Anthrorusticaphobia is an extreme, irrational fear of rednecks. Yes, a real word for a real phobia. It’s a fear the United States, particularly its growing urban, coastal, well-heeled populations, needs to confront, a fear that I blame in significant part for what happened yesterday. I’m not a therapist, but I know the first step in confronting a fear is admitting you have one. The second is figuring out where those fears come from and what makes them extreme and irrational. The third is finding a treatment plan that includes “exposure therapy,” or coming to terms with those fears by actually changing your perception of, and interacting with, the cause of them.

Why assume people are smart? And why does that matter? It’s a starting point for just about everything else I do as a sociologist. I learned people are smart by spending over a decade of my life studying what they do and why they do it (and a lot longer than that interacting with them). What I mean is that people have reasons for doing what they’re doing that are as complicated and well thought out as the reasons you have for doing what you’re doing. Because I am a pragmatist, this wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t some benefit to assuming people are smart, so I offer three rules, things to gain from assuming that People are Smart, and not the opposite, based on all this.

Lately I’ve rekindled a love of jigsaw puzzles I first developed in childhood. My wife and I bought a David Bowie puzzle shortly after our beloved dog Chewie passed away last January. We also got a puzzle as a gift from some friends a bit before that. This year, being a mature, middle-aged man, my wife bought me a He-Man puzzle for an early birthday present. Just about everything I love to do has a “puzzle” element to it; there’s a way that putting together puzzles makes your brain work that really appeals to me and that reflects in my other goals.

Part of this idea of “strong” means to be unafraid—unafraid to stand up for what is right, to defend oneself and others, and so on. But I am afraid of a lot of things. And so are you. Being afraid isn’t weak; at the most basic biological level, it’s being alive and wanting to stay that way. Like pain, fear is information about the world that guides you to pursue some behaviors and avoid others. Working out and anything else that’s challenging involves enduring physical discomfort, but pain is also your body warning you of its physical limits. If I don’t listen to my body, I will hurt myself, and in middle-age I don’t heal as quickly as I used to, meaning I have to gauge the “right amount” of pain during exercise. Too little, and I’m not challenging myself. Too much, and I’m going to risk injury and will not be able to work out at all, perhaps for weeks.
Similarly, the trick with fear is to make sure that fears are proportional to the actual risk posed by some hazard…

A grifter is a person who enriches themselves by tricking other people. I will describe some human activities as grift that maybe we don’t usually think of in these terms, but we should, because the definition fits. In referring to the present as the “age of the grift,” I mean exactly that—we live in an era where cheating, in a wide variety of ways and venues—but ultimately for financial gain, as that is how we generally measure success in this era—is easier to do, harder to catch, and more incentivized than ever before. It comes down to how we believe, learn, think, and structure knowledge.

Mint chocolate chip ice cream is, in my opinion, the best flavor of ice cream. Maybe that isn’t a popular opinion to hold, or to express. I know lots of people prefer rocky road, or chocolate, or vanilla. But it’s an opinion I hold, and you may, or may not, hold the same opinion. No big deal, right? If I like mint chocolate chip ice cream, I can eat it, and if you don’t, you don’t have to. It is easy to have an opinion, express an opinion, and respect one another’s opinions. That’s what an opinion is…

if you could pick any time in the whole history of the human species in which to live, and you didn’t know who your parents would be, how much wealth or privilege you would be born into, what your race or gender or sexual orientation would be, when would you choose? The only rational choice, in my view, would be now…

I found two easy ways to practice what I preach, to stop functioning from overwork to burnout like that crappy old guitar amp.

Putting together what I know about the social world and being human, when we lose someone, we can make sense of loss simply trying to consciously honor their memory. Not just by thinking about them, but in our actions. I want the lessons I learned from my college mentors (two of whom have now passed away) to be reflected, in a practical sense, in what I do with my life after they’re gone. But it’s relatively easy for me to see how to honor them, especially since I became an academic myself. It’s not that much harder to figure out how to honor the memories of family members who lived to a ripe old age, as well as friends whose lives were cut tragically short, as honoring a person’s memory involves learning from both their triumphs and missteps. When I die, I want people to have learned at least as much from what I did wrong as what I did right so they can get it a little less wrong than I did.

Something happened on that walk. I still felt the grief of loss that occupied the silences between the bustle of everyday life. But something else began to take over: a sense that it was all part of something bigger, that life and death and light and darkness were all one and essential and part of a broader cosmic unity. I miss my best friend, but I will carry with me all that we experienced together—until the day that I, too am gone. I hope to have letf behind some positive memories for others, as well, when my time comes. I also take with me, not only the memories, but an imperative—to live in such a way as to honor the memories of those lost along the way.

He wanted to sit on the outdoor couch with me but couldn’t summon the leg strength to jump. His muscles had shrunk as his body struggled to funnel protein to his enlarged and failing heart. I picked him up gently and set him beside me. For the first time that day, he seemed genuinely comfortable. The air was cool, but not cold, and crisp. There was just enough sun to offer a little warmth. I scratched him on his head, behind his ears. He leaned into my hand as he leaned on the couch. We were tired and we were sick. But for a moment we both felt comfortable and loved.
Less than a month later my wife and I wrapped Chewie in a blanket and carried him to the car. We took him to the vet, and they led us to a room in the back with a cold stainless-steel table. There was a bit of conversation and explanation, a form to sign, two injections, and it was over. My best friend is dead. I am not ok. I have not been ok since.

The final weeks of December are the coldest, darkest weeks of the year, with the longest nights (if one lives in the Northern Hemisphere and outside the tropics, that is). There is something about that last week of the year, between Christmas and the New Year, in which the traditional notion of self-reflection and resolution holds great appeal.

I like New Year’s Resolutions. I know most people don’t “stick with it,” and that the gyms will empty out and the baked goods aisles will pick up in a couple of weeks, followed a couple of weeks later by the beer aisles and the liquor stores when “Dry January” comes to its inevitable end. The fact that most people try to make changes and fail almost doesn’t matter, in a way, because it’s the motivation—self-reflection, self-improvement, and “cleaning up the mess,” that matters. If you try to make a change enough times, it’s because you want (or need) to; eventually thinking it through and trying different things is more likely to lead to a successful effort toward enduring change.

Public trust must be earned and continually renewed for public education to continue to best function as a public good. To me, this means that I must show that I can be trusted not to unduly cross into other domains of social life in doing my job. In the words of literary critic Stanley Fish: do my job, don’t try to do someone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do my job. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, this ideal should be upheld to retain public trust in scholarship and to ensure that people in a democracy can best make use of knowledge. In the words of Max Weber, a founding voice in sociology (as is DuBois) and an intellectual hero, the closer to politics our subject matter comes, the more we are obligated to avoid partisanship, to save that for outside the classroom, where criticism is possible and there is not the power imbalance.
More practically (and perhaps cynically) speaking, institutions don’t survive because they are built on some vision of how people ought to be; they must be resilient in the face of how people actually are…

The real issue that confronts me when I consider the role of social media is the extent to which it may reproduce or facilitate “binary” thinking—“this” or “that”; us and them (my least favorite four-letter word is “they”). It’s hard to say something with nuance and qualification in a tweet. Memes, propaganda, and conspiracy theories do well in this sort of environment because they stimulate our brains in certain sorts of ways that cause instant, unreflective emotional reaction—it takes just a second to share or post something that viscerally stimulates but often hours to properly examine the claims being made. Those willing to engage in the work of carefully and skeptically examining claims, to be “informed and not just opinionated,” are perpetually disadvantaged in this kind of media environment; truth is the first and biggest casualty. That we talk admiringly now about “his truth” or “your truth” or “their truth” and telling, or seeking, “the truth” starts to sound quaint and old-fashioned reflects the kind of world that this media atmosphere has created.

I am an unashamed, unrepentant, unapologetic workaholic. I love my job (and have loved other jobs I have held) and have tended to invest a lot of myself in my work. When discussing work, one frequently thinks about a job, profession, or career and these imply that you’re making money—earning a living—doing whatever it is one is doing. Of course, a person who has “a job” might actually work at a single place but find themselves doing a broad range of activities. A person who “doesn’t have a job” might still be doing things that don’t involve “having a job” in this sense but are still undoubtedly work (such as a parent who takes care of their home and children, perhaps while another parent earns income)…

I am a very sensitive person. I am so sensitive I once punched someone in the face for calling me sensitive (more on that later). I have been bullied, harassed, ridiculed, threatened, and stigmatized—both as a child (for things I’ll get into in a moment) and as an adult (mostly for writing things like this). Being sensitive is a touchy subject if you’ll forgive the terrible pun; it might make a short list of things that people find desirable in a friend or a mate, but it might also make one an object of ridicule and even hatred today…

I am wondering aloud whether the technological society we inhabit should be treated like Mithridates treated poison, or if we are just as doomed as the June bug. I could hardly argue that electric light is a bad thing; it’s made the night, and in many cases, the day, a far safer place, and as someone who reads a lot of books it’s hard to imagine my vision would be any good anymore if I read all those hours by candlelight. I feel for the June bug, and after learning more about them, made an effort to scoop them out of the pool, even if, to my chagrin, sometimes I’d find another, or even the same, June bug flailing helplessly in the water minutes later.

There is a reason I tell this story, besides getting something personal off my chest or challenging stereotypes. A lot of this comes down to time and how I used it. Since I quit social media back in November, followed more recently with deleting numerous games and apps from my smartphone, I have noticed many disturbing parallels to when I quit partying in terms of how my life has changed. I think about what my late academic advisor and friend Ben Agger wrote over a decade ago about how smartphones were changing the ways we interacted with each other, how we perceived time, and even our biological rhythms and cycles. He called it iTime, a blurring of boundaries between private and public, of work and leisure, of day and night. It has, consistent with his theories, unfolded as a constant battle for “eyeballs” or attention which has the effect of “dopamining” society, as philosopher Gerald Moore has recently discussed, in which the machinery of profit-making is turned ultimately on hijacking the reward-mechanisms of the human brain via increasingly sophisticated technological interventions (i.e. “screen culture”).

…Thinking small is just something that happened slowly with the shift from urban to rural; and from global and virtual to local and interpersonal. It’s hard to explain, but maybe thinking small is more about practice and experience, and less about theory and explanation. Every day I think small, I feel more content, less anxious, and less depressed on a day-to-day basis; my attention span has increased and sharpened, and I’m feeling more self-confident. Even though I’m more relaxed and have more time, I also seem to get more done. My interaction with other human beings is much smaller, too: face-to-face conversation and live events with an occasional text message or phone conversation. I talk to a handful of people regularly rather than the thousands I “talked to” on social media. Though the quantity of interaction is small, the quality of those interactions has without doubt improved overall. Do I miss some people? Of course. And I hope to meaningfully connect with them again. Someday. Some of them…