insulin sensitivity, all of which are physiological changes associated with the slowing of aging in rodents.
However, it’s possible that for humans there could be counterbalancing negative effects, such as suppression of the immune system. The problem with doing the long-term studies needed to address these issues is that it is difficult to find study subjects willing to reduce their calories and stick with it for years or decades because this spartan diet is unpleasant and can have uncomfortable side effects (low sex drive for one).
This roadblock makes the case for developing drugs or supplements that work as calorie restriction mimetics. But we first need to understand how calorie restriction works at a mechanistic level. For many decades after McCay’s studies, it was thought that metabolic rate (which is a measure of how fast the body consumes oxygen) slows down when food is limited, and this, in turn, decreases the production of toxic molecules known as reactive oxygen species, which are a by-product of normal metabolism and also involved in accelerating aging.
In accordance with this theory, metabolic rate seemed to be inversely proportional to life span across a spectrum of mammalian species. However, many cracks have appeared in this theory, such as finding exceptionally long-lived species (bats, naked mole rats) that have unexceptional metabolic rates. Instead, research over the past 25 years has led to the discovery of specific genes and pathways that natural selection may have anointed to respond to calorie restriction and provide health benefits and longevity.
All of this leads us to now: when the discovery of these genes and pathways portends the emergence of calorie restriction mimetics, which might deliver some of the benefits without any of the difficulties or side effects.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-old-age/201907/is-restricting-calories-the-key-longer-life?utm_source=email&utm_medium=newsletter&eha_key=MzY0NDQ4NDE1NzY2NTMyNDY2NDcyMzY5
Oriana:
These calorie-restriction mimetics include resveratrol, its apparently more potent cousin pterostilbene (available online), low-dose rapamycin, and metformin.
The best studied of these is metformin. “A lower level of circulating insulin appears to be an important mechanism of longevity with CR. Hence, all compounds that improve insulin sensitivity have the potential to act like a CRM and improve longevity. Metformin is the most well studied anti-diabetic CRM, which acts by inhibiting mitochondrial enzymes and activating the AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). Up-regulation of AMPK appears to increase lifespan in a variety of organisms. The effects on longevity are likely mediated by changes in mitochondrial metabolism and increase in activity of sirtuin.” ~ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4743377/
A friend asked me, “Can you imagine asking your doctor to prescribe you even the lowest dose of metformin?” I answered, “No way.” My doctor plays it safe and sticks to “standard practice” — so I’d have to be diagnosed with full-blown diabetes before qualifying for metformin. Thus, even being “pre-diabetic” (in which case metformin could prevent diabetes) might not be qualifying enough. Yes, there are a handful of physicians who are interested in longevity and might be open to prescribing metformin, a drug whose benefits have been established by large studies, but these physicians tend not to accept insurance and charge outrageous fees per visit.
So, is there anything the average, non-diabetic, person can do? There are ways to lower your insulin, both through diet and exercise. We also know that the cruciferous vegetables (the cabbage family) appear to mimic rapamycin. We know that coconut oil and olive oil also appear to have a range of health benefits, and greater longevity has been shown for those who use a lot of olive oil (caution: much olive oil on the market is actually adulterated with cheap, unhealthy oils).
Besides, humans are already a genetically long-lived species, and diet (as long as you don’t get obese) may not be as important for them as it is for laboratory animals. Humans need something to live for, something that makes them fulfilled. They need to feel useful. They need to have satisfying relationships with others. Studies of communities where longevity is the rule tend to mention in passing that those are traditional cultures where elders remain useful and have plenty of human connections. Yes, there is much to be said for using coconut oil for cooking and eating plenty of broccoli and other veggies, as well as salads soaked in quality olive oil, but — it’s entirely possible that psychological factors are ultimately more important.
kimchi: never underestimate the power of cabbage*
ending on beauty:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: - feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
~ William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey
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