In June, I wrote about how when I get off track I like to pick up The Meditations and recenter. In fact one of the primary messages of the book is that you cannot despair at every slipup, flaw and gaff–and that all you have is to get up where you’ve fallen and try again. And in reminding yourself of this you can stop the self-perpetuating slide and regain traction.

Well I like to go through the same process when things are going well. After a few successes–no matter how small, I like to flip through the pages and recenter. Remind myself the answer to a few major questions: Why? What for? How? And with who? We find that time and time again, ego is more destructive than low esteem, that we lose our vision the closer we come to attaining it.

Soon you’ll be ashes or bones. A mere name at most–and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, trivial.

The chase toward immortality is alluring–even more so when you’re young, idealistic and inexperienced. So that cannot be the “Why,” life cannot be the means to that end. When you break down those things you covet–truly see them for what they are–they lose their gilded varnish. I like to read this not to corrupt the dreams but to temper them. It prevents exaggeration from overcoming hope, and allows you to more fully examine what you’re after. Is it fame? Or is it a chance to influence from that pulpit? Is it adulation or is it respect? Is it freedom from or freedom to? Is it to be or to do? It must always be the latter options.

The “How” and the “With who.” My favorite piece of advice ever–do what you love and be a good person, that is all you have. So now, as a clean slate, I try to preserve those more than anything else. What value is there in learning this young if you refuse to make it your foundation? Epictetus once wrote that knowledge–like strength–must be measured in what you’re about to construct with it, not simply what you can life. Anything else is vanity, hypocrisy. Again, as real, life-lasting decisions become more apparent, you must increase the stringency of this benchmark. Do I get red in the face when I think about someone discovering what I’ve done? Then I probably shouldn’t do it anymore. Have I been totally honest about my intentions–either maliciously or out of shyness? Then I must stop now, and be blunt. Am I more empathetic today than I was last month? Then I am traveling down a bad road.

For now, I’m please to say that this standard has not been violated. As I predicted, I am happier AND finding that others are equally pleased with my work. My advice here is to be as temperate in your relative successes as you are in your failures. Never use a good mood as an excuse against introspection. And never let the downhill–the momentum–dictate your speed. However you recenter is up to you–it doesn’t have to be Meditations, in fact it probably shouldn’t be. But find a rock to which you can return, be it a person, a book, a quote, an image, a thought, and use it maintain control. Prevent straying from Siren or by despair, for they are equally dangerous.

I just finished Dave Grossman’s “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.” It’s an interesting read–about how realistically, violence is a much rarer human trait than we think and that we actually have an aversion to killing. In fact, he asserts that most PTSD cases stem not from fear of dying but from regret from killing (or almost killing).

Couple of thoughts:

–He talks about how that contrary to what we’ve believed, attrition bombing is not effective. That the fear of being killed from afar is drastically less than being killed up close. He called this the “Winds of Hate” effect. The most traumatizing things that happen to us are the ones that ones that happen up close. Hatred staring you in the face is perceived as much, much worse than a greater hatred from behind a computer or far away. And not because it’s less dangerous but because it’s personal. Which I think anecdotally, has a lot to do with some of this Hollywood/New Media business. It’s very easy (or easier) to sit back and watch as your market share diminishes. You can ignore the audience shifting online–you can even make some moves to prevent it. You will only be motivated to action however, when you someone comes onto your turf and really kicks the shit out of you. No one has done that yet. Still the internet new media has competed mainly from afar, never really striking in the mainstream realm. That will soon change and I think a lot of the bluster and ignorance will go away. But for the nerds THAT’S WHY NO ONE CARES.

–He brings up an example about a soldier ordered to execute a line of enemy soldiers who protested and refused to do it. He was instantly charged with treason, lined up and killed along with them.

Grossman exalts this as “hope for mankind” which totally misses the point. He doesn’t bother to consider the sad, sad paradox of this example. That in simple game theory, in the most basic evolutionary sense, goodness failed and evil prevailed. The man who resisted died, childless. Had he murdered, he would have lived and reproduced.

Which of course contradicts the basic premise of the book–that only in looking at darkness can hope to change it. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that very often what is best for our reproductive purposes is not aligned with our commonly agreed moral code. That being a good person isn’t always the best way to be a good human (animal). Which I think ultimately is the major moral question that modernity faces: Will the individual abandon those evolutionary tendencies–a sort of well-intentioned eugenics? Or, despite the posturing and the progress are we always going to be inhibited by the sucker’s payoff?

Those are the real questions the book ought to be addressing, but it doesn’t. It rarely acknowledges the role of evolution and the intense affect war has on natural selection. He casually drops the fact that in Berlin, an estimated 100,000 children were born from soldier rapes–like that doesn’t have MASSIVE implications. When we examine why behaviors exist we must first consider how they are rewarded. What he shows time and time again (without noticing) is that evil behavior–rape, condoning of execution–have reproductive benefits while resistance or simply the status-quo does not.

More on another book later tomorrow…

Hollywood runs on a very peculiar model. When people call it an “incestuous town” there is a very unfortunate kernel of truth. The most egregious example is that there is little distinction between clerical and executive staff. One day you’re an assistant and the next you’re handling someone’s movie. But an assistant doesn’t go to meetings or consult on strategy, they answer phone calls and make dinner reservations. They put together packets all day and get stressed if papers aren’t perfectly aligned. They are on the receiving end of the abuses of some very high-strung, opinionated and pampered people. And they fill whatever remaining time they have with yelling on the phone and being snotty to interns. So you have to ask yourself, is the kind of person you’d actually want as your representation, producer or executive–intelligent, confident, cerebral, curious–situated with the skills that constitute a good secretary? I made it one day. One day! So take someone even more qualified than me, they have their MBA, they’re eager to dive into Hollywood, passionate about art, the works, and then coming in and having to answer the phone for 18 months. Who does natural selection favor to survive? What you have is a system that incentivizes the absolute worst type of behavioral traits and then puts them through a horrific hazing process. When they finally get promoted, their first instinct is to put the person below them through the same hell that they endured, to find people just like themselves.

And then we wonder why Hollywood is so out of touch with what “people” actually like. We wonder how these massive misjudgments can happen, how they can tolerate stupidity and repeated failure–well it’s because we have secretaries being promoted to the highest levels of industry. Show me another business that works like that–maybe law, but Philalawyer disputes whether this “works” or not. Right now, to be a school principal you have to be a teacher first. Well Hollywood would have you be the janitor, under the guise of “making sure you understand how EVERYTHING works.” Again, would you want a principal who could stand being a custodian? Of course, the justification is that being an assistant is a way to learn the ropes but these are the wrong ropes to be learning. They break you of your valuable assets–critical thinking, enthusiasm, compassion–and mold you into the same model as everyone else.

Who ultimately gets shit on the most by this structure? The artists, the thinkers and the people who refuse to buckle to the system. Someone who simply grinds out their existence, finds success by mutilating themselves on a daily basis is not going to be particularly fond of anyone with natural gifts. They are the same people who have hated artists and the popular kids since high school. They are not Lloyd from Entourage. Creativity simply cannot survive in this environment. It’s why you see so much emulation and derivative work. As economics and game theory revolutionize every major school of thought, Hollywood has lagged behind. This is always a good example: What is the purpose of your average bureaucracy–say the DMV? It is not to regulate motor vehicles, it is to continue to exist. Through that lens, the actions of your local DMV clerk make sense. Why should they bring good customer service to the table? They don’t get anything for it. Your average assistant in Hollywood–well their only goal is to NOT fuck up. If the simply let things take its course, they’re set. If they rock the boat, put forth an innovative idea and it fails, they lose. So why should they be creative? Why should they question the system? The status quo protects and insulates their kind.

I have been absurdly lucky here. I managed to find two important people who have allowed me a pass, given me access to go around the traditional process. On my first day, there was a bit of a misunderstanding and I got put in the wrong place–I barely made it out alive. I was the assistant to an assistant–and I can’t even begin to describe how much I hated it. I filled out a spreadsheet and got yelled out for not being innately familiar with their fax machine. I got attitude from a guy I could run circles around, but he had the phone headset so that was that. Ascribing my new situation to luck is still misleading however because it ignores one crucial personal detail: I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. So when they tried to pawn their work off on me, I could say no. When they gave me attitude, I didn’t have to take it. If the “crawl on your bloodied knees until you can walk” path was the only one available for me here, I would have just done my own thing. It’s not about padding my resume until I can land a do-nothing job at 200k a year and then coasting. It has never been that. It never will be. It can be the same way for you. The only reason these traditions continue is because people are whorish enough to submit to it. So fuck the system, forget doing the busy work, or I’ll just go my own way. Hard work though–as many hours as it take, real passion and dedication, I’d do that until I collapsed. The system as it is, doesn’t seem to value that, it’s more like high school, measuring on arbitrary standards and quantity. It makes no exceptions for people who think well from home or become entirely useless if they don’t have any autonomy.

It’s very easy to fall in the trap of thinking that “this is the path I HAVE to take to get where I want,” when that’s not really true at all. And in the process endure the sort of things that the phrase “life is too short” was invented to address. Ginsberg wrote that he saw “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” This system is madness, everyone knows it’s madness, but no one wants to do anything about it. You see the same thing with your friends, with other interns. Beating their heads against walls because their parents told them it’d lead to a big check, because the guy two steps ahead of them in line had to do it too. It’s heartbreaking. I swear one of the guys I work with is just seconds away from tears everyday…but he never does anything about it. So the caveat of course is this: You only get to cut in line if you’re worthy of it. Bring something new to the table and the crowd will part before you, it’s always been that way. Ultimately, there is no set series of checkpoints in the race of life. You choose your own course. Or you can cede that right to other people…