Signals From The Earth

I often feel I talk too much. But why? What makes it too much, and what signal does it send to those around me that I talk too much? If I’m talking too much, there must be a right amount to be talking. But how much even the most quiet person talks depends on how much needs to be said. So it must be that my ratio of talking to information needed is too high. Perhaps other people have a ratio of talking to needed information that’s too low.

Diagram 1

In Diagram 1, I demonstrate the implications. The x-axis is the rate of information exchange that is necessary under whatever circumstances. The y-axis represents the rate of information that is adopted by the talker. The center diagonal is the ideal function, in which the talker gets across what is needed, no more, and no less. We’ll call it the Need-to-Know line, or N. But even the ideal talker doesn’t follow this line indefinitely. At a certain minimum point, we are socially expected to talk even if we have nothing to say, just to prevent awkward silence. This is the dotted line toward the bottom of the y-axis, labeled the “Small Talk Line.” Furthermore, there is only so much that one can talk, regardless of how much needs to be said. This is represented by the top dotted line, labeled the “Lecture Line.” The resulting ideal rate (labeled “Ideal Talker”) is S-shaped, outlined in green.

But clearly, not everyone follows the ideal rate. Diagram one addresses the talkers who behave in a way approximated by the assumption that they operate on the basis of a uniformly lower or higher perception of how much information is needed. These rates are labeled “Guarded (N’)” and “BFFs (N”),” respectively. These talkers have differing minimum and maximum talking rates, and otherwise behave as if the Need-to-Know line has shifted in one direction or another.

Note, however, that there are multiple potential explanations for why they may have shifted. The “Guarded” talker could just be shy, in which case they are not actually misperceiving the proper location of N, but could be communicating less than necessary, due to difficulties connecting to their listeners. Or, the Guarded talker could recognize how much information needs to be shared, and intentionally decide to hold some back, perhaps for strategic reasons. Either of these cases could be quantified as “Undershare,” labeled in Diagram 1. But the possibility remains that the talker misperceives the location of N as being that of N”. This person may be underrating the strength of the relationship, or the needs of the listeners. This person is underrelating to his listeners, who may be offended.

Likewise, there are multiple explanations for the behavior of the Big Talker. He or she may know the location of N, but decide to share more. This may be because they are uncertain, and prefer to cover their asses rather than risk undershare, like lawyers. This would be the opposite of the strategic undersharer or secret-keeper, also observed in attorneys. Or, they may know that they are saying too much, but have difficulty being succinct, or for some other reason have problems communicating at a lower level. Serial restaters, sprawling storytellers, stutterers, etc. may fall into this category. These both constitute “Overshare” in Diagram 1. But there remains the possibility that they are mistaking the location of N as being N”. This person believes that the strength of the communication channel, relationship, or need for information is stronger than it actually is. The admirer, who desperately loves their audience and projects that love onto their listener, may fall into this category. The pedantic speaker may think their audience less informed than they truly are, and condescend to tell them more than they need to hear. The old friend whose companion has grown apart may find themselves tragically lost along the trail of N” while their friend knows N is inevitable.

This begins to answer my last question. Now that we have some idea of why people may share more or less than they should, it begins to become clear what signals may be sent to listeners of undersharers and oversharers. But the signals are ambiguous. Is the person who never gives me a full answer hiding something, are they shy, or are they just not that into me? Is the incessant talker (or writer) just covering their bases, are they bad at shutting up, or do actually think I’m stupid? Perhaps the interpretation is based on context, or even on the self image of the listener. I, for example, assume that anyone who talks to me too much is simply sexually attracted to me.

There is a related question: why is it sometimes hilarious to talk a lot, and really cool to talk too little? Easy. The comedian who talks a mile a minute is analogous to the super-smiley clown: they both act like they’re your best friend when you hardly know them, which is both absurd and lovable. Alternately, the person who talks too little is sending you the message that they don’t think you’re so hot, implying without showing that they are actually hot shit compared to you in ways that they know and you don’t.

The lesson, for me and everyone else, is simple. Unless you’re writing a legal opinion on a merger proposal, less is more. Sure, your audience may suspect that you’re holding something back, or that you don’t consider them to be your buddies. But at least you’re not insulting their intelligence. And if you’re lucky, you’ll give the impression that you are pretty much too cool for school.

This guy’s bad haircut is hilarious.

Last week, I retook the Myers-Briggs Personality Type test. I’d taken the test before. So I was surprised when the result proved enlightening. The Myers-Briggs test is designed to sort the test taker into one of sixteen personality types. The test defines personality types along four binary axes of psychological function, originally identified by Carl Jung in his book Personality Types: Introversion/Extroversion, iNtuitive[sic]/Sensing, Feeling/Thinking, and Perceiving/Judging. The subject answers a number of questions that place them along a spectrum for each opposition, and the result determines the subject’s personality type.

The last time I took the test and paid attention to the results, I was in high school. I was attending a math and science magnet school, and planned on studying computer science in college. My personality test result was “INTJ” : Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging. No surprise: introverted described most of the people at my school, and I felt I was no exception. Intuitive in the context of the test means something slightly different than in common parlance: it signifies an internal way of understanding things, perhaps using abstract ideas, feelings, theories, or rules, rather than an observational way of understanding things (”Sensing”). I thought of myself as a thinker rather than a feeler, as was expected of me, if nothing else for being a male. Judging meant discerning, clear-thinking, and rational. INTJ is the typical aloof scientist, disconnected from much of everyday life, but dedicated to solving the abstract problems set before them. I never paid the result much attention, since it didn’t seem to tell me anything I didn’t think I already knew.

So here I am, a soon-to-be law school graduate whose most polished work product is a decade-long existential crisis. I had given up on any clear answers. But I never stopped searching for inspiration, some sign or poem or earthquake that would slap me in the face.

I’m not sure why my results were different this time around. Maybe I just wasn’t honest with myself the first time I took it years ago. Maybe I just didn’t understand myself well enough to answer accurately. Maybe peoples’ personalities change over the years. If so, it’s not taken into account by Jung’s theory, as far as I can tell: the implication is that the result of childhood development will radically influence your entire life. Regardless, the new answer made a world more sense of my life, then and now: “ENFP.”

Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving. At first I wasn’t sure what this meant, but as I read a few descriptions, my eyes started to widen. Talks too much. Starts projects he doesn’t finish. Cares more about abstract ideas than concrete facts. Prone to emotional dependency. Bad with details. Not punctual. It was like reading note cards jotted down by some celestial life critic. But it wasn’t all bad. Gifted with language. Prefers creative work. Strong inner values. Likes to read and travel. Committed to relationships. Likes helping others. At first it seemed too vague; wouldn’t everyone prefer to travel and avoid deadlines? But as I read on, I understood that the dead-on feeling I was experiencing wasn’t fortune cookie optimism (”You have great friends and will be wealthy pretty soon!”). It hit right at the insecurities I’ve harbored my whole life.

But maybe I could have done that myself. The very fact that I am able to identify the accuracy of my personality portrait means that I already understood myself fairly well in the first place. I probably spend an hour a day listing my own shortcomings with no help at all. What made it uplifting was that my most fundamental strengths and weakness had been joined together, linked inexorably with one another in a mutually justifying structure. It was okay to have flaws, because those flaws came with talents. It was okay to recognize those talents, because their reality was reinforced with concomitant flaws. The recognition of that wholeness flicked a light switch in my mind, and allowed a new sense of self-acceptance that I’ve been searching for a long time.

Then the pitfalls started to emerge in my vision. If I had it wrong before, what if I’ve gotten it wrong again? Doesn’t this outcome just reinforce the fact that my life is totally screwed up, that I’m in the wrong place and have little hope of succeeding there? Doesn’t Sartre say that existence precedes essence? Certainly I have a hand in the making of my own identity.  What if this isn’t progress, but just another station in a circular route of self-examination. After all, ENFPs are known for their peripatetic pursuit of self-realization. Wait, what?

Dr. David West Keirsey took the Jungian types and assigned temperaments to them. These have a long pedigree. In ancient times, my personality may have been called “choleric;” Keirsey called it Apollonian. I wonder if this is a reference to Apollo’s position among the muses (ENFPs are thought of as artistically inclined). Or perhaps it involves his prophetic powers. Although the Oracle at Delphi is often thought of as projecting the future, Jung argues that mythological narratives reflect our own path of personal development. Maybe Apollo represents the ability to look forward to the future of the self. In that context, we are all oracles, and are all called upon to prophesize.

City dwellers have a long history of self-satisfaction. Even in Philadelphia, a relatively humble metropolis, I can usually smell the superiority around me at all times of day. And I like it. We may not be John McCain’s “real Americans,” but urbanites know they’re on the right side of history. Suburbs are an environmental evil, as we all know, so moving to the center of things practically makes us Planeteers. So I constantly find myself involved in persuading my friends to become more urban. Ditch the car, get an apartment, ride the train, get a life. But even though I’ve been vegan for several years, I rarely find myself proselytizing against the perils of meat.

A good friend recently asked me an interesting question. She knows I’m not a religious person, or even a big believer in traditional notions of morality and rights. What she wants to understand is how vegetarianism fits into my life, without the idea of animal rights. When I got to thinking about it, this question evokes many of the same reasons I live in a city.

1. Health

Eating dead animals kills you. This is the elephant in the utilitarian room. Cholesterol, excess fat, accumulated toxins, hormones, fatty acid imbalance. On balance, animals are not good for you. And urbanites want to be healthy. Many of us are type-A neurotics who never stop worrying about their life expectancy. Others just don’t have the time to be fat and sick.

2. Efficiency

Meat is wasteful. Even after all the government subsidies, it’s expensive. That’s because its production involves multiple layers of resource consumption. You could irrigate fields, sow them with wheat, harvest it, feed it to old cows, house them in stalls, impregnate them with tools, raise their children, kill them, clean them, butcher them, and package them. Or you could raise fruits and vegetables, and stop at step three. City dwellers don’t have the luxury of inefficiency. We have efficiency apartments, efficient locations, and efficient bags to carry our junk. Living in the city is expensive, and there’s no point in making it any more so.

3. Fashion

Eating meat is not hip. Vegans tend to be younger, trendier people. Progressive attitudes are always cool. That’s because the old way of doing things represents the establishment. I don’t eat at McDonalds, or some steak restaurant for overweight married professionals. I might be able to get something vegan there. But how cool would that be? Instead, I’ll eat where people wear clothes that weren’t designed by Brooks Brothers or Wal-Mart.

4. Politics

I’m not a Republican. I don’t think that a hamburger is a symbol of the American dream. I don’t idealize cattle ranches. I don’t consider excess to be a virtue. That includes excess gas consumption, excess ass fat, excess spending, and excess calories. Like it or not, the personal is political. The more meat you eat, the more similar you are to the kind of insincere cowboy hat wearing, SUV-straddling, war-mongering troglodytes that inhabit the various meat-producing areas of this country and others. Yee-ha.

5. Ecology

Unless you’re the president of Chevron, becoming a vegan is the single biggest decision you can make to improve the odds for our planet. Enormous amounts of water, land, and energy are wasted, and equally astronomical amounts of pollution created, by the raising of animals for food. And most of it falls under tidy exceptions to the relevant environmental statutes, thanks to our powerful agribusiness lobby. Many seasoned citizens of big cities would give the death glare to an irresponsible dog-walker who failed to scoop up their best friend’s bowel movement- and eating meat is the consumer equivalent of taking a dump on our shared environment.

6. Equality

I support animal rights. But what about the rights of human beings? Although this question is sometimes leveled as a counter to militant veganism (”I can do what I want!” or, more insidiously, “Isn’t vegetarianism a largely white, bourgeois behavior?”), the scepter of social equality rests firmly in the hands of the lettuce-munchers. Fast food exploits economically marginalized groups on the supply and demand side; “quality” animal products exclude them. If would-be refined luxuries like select cuts of steak or foie gras are emblematic of class, they operate to distinguish those who can afford to behave with such brazen disregard for practicality from those who cannot. The worst aspect of this fact is also the most apparent: the most economically disadvantaged members of our society share the greatest share of our health problems, and the worst of our health problems are caused in large part by the consumption of meat.

And there’s more. Vegans are sexier, which goes a long way in the city. And when you’re packed onto a subway train, you’ll be glad you’re not the tub with the Burger King bag trying to squeeze into a molded plastic chair. And, of course, there are many powerful ethical arguments as well. Perhaps most important of all, cities are filled with the kind of people who want to make things better; sometimes, that’s why they moved to the city in the first place. So do your town a favor and get with the program.

I’ve been frustrated recently by my inability to hit 100% of a few nutritional targets, despite sustained efforts. Today, I decided to double-check the targets themselves. A few months ago, I was banging my head against the wall: I couldn’t hit 1200mg/day of calcium, the FDA recommended daily allowance. As a vegan, it was hard enough getting around 800mg/day. But after I did some research, I turned up the fact that most other countries (including the UK) don’t think more than 1000mg/day is necessary for any adults, and that 800mg/day is sufficient for most adults under 50 years of age. Read the rest of this entry »

Because I’m vegan, and because I subscribe to CR ideas about nutrition, friends often ask me about the contents of my diet. Yesterday was typical:

Read the rest of this entry »

As finals begin, I have my work cut out for me. Not only must I study for and execute my remaining tests, but I am continuing my bar application and finishing up work for the Clean Air Council. I also am engaged in various personal projects. It makes for a lot of time spent in the apartment. If you’re like me, and you need a simulation of human contact, try Berkeley’s audio course recordings. Of course, maybe you feel like you’ve already spent too much time at university.

I have spent a great deal of time recently thinking about utopian projects. My friend Shane, who just returned home to Texas after visiting me in Philadelphia, is collaborating with me on a new project to solicit videos that describe people’s ideas of a perfect world, called the If Project. I also found this great series of videos about sustainable living.

After my final exams are over (December 20th), I’ll be flying to Texas for a couple of weeks. I’ll be in Dallas for about a week, then Austin for a few days starting the 27th. Let me know if you want to get together.

JPMorgan Chase Building in Houston After Ike

Galveston, Texas is my home town, and although I grew up hating it, I have come to appreciate its positive impact on me. Almost everyone I know grew up in a suburb: outside of Houston, outside of Dallas, Austin, Philadelphia, Baltimore, L.A., New York. But my childhood friends and I grew up in a place. A city, in fact, even if it was a morbid, languishing place. One of the few post-industrial places in the South, old enough to have that distinction. It had history, and purpose. Texture.

Recently, Galveston was devastated by another hurricane. We grew up preparing for it, but never really believed it would occur. My friend Shane has been documenting the hurricane’s destruction. I have yet to bear witness to it. I am unsure how I will react.

Because Galveston was a classic city, it has many of the elements of the city that are now missing, although in a faded form. But it is also an area of ecological sensitivity, and carries the special status of a transitional space. This status is not merely ecological (land to ocean, fresh water to salt water), but also socially (between industrial and post-industrial, black and white communities). It is a city in the way that many new large cities will never be cities, and a real ecological place in the way that many cities will never again be.

And it has survived. Althogh the Winter Texans have pulled up stakes and the weekend warriors’ condos are going rental, island people are staying put. They’re rebuilding at great cost, investing sweat equity. Some of them have little choice. But others do, and choose to stay. Anyone who has made that choice must know better than me what really makes a city. But from the people I’ve talked to, it may be hard to put in words.

But I’m not surprised. Galveston has weathered worse. It may have to weather worse in the near future, if models are to be believed. And what for? When we believe in a place, what do we believe in?

I live in Camden, New Jersey. Both Camden and neighborhing Philadelphia are profoundly post-industrial places. And moving here, I was unimpressed by both. Philly seemed insular, rude, and uneducated. Camden was the murder capital of the country. But after a few years here, the area’s grown on me. The place has soul. There’s color and meaning to the space it inhabits, and the people know it. I was lucky to be here when Halloween, the Phillies’ championship victory and Obama’s election all fell in one week. Philly is a town that loves to drink, a sports town, and deeply Democratic. I’ve never seen a polis so elated. I could feel the civic rapture seeping into me. It made me want to be a native.

Maybe that’s what makes a city. Lots of places can attract tourism with their exotic history or landscapes, or court business with low taxes and cheap labor. Low land prices and cookie-cutter lawnscaping is a good bet to lure young couples, even in a country that ought to be kissing the suburbs goodbye. But the great cities of the world make you want to be from there, to be identified with them. So I find myself asking, what could it possibly mean to be a Philadelphian, a New Yorker, a Galvestonian?

For Galveston at least, it means sitting through some storms. And people take pride in it, just as people everywhere take pride in the shit they put up with: crime, subway incivility, poverty, and especially the weather. Adaptability is what sets humans apart. But when we adapt as a community, when we move in step to face whatever malfeasance fate has sent our way, that feeling is elevated.

When Hurricane Rita tore through the Gulf Coast only months after Katrina wrecked New Orleans, families fled Galveston in droves. I was living in a tiny, poorly air-conditioned apartment in North Austin, but was proud to host a half-dozen of my Galveston friends. When my extended family descended on Galveston Island to help rebuild the lives of my older relatives and salvage the heirlooms that survived Ike, I was sad I couldn’t come. Not just because I couldn’t help my family. Because I wanted to part of it, to identify with the ongoing life of my birthplace.

I think that’s what makes a city. We can all point to reasons we live where we do. School, work, family, economics, politics. But shared experience, common identity, and the desire to stake your selfhood on the meaning of a place go beyond all these. Any of us who can should feel fortunate to hold such a stake, no matter what fortune it brings us.

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So Jung argues that archetypes are prevalent in our dreams and psychological symbolism. This may be why so many of us have such similar dreams. Thought I’d check in on how everyone else is doing on this.

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