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On the way to and from the Finger Lakes last week, I listened to Barbara Ehrenreich’s provocative Natural Causes.
I am an Ehrenreich fan girl: It would not be an exaggeration to say Nickel and Dimed changed my life.
In fact, you might say the existence of contrarians like Ehrenreich gives me some small faith that the invention of humans on the part of that Great Cosmic Gamer was not a hideous mistake.
##
Anyway, Natural Causes is an exceedingly eccentric volume in which Ehrenreich basically talks trash about healthcare for 218 pages.
Interestingly, she is not talking trash about access to health care or how to fix the broken healthcare insurance industry. Nope. Ehrenreich is talking about the quality of healthcare itself; the book’s subtitle is An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
Ehrenreich starts the book by announcing she is done with the invasive health screenings expected of a responsible person with health insurance. No more colonoscopies! No more mammograms! “I will seek help for an urgent problem,” Ehrenreich writes, “but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.”
If you’re tempted to write Ehrenreich off as a crackpot here, there are two things you should know:
First, Ehrenreich has a PhD in cellular immunology from a reputable university.
Second, Ehrenreich is a breast cancer survivor. “What sustained me through the ‘treatments,’” she writes, “is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health-insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon … I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.”
###
An entire chapter of Natural Causes is dedicated to a scathing critique of “mindfulness,” one of the big, big buzzwords in Silicon Valley boardrooms right now.
Ehrenreich describes mindfulness as “Buddhism sliced up, commodified, and drained of all reference to the transcendent” that’s intended to help little worker bees in the vast technological complexes of Google, Facebook, Apple et al become perfect self-correcting machines. Artificial Intelligence is not a symbolic extrapolation of human beings in other words; human beings are a symbolic extrapolation of Artificial Intelligence.
I was reminded of this yesterday because one of my clients wanted an analysis of Sam Harris’s business model.
Sam Harris is widely referred to as one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. (The other three are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.) Harris has absolutely no use for religion, viewing it—perhaps correctly—as the source of much of the mad sectionalism in the contemporary political climate.
But as he went through the usual GenX maturational experiences—MDMA, meditation retreats, advanced degrees—Harris is in a perfect position to monetize mindfulness. Which he has through an app called Waking Up. He clears approximately $200 K a month through this app. He also has a podcast that gets approximately a million downloads a month, which he monetizes through a subscription option. You can listen to the podcast for free, but if you want to have access to any of those deep, profound insights that only Sam Harris can provide, you will have to pony up. It’s impossible to get figures on that one, but say 10 percent of Sam’s podcast listeners go for the bait. That’s a nice chunk of cash.
###
Sam Harris is not a complete snake oil salesman. I share his repudiation of identity politics, as a matter of fact, and his contention that Islam is quite the most dangerous of religions because it suppresses free expressions with explicit threats of violence. (Practically all organized religions squelch free expression, but no other, in the 21st century at least, has incorporated an overt mechanism like jihad.)
But Harris’s monetization model kinda smacks of PT Barnum-ry: There’s anothersucker—er—seeker of enlightment born every second.
###
In another news, started popping Zicam again. Stopped sneezing. Still feeling woozy and wasted and weak. Since I am incapable of thinking outside the present moment, it is clear to me that I will never feel strong enough to step outside the house again.
Neighbor Ed kept trying to make me talk about the impeachment.
He is very excited about the impeachment!
Alas! I have nothing to say about the impeachment.
Is impeachment warranted? Probably. The very use of a word like “favor” implies a quid pro quo.
Is it gonna get Trump out of office?
Absolutely not. The Senate will never vote for it.
So the whole thing seems like a waste of time and other resources.
Plus it reduces the chances of a Democratic win in 2020. Despite how giddy and excited the Democrats are, I suspect the majority of independent voters agree with my assessment and will punish the Democrats by not voting.
I am an Ehrenreich fan girl: It would not be an exaggeration to say Nickel and Dimed changed my life.
In fact, you might say the existence of contrarians like Ehrenreich gives me some small faith that the invention of humans on the part of that Great Cosmic Gamer was not a hideous mistake.
##
Anyway, Natural Causes is an exceedingly eccentric volume in which Ehrenreich basically talks trash about healthcare for 218 pages.
Interestingly, she is not talking trash about access to health care or how to fix the broken healthcare insurance industry. Nope. Ehrenreich is talking about the quality of healthcare itself; the book’s subtitle is An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
Ehrenreich starts the book by announcing she is done with the invasive health screenings expected of a responsible person with health insurance. No more colonoscopies! No more mammograms! “I will seek help for an urgent problem,” Ehrenreich writes, “but I am no longer interested in looking for problems that remain undetectable to me.”
If you’re tempted to write Ehrenreich off as a crackpot here, there are two things you should know:
First, Ehrenreich has a PhD in cellular immunology from a reputable university.
Second, Ehrenreich is a breast cancer survivor. “What sustained me through the ‘treatments,’” she writes, “is a purifying rage, a resolve, framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter, along with, say, the last smug health-insurance operative, strangled with the last pink ribbon … I will not go into that last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.”
###
An entire chapter of Natural Causes is dedicated to a scathing critique of “mindfulness,” one of the big, big buzzwords in Silicon Valley boardrooms right now.
Ehrenreich describes mindfulness as “Buddhism sliced up, commodified, and drained of all reference to the transcendent” that’s intended to help little worker bees in the vast technological complexes of Google, Facebook, Apple et al become perfect self-correcting machines. Artificial Intelligence is not a symbolic extrapolation of human beings in other words; human beings are a symbolic extrapolation of Artificial Intelligence.
I was reminded of this yesterday because one of my clients wanted an analysis of Sam Harris’s business model.
Sam Harris is widely referred to as one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. (The other three are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.) Harris has absolutely no use for religion, viewing it—perhaps correctly—as the source of much of the mad sectionalism in the contemporary political climate.
But as he went through the usual GenX maturational experiences—MDMA, meditation retreats, advanced degrees—Harris is in a perfect position to monetize mindfulness. Which he has through an app called Waking Up. He clears approximately $200 K a month through this app. He also has a podcast that gets approximately a million downloads a month, which he monetizes through a subscription option. You can listen to the podcast for free, but if you want to have access to any of those deep, profound insights that only Sam Harris can provide, you will have to pony up. It’s impossible to get figures on that one, but say 10 percent of Sam’s podcast listeners go for the bait. That’s a nice chunk of cash.
###
Sam Harris is not a complete snake oil salesman. I share his repudiation of identity politics, as a matter of fact, and his contention that Islam is quite the most dangerous of religions because it suppresses free expressions with explicit threats of violence. (Practically all organized religions squelch free expression, but no other, in the 21st century at least, has incorporated an overt mechanism like jihad.)
But Harris’s monetization model kinda smacks of PT Barnum-ry: There’s another
###
In another news, started popping Zicam again. Stopped sneezing. Still feeling woozy and wasted and weak. Since I am incapable of thinking outside the present moment, it is clear to me that I will never feel strong enough to step outside the house again.
Neighbor Ed kept trying to make me talk about the impeachment.
He is very excited about the impeachment!
Alas! I have nothing to say about the impeachment.
Is impeachment warranted? Probably. The very use of a word like “favor” implies a quid pro quo.
Is it gonna get Trump out of office?
Absolutely not. The Senate will never vote for it.
So the whole thing seems like a waste of time and other resources.
Plus it reduces the chances of a Democratic win in 2020. Despite how giddy and excited the Democrats are, I suspect the majority of independent voters agree with my assessment and will punish the Democrats by not voting.
