Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

“In retrospect, it was a bad idea.” “One day we’ll look back at this and laugh.” We all understand that our views on things are not fixed forever. That looking back on things with some critical distance from our actions we’ll likely see more clearly what was going on and what the wiser course of action would have been.

I think the best way we can hope to live is to always see events as we would see them with the critical distance of a few years. The goal of a mindfulness practice, I believe, is simply to see all things with the critical distance that time naturally provides for us much too late. Such that we can use our clear vision of how things really are to act wisely, rather than on to react to what we misunderstand to be unfolding.

This is both one of simplest ideas anyone ever had, and the most difficult. It’s simple. I pretty much captured all that I can about it in two paragraphs. And yet it’s difficulty is real. Even people who’ve dedicated 20 years to mindfulness, or living in retrospect, find themselves undertaking unwise actions from time to time. Actions that they later see quite clearly were inappropriate, and could have been handled better.

Experience and wisdom are shorthand for knowing what is right to do in a given situation. They’re generally born of an ability to see parallels to a previously encountered situation from which it is understood what is likely to work in this situation. But contrary to popular belief, I’m confident you don’t really need either age or experience to know how do something well. What you need instead is a clear vision of all the factors unfolding in a situation and all the outcomes that could occur. If one, even as a beginner, can see these thing clearly they have the potential to do as well as even the most experienced experts to take the best course of action.

When one makes no effort to accurately percieve what is unfolding and what would be a wise way to respond, they only ever come to an adequate understanding through time. But inattentive centuries will hardly make you better at creating intelligent solutions to hard problems than a few weeks of careful attention from someone truly dedicated to seeing clearly and acting wisely.

I am not here to promise that you can be an instant expert in everything if you just learn to use this magical skill I’m trying to tell you about. You can’t, and it would be idiotic for me to try to convince you. But I do know that you’ll learn a lot more if you place yourself mindfully in the situation you find yourself than if you merely move through the routines of your life as if you’re anxiously awaiting some destination you’ll never arrive at.

We have so many stories, jokes, and morality plays as a culture about coming to the end of your life and realizing something about the way you lived it. But we have the capicity, rigt now in the very moment, to have the same insight and clarity that we’re so often told only death provides. Most of us are simply so pre-occupied with other things to see that we’re really not treating our family fairly. That we really don’t care all that much about our job. That there’s nothing more important than the people we choose to spend time with. This is the value of mindfulness. The value of striving to live in retrospect.

I’ve been thinking a fair amount lately about the idea of “gamification”—yes, it’s an atrocious word but a useful concept. I’m sure there’s value in thinking about how we can bring the most successful aspects of games into the concrete world of physical people and objects. I know there are many activities I should be doing that I’m not. Many tasks that the right game-like inducements could make automatic, and maybe even enjoyable.

It was while considering this that it crossed my mind that money is the most successful game idea that exists in the culture. Now certainly to say that money originated from the world of games would be, at best, generous. More likely, it’s just flat out wrong. But the thing that’s interesting about money—and the possessions that we understand to be it’s correlates—isn’t how it came to exist but what it represents about human psychology and games.

Before I get too far, I want to be sure to acknowledge that money is hardly a game when you don’t have enough of it. Possessing money represents a tangible ability to to feed, water, shelter, and clothe ourselves and our families in a safe and easy way. But for the majority of people in first world, this is no longer the way it operates. Any country rich and egalitarian enough to assure that none of its citizens go hungry, homeless, or uneducated effectively eliminates the survival value of money. Even outside of such a society, any income above the locally defined poverty line is beyond sheer survival. It is in these situations that it makes sense to talk about money as a game.

One of the most powerful aspects of money as a game is how score-like it is. Just like the score you rack up as you progress through a level in Mario or a game of Tetris, net worth is a concrete signal that you can use to judge whether you’re advancing our falling behind. Very unlike personal relationships, or professional or personal development, money is almost always transparent. You never have to wonder where you stand with money. You can easily identify that you’re $200 richer than you were a week ago, but there’s no easy way for you to know that you’re 200 points better at not being a jerk.

I’d go so far as to contend that a large part of the much-maligned use of money and material wealth to define success is that people can easily identify material progress. Being less of a jerk is so frustratingly unquantifiable that one has to be hugely better at it for people (including yourself) to even recognize that you have any skill at it. But I can clearly tell that you’re a better businessman than me because you own a million dollar home, drive a BMW, and own this whole restaurant we’re sitting in. But without being almost as unassailable as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or the Dalai Lama, you won’t see how hard I’ve worked to be less of a jerk.

Beyond the ability to know the score with money, it’s got a powerful reward system built into it. If personal development were as easy to score as money, we’d only be halfway there. The other half of money’s advantage is the pleasure that it can offer us. I need a way to get between points A and B: for essentially zero dollars I can walk, for around $200 I can get a bicycle for travel. For around $2000 I can get a beat-up but functional car, for $20,000 a nice new one, and for $200,000 a rare, intricate, and delightful one. This fact has powerful effects on the incentives for the pursuit of money beyond mere score. While we could endlessly discuss the merits of the type of pleasure imparted by say, a new Ferrarri, no one but a fool would reasonably contend that it gives equal pleasure to possess as a simple bicycle.

Wealth also provide a level of the social, cultural, and locational access that many people never see. It is undeniably a qualitatively different experience to be living on $20,000 per year than it is to be living on $2,000,000. Two million will afford you not only the ability to buy free time at will, but also the chance to take that free time in any manner you please. Want to take a few weeks off to see the sights of Kenya with your 10 closest friends? You can. This purchasing of experience is not only wise (research indicates it gives more long-term satisfaction than purchasing things), but is inaccessible to those of lesser means. One wouldn’t even take the time to consider the possibility of an African safari if they and their friends made less than $25,000 per year. This reward mechanic, which is native to money and difficult to imagine importing, is at least as important as it’s scoring value.

Before we finish, it’s worth considering the meta-game of money. There’s a saying much loved by the economics-minded (and damn hard to refute), “You optimize what you measure.” There’s an idea very much in vogue in the last decade “Gross National Happiness.” These are both deeply related to the meta-game.

Because we can only optimize the things we’ve quantified, and we can only quantify rather concrete things, most measures of performance and progress that are used today (and have been used for almost 500 years) to gauge the success of a town, county, or country relate to how well they’ve optimized their money score. This is thus what politicians make their reputation on and what makes countries into magnets. Much of this emphasis on countable measures of development is deeply valid, one clearly is much more likely to have a better, easier, and more enjoyable life in a country with a notably higher GDP per capita. Clearly the Renaissance-era Italian city-states which valued commerce and wealth were better places to live than the backwaters of Scotland. Today, given an even choice, most people would rather be an average citizen of the United States than Chile.

There is much to recommend the use of GDP (or GNP, PPP, etc) numbers. Without them we’d have almost nothing with which to gauge the success of competing countries, methods of leadership, or manners of economic progress. But there is manifestly much they leave out. While China’s a freer place than it was 50 year ago, it’s also true that it’s not the nicest place to live among all it’s economic neighbors. This basic fact is the reason that people are currently infatuated with notions like “Gross National Happiness”. While no one has yet successfully used it this way, it’s possible that if it were ever actually quantified in a universally agreed upon way, GNH could represent a new way for government schemes and governors to be judged that would better represent the whole panoply of things we humans value.

Perhaps there would be great value in striving for such a measure, which would allow people to measure how satisfied they are along all aspects of their life. Certainly a world that sweated GNH points would be qualitatively different than a world obsessed with GDP. But because any attempt to measure GNH would be inherently limited to the factors it decided to value, the notion that it would be an inherently better scoring system deserves skepticism.

And finally, we circle back to this: if you’re looking to create a better achievement scoring system for the world and its people  to judge themselves, you could do a lot worse than emulating the benefits that money has so long provided. If we mean to be serious about this “gamification” business (and not just bullshit it), money seems a good place to start.

In response to some poor writing, Ben Brooks was trying to come up with a good analogy for how computers are like cars. Specifically, how we can use the analogy to understand the difference between Macs and Windows PC. In response, I sent him an email which adds drivers (chauffeurs) into the mix. The crux of it is below.

Let’s posit that blue-eyed people are notoriously bad drivers. They’re randomly slow, they crash the most frequently, and generally are serviceable but unlikeable. Brown-eyed drivers are notoriously dependable, but a little dull, frustrating, and hard to work with. Green-eyed drivers are widely recognized to be the best overall drivers because they’re relatively reliable, as well as fun and enjoyable to work with.

All of this functions rather independently from the car, which can be fast or slow, reliable or prone to failure, etc. Oricchio is right to point out that a blue-eyed driver is going to be as likely to crash, be irritating, etc whether the car is a Hyundai or a BMW, a Chevy, or a Rolls Royce. Similarly brown-eyed drivers (they’re Linux, and outside of your discussion; because there are three basic eye colors I included them) are going to do a dependable but uncharismatic job keeping either a Kia or a Bently on the road.

Green eyed drivers are a little different. If you want a green eyed driver, you have to have a car they approved. And they simply will not ever drive a Kia or Hyundai, as a matter of principle. They believe it’s an inferior experience being driven in one, so they just won’t do it. Sure, you can maybe get them to drive a Chevy (Mac Mini), but mostly they’d prefer to drive something like a BMW, Mercedes, or Acura. This leads people to inevitably complain that green-eyed drivers are super expensive, despite the fact that they’re roughly comparable to other-eye-colored drivers in similar cars.

Friendship—whatever we are to understand that to mean in the age of “friending”—and relationships generally can take place on the internet as well as offline. No one denies that. But few people seem to understand the advantage of internet-originating relationships against the physical-world-originating kind.

To grasp the distinction in a deep way, it helps to understand some of the constraints on relationships. First and foremost, human relationships are constrained by language. Take any two people alive on Earth and throw them into a room. After five minutes no pair that didn’t have at least some vague knowledge of each others language would come out feeling unlike strangers. They may have thought each other nice, friendly, or attractive, but they’d not get deeper than that.

After that, the strongest predictors of relationship success are a broad class of less tangible things, like interests, values, and temperament. These broadly amount to the soft stuff that’s made up our lives. Your languages, appearance, and perhaps even some part of your temperament are hard-wired. After that the strongest factors in relationship creation and maintenance are the net overlap of the soft stuff of our lives. This is why you’ll notice that Christians are more likely to be friendly to Christians. People who love basketball are more likely to be friends with people who enjoy sports. People who value curiosity and knowledge-seeking are likely to feel distant from people who write “I don’t read” in the favorite books field on Facebook. You get the picture.

The final factor in friendship compatibility is the one that was for millennia the limiting factor on human friendship: physical proximity. Before the advent of written language, one could only ever feel an emotional connection to someone who lived near them. Before words were mobile, one could only ever feel an emotional connection to someone who had lived near them. And before we could transmit voices over non-physical media, we could only be friends with people who had cause to send us letters at the physical address of our home.

Books allow emotional connection, but it’s almost exclusively a one-way relationships. For a reader in the past to develop a two-way relationship with anyone whose book he might have chanced across would take a good deal of luck and a strong sense of generosity in the author. Short of that, almost no one ever developed a single relationship with anyone with whom he hadn’t at one time shared physical space. This naturally led us to value these place-originating relationships as their only true form, and make us feel the need to excuse anyone who we met by other means through some series of lies and jokes.

But in case my profile of the constraints on friendship didn’t make it clear to you, I view the higher value placed on place-originating (or “real-life”) friendships as wrongheaded. It seems only logical to me that it is better to build your relationships from a pool of people who speak your language and have similar soft-qualities to you, than to attempt to start from a geographically constrained group and then attempt to find soft-quality matches in a face-to-face series of interactions. This is fundamentally what the internet allows: the friendship process to start from a set of commonalities around soft attributes, and then potentially aim for geographic matching. This is the opposite of the standard process, but certainly the one more likely to yield deep and long-lasting relationships.

To get at the nature of this phenomenon, consider Bob. Bob is an atheist who lives in America’s “Bible Belt.” He has a passion for dance, in an area where prevailing opinion states that only “sissies” like it. Bob could almost certainly find some people who match those two (utterly arbitrary) facts about himself if he looked hard enough around the area he happened to be living because of the nature of his employment.

Or Bob could find a few websites that were as passionate about the tango as he is, and get involved in the discussions that take place around them. Bob would easily find people with whom he already shared an interest, and thus would be much more likely to find conditions ripe for friendship. Surely some of these tango enthusiast wouldn’t be atheists, and some of them would just be jerks, but Bob would find many more people with whom he shared interests with than he would by traveling his local bars. He’d probably even be more likely, if the internet-communities he found were well-populated, to find local people who shared those interests.

Surely, Bob could also mix the quests from geography and affinities. Local tango clubs would be much more likely to allow him to find “Bob’s people” than bars, but we shouldn’t forget that not all Bobs like the tango, and not all interests lend themselves to clubs. This is the essential reason that, forced to come down on a side, I’d argue that internet-originating relationships are likely to be deeper and more durable than the proximity-originating kind.

And so, we’re ready to tackle that title. Around a year ago, this sentence was making the rounds:

Twitter makes me like people I’ve never met and Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life

This is, if I may, exactly my point. Twitter is generally a place that people collect an affinity group, a set of people—authors, movie stars, bloggers, software developers—they like and admire. Facebook is mostly a place people use to catalog those with whom they’ve shared physical space over the course of their life. It was, in light of these facts, utterly inevitable that people who saw both groupings would prefer one to the other.

A pattern I’ve noticed: after I fail to achieve something I think I should have, I enter a period of grasping for any assurance I can find that I’m really better than that failure. Actually, I look for evidence that I’m even better than success in that failed effort would have shown me to be.

That isn’t the only time I look around for validation. To a large extent your, my, and everyone’s life is a series of validation quests. But it’s when my value has been most strongly challenged that I am most completely aware of all the little places I’m looking to make a stand. A place from which I will be able claim some power or importance.

“I may not have gotten that promotion, but I’m nicer than the person that did.” “I may not have gotten that date, but I’m more financially successful than the guys she dates.” “We didn’t win that game, but that’s just because my teammates wouldn’t get me the ball.”

A friend made the point recently that there really is no solid ground from which to make that stand. That the whole quest for validation is itself a part of the way that we humans drive ourselves crazy. A part of our ceaseless desire to have a life better than can possibly exist.

The quest for validation doubtless has evolutionary advantages; it seems very unlikely that the most successful species on our planets has much that isn’t at least a little evolutionarily advantageous. The story for the validation quest is pretty simply: our constant effort to be demonstrably better than others at something leads us to compete harder and survive better than those not motivated in those ways. We are more likely to reproduce successfully if we work hard to be the best prepared for winter, rather than trust that what preparations we’ve made will sustain us through the lean months.

But we don’t live, anymore, in a world where there’s much need to worry about winter preparations. There’s little possibility of dying in most of the world today because we were caught ill-prepared by the fall snow. There’s much said about the cut-throat nature of modern society, but it’s demonstrably less so than most of the past. No one dies in the first world anymore just because it was really cold outside for a long time. Nor do many first-worlders die from it being very hot and dry for a very long time.

And in a world where one can’t derive much success from a constant feeling of insecurity, it’s worth considering the possibility that our validation quests are the opposite of useful. That they are, perhaps, the primary driver of unhappiness in the world.

On the other end of the phone-line I hear her ask her friend “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE!?” Her outrage at my inability to solve her mundane and minor problem got me wondering who the hell “these people” were and when I became one of them. We’re all, at some point in our lives, one of those wondering what’s wrong with some others, and one of those being wondered about.

It’s a strange and unpleasant sensation, suddenly feeling pushed into a group of “THESE PEOPLE” you never signed up for. You were born with a number of characteristic that can lead you to be stuck into an outgroup. The place you were born, the color of your mother, the color of your father, the fact that you don’t have a father, the fact that you were born in this place rather than that, the way in which you were born, the size of your feet, your predisposed weight and height, what you have between your legs… I could obviously go on, but if you haven’t grasped the point by now you never will.

There are also choices you make that affect the outgroups you are thrown into. Even choices that were minor when you made them can make a difference. Pity the poor boy whose only clean clothes were black on a day a bully decided he was going to beat up “one of them goths.” Pity, too, the kid who chose to dress that way because he thought he looked cool, or because he thought it would make him cool, or just because he liked people who did it.

Where you’re working, as in my opening example, can provide an outgroup for you to be lumped into. So can the place you choose to live and the manner of dwelling you inhabit there. The type of vehicle you drive is an especially popular one in the United States. Again, I doubt the value of further examples.

Surely these choices and characteristics do have an impact on our lives. I’m not so deluded as to think it’s meaningless that you have two brown-skinned parents and I have two white-skinned ones. But these effects are created by the people who surround our life, and are not in any way inherent in the characteristics. It’s not similarities and differences among people that place them in groups, but the similarities and differences that people treat as meaningful.

Eventually, you realize the utter banality that underlies the in- and out-groups into which people divide the world. And then you can’t really avoid the conclusion that people can’t be put confidently into any groups. That they’re all just people, like you, doing the best they can.

This site has been available at this web address for nearly four years. Before that, I had a eponymous blog at a different URL for about three years. And during that whole time maybe 100 people actually read anything I’d written with enough attention that they left a substantial response. So I think we can call me an expert in writing blogs that people don’t read.

All this time I’ve had blogs that no one reads, I’ve imagined that a time would come when they would start being my meal ticket (or at least stop being a hole in my pocket). I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person on the internet who’s ever nurtured this hope.

A lot of the reasons no one reads your website come down to your expectation that they inevitably will. While it’s easier than ever to be published (have your words widely accessible), that very fact means it’s harder than ever to rise above the din of the published corpus and actually gain a substantial audience willing or able to pay your bills.

This site, unfocused as it is, makes that problem harder. While my lack of focus is strategic—I want to cover many topics because I feel it makes for both better reading and writing—the effective difference between it and the just-starting-out ramblings of most new blogs is nil. The problem with a scattered focus is that on the rare occasion that someone stumbles in from the internet and finds something they like, they’re given little assurance that anything they see in the future will be like that thing they liked. Consequently, most sites that manage to support writers financially are focused niche sites that do one thing and do it at least a little bit well.

Single-authorship is another problem. Once I’ve told everyone I know who might be interested about my site’s existence, my word of mouth growth is just about exhausted. Magazine style sites, which relentlessly publish new authors, have an automatic and constant source of new traffic directed there by people who just saw their contribution published. (This is also the reason interview sites do abnormally well.)

I’d be remiss if I went too far without mentioning quality. While I’m proud of some of the things on this site, I don’t think they’d be published in volume by anyone. And not all of the stuff I’ve published here makes me proud. Certainly plenty of websites are able to persist on bad writing, but it’s despite it that people read them.

More than that, I publish long text-only pieces without any pictures to entice people to read. This may work well for the well-heeled likes of the New Yorker or London Review of Books, but out here on the wilds of the internet, a boring looking site (whose opposite is a visually interesting site, not a busy one) is unlikely to convince many people to stay around long.

I think I first heard it from Austin Kleon (if it was him he probably stole it), but for years echoing around in my heads has been the undeniable—and undesirable—truth that “No one wants to read what you write.” It’s not that they’re jerks. People are just busy and won’t care about things you write without a good reason to.

Old school publishing largely relies on the obstacles to publication as the way to entice people to read. A piece that was published and on an interesting topic is sufficient inducement to get readers in a world of scarcity. In the huge cornucopia of the internet, it rarely is. So if that’s all you’re offering, you’ll probably be writing for yourself (and your twenty closest friends) for the rest of your life.

Which isn’t a problem. There’s much to recommend writing beyond the remote possibility of fame and fortune. But if that’s what you’re looking for, you need to start offering approachable and focused content that people want to look at and have reason to. And if you won’t do that, welcome home to obscurity.

It’s 1950 and the only media you can consume on your own schedule are printed words and records. You have no accessible way to take control over any other cultural artifacts that you may hold dear. You may have thought Gone with the Wind was an excellent picture—as I’ve been lead to believe people once called movies—but you have to wait for a showing to see it. You may like the radio stylings of Amos and Andy, but when they aren’t on the airwaves you have nothing but your memory to relive that glory. And maybe you’ve even taken a liking to this television thing that’s just breaking onto the scene, but that too is staunchly controlled by others. The only cultural products we can realistically say you have control over are the books and vinyl records you own.

It’s 2010, and in your pocket you have a small device the size of a paleolithic hand axe that contains all the cultural products we mentioned in the previous paragraph. All your music and podcasts—as they’ve taken to calling radio programs today—are MP3s, all your movies and television are MPEGs, and all your book are (probably) EPubs. And all of them are instantly accessible in a device smaller than either a book or record were in 1950. Oh and this thing also has access to some newfangled “internet” thing. There’s even a chance it’ll make phone calls.

This, in short, is why the music industry will never be as large a cultural force as it was in the second half of the twentieth century. Just as people today read far fewer books than we’re led to believe they did in the past, people listen to less recorded music. When other cultural forms become more accessible, ones that previously reigned because of their accessibility are bound to suffer. New things don’t replace old things, they fracture the old market.

Music only became truly portable with the arrival stateside of the Sony Walkman in 1980, but it had a personalizable form before that. The falling price of turntables, as well as the arrival of reasonably priced headphones meant that in 1970 you could reasonably listen to a large selection of music alone in the way you chose.

If we jump forward twenty years, the advent VHS—and far more importantly, the release of motion pictures on them—meant that around 1990 you could reasonably have amassed a personal movie collection. Television also became a little more customizable—by virtue of home recording—but the gymnastics required to amass a meaningful collection by personal recording meant that almost no one did.

No, it took until 2000, when television studios realized that they could make money on more accessible versions of their content that they began releasing their shows on DVDs. Then you could really, for the first time, personalize an array of television programs that you could call your own.

And though it started in 2004, it really took until just about today that people might reasonably be expected to realize that they could easily receive the audio-only programming they loved from the radio in much more controllable podcasts. It’s only once that happened that we had a form identifiable as personalized radio.

It’s really not until you have full control over something that you’re able to fully engage with it. I’m sure some—likely older people—will disagree with that statement, but the personal power over the way people define themselves that recorded music had until VHS cassettes arrived is certainly never coming back. And though I wouldn’t deny the potential effects that piracy has had on the music industry’s profits, its problem is far far deeper than that.

200 years ago you were able to assert complete control over materials issued in the printed word. 50 years ago you were able to assert complete control over two universally recognized types of culture. Today you can easily control five—and if we’re willing to count video games, six—unique and interesting types of cultural products. (This is obviously to say nothing of the new things constantly arriving on the internet.)

This possibility for control and deep interaction has remarkable social and cultural impact. In the 1970s, one of the primary ways people would define themselves to each other was their taste in music. Most people knew music, and if they didn’t know your favorites you could play or lend them your records. But if you loved a movie made in 1963, and you were listing it as a favorite to a friend who hadn’t seen it in 1972, it would likely have taken them years to find a way to see it.

This is no longer true. Today a simple trip onto Netflix and they can either stream it in seconds, or receive it on video disc in days. Like records in the 1970, you can show it to them yourself or lend them your disc. Also like the ’70s, they can probably even go buy it in at least one brick-and-mortar store that stocks it. And if none of them do, they can certainly buy it on the internet. This is a revolution that allows people to have deeper ongoing conversations about all manner of cultural products. They’re no longer limited to just music and books.

The quintessential example of this is the enduring popularity of the television show The Wire. Though most of the show’s run happened in relative obscurity on a channel a modest number of US households receive, the show gained some prominence and much critical acclaim as it ended. Since then—when it stopped being available in its original medium of distribution—its popularity and profile has grown. This would have been unfathomable in that half century of the music industry’s cultural dominance.

In 1980, I’d venture that 90% of young people would profess to have a favorite album. Today, I’d venture that 50% might. And this isn’t due merely to the ease with which we can free ourselves from the imposed construct of the album, but also because young people are as able to spend their free time and money becoming movie buffs, television buffs, podcast buffs, video game buffs, as they are to be book or music buffs. This fracturing is the essential problem facing the music industry, and there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.

There’s a type of television that I really like. Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days was sometimes dull, but mostly great. MTV’s World of Jenks is good, If You Really Knew Me is laudatory (if a little shallow and repetitive), and True Life is consistently watchable. Errol Morris’s First Person did an admirable job. The best interviews of Charlie Rose or 60 Minutes fit into this basic category, as can some assorted greatness on PBS’s Independent Lens and POV.

All of these, and certainly some others I’ve never seen, and maybe a few I forgot, penetrate some distance into what it’s like to be a person. Their formats, which almost never involve more than three people, and usually heavily emphasize conversation, require a certain frankness to be compelling. And this is typically a frankness with a wide array of people, frequently those not well understood in the mainstream. The conversations that make up these programs reach for, and sometimes achieve, a whole new kind of discourse.

The majority of TV, and at my bleakest I’d say the majority of people, depend deeply on appearances. Not merely in a beauty contest sort of way, but in a “I’m this type of person, you’re that type of person” way. That is, even when they aren’t directly making issue of the physical appearance of people, they’re making issue of the surface of them.

There’s lots of interesting programming on television about objects—appraising them, taking walk-throughs of them, seeing how they are made, sold, or discovered—but there’s little interesting nonfiction programming about people. What we get in that department is usually celebrity coverage (which is contractually obligated to be shallow) and cataloging of the sordid things that people do to each other. You have slightly better luck with people content in fictional programing, but even there a large majority of it is superficial.

But all those programs I listed above, they really go for it. They strive to ask the right questions to make people open like books. By forcing people to confront, face to face, people who disagreed with them strongly on a given issue, Spurlock’s show forced its subjects to really look at themselves and thus air that look back to us. By asking flattering questions, Charlie Rose has the ability to get people to speak frankly about their struggles. By never turning off the camera, True Life can show people at their most foolish or vulnerable.

These shows have, essentially, penetrated in an impressive way the human condition of those who appear on them. They don’t always succeed, but when they do they can achieve a magnificence much greater than the rest of television even tries for.  They offer a richer and deeper understanding of others than many of us ever try to get from even the most intimate people in our lives. They foster an understanding of another that is massively valuable if we truly want the world to be a better, more peaceful and compassionate place.

In his book Being Peace, Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn wrote:

When you understand, you cannot help but love. You cannot get angry. To develop understanding, you have to [see] all beings with the eye of compassion. When you understand, you love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that relieves the suffering of people.

This is essentially, what makes me love these shows intensely when they succeed. When they allow us to see the deepest parts of a person, and allow us to understand them with the depth we understand ourselves, it becomes impossible for us to see their subject as “other.” The shows give viewers the gift of easy understanding, and thus easy compassion and love, for these people they might never have encountered at all.

Right there, laid out before us, is the strongest force in the world. These shows offer up for us an understanding of others that is deep and lasting. And such an understanding, if fully received, makes it impossible to hate. We cannot love someone we regard as “other,” we cannot hate someone we understand to be like ourselves. And so it is: the key to peace in our time is right there on your “idiot box.”  And that is why I love these programs, these Covert Crusaders for Compassion.

For nearly a decade I’ve had strong preferences about cultural products, but lacked the ability to capture what the difference between them was. I think I’ve finally found what differentiates the things I really love from the things I don’t really like. That differentiator is the way they address the human condition.

The term is problematic because of its tiredness. That is, while people do sometimes address “the human condition,” it is usually students reaching for things they can call “themes” in a piece of literature. This rarefied notion that only literature can or does address “the human condition” is essentially the reason that it took me a decade to realize it was the idea I was looking for.

“La condition humaine”—the term’s failings seem perfectly contained in the French spelling of it—is not something we should leave to the academics and would-be academics, who talk about it only tangentially and briefly in their works few people read. The human condition is the most valuable thing to study and the utter essence of what it means to be alive. The extent to which we understand the human condition is the extent to which we understand what it means that we are alive.

Looking at it now, I can see that what I love about American Beauty, and The Little Prince, the Buddha’s teachings, this video, and Louis C.K.—this is a small selection of things I love, it is neither a complete nor universal list—is the way they deal deeply with the nature of what it’s like to be alive in this time and place, and by extension, all times and places.

Louis C.K. isn’t funny because he’s willing to “work blue,” or because he’ll badmouth his children—he does both of those things if you’re unfamiliar—it’s because what he’s talking about are truths universally known and seldom acknowledged. His comedy is rooted in that dark part of the human condition we prefer to pretend isn’t there. He’s telling the most private jokes in the most public setting. Much of the laughter comes from the tension between the public and private truths.

But no discussion of his talent, and I’ve seen many, talks about this tension. I can’t tell if it’s ignorance, a general unwillingness to “get heavy” about comedy, or something else, but this kind of thing has been frustrating my efforts to understand my preferences for years.

This may well be the central problem with discussing the human condition. It’s heaviness. I have a feeling that it’s so frequently glossed over because it’s one of those topics people prefer not to talk about. Essential to any serious understanding of the human condition is a grappling with the reality that we are not crucial, blissful, flawless, beautiful people who will always be young and never die.

The human condition is, to the extent I find it’s interrogation valuable, a delving into the deeper realities of life. Its exploration, when done well, leaves behind issues of who, what, and when and focuses on the why and the how.

Bad drama shows pieces moving around on a chess board. We see who’s yelling at who, then who punches who, and finally, when they’re due in court. Good drama tells us the meaning of the pieces moving around on a chess board. Or: why that person’s yelling and how that punch won’t make either combatant any better off.

The only place people seem to frequently discuss the whole range of the human condition is in religious practice. But since so few people change religions—the majority die in the one they were born—few people ever spend long looking around for understanding that isn’t contained in their chosen scriptures. And the crutch of these scriptures, I suspect, has something to do with why the deeper nature of life is discussed so little in public settings.

As an atheist-leaning agnostic in an increasingly secular country, I think we can and must do better. We encounter each other most honestly in a place where we don’t worry about the facts and figures we often confuse for our life and meet one another instead as people struggling with similar problems. It is on this plain that we can see how minor our differences really are and how much we share with those people the fact and figures of our lives would have us hate.

Every encounter with a work that really grapples with the human condition leaves the encounterer with something to wonder about. Perhaps it’s: “What would make people do that sort of thing?” Or “I’d never considered that. What else haven’t I considered?” These are the essential questions of life. “Where did we come from?” and “Where are we going?” Most succinctly: “What is this?”

There’s no end to the ways we could seek to the define the human condition. At minimum, I can say with certainty that there exist over 100 billion ways it’s been experienced thus far, and many more likely to come in the future. Any failings in my characterization are due to the the inevitable fact that I struggle to gain access to any more than my own experience of this, our human condition.

That is why, I think, I love the things I do. Because when they succeed they give a window onto how someone else experiences the human condition, and thus grant some modicum of knowledge about the reality of how all of us experience the human condition. And that knowledge is the most valuable kind.