Kilroy Café #16: "Mindless Entertainment Wasting Our Planet"

Here is a re-post of a Kilroy Café philosophy essay from July 2008. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

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Mindless Entertainment Wasting Our Planet

By GLENN CAMPBELL

There is an evil upon this land. It is a parasitic force draining our society of life. It seduces our young people into slavery. It clouds the mind and prevents the individual from accomplishing anything near what he is capable of. It takes whatever it can get from us and gives back nothing.

Entertainment. It's the scourge of humanity.

It's a lot like cocaine. When entertainment is available, most people will ingest as much of it as they can. They may not feel good afterwards, but they keep coming back for more because they're addicted. Withdraw the entertainment, and there are terrible symptoms: tremors, anxiety, profuse sweating. When locked up alone with his own thoughts, the subject claims to be "bored" and makes desperate attempts to fill the void with something, anything to displace his own identity and occupy his mind.

The content of the entertainment isn't important. Video games, romance novels, re-runs of American Idol—it's all the same. It's 99.9% meaningless. You sit there for an hour, two hours, eight hours, 16 hours, and nothing at all is accomplished. Soon, half your life is wasted on entertainment, then the other half. You're dead, and all they can say at your funeral is, "He watched a lot of TV."

Nonetheless, entertainment remains legal in most jurisdictions. It is even glorified. Who are the most visible heroes of our society? Are they teachers, humanitarian workers, great thinkers and activists? No, they are actors and performers. We worship poseurs whose only claim to fame is pretending to be someone else.

Their job is to promote the addiction, to keep the illusion going so the corporate sponsors can continue to feed off it. It's a huge conspiracy—the entertainment-industrial complex. Its purpose is to sell the public candy-coated garbage, because that's what makes the most profit. It peddles empty calories instead of real food.

The opposite of entertainment is "function." That's when people have a genuine need that a product quietly and efficiently serves. When a doctor saves a patient's life, that's not entertainment; it's a legitimate service. When you provide people with information that somehow improves their existence, that's not entertainment either. It's education.

Entertainment is certainly capable of such enlightenment, but it rarely happens. Hardly one product out of a thousand is in any way useful or illuminating. The remainder is drivel and dross that people lap up because it engages their emotional circuitry and seems to be meaningful on the surface.

News and documentaries are like that. They seem to be illuminating but really aren't as long as people "watch" instead of "do." Even things you "do" can be entertainment in disguise: surfing, mountain climbing, expeditions to Machu Picchu. The main criteria to distinguish entertainment from function is whether anything is really accomplished.

Entertainment exists because the channels for it exist and someone with a profit motive is willing to pay for access. If you've got 200 TV channels available, they have to be filled with something, and a huge pimping and whoring industry has arisen to feed this machine.

An endless stream of naive virgins are sacrificed in the volcano of entertainment. Young people are seduced by the apparent glamor of it, the promise of fame and the tiny sliver of hope that the product they generate might be meaningful.

Most are sucked dry by the beast and discarded, realizing only then that they'll have to get a real job.

—G .C.

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©2009, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy Café #57: "The Tragic Burden of Stuff"

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

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The Tragic Burden of Stuff

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Humans are natural packrats. Back in our prehistory it was logical to horde food and tools in case they might be needed in lean times. Naked animals that we were—without fur or claws—we couldn't live without possessions. When your survival depended on a spear or piece of clothing, you didn't lose track of it and were loathe to abandon it even when you had more than you needed. To stay alive, you always knew where your stuff was and you guarded it jealously.

In modern conditions of plenty, that impulse has become dysfunctional. We have way more stuff than we need while our urge to collect it is unimpeded. It's like our lust for sugar and fat even when we have had enough to eat. Today, we suffer not just obesity of the body, but obesity of ownership, to the point where we are crippled by our stuff and our true quality of life is sacrificed.

Some possessions, no doubt, are valuable tools. Take, for example, the fork: unquestionably a useful eating utensil. The personal ownership of a fork is not unreasonable. You use it, wash it and use it again. Owning twenty forks, however, does not add any utility to your life, only obligation and complication, yet few people would divest themselves of extra forks if they weren't forced to. The first fork is useful, but the others are programmed by our packrat genes and are justified only by excuses.

If you own multiple forks, then you can employ a mechanical dishwasher to clean them—a supposedly labor-saving device that has to be fed, serviced and housed. Soon you're buried in such ancillary obligations when a simple fork was all you really needed. Multiply this complicating process by the thousands of objects in one's life, and you can see how people imprison themselves in their stuff as soon as they have the means to do so. Whatever resources one has, they are quickly absorbed by possessions and their maintenance.

Businesses, honed by the pressures of the marketplace, are relatively lean in their use of stuff. A machine has to prove itself in stark monetary terms or it's out the door. The same cannot be said of individuals, who will acquire tools and supplies they use only rarely and decline to get rid of them. They will also accumulate vanity objects of no practical value, seeing these possessions as a measure of their own worth.

At the same time, business is utterly relentless in its attempts to sell us stuff we don't need, because that's where the greatest profit lies. You don't just need a fork, they say, but a jewel-encrusted fork. You need a fork with special qualities you never knew you needed until advertising told you about them. Since advertising is the dominant voice in our culture, it's hard to resist the commercial message: Buy more stuff! There's no money to be made in encouraging thrift, only in promoting obesity, so that's what most of us are: big fat possession hogs!

And "stuff" isn't limited to physical objects. There's also mental stuff congealed around us—accumulated habits, projects and activities of little practical value that tie up our time like possessions monopolize our space. If Tuesday nights are dedicated to a certain activity and Sundays are occupied by another and every year a certain holiday must be celebrated in a certain way, soon your whole life is preprogrammed and there is no opportunity left for growth or change. Mental stuff is having prior commitments and perceived necessities occupy all your future time, so your opportunity for creativity is low. The world changes but you can't, because you are already committed to certain entrenched ways.

It's easy enough to take on new habits or obligations but often painfully difficult to withdraw. If you volunteer for a worthy cause, they soon depend on you. If you start growing a plant that needs your attention every day, how can you let it wither and die? Things like this may occupy your time, but they aren't necessarily the best use of it. You could be doing something more meaningful, but your calendar is already filled.

The accumulation of stuff—both physical and mental—is the primary burden of old age. It isn't the deterioration of the body that makes us old but the accumulation of possessions and preconceptions. Even if our lifespan was 500 years, the problem would be the same: After a few years of prosperity, we become ensnared in a web of our own stuff. We can't move because we can't bear to part with the objects and habits that no longer serve us.

Thankfully, we don't live 500 years. We'll die soon enough, and when we do our stuff will be quickly dispersed in some undignified garage sale. Our heirs will shake their heads at all the crap we accumulated as they crudely perform our downsizing for us.

It would have been better had we controlled our stuff on our own. If we had held the line on acquisitions and conducted our own garage sales before they were necessary we might have remained young forever. Sure, the body would have given out eventually, but there's no physical reason you can't be productive and adaptive until the very end.

Only your stuff holds you down.

—G .C.

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©2009, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Bedford, Massachusetts.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy Café #56: "Boundaries: Your Defense Against Chaos"

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

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Boundaries

Your Defense Against Chaos

By GLENN CAMPBELL

An essential dilemma of life is figuring out where your own personal responsibilities begin and end. No matter what resources you have, they are never enough to address all the needs around you, so you have to decide which problems are "yours" and which are not. The place you draw this line is called a boundary.

If my own life is at risk, that's certainly my problem. If someone else's life is a risk—a stranger I have no connection with—it's not my problem. I may be able to sympathize, but my resources are limited and I can't save everyone. If I try to do too much, then my own system will collapse and I'll be able to save no one. Therefore, I have to draw the line somewhere.

A boundary is a fenceline between yourself and the outside world. The health of what goes on inside the compound depends on how well you defend the fence. If you try to take on too much responsibility by letting too many problems come in, life inside the fence will eventually degenerate into chaos.

The problem of the underclass in a wealthy society like ours is not just the lack of resources but poor personal boundaries. The limited resources of an average family usually get absorbed by things that aren't related to core survival: pets, entertainment systems, drugs (legal or otherwise), friends who visit and never leave, etc. In fact, this is a problem of the upper classes as well. As soon as someone has more money or time than they need to survive, the fence of their compound usually expands to absorb those resources.

Intrusions into the fence are sneaky. If a stranger was breaking into your home, you would have no trouble defending your boundaries. You would call the police! However, if a relative lost his job and moved into your home, your defenses would be a lot weaker. When he has nowhere else to go, how do you tell him to leave? The real threat to our boundaries is situations where our emotions say we have no choice.

No one would turn away a starving child or a little lost puppy appearing on their doorstep, but what if there were hundreds of starving children or lost puppies? At what point do you close the gate and start refusing entry?

That, in fact, is the permanent state of the world: Needs will always far outstrip the resources available. Once you start caring about others, the problem is deciding where to stop. If you can't stop, then your compassion will eventually eat up everything you have.

Indeed, most people don't know how to stop. Regardless of their starting position, their responsibilities tend to expand until all their resources are absorbed. That's when chaos kicks in. When any system is over capacity, safety systems break down and catastrophe becomes the de facto defender of boundaries.

For example, if your family has ample resources, it is noble to take on a foster child, but if you take on ten foster children, the integrity of your household is going to deteriorate to the point where it is just as dysfunctional as the families those foster children came from. Yet, how can you turn away a child who desperately needs you? Knowing he may be lost forever if you don't help him, how can you refuse?

The answer is: You can and you must! Defending boundaries means looking into a cute little puppy's eyes and saying, "No," even if it means the puppy might suffer or die.

Every relationship involves boundaries. Certain things are my responsibility and other things are yours, and if the border between the two becomes blurred, our relationship will deteriorate. You can't help your child too much or you'll damage his incentive to help himself. You can't be too supportive of your spouse or you will become the crutch he habitually leans on. In even the most caring relationship, you have to carefully guard your fence and push back responsibilities whenever they intrude into your space.

To someone who is repulsed by a boundary, it will inevitably seem cruel and arbitrary, but an arbitrary line is better than none at all. Whenever possible, you should use natural borderlines and simple rules. For example, it is a lot easier to say "No dogs" than to say "Only one dog," because one dog will often open the door to others.

To prevent your own life from sliding into chaos, you have to actively define and defend the responsibilities you will let in. You can't be totally cold to the needs and suffering of others, but you also can't let your life be taken over by other people's problems.

Your main instruments in this world are your own body and mind, and your first priority is their health and maintenance. It is noble to help others, but only as long as your own core resources are protected. If the problems of others take too much out of you, you have to pull back and redraw your borders.

If you truly care about others, then your first responsibility is protecting yourself. You must define your island and what you can reasonably do on it, then defend it firmly against any new entanglements.

—G .C.

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©2009, Glenn Campbell.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Stroud, Oklahoma.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy Café #55: "Puffery! The Legal Way to Lie!"

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

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Puffery!

The Legal Way to Lie!

By GLENN CAMPBELL

To lie in a commercial transaction is illegal. That's called "fraud". However, it is not illegal to distort perceptions, misinterpret facts, overstate benefits or fail to disclose drawbacks of a certain product. That's called "puffery", which is constitutionally protected free speech.

We live in a world of puffery. It's everywhere! Whenever someone has something to sell us, puffery is probably in use. Over 99% of all advertising consists of it. We are told a product is NEW! Improved! Amazing! Legendary! We see the product being used by beautiful people (usually paid actors and models) who say it's wonderful. Puffery leads us to believe that the product can do more for us than it actually can, and such suggestions are perfectly legal because no one has technically misstated facts.

Take soda pop. It consists of water, sugar, caffeine, artificial flavor and carbon dioxide—a penny's worth of ingredients. Watching the advertising, though, you'd think consuming the product was an important lifestyle decision. You're imbibing "The Real Thing" or "The Taste of a New Generation". Sugar provides simply food energy; water replaces any that was lost, and caffeine temporarily stimulates nerve cells (depleting them later). Anything more you believe you are getting from the drink was planted in your head by puffery.

It becomes so natural to order a $2 soft drink with your meal that you don't even know your mind has been polluted. It's possible your whole life is enslaved to puffery! Perceived needs have been planted in your head by those who have something to gain, and you run around trying to serve these illusory goals as though they were real.

And puffery isn't limited to advertising. Anyone who is already emotionally invested in something probably wants to sell it to you. They tell you how great their own choices were, and if you're naïve you'll follow them.

What advertising is not puffery? There isn't much! One example is an airline ad that simply shows you a list of destinations and the lowest airfare available. That's the original form of advertising, as it first began. A merchant says: "I have this product to sell with these characteristics at this price." If you need the product, and the price is right, you'll buy.

Today, reasonably honest advertising, mostly free of puffery, can be found on eBay and Craig's List. Other honest advertising might be an impartial review in a neutral forum. But most mass-market advertising—the stuff that pollutes the environment around us—is not honest. It is focused on creating artificial needs where none previously existed or on distinguishing the product based on functionally insignificant factors. It's an exercise in image spin and fact distortion. Legal or not, it's all lies!

Does it matter that Britney Spears uses the product or appears in its ads? Of course not! She has been paid to do it! Yet, advertisers wouldn't pay the price if the ploy didn't work. Most people buy image, not function. It must be part of our genes!

Perhaps puffery is so powerful because modern culture consists of little else. Is there anything on television that isn't puffery? Is there anywhere you can go where puffery isn't the dominant public message? Religions use puffery in all the pomp of their rituals. Politicians are full of it! Entertainment is mostly puffery: It may occupy time, but it's not usually very satisfying because it rarely consists of more than self-promotion.

Certain rare art works are not puffery—a deep song, a meaningful movie—but you'll encounter only a few of these in a lifetime. A few products are indeed useful; they can save time or even save your life. All the rest is crap that continues to sell only because the puffery works.

Most people are happy to live a life of lies, fulfilling artificial needs that have been handed to them by others. Is that you? Are you a puffery addict, or do you care about function?

Function is what really works, what really serves your needs. The trouble is knowing what your needs truly are, and for this you must return to basic science. You conduct experiments. You collect data. You employ dispassionate logic to reach provisional conclusions. Advertising is irrelevant, because you know it's skewed in favor of the advertiser.

Puffery is legal because these lies are unenforceable. Advertising usually implies the lie rather than stating it. The only way to stop puffery is to defeat it in your head. "This guy has something to sell me, so I can't trust him!" To live well in your own unique world, you must conduct your own research and reach your own conclusions.

—G .C.

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©2009, Glenn Campbell.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Written on a transcontinental flight. (Released from Las Vegas.)
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy Café #54: "The Fallacy of 'Commitment'"

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

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The Fallacy of "Commitment"

Young people often mistake imprisonment for commitment. Commitment isn’t real if it is enforced by outside chains.

By GLENN CAMPBELL

On the subject of marriage, a correspondent writes:

"Once someone marries, there is a high cost for divorce. Accordingly, one is willing to work harder to solve problems resulting in a better marriage via effort."

This is a big, fat fallacy, perhaps the most common one cited when young people get married or bind themselves to any extended contract. It's the equivalent of saying "I don't trust myself to do the right thing unless I am forced to."

If this were true, then we would always choose prison over freedom. Prison forces us into a single path, and, yes, we are going to have to make the most of that path, but that's still not better than having many paths available.

Indeed, there are many happily married people who have made their relationships work. The question is whether it's the hard-to-get-out-of element that makes it happen or something else?

Do you make your life better by locking yourself into a certain path and throwing away the key? Does lack of choice improve your life or make it worse?

The issue here is free will. Are you staying with your partner because they are the best one for you, because you are constantly testing the relationship and proving yourselves to each other every day, or are you staying together merely because the cost of breaking up is too high? In the first case, you are staying together freely; in the second, you are not free at all. You can't say for sure that your choice is best when you don't have a realistic option of choosing another.

Locking yourself up with someone is not the recipe for vibrancy, creativity or motivation. Instead, it's a plan for entrenchment. Battle lines will be drawn, and they won't budge for years. You'll learn to survive by recognizing fragile boundaries and never stepping over them. Over time, you inevitably become mutual enablers, carefully avoiding and thereby implicitly reinforcing each others' weaknesses and sensitivities.

The essence of any relationship is negotiation. Each partner is always struggling to get what they want from the other, and love alone can't solve anything. It would be nice to think you could talk every problem out, but with entrenched and emotionally driven behaviors (which we are all composed of) words just don't work. To get what you want, you also have to have an element of power at your disposal, including the ability to withdraw at will.

Everyone has "issues". Everyone has problems integrating themselves with the outside world, and these things are bound to interfere in a relationship. Let's say your partner drinks more than you'd like him to. If you are imprisoned with him, than you have little leverage to change his behavior. You probably have to accept it as it is.

If you are not imprisoned and are free to come and go, then you have more weapons at your disposal, including the ultimate one. You can say, "This behavior is too much for me; I have to pull away." Then your partner will either change or he won't, and the relationship will either last or it won't.

Is it frightening to know your relationship could dissolve at any time? Darn right! But that's the cost of freedom. Nothing is really solved by neutralizing choice and forcing people to remain together. Prison doesn't resolve problems as much as it pushes them underground, where they fester for years and may eventually explode.

The theory of the correspondent is that if it is painful to withdraw, you'll have to make the relationship work, but the way you'll probably do it is by accepting a mediocre relationship that is no longer growing.

People say they are getting married to express their love and commitment to each other, but really they are doing the opposite. Once you lock yourself in, love and commitment are no longer a choice but an obligation. Yes, married couples say they love each other. They say they wouldn't want it any other way, but how can they really know? It's more of a religious belief at that point. You believe because you have to believe, because the alternative is simply too painful.

Religion works for most people, but it's not the same as free-will choice. Face it, most relationships don't last forever, and you can't make the magic last simply by taking away future discretion.

Personal growth is, by definition, unpredictable. If you are truly alive you are bound to go through many unanticipated changes, and your partner may or may not be able to follow. By making it harder to withdraw from a relationship, you simply slow down growth for both of you, not encourage it.

—G .C.

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©2009, Glenn Campbell.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Written in the library the University of Louisiana, Monroe.
(Released from the library at Western Piedmont Community College, Morganton, NC.)
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main entry for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy Café #53: "Why Do You Believe?"

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

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Why Do You Believe?
People believe what they need to believe to protect the value of their prior investments.

By GLENN CAMPBELL

What makes someone a liberal or a conservative? Why do they believe in one religion and not another? Why do some people become vegans or lawyers or skiers or con artists? Why do they choose a certain spouse and stay with them? How do they choose their personal preferences? How do they know which sports team to root for?

If you ask someone why they believe something, they will usually give you rational-sounding reasons. "I am a liberal because X, Y and Z." They claim logic is their only guide. Alternatively, they may insist the decision was in the stars, and they present a mythology showing no other choice was possible.

But these are rationalizations, not true causes. Beliefs usually arise from emotion, not logic or fate. Beliefs are largely egotistical and self-serving. The "reasons" are assembled only later, after the belief has already been established by emotional necessity.

Both liberalism and conservatism have their strengths and weaknesses, their absurdities and excesses, and you can debate endlessly which one is right. If a person chooses one over the other, it's not because it is demonstrably "correct" but because their ego in some way benefits from this choice. They have already invested in a certain way of life and can't go back, so they tailor their beliefs to support this investment and make it seem heroic.

What really determines human belief? Two factors: (1) the quest for personal identity, and (2) the defense of one's prior investments.

The first trend tends to happen early in life. If your parents are conservative, you might embrace liberalism to distinguish yourself from them. You may also choose outrageous fashions, hobbies, behavior or body art to tweak your elders and define your own path.

Such defiance of convention can also happen later: A successful businessman who built his life on capitalism can vote liberal to show how independent and well-rounded he is. Both young and old are using their beliefs to say: "Look at me, I'm unique and special!"

The second motivation for belief is to maintain internal consistency. Whatever you have already done with your life, it needs to be defended or you will experience great emotional discomfort. "Is my whole life worthless?" you would ask if you fairly consider a contradictory belief, so you don't fairly consider any. If you have already committed yourself to a certain set of assumptions, your current beliefs are usually going to support this investment.

Due to the second factor, beliefs tend to be self-reinforcing over time. That's one of the reasons old people get stuck in their ways. You may choose a certain religion to be unique and annoy your elders, but once you start investing, you tend to retain the belief forever. You believe in your religion because you have already invested in it and you continue to invest because you believe.

For most people, beliefs change only when they smack hard into reality. If you believe you can fly and you jump off enough cliffs trying, eventually you might begin to see the error of your assumptions. On the other hand, each attempt to fly is in itself a costly investment. Instead of withdrawing, each failure may reinforce your resolve, leading you to repeat the behavior.

Belief can become a drug. Whatever people invest in at the beginning of their life is usually what they continue to believe for the remainder. It's an addiction they rarely escape from.

There is no sense is faulting humanity for this trait. Humans are matched only by dogs for their fierce loyalty to their clan, regardless of logic. It has always been true that people will defend the prevailing beliefs of whatever group they are invested in. "My country, right or wrong!" is as old as the hills.

But while it may be good for social cohesion, invested belief is a burden to one's personal problem solving. People who are heavily invested in certain belief systems may do well within the artificial protection of their clan, but they make poor decisions when presented with the complexities of the outside world.

Wise decisions do not arise from ideology. They depend more on assessing current conditions as they actually exist and fairly considering all the available options. An entrenched belief system blocks out many of those options and may prevent you from seeing the problem as it really is.

To protect the integrity of the decision-making process, you must eschew belief. Is that even possible? Never entirely, but you protect your discretion by avoiding situations where you have no choice but believe. If you remain lightly invested over time and return to a neutral base whenever possible, then you will be under less pressure to believe your own dogma.

Freedom is not just the ability to choose your own beliefs but also the privilege of not believing in anything. All that really matters is the decisions you make and how well they turn out.

—G .C.

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©2009, Glenn Campbell.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Fort Stockton, Texas.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main entry for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

World's Worst Songs

On my Facebook page, I have assembled a list of songs I like, but my critical analysis would not be complete if I did not create a list of songs I hate. Too many hit songs have lyrics that suck, and I'd like to give them credit.

To qualify for my list of World's Worst Songs, a song must (1) be a former hit, (2) have compelling music, (3) have words that are extraordinarily stupid if you analyze them without the music. My list is short, but I will add to it as new candidates come to me. (You can also email me your suggestions.)

Waiting On The World To Change by John Meyer.

Listen to the words. Translation: "We know the world needs to change, but we prefer to sit around and do nothing." Great social message!

Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston

This song is a compilation every conceivable adolescent cliche, starting with "I believe the children are our future." Duh! There's no obvious connection between the cliches. If you throw in enough of them, every teenager's going to find something to identify with. Basically, though, the song is about "me, me, me," which also helps sell it to teens.

You're Beautiful by James Blunt

"I saw your face in a crowded place, and I don't know what to do." This guy is beauty-fixated. I mean, this girl could be a total moron, and he don't care. The purest form of love, it seems, is based purely on appearance where you never actually communicate with the object of your desire.

Lady in Red by Chris De Burgh

Everything in this song is about superficial beauty. Not one word about this lady's abilities or anything she actually does, only about how she looks to the singer and others in the room. Complete and utter idiocy.

ALL Rap Music

The whole genre is crap! These guys know how to rhyme, nothing else.

Glenn's Photo Management System

One of my Facebook friends, Gavin Payne, writes:

How about a new blog entry on how you process all of your images, index them, make the libraries, add text to them etc?

As you wish. Let's see if I can give you the highlights in 15 minutes...

1. I take a LOT of frames, only a tiny percentage of which I ever show to the world. The pictures are all free on a digital camera, so why not?
2. On my laptop, I store photos in directories by year and month and setting. e.g. inside directory "2009" is a directory "September" which has a directory "BAR HARBOR".
3. Inside the setting, I have four working directories: "raw", "web", "UPLOAD" and "UNPROCESSED".
4. When I download the photos from my camera, they go into "UNPROCESSED" and are immediately deleted from the camera.
5. I go through UNPROCESSED at my convenience, looking for good photos. I'll first "cherrypick" the very best photos, then I'll go through the rest of them as I have time.
6. Each photo I choose will be cropped, corrected for color/darkness/etc and resized to 604 pixels across, as suitable for Facebook. (I use Corel Paint Shop, the cheaper equivalent of Photoshop.)
   
7. For the clear, crisp quality, I "sharpen" at 604 pixels. (Makes all the difference in the world.)
8. I save the edited photo under the same name in "UPLOAD".
9. I move the raw photo I just edited into "raw", along with any original photos I know I won't be doing anything.
10. Facebook is my main album medium. (I once had my own album system, but Facebook does it better.) After I upload the "UPLOAD" photos to Facebook, I move them into the "web" directory.
11. If I have time to edit the whole batch, I'll end up having all the original photos in "raw", the upload photos in "web" and the other two directories empty. Then I delete those two directories and have only "raw" and "web" left. I'm done!
12. More likely, however, I will still have some "UNPROCESSED" photos left by the time I move to the next project. I could come back to these later, but probably not. C'est la vie!
13. As I pass through my parent's house once or twice a month, I back up my new monthly directories onto some terrabyte hard disks I have. Once I have backed each directory up on two or more media, I can delete the "raw" directories. (I keep the "web" directories because they are small.)
14. My on-line index (http://roamingphotos.com/main) is of my own construction using Perl. (Remember that I used to be a programmer.) I can't easily explain how it works, but it all routes back to the albums on Facebook.
15. For every album, Facebook provides a public URL that anyone can use to access the album, even if they are not on Facebook. (Look at the bottom of the album's page.) I use that address but don't have complete confidence that the address won't change. (It has in the past.) To protect myself from future address changes, I have an intermediate system that translates my own preferred address into Facebook's address. For example...
    
    
    http://roamingphotos.com/a?barharbor
    
    ...is redirected by my system into...
    
    http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2008128&id=1003315385&l=410397cfbd
    
    
    I have a spreadsheet table I maintain that has both addresses, as well as some other info about each album, and this is what my online indexes are generated from.
16. My Facebook albums roughly correspond to my monthly directories (e.g. "Bar Harbor"). At the end of each directory, I have a bumper image...
    On that page, I provide my preferred public URL, as well as links to my photo home page and any other albums that are related to this one.
    

That's my system (or at least all I can think of).

Most people can do everything I can do except the fancy index, but most people don't have hundreds of albums like I do, so it doesn't really matter. You can always create a similar index in html using Facebook's public address, since it has been stable now for over a year. (You could just copy my table at http://roamingphotos.com/main, edit the html and plug in your own album information. I won't object.)

Kilroy Café #52: "The Shamanism of Luxury"

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

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The Shamanism of Luxury

By GLENN CAMPBELL

In ancient shamanic traditions, one could supposedly gain power or good luck by ingesting, touching or possessing certain sacred or magical objects. A cannibal might eat the flesh of his enemy to gain his power. A pretty stone could be used as talisman to attract a mate. Even today, endangered animals are poached throughout the world for certain body parts that are seen to have medicinal properties when consumed.

Western society today generally rejects such beliefs as unscientific and destructive. Ground horn of rhinoceros is not an effective cure for cancer, except to the extent that any placebo is. The danger is that it displaces more effective treatments—not to mention threatening the rhino!

There is one form of shamanism, however, that remains strong in our society: the market for luxury goods. We don't necessarily believe that a Louis Vuitton purse or filet mignon dinner will bring us good luck, but there is always an implied belief that consuming the special product—ingesting, touching or possessing it—will somehow make us more valuable ourselves.

Behind most consumer products is a practical function. The function of a wristwatch is to tell time. The purpose of food is energy and nutrition. The role of a car is to get to you from place to place with minimal maintenance.

The luxury market says that function is not enough. The product has to have a right brand, the right cachet. It has to convey the impression that you are important, distinguished. That's where the shamanism comes in. By consuming the product, you believe you are gaining some sort of magical power.

Advertisers never exactly say what the magical power is (so they can never be accused of lying). Instead, they imply it with imagery, such as a gorgeous model displaying the product in a prestigious setting. And no one purchasing the product would acknowledge a belief in magic, but that's what their purchase implies.

You can buy a wristwatch for $10 or $10,000. What do you get for the extra $9990? Do you get a more accurate timepiece? Only marginally so—and how accurate does a wristwatch have to be? The purchaser might claim that the luxury watch conveys a good impression to business and social contacts, but does anyone you meet really care about your watch compared to your words and personality? A valuable watch has to be protected and locked up. It limits your movements through the streets. In functional terms, it's a pain in the ass.

There's only one reason you would own a $10,000 timepiece: the implied belief that possessing such an object makes you a better person.

There's always a cover story. The purchaser may speak of the watch as an "investment" or talk about its beauty or workmanship, but it's all a sham. The fact is, the purchaser suffers from low self-esteem and the luxury product is a magical talisman to salve it. "If I own such a valuable object, I must be valuable, too."

Luxury shamanism permeates our society, not just in the objects labeled "luxury" but in excess of all kinds: the premium hamburger, the exotic tourist destination, the expensive wine. It persists because of people's natural affinity for shamanic solutions to their problems. Buying something always seems much easier than actually changing one's life, which involves far more anxiety.

The other reason luxury grips our society is there's huge profit in it. There is little money in selling people things they actually need, because this is usually a commodity business where competition keeps prices low. Slap some premium cachet on the product, like a designer label or vintage year, and suddenly you can sell the same thing for many times more. This obscene profit margin fuels the advertizing that dominates the world around us. The luxury sellers are out there hawking, cajoling, pushing their products on you, while the things-you-really-need sellers can't afford to. You have to find them.

Take luxury out of our economy, and there wouldn't be much economy, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. When people seek talismans for their problems, they aren't taking real actions to solve them. They are burdened by luxury, not freed by it, and real solutions are pushed into the distance.

There are other remedies for low self-esteem. You could, for example, accomplish things you are proud of. If you're not inherently pleased with who you are or what you've done, then there's always luxury to tell you what you want to hear. That helps explain why drug dealers, mafiosos and scam artists are notorious consumers of luxury. The more reprehensible your industry is, the more you need the shamanic potion to try to feel right.

But the rest of us should be content with function. If you do what you're proud of then you don't need the false reassurance of your value. You don't need the better class of wine—or even any wine at all! You need to find the things that work, that most efficiently get the job done, so you can get on with your own job of doing what's important.

—G .C.

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©2009, Glenn Campbell.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Bar Harbor, Maine.
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Glenn's Photo Tips

Here are my tips for taking good photos, as expressed succinctly on my Twitter feed:

#1: CROP. Cut out extraneous data along edges of photo, either in-camera or in post-production.

#2: SEPARATION OF ELEMENTS. Each person or other subject should be distinct from its surroundings. Move to make that happen!

#3: SINGLE FOCUS POINT. Each photo should have only ONE center of attention, no more. If two things are competing, cut one out.

#4: COMPRESSION. Select a viewpoint that compresses the scene into a tight area. E.g. A whole mile-long train seen from the front.

#5: ILLUSION OF DEPTH. Always put something in the foreground and something in the background.

#6: HUMANIZATION. Every photo needs a human or human-like character to give the scene perspective.

#7: HIGH CONTRAST. Search for bright colors and high contrast between colors. Avoid dull grays.

#8: IRONY. Seek the outrageous and that which is unexpected for the situation.

#9: FIND HIDDEN MESSAGES. Look for messages in the juxtaposition of objects. Change your viewpoint to bring these items together.

#10: TAKE A LOT OF FRAMES. Shoot first, ask questions later. In the digital age, it's all free, so why not?

#11: REMOVE DISTRACTIONS. Frame or crop to exclude distracting objects, or Photoshop them out.

#12: KEEP SUN BEHIND YOU. Whenever possible, stand with the sun behind you for best light.

#13: ILLUSION OF MOTION. Every photo should be "going someplace" with its main character engaged in an action.

Most of these elements are present in the photo above (from Rome, see larger version). The girl in pink is the reference point. There's depth. There's motion. Most of the people in the photo are nicely separated. The "irony" element is that this place looks surreal, yet it is real.

Also see my Guide to Photo Cropping.