craschworks

What Should I Do With My Life?

http://www.fastcompany.com/online/66/mylife.html

The real meaning of success — and how to find it

by Po Bronson
photographs by Michael Grecco
from FC issue 66, page 69
Read more stories from this January 2003 issue

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It's time to define the new era. Our faith has been shaken. We've lost confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been tested. We've discredited the notion that the Internet would change everything ( and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the grind ). Our expectations have been dashed. We've abandoned the idea that work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that careers should be a wild adventure. Yet we're still holding on.

We're seduced by the idea that picking up the pieces and simply tweaking the formula will get the party started again. In spite of our best thinking and most searing experience, our ideas about growth and success are mired in a boom-bust mentality. Just as LBOs gave way to IPOs, the market is primed for the next engine of wealth creation. Just as we traded in the pinstripes and monster bonuses of the Wall Street era for T-shirts and a piece of the action during the startup revolution, we're waiting to latch on to the new trappings of success. ( I understand the inclination. I've surfed from one boom to the next for most of my working life — from my early days as a bond trader to my most recent career as a writer tracking the migration of my generation from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. )

There's a way out. Instead of focusing on what's next, let's get back to what's first. The previous era of business was defined by the question, Where's the opportunity? I'm convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right. The most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings is the most urgent and pragmatic approach to sustainable success in our organizations. People don't succeed by migrating to a “hot” industry ( one word: dotcom ) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra ( remember “horizontal careers”? ). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are — and connecting that to work that they truly love ( and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined ). Companies don't grow because they represent a particular sector or adopt the latest management approach. They win because they engage the hearts and minds of individuals who are dedicated to answering that life question.

This is not a new idea. But it may be the most powerfully pressing one ever to be disrespected by the corporate world. There are far too many smart, educated, talented people operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of modern civilization. There are far too many people who look like they have their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are. It comes down to a simple gut check: You either love what you do or you don't. Period.

Those who are lit by that passion are the object of envy among their peers and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the source of good ideas. They make the extra effort. They demonstrate the commitment. They are the ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship. And they will be rewarded. With money, sure, and responsibility, undoubtedly. But with something even better too: the kind of satisfaction that comes with knowing your place in the world. We are sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity — if we could just get the square pegs out of the round holes.

Of course, addressing the question, What should I do with my life? isn't just a productivity issue: It's a moral imperative. It's how we hold ourselves accountable to the opportunity we're given. Most of us are blessed with the ultimate privilege: We get to be true to our individual nature. Our economy is so vast that we don't have to grind it out forever at jobs we hate. For the most part, we get to choose. That choice isn't about a career search so much as an identity quest. Asking The Question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. There is nothing more brave than filtering out the chatter that tells you to be someone you're not. There is nothing more genuine than breaking away from the chorus to learn the sound of your own voice. Asking The Question is nothing short of an act of courage: It requires a level of commitment and clarity that is almost foreign to our working lives.

During the past two years, I have listened to the life stories of more than 900 people who have dared to be honest with themselves. Of those, I chose 70 to spend considerable time with in order to learn how they did it. Complete strangers opened their lives and their homes to me. I slept on their couches. We went running together. They cried in my arms. We traded secrets. I met their families. I went to one's wedding. I witnessed many critical turning points.

These are ordinary people. People of all ages, classes, and professions — from a catfish farmer in Mississippi to a toxic-waste inspector in the oil fields of Texas, from a police officer in East Los Angeles to a long-haul trucker in Pennsylvania, from a financier in Hong Kong to a minister at a church on the Oregon coast. These people don't have any resources or character traits that give them an edge in pursuing their dream. Some have succeeded; many have not. Only two have what accountants call “financial independence.” Only two are so smart that they would succeed at anything they chose ( though having more choices makes answering The Question that much harder ). Only one, to me, is saintly. They're just people who faced up to it, armed with only their weaknesses, equipped with only their fears.

What I learned from them was far more powerful than what I had expected or assumed. The first assumption to get busted was the notion that certain jobs are inherently cool and that others are uncool. That was a big shift for me. Throughout the 1990s, my basic philosophy was this: Work=Boring, but Work+Speed+Risk=Cool. Speed and risk transformed the experience into something so stimulating, so exciting, so intense, that we began to believe that those qualities defined “good work.” Now, betrayed by the reality of economic uncertainty and global instability, we're casting about for what really matters when it comes to work.

On my journey, I met people in bureaucratic organizations and bland industries who were absolutely committed to their work. That commitment sustained them through slow stretches and setbacks. They never watched the clock, never dreaded Mondays, never worried about the years passing by. They didn't wonder where they belonged in life. They were phenomenally productive and confident in their value. In places unusual and unexpected, they had found their calling, and those callings were as idiosyncratic as each individual.

And this is where the second big insight came in: Your calling isn't something you inherently “know,” some kind of destiny. Far from it. Almost all of the people I interviewed found their calling after great difficulty. They had made mistakes before getting it right. For instance, the catfish farmer used to be an investment banker, the truck driver had been an entertainment lawyer, a chef had been an academic, and the police officer was a Harvard MBA. Everyone discovered latent talents that weren't in their skill sets at age 25.

Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper — a faint urge. That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer. Of course, there's never a single right answer. At some point, it feels right enough that you choose, and the energy formerly spent casting about is now devoted to making your choice fruitful.

This lesson in late, hard-fought discovery is good news. What it means is that today's confused can be tomorrow's dedicated. The current difficult climate serves as a form of reckoning. The tougher the times, the more clarity you gain about the difference between what really matters and what you only pretend to care about. The funny thing is that most people have good instincts about where they belong but make poor choices and waste productive years on the wrong work. Why we do this cuts to the heart of the question, What should I do with my life? These wrong turns hinge on a small number of basic assumptions that have ruled our working lives, career choices, and ambitions for the better part of two decades. I found hardly any consistencies in how the people I interviewed discovered what they love to do — the human soul resists taxonomy — except when it came to four misconceptions ( about money, smarts, place, and attitude ) that have calcified into hobbling fears. These are stumbling blocks that we need to uproot before we can find our way to where we really belong.

MONEY Doesn't Fund Dreams
Shouldn't I make money first — to fund my dream? The notion that there's an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn't find any.

Sure, I found tons of rich guys who were now giving a lot away to charity or who had bought an island. I found plenty of people who had found something meaningful and original to do after making their money. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the garden-variety fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, go out and make a ton of money, and then come back to the lockbox to pick up your calling where you left it.

It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world — and psychologically adapted to it — that you don't really want to ditch it.

I met many people who had left the money behind. But having “enough” didn't trigger the change. It had to get personal: Something had to happen such as divorce, the death of a parent, or the recognition that the long hours were hurting one's children. ( One man, Don Linn, left investment banking after he came home from a business trip and his two-year-old son didn't recognize him. )

The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom. Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the “practical approach.” But in truth, the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means ( whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be ). It's scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.

This is an extremely threatening conclusion. It suggests that the vast majority of us aren't just putting our dreams on ice — we're killing them. Joe Olchefske almost lost his forever. Joe started out in life with an interest in government. In the early 1980s, he made what seemed like a minor compromise: When he graduated from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he went into public finance. He wouldn't work in government, he'd work with government.

Joe went on to run Piper Jaffray in Seattle. By the mid-1990s, he realized that one little compromise had defined his life. “I didn't want to be a high-priced midwife,” he said. “I wanted to be a mother. It was never my deal. It was my clients' deal. They were taking the risk. They were building hospitals and bridges and freeways, not me. I envied them for that.”

One night, riding up the elevator of his apartment building, Joe met newly hired Seattle schools superintendent John Stanford. Soon after, Stanford offered Olchefske a job as his CFO — and partner in turning the troubled school system around. Olchefske accepted. Stanford rallied the city around school reform and earned the nickname Prophet of Hope. Meanwhile, Olchefske slashed millions from the budget and bloodlessly fired principals, never allowing his passions to interfere with his decisions. People called him Prophet of Doom.

Then Stanford died suddenly of leukemia. It was one of the great crises in the city's history. Who could fill this void? Certainly not the green-eyeshade CFO. But Stanford's death transformed Olchefske. It broke him open, and he discovered in himself a new ability to connect with people emotionally, not just rationally. As the new superintendent, he draws on that gift more than on his private-sector skills. He puts up with a lot of bureaucrap, but he says that avoiding crap shouldn't be the objective in finding the right work. The right question is, How can I find something that moves my heart, so that the inevitable crap storm is bearable?

SMARTS Can't Answer The Question
If the lockbox fantasy is a universal and eternal stumbling block when it comes to answering The Question, the idea that smarts and intensity are the essential building blocks of success and satisfaction is a product of the past decade. A set of twin misconceptions took root during the celebration of risk and speed that was the 90s startup revolution. The first is the idea that a smart, motivated individual with a great idea can accomplish anything. The corollary is that work should be fun, a thrill ride full of constant challenge and change.

Those assumptions are getting people into trouble. So what if your destiny doesn't stalk you like a lion? Can you think your way to the answer? That's what Lori Gottlieb thought. She considered her years as a rising television executive in Hollywood to be a big mistake. She became successful but felt like a fraud. So she quit and gave herself three years to analyze which profession would engage her brain the most. She literally attacked the question. She dug out her diaries from childhood. She took classes in photography and figure drawing. She interviewed others who had left Hollywood. She broke down every job by skill set and laid that over a grid of her innate talents. She filled out every exercise in What Color Is Your Parachute?

Eventually, she arrived at the following logic: Her big brain loved puzzles. Who solves puzzles? Doctors solve health puzzles. Therefore, become a doctor. She enrolled in premed classes at Pepperdine. Her med-school applications were so persuasive that every school wanted her. And then — can you see where this is headed? — Lori dropped out of Stanford Medical School after only two and a half months. Why? She realized that she didn't like hanging around sick people all day.

The point is, being smarter doesn't make answering The Question easier. Using the brain to solve this problem usually only leads to answers that make the brain happy and jobs that provide what I call “brain candy.” Intense mental stimulation. But it's just that: candy. A synthetic substitute for other types of gratification that can be ultimately more rewarding and enduring. As the cop in East L.A. said of his years in management at Rockwell, “It was like cheap wood that burns too fast.”

I struggled with this myself, but not until I had listened to hundreds of others did the pattern make itself shockingly clear. What am I good at? is the wrong starting point. People who attempt to deduce an answer usually end up mistaking intensity for passion. To the heart, they are vastly different. Intensity comes across as a pale busyness, while passion is meaningful and fulfilling. A simple test: Is your choice something that will stimulate you for a year or something that you can be passionate about for 10 years?

This test is tougher than it seems on paper. In the past decade, the work world has become a battleground for the struggle between the boring and the stimulating. The emphasis on intensity has seeped into our value system. We still cling to the idea that work should not only be challenging and meaningful — but also invigorating and entertaining. But really, work should be like life: sometimes fun, sometimes moving, often frustrating, and defined by meaningful events. Those who have found their place don't talk about how exciting and challenging and stimulating their work is. Their language invokes a different troika: meaningful, significant, fulfilling. And they rarely ever talk about work without weaving in their personal history.

PLACE Defines You
Every industry has a culture. And every culture is driven by a value system. In Hollywood, where praise is given too easily and thus has been devalued, the only honest metric is box-office receipts. So box-office receipts are all-important. In Washington, DC, some very powerful politicians are paid middling salaries, so power and money are not equal. Power is measured by the size of your staff and by how many people you can influence. In police work, you learn to be suspicious of ordinary people driving cars and walking down the street.

One of the most common mistakes is not recognizing how these value systems will shape you. People think that they can insulate themselves, that they're different. They're not. The relevant question in looking at a job is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because once you're rooted in a particular system — whether it's medicine, New York City, Microsoft, or a startup — it's often agonizingly difficult to unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards. Your money is good anywhere, but respect and status are only a local currency. They get heavily discounted when taken elsewhere. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.

Don Linn, the investment banker who took over the catfish farm in Mississippi, learned this lesson the hard way. After years as a star at PaineWebber and First Boston, he dropped out when he could no longer bring himself to push deals on his clients that he knew wouldn't work. His life change smacked of foolish originality: 5.5 million catfish on 1,500 water acres. His first day, he had to clip the wings of a flock of geese. Covered in goose shit and blood, he wondered what he had gotten himself into. But he figured it out and grew his business into a $16 million operation with five side businesses. More important, the work reset his moral compass. In farming, success doesn't come at another farmer's expense. You learn to cooperate, sharing processing plants, feed mills, and pesticide-flying services.

Like Don, you'll be a lot happier if you aren't fighting the value system around you. Find one that enforces a set of beliefs that you can really get behind. There's a powerful transformative effect when you surround yourself with like-minded people. Peer pressure is a great thing when it helps you accomplish your goals instead of distracting you from them.

Carl Kurlander wrote the movie St. Elmo's Fire when he was 24. For years afterward, he lived in Beverly Hills. He wanted to move back to Pittsburgh, where he grew up, to write books, but he was always stopped by the doubt, Would it really make any difference to write from Pittsburgh instead of from Beverly Hills? His books went unwritten. Last year, when a looming Hollywood writers' strike coincided with a job opening in the creative-writing department at Pitt, he finally summoned the courage to move. He says that being in academia is like “bathing in altruism.” Under its influence, he wrote his first book, a biography of the comic Louie Anderson.

ATTITUDE Is the Biggest Obstacle
Environment matters, but in the end, when it comes to tackling the question, What should I do with my life? it really is all in your head. The first psychological stumbling block that keeps people from finding themselves is that they feel guilty for simply taking the quest seriously. They think that it's a self-indulgent privilege of the educated upper class. Working-class people manage to be happy without trying to “find themselves,” or so the myth goes.

But I found that just about anybody can find this question important. It's not just for free agents, knowledge workers, and serial entrepreneurs. I met many working-class people who found this question essential. They might have fewer choices, but they still care. Take Bart Handford. He went from working the graveyard shift at a Kimberley-Clark baby-wipes plant in Arkansas to running the Department of Agriculture's rural-development program. He didn't do this by just pulling up his bootstraps. His breakthrough came when his car was hit by a train, and he spent six months in bed exploring The Question.

Probably the most debilitating obstacle to taking on The Question is the fear that making a choice is a one-way ride, that starting down a path means closing a door forever.

“Keeping your doors open” is a trap. It's an excuse to stay uninvolved. I call the people who have the hardest time closing doors Phi Beta Slackers. They hop between esteemed grad schools, fat corporate gigs, and prestigious fellowships, looking as if they have their act together but still feeling like observers, feeling as if they haven't come close to living up to their potential.

Leela de Souza almost got lost in that trap. At age 15, Leela knew exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up: a dancer. She pursued that dream, supplementing her meager dancer's pay with work as a runway model. But she soon began to feel that she had left her intellect behind. So, in her early twenties, with several good years left on her legs, she took the SATs and applied to college. She paid for a $100,000 education at the University of Chicago with the money that she had earned from modeling and during the next seven years made a series of seemingly smart decisions: a year in Spain, Harvard Business School, McKinsey & Co., a White House Fellowship, high-tech PR. But she never got any closer to making a real choice.

Like most Phi Beta Slackers, she was cursed with tremendous ability and infinite choices. Figuring out what to do with her life was constantly on her mind. But then she figured something else out: Her need to look brilliant was what was keeping her from truly answering The Question. When she let go of that, she was able to shift gears from asking “What do I do next?” to making strides toward answering “To what can I devote my life?”

Asking What Should I Do With My Life? is the modern, secular version of the great timeless questions about our identity. Asking The Question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. Answering The Question is the way to protect yourself from being lathed into someone you're not. What is freedom for if not the chance to define for yourself who you are?

I have spent the better part of the past two years in the company of people who have dared to confront where they belong. They didn't always find an ultimate answer, but taking the question seriously helped get them closer. We are all writing the story of our own life. It's not a story of conquest. It's a story of discovery. Through trial and error, we learn what gifts we have to offer the world and are pushed to greater recognition about what we really need. The Big Bold Leap turns out to be only the first step.

Sidebar: One Size Does Not Fit All
Two different answers to one ultimate question

Organization Man Of the 900 people who I talked to, only one has had the same employer for his entire adult life. His name is Russell Carpenter, he's 35, and he's an aerospace engineer at NASA Goddard. We can all learn from him. Russell began working at NASA during college. In exchange for his summers, they paid for his tuition and, later, financed his PhD. Russell is a GS-14, stuck to government pay scales. The money is okay, but it's never the reason to stay. He's building a guidance system for the newest type of satellite.

The halls and offices at NASA are quiet. These engineers are content with slowly pushing toward a solution. Which I took as Extractable Lesson number one: time frame. At NASA, Russell has found an intermediate time frame where he can accomplish the high-minded objectives that his division is charged with, but he's not under absurd pressure to do it all in 90 days.

Aerospace engineers are obsessed with redundancy and backup systems. Russell knows that metals give, that gears slip, and that motors overheat, and he plans for that in his designs. Not everything has to go right in order for it to work. And that way of thinking shows up in every aspect of his life, including how he achieves his ambitions. Which I took as Extractable Lesson number two: His backup plans do not lead to different destinations, such as “If I don't get into business school, I'll be a schoolteacher.” His backup plans lead to the same destination, and if he has to arrive late by a back road, that's fine.

Later, Russell and I went to a baseball game, which clued me in to Extractable Lesson number three: Russell doesn't let himself get burned out. He doesn't think it's a big deal that he's only had one employer. His method is his secret, but it's no secret.

“So what do you do?” For five years, Marcela Widrig had a dream job that compensated her well, let her live in Barcelona, and paid for her frequent travel throughout Southern Europe. She sold modems for a big modem manufacturer. Modems were her means to her ends: money, travel, human connection.

When her company moved her to San Francisco, she suffered culture shock. The Internet was destroying everything that she loved about sales. The new ethos was speed. Get the deal done in a day! Don't even fly — email makes it so easy! The human contact was gone.

The worst part was constantly being asked The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question: “What do you do?” Marcela had been away long enough to have forgotten about this disgusting American custom. She found it degrading and reductive and mercenary. I too used to think that The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question was a scourge on our society. But I'm starting to see that it is really about freedom to choose. A status system has evolved that values being unique and true even more than it values being financially successful.

In other words, if you don't like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it's partly because you don't like your answer.

Marcela no longer liked her answer. She endured migraines and insomnia. After flying all the way to Hong Kong for a meeting that didn't even last one hour, she vowed, “I cannot sell one more modem.” But she didn't quit for two more years. On her vacations, she flew to Switzerland to train in a school for deep-tissue massage. It was her way to move toward genuine human contact. The day she returned from one of her Switzerland trips, the modem company went under, and she was forced into her new life.

It took her about a year to drop the business-suit persona and truly embrace her new profession. The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question no longer bothers her. “I do body work,” she says. “I love what I do, and I think that comes across.”

Po Bronson is the author of three best-selling books. This article is adapted from his new book, What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question ( Random House, January 2003 ). Contact him by email ( [email protected] ).

[Editor's note: Sadly, I cannot claim credit for creating this card. Unfortunately, I don't know who did (I found it somewhere in a collection of funny pictures). If anybody knows, please let me know.]

http://villagevoice.com/issues/0252/savage.php

Hot Spot

Savage Love
by Dan Savage
December 25 – 31, 2002

A few weeks back I invited readers to share their most horrifying true stories of desperate and/or depressing holiday sex. As promised, the author of the best horrifying true story of holiday sex—as determined by me—wins a $75 Toys in Babeland gift certificate. See if you can spot the winner before you get to the end of the column . . .

When I was in eighth grade, my cousin Donna from Wisconsin came for Christmas. She and I were the same age, and she had sprouted some major hooters. After dinner, with our extended family sacked out on couches, I found myself alone in a bedroom with Donna. Without saying anything, I started pawing at her tits. My hands were shaking like crazy, fearing rejection, but she didn't mind. I pulled her tits out of the top of her dress, and she got on her knees, undid my zipper, and took my dick in her hands. I shot my very first load all over Donna's tits. Then someone said, “My Lord!” It was my very uptight aunt, Donna's mother, standing in the door. Horrified, I mopped up Donna's breasts with my shirt while her mother stood there watching. —Jacked by Cousin

I moved away from my friends and family last year to Seattle. As I left work on Christmas Eve, the homeless people were having a trash-can-fire, plastic-bottle-liquor hoedown on University Avenue. I figured what the hell, and decided to join in. I wound up sharing a bottle of cheap vodka with one particularly attractive homeless girl. My judgment eroded, I invited her back to my apartment. Before I could protest, she invited two of her friends to join us. My Christmas Eves until this point in my life were Norman Rockwell-ian clichés. This particular year, I had an all-night drunken orgy with three homeless girls. We fucked our brains out, baked cookies naked, and fucked some more. When I woke up in the early afternoon, the girls were gone. So were my wallet, most of my food, my toiletries, and my CDs. —Finally I Love the Holidays

Last Hanukkah I decided to tell my mother I was a lesbian. Around the table were my mother, her husband Phil, and a couple my mother and step-dad are friendly with, Don and Mary. “I have something I want to share with all of you,” I said. “I'm gay.” My mother gave me a supportive look before turning the attention to herself. “Well,” she said, “I'm really happy you told me that because now I feel comfortable exposing a part of my life to you. When Phil and I first started dating, we found that we both enjoyed nudist resorts. We met a lot of people with whom we're still friends. Don and Mary are two of the people we met there. We've been together with them for three years now.” Later that evening, while I was out on the porch having a cigarette. Don came out. “So you're gay,” he said. “Would you be interested in getting together with us some time?” I left before my mother brought out the carrot cake. —Freaked Out Then, Freaked Out Still

Last year, my husband's folks were visiting us in New York for Christmas. My husband decided to treat me to something I'd always wanted: a session with a dominatrix. I'm not a lesbian, but it had always been a fantasy of mine to be dominated by a woman, tied up, and, you know, other stuff. So my husband made an appointment for me early in the day on Christmas Eve, thinking it would relieve the holiday tension—and the tension of having his parents around. So I go, and halfway through a rather lame, not-living-up-to-my-fantasy domination session, the woman I'm “serving” starts to cry. She's all alone for the holidays, and she's depressed. Wanting to reach out to a person in need, I invited her to come to our house for dinner. Big mistake. When I introduced her to my in-laws as “a friend from work,” she got bent out of shape. She's not ashamed of who she is or what she does, she announced, and then she told my husband's parents just exactly when we met (that very day) and how (kinky sex for money). She lectured me about being ashamed of my masochistic and homoerotic desires (in front of my in-laws!), then stormed out of our apartment. My in-laws think I'm the whore of Babylon now. —Could've Died

My ex-girlfriend was in town from college and called to ask if we could meet up for a beer. Eventually the Coronas became tequilas. After we staggered out to my freezing car, she pulled my face down to her crotch. After I had gone down on her for five minutes, she lifted my head up and, sobbing, told me that she couldn't do this, that she had a boyfriend who she loved. She begged me to take her to a pay phone so she could call him and apologize. I drove around for a while, hoping that she would calm down and not make the call. But when we drove past a gas station, she demanded that I stop. After she was on the phone for a few minutes, she motioned for me to get out of the car. “He wants to talk to you,” she sobbed. Here's how our conversation went:

“Hello?” I said.

“So, what happened there tonight?” he asked.

“What'd she tell you happened?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Went to a bar. Ate your girlfriend out. She started crying. That's about it”

“That's what she told me. Put her back on.”

I handed the phone back to my ex, got back in the car, turned the music up, and waited for her to return so I could drive her back home. —Would Rather Give Than Receive

You want a depressing holiday sex story? This girl has never had sex or anything remotely like it on or near any holidays. For everyone out there who thinks they have it bad because the sex they had during the holidays was horrifying, I say this: At least someone was looking forward to having sex with you. —Sexless Holidays

No holiday sex? Good or bad? Ever? That's horrifying! If anyone needs a $75 gift certificate to Toys in Babeland, it's Sexless Holidays, so . . . you win, SH! Your gift certificate is in the mail, and I recommend you blow your dough on a Hitachi Magic Wand. A Magic Wand isn't a lover, of course, but look at it this way: A vibrator won't tell your in-laws what you've been doing with it, it won't break down sobbing, and it won't come all over your cousin's tits. Enjoy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/15/business/15SCEN.html

The papers cited can be found at Xavier Sala-i-Martin's Home Page here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/papers/referen.htm

ECONOMIC SCENE
The Rich Get Rich and Poor Get Poorer. Or Do They?
By VIRGINIA POSTREL

To critics of economic liberalization and international trade, it is an article of faith that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.

“Inequality is soaring through the globalization period — within countries and across countries,” Noam Chomsky told a conference last fall, summarizing this common view.
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Antiglobalization activists are not just making up this idea. They have taken it from seemingly authoritative sources, notably the 1999 United Nations Human Development Report.

That widely cited report stated: “Gaps in income between the poorest and richest countries have continued to widen. In 1960 the 20 percent of the world's people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20 percent — in 1997, 74 times as much.” It added that “gaps are widening both between and within countries.”

Fortunately, this scary portrait is highly misleading.

“When I started looking at the numbers, I saw a lot of mistakes,” says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, an economist at Columbia. Some were departures from standard economic procedures, like not correcting for price levels from country to country.

“Some agencies didn't adjust for the fact that Ethiopia is cheaper than the U.S.,” he said. “Some of them were hiding numbers that we know exist.” For instance, the report included data from only 19 of the 29 industrialized countries then in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But the biggest problem was not so technical. It was hidden in plain sight. The United Nations report and others looked at gaps in income of the richest and poorest countries — not rich and poor individuals.

That means the formerly poor citizens of giant countries could become a lot richer and still barely show up in the data.

“Treating countries like China and Grenada as two data points with equal weight does not seem reasonable because there are about 12,000 Chinese citizens for each person living in Grenada,” writes Professor Sala-i-Martin in “The World Distribution of Income (Estimated from Individual Country Distributions).” That is one of two related working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research. (The papers are available on Professor Sala-i-Martin's Web site at www.columbia.edu/~xs23/home
.html.)

Counting by countries misses the biggest economic advance in history, completely distorting the record of the globalization period.

Over the last three decades, and especially since the 1980's, the world's two largest countries, China and India, have raced ahead economically. So have other Asian countries with relatively large populations.

The result is that 2.5 billion people have seen their standards of living rise toward those of the billion people in the already developed countries — decreasing global poverty and increasing global equality. From the point of view of individuals, economic liberalization has been a huge success.

“You have to look at people,” says Professor Sala-i-Martin. “Because if you look at countries, we do have lots and lots of little countries that are doing very poorly, namely Africa — 35 African countries.” But all Africa has only about half as many people as China.

In his paper, “The Disturbing `Rise' of Global Income Inequality,” he estimates the worldwide distribution of income by individuals rather than countries. The results are striking.

In 1970, global income distribution peaked at about $1,000 in today's dollars, a common measure of poverty ($2 a day in 1985 dollars). In 1998, by contrast, the largest number of people earned about $8,000 — a standard of living equivalent to Portugal's.

“That's what I call a new world middle class,” says Professor Sala-i-Martin. It is mostly made up of the top 40 percent of Chinese and Indians, and the effect of their economic rise is big.

What about the argument that income gaps are widening within these rapidly advancing countries? With a few exceptions, it is true, but still misleading.

The rich did get richer faster than the poor did. But for the most part the poor did not get poorer. They got richer, too. In exchange for significantly rising living standards, a little more internal inequality is not such a bad thing.

“One would like to think that it is unambiguously good that more than a third of the poorest citizens see their incomes grow and converge to the levels enjoyed by the richest people in the world,” writes Professor Sala-i-Martin. “And if our indexes say that inequality rises, then rising inequality must be good, and we should not worry about it!”

There is, however, one large country where the poor really are getting poorer while the rich grow richer: Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.

Nigeria's economy has actually shrunk over the last three decades, and the absolute poverty rate — the percentage of the population living on less than $1 a day in 1985 dollars — skyrocketed to 46 percent in 1998 from 9 percent in 1970.

While most Nigerians were falling further into destitution, the political and economic elite grew richer. The problem is not too much liberalization but too little, a politicized economy with widespread corruption.

“The rich guys are doing well, therefore reforms will not come,” says a pessimistic Professor Sala-i-Martin. He has begun studying Nigeria, trying to come up with ways around the political problem.

That country is typical of Africa, which is growing ever poorer. Fully 95 percent of the world's “one-dollar poor” live in Africa, and in many countries they make up the vast majority of the population. That poverty, not the rising wealth of Asian countries, is the global economy's real problem.

“The welfare implications of finding how to turn around the growth performance of Africa are so staggering,” he writes, “that this has probably become the most important question in economics.”

's Very Secret Diary of Aragorn, son of Arathorn is hysterical.

“Day Twelve

Triumphant return to Helm's Deep. Got hugged by Gimli. As if I needed to be reminded that he is belt buckle height yet again. Necklace returned to me by Legolas, yay! He muttered something in Elvish that could have been “You're late” or could have been “Throw me down and shag me rotten.” Not entirely sure which. Must brush up on Elvish as do not wish to presume.

Still not King but too busy keeping up men's morale to brood. Upcoming battle should be piece of cake, really.”

Links courtesy of

Rubber boy (.wmv file)

Shadow catchers (.mpg file)

turned me on to Philip Pullman's superb His Dark Materials trilogy. The Third Way, a magazine dedicated to “Seeing the modern world through Christian eyes” has a fascinating interview with him.

http://www.thirdway.org.uk/past/showpage.asp?page=3949

Can I elucidate my own position as far as atheism is concerned? I don’t know whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic. I’m both, depending on where the standpoint is.

The totality of what I know is no more than the tiniest pinprick of light in an enormous encircling darkness of all the things I don’t know – which includes the number of atoms in the Atlantic Ocean, the thoughts going through the mind of my next-door neighbour at this moment and what is happening two miles above the surface of the planet Mars. In this illimitable darkness there may be God and I don’t know, because I don’t know.

But if we look at this pinprick of light and come closer to it, like a camera zooming in, so that it gradually expands until here we are, sitting in this room, surrounded by all the things we do know – such as what the time is and how to drive to London and all the other things that we know, what we’ve read about history and what we can find out about science – nowhere in this knowledge that’s available to me do I see the slightest evidence for God.

So, within this tiny circle of light I’m a convinced atheist; but when I step back I can see that the totality of what I know is very small compared to the totality of what I don’t know. So, that’s my position.

What the hell are they thinking?!? Even if you care nothing for civil liberties, who knows best who the “good guys” vs “bad guys” are in immigrant communities? What's the response going to be to police investigating leads regarding possible terrorists? You think that the next time Iman learns of a terrorist plot, he's going to talk to the authorities?

Fools. Bloody fools.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/americas/2589317.stm

BBC NEWS

Mass arrests of Muslims in LA
US immigration officials in Southern California have detained hundreds of
Iranians and other Muslim men who turned up to register under residence
laws brought in as part of the anti-terror drive.

Reports say between 500 and 700 men were arrested in and around Los Angeles
after they complied with an order to register by 16 December.

” People went down wanting to co-operate and then they were detained “
Ramona Ripston
civil liberties leader

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is refusing to say how
many people were arrested but said detainees were being held for suspected
visa violations and other offences.

The arrests sparked angry protests in Los Angeles by thousands of
Iranian-Americans waving banners which read “What's next? Concentration
camps?” and “Free our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons”.

Official radio in Iran also reported the arrests and the protests, which it
said were mounted by families of the detainees who converged on Los Angeles.

Deadline

Under the new US immigration rules, all male immigrants aged 16 and over
from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria had to register with authorities by
Monday unless they had been naturalised as citizens.

Immigrants from other mainly Muslim states have been set later deadlines
for registration.

Community groups said men had been arrested in Los Angeles and nearby
Orange County as well as San Diego.

California is home to about 600,000 Iranians who have been living in exile
since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

One of the Iranian-American demonstrators in Los Angeles, Ali Bozorgmehr,
told the French news agency AFP that his community was being targeted
unjustly.

“All Iranians that live in America are hard-working people… They love
this country and all… are against terrorism,” he said.

'Shocking'

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California chapter of
the American Civil Liberties Union, said the arrests were reminiscent of
the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

REGISTRATION ORDER
# Introduced after 11 September attacks
# Affects all males over 16 from a list of Arab or Mid-East countries who
do not have permanent resident status in the US
# A 10 January deadline will affect men from Afghanistan, Lebanon, Eritrea,
North Korea, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen

“I think it is shocking what is happening,” she said.

“We are getting a lot of telephone calls from people. We are hearing that
people went down wanting to co-operate and then they were detained.”

Islamic community leaders said many detainees had been living, working and
paying taxes in the US for up to a decade and had families there.

“Terrorists most likely wouldn't come to the INS to register,” said Sabiha
Khan of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American Islamic
Relations.

She said the detainees were “being treated as criminals, and that really
goes against American ideals of fairness, and justice and democracy”.

http://victoria.tc.ca/int-grps/books/techrev/bkatshrg.rvw

From Robert M. Slade's review of Atlas Shrugged:

“Marriage vows in an objectivist church would probably run along the
lines of “Do you promise to attempt to dominate and subdue this woman
until such time as you grow bored?” “Maybe.” “Close enough. And do
you promise to applaud this man`s production until such time as you
find someone with a bigger … corporation?” “Whatever.” “By the
power vested in me by having scammed you guys out of a marriage
license fee, I now pronounce you man and appendage. May you be
unencumbered by small persons.”

http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-121102D

For Richer, Not for Poorer
By Stephen W. Stanton 12/11/2002
E-Mail Bookmark Print Save
TCS
A recent TCS column discussed the dark side of double taxation. In a nutshell, it demonstrated how this quirk of our tax code makes the stock markets more volatile, increases the number of bankruptcies, and chokes off dividend payments to shareholders, nearly a third of whom make less than $30,000 a year. The story gets worse from there. So bad, in fact, that it calls for another column.

What many voters and politicians fail to grasp is that double taxation is often regressive. In fact, Bill Gates does not worry about double taxation. Microsoft does not pay dividends, even with $38 billion in cash and short-term investments. Warren Buffet has not received a nickel in dividends from Berkshire Hathaway over the past 25 years, though the company is worth $111 billion dollars. As a result, the federal government has raised absolutely no revenue from taxing the dividends of these two companies. (Forty percent of nothing is nothing.)

Many of the nation's richest folks avoid double taxation completely by simply refusing to incorporate their businesses. Mike Bloomberg, for example, amassed a $4.8 billion fortune from his eponymous company, Bloomberg L.P. Note that it is an “L.P.” and not an “Inc.” That minor distinction saved Mr. Bloomberg several hundred million dollars. The company is a limited partnership, a structure that provides many of the benefits of corporations with none of the corporate level taxes. Other organizational forms that provide similar benefits include limited liability companies (LLCs) and limited liability partnerships (LLPs). Unfortunately, these tax-efficient vehicles cannot be publicly traded, and the average investor can only access heavily taxed public corporations.

Picture the average Joe. Joe owns one share of XYZ Corp. The company has a good year, and makes a profit of $10 per share before taxes. XYZ pays corporate income tax at 35%, leaving only $6.50 in after-tax profit per share. The company pays that entire sum to Joe in a dividend. Since Joe makes about $30,000 a year, his marginal tax rate is 27%. So Joe's $6.50 dividend is only worth $4.74 after taxes. Joe pays a total of $5.26 in taxes, an effective tax rate of 53%. In fact, Joe probably pays even more since many states impose their own income taxes.

Now picture a hypothetical billionaire named Mike. Mike earns about a thousand times as much as Joe. Mike also decides that he would like to own XYZ Corp, but he doesn't want to pay corporate income taxes. So he takes XYZ private. That means he buys up most of the shares and converts the corporation into a privately-held LLC. The new XYZ LLC pays no corporate income tax. The firm's profits are now taxed only once at the shareholder level. The highest tax rate Mike will face on his investment, then, is the top individual tax rate of 38.6%. Moreover, as a private company, XYZ no longer has to file with the SEC, and it does not have to publish its financial results. Now Joe cannot buy any shares of the newly private firm.

So the average Joe pays taxes of 53%, yet billionaires often pay less than 39% tax on similar investments. Does that sound progressive? Does dividend tax relief still seem like a “tax break for the rich”?

Some people still believe it is. They point out that many average Joes put their stock into tax-free IRAs and 401(k)s. They believe this eliminates the double taxation problem. However, they fail to grasp a fundamental flaw in their logic. IRAs and 401(k)s are not tax-free, they are tax-deferred. In other words, investors will eventually have to pay the piper. Retirees will have to pay income tax on every dollar they withdraw from their retirement accounts.

Yet sophisticated tax structures are generally only available to wealthy taxpayers because the administration costs are staggering. Each partner in an L.P. (or LLC, LLP, etc.) must report his share of the company's profits on his respective individual tax return. On a partner-by-partner basis, the company must calculate and track a variety of arcane tax attributes, including at-risk limitations, passive activity losses, inside basis, outside basis, built in gain on contributions of appreciated property, foreign tax credits on a country-by-country basis, and state tax withholding on a state-by-state basis. Most partners have no idea what this gobbledygook means, but they know their CPAs charge a lot of money to go through it all.

The costs are well worth it for investors expecting several million dollars from each investment. Even after paying teams of accountants and lawyers, wealthy investors can save millions by avoiding the 35% corporate tax. To paraphrase the words of Senator Dirksen used in a different context, “A million here, a million there, and soon it adds up to real money.” By raising several million dollars from several hundred partners, an entrepreneur can launch a multibillion dollar company. Several of the world's largest businesses are structured in this way. Even the world's largest accounting firms consist of several thousand partners each contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars on average.

But the economics do not work for the average Joe. It is simply not cost efficient to organize a partnership of several million partners investing only a few hundred dollars each. The administration costs for each partner would dwarf the corporate tax savings on such a small investment. The average Joe is getting jerked around by double taxation, and there is nothing he can do about it.

Washington could do a lot to level the playing field. Higher tax rates are certainly not the answer. Simply eliminating the double tax on dividends would ensure that the average Joe pays a lower effective tax rate than the billionaires. Further, harmonizing the tax treatment of corporate and individual income would prevent many of the elaborate organizational structures designed to help the rich avoid taxation.

Until Congress reforms the tax code, there are a limited number of tax-efficient investment vehicles for the small investor, such as REITs. Traditional stocks that pay taxable dividends may offer the most benefit to small investors if held through tax-favored structures such as pensions, 529 plans, 401(k)s, traditional and Roth IRA's. So in the meantime, consult a financial advisor, get a second opinion, and grow more informed as an investor – and as a voter.