Buddhist Marketer

Ox E. Moron, PhD?

I’ve been sitting in a library for about six hours straight at this point, cranking on an application.  I just took a break to eat some lunch in the form of a Larabar and some GORP.  I haven’t had any fluids since my cuppa joe this a.m.  So perhaps that informs the tenor of the question I’m about to ask.

What’s up with the term ’social scientist’? Do you know any scientists that are particularly skilled in things social?

I almost feel like being social is a bad thing in academia.  For example, my terrible no-good very-bad schmoozing talents, culled over years of trying to ape the cool kids, makes me appear more socially ept than I really am.  Frankly a day like today (hours in front of my raptop, earplugs in, technology-mediated interactions with humans) is basically ideal, particularly knowing that at some point tonight I’ll have human interactions in real life, in same place, yaddi yaddi yadz.  But if I appear too social, maybe it’ll send a signal of, “Hmm, she’s not cut out for research, she seems to enjoy herself at parties after all.”

?????

Signed,

Prospective pseudosocial scientist

(Not to be confused with prospective pseudo social scientist!)

Rewarding addictive behavior

In which I use italics willy-nilly and try to figure out at what point good becomes bad

Kara Richardson Whitely, in “Reaching my peak” in the October 2008 issue of Self magazine, writes, bolding mine:

For a long time, I used food — and by extension fat — to insulate myself against all the bad things:  my parents’ divorce when I was 9, the family friend who molested me at age 12, the countless people who sorrowfully told me I had “such a pretty face.” …

I ate, pushing Little Debbie Zebra Cakes

(I’m more of a Donut Stick girl myself, or when available, Zingers, yum!)

into my mouth until I’d finished a box of 10 in a sitting…

I felt suspended between my desire to lose weight and my seeming inability to do anything about it…  I’d go to Weight Watchers, then swing by McDonald’s on the way home.  As my weight yo-yoed between 300 and 335, I felt frightened of what would happen if I lost more.  What would I do without the security blanket that had comforted me for so long?

Indeed.

Kara’s not the only one with an addictive behavior (you’ll have to read her full piece to know what happens; I don’t want to rob you after all), but her addictive behavior is pooh-poohed by society.  What about those of us who engage in self-soothing
behaviors that society rewards?

to insulate myself against all the bad things

I remember a specific moment during my writing class this summer, an intimate group of half a dozen women from our mid-twenties to late seventies, guided by the very awesome and highly recommended Elaine Edelman.  One woman had just finished reading her draft of a piece that closed with her, as a young girl, turning to the pages of a book immediately after being molested (by the teenage son of family friends as her mother chatted with his in the kitchen) (!!!).

“How heartbreaking,” one sixty-something woman responded, “that the girl immediately numbs herself with a book.”

I was nodding vigorously, thinking of my own public library denizen status as a young girl, and it was as if a lightbulb went off in the author’s head.  “Oh my,” this woman in her late seventies uttered quietly.  “I never made that connection.”

And why should she have?  We applaud reading, we give you Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas if you read a quota within a month, we remind you that reading is fundamental, and Levar Burton takes the banana comb out from in front of his eyeballs and devotes rainbows to the act.  Reading teaches you things and makes you smarter and we like smarts, so read!

But at what point is reading an escape mechanism?  At what t=bad does reading get in the way of, rather than contribute to, a happiness-optimized existence? Is there ever any way to tell when swimming into pages of black and white text has become the equivalent of jamming black and white striped cakes into your gaping maw?

Reading isn’t the only possibly-addictive behavior that our society rewards. I used to crank 90 hour weeks while taking two MBA classes, commuting 70 minutes each way, getting clobbered weekly by my best friend and her law school roommate in Scrabble, and running the national not-for-profit that I started.  Without even noticing. It would’ve been unthinkable for me to consider that I was cramming activities onto my plate as a way to escape myself — because I was wholly unawarez who and/or where this alleged self of mine was. Working long hours meant I rose up the ladder (and pay grade) quickly; getting an advanced degree was what you did as A Smart Person, and of course I was going to keep on running the organization that landed my name in the press. Duh. I mean, how could any of that stuff be bad? It’s not like I had track marks up my inner arms. Quite the contrary. Society was cheering me on.

And society cheers a lot of people on, encourages their addictive behavior.  “We’re a nation of consumers, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” coos an awful, terrible, very bad no-good Discover Card advertisement.  We’re proud when we’re workaholics.  We applaud industrious entrepreneurs.  And it’s a lot easier to go for that hit of instant gratification approval than take a moment to slow down, pause, and feel the twinkly warmth that comes from “little” things.

Like a warm hug from a friend.

The twinkle in the eye of a toddler.

The mesmerizing way the late afternoon sunshine floats through your curtains and twirls through the dust in the air.

===

Last year I broke with tradition and brought my old man with me to the Yale Medal Dinner.  One of the recipients was none other than John Pepper 6Y0, former CEO of Procter & Gamble.  As President Levin announced the award, he also noted that an entire table was here to support Mr. Pepper.  What loyalty this man inspires!  They all stood up and continued to applaud Mr. Pepper, one of the newest Yale Medal recipients.  We all applauded, clap clap, clap clap.  The men, President Levin reported, were primarily comprised of his direct reports and close colleagues at P&G.

I looked around for a woman I ran track with, albeit briefly, during my freshman year. I wove my head and searched the tables near the dozen men who were standing and cheering on their man Pepper. I was hoping to catch her afterwards, say hello, catch up. I didn’t see her or anyone else that she might have been with (for example, her mom).

This surprised me, seeing as she’s his daughter.

It’s not easy to be there for your kids (I surmise) especially when they’re snarly-lipped teens.  But medal-givers and paycheck-signers and the lovely pages of books that don’t talk back and the warm gooey wonderfulness of food food food –

===

Oh dear, how I love to write.  Oh my oh my oh my

Sleeping on a floor; chucking my sunk cost bias

I’ve been sleeping on my living room floor the past couple of weeks.

Okay, okay, not quite. The first night I pulled out my queen sofa and got yelled at by my old-lady back the next morning. Lacking the plywood board I’d been toting from apartment to apartment from 1998 - 2007, I decided to make a bold move to my twin size Aerobed.

But, there I am, living in my living room, protected from my pants-optional sixty-something bachelor neighbor by scraps of my former clothes that I’ve fashioned into a curtain. My other window I simply avoid by changing clothes in the part of my room that prevents my friends Dan and Melissa from the across the courtyard from being able to see me less decent than they have come to expect (and the bar is low).

My bedroom contains a summer law associate from Toronto. She’s been here for two weeks so far with one week to go. Unexpectedly, her fiance has also been here the entire time, keeping the air conditioning and many a DVD cranking all day long. This factoid is annoying as energy costs are up and this is 8 - 10 hours of additional electricity consumption I had not factored into my roommate price. Grumble.

But all in all, the experience has been secretly satisfying:

• I get to complain about it. I like having reasons to whine; it sates my inner need to feel somehow exploited and taken advantage of. Poor me! Boo hoo! I like sympathy points and having to bear, as a thirtysomething, the injustice of a roommate and her over-cologned, 24-pack buying fiance breaking my picture frames, ripping the curtains that took me so long to hang out of the wall, demanding more clean towels, refusing to wash their own dishes and jumping up and down on my bed with the a/c cranked to eleven while I develop scoliosis and sweat my balls off on a hissing aerobed gives me great reason to kvetch.

• Now I feel like a real Manhattanite. This was the experience I really wanted, wasn’t it? To be in a bizarre housing situation if only to live in a neighborhood with a walking score of 98?

• If I can live like this, I can do anything. I was worried that in my old age I had become habituated to long-thread sheets and furniture that did not involve cinder blocks and/or pilfered milk crates. “The next time I visit Berlin,” I sniffed to myself, “I am so not crashing on Sandeman’s floor!”

The last bullet is the most important. The experience has proven something to me: I can actually hang with purpose-driven ersatz poverty. So long as the curtailment has a goal, I’m actually cool with it.

So what’s the purpose of all this? Long short: I’m going back to school. No, not for an MBA, and I’m not sure who will accept me and my patchwork quilt of unsubstantiated-by-transcript-data maff skillz, but I’m now willing to trade a good salary for a legitimate permission slip to Think About Stuff. I think it would be wicked awesome to turn vast undulating sheets of data into my personal trampoline, to juice meaning out of numbers, to translate findings into reams of journal articles, and to stand in front of a bunch of kids and make math relevant.

1. Wait, but don’t you juice meaning out of numbers already in your day job? Yes, true, but I want to take it to a different level.
2. And, wait, but didn’t you stand in front of a bunch of kids and make math relevant back in the day? (Favorite class I designed / taught: Architecture & The Stock Market. Teaching geometry, ratios, and fractions to seventh graders was never so much fun.) Yes, and I loved it, and I want more.

So now that I know that I don’t mind sleeping on the floor, I’ve been considering jamming all my stuff into storage and subletting around New York City until I know where I’ll end up for grad school. (It won’t be New York because my soul needs to leave the City; Columbia & NYU aren’t options.) (Assuming I could even get in, of course.)

But the issue of sunk costs weighs heavily on my mind. I had to pay $2,640 to a realtor to find the place, $500 or so in forms for the co-op board for a sublet approval, $900 for a new range (whatever, the one that was here was subprime), $3,300 for movers (coming from a three bedroom in Brooklyn … I have a lot of stuff), $1400 for painters (the walls were yuckers) … That’s $8,700, or about $730/month for a year. Which brings my rent to nearly three grand a month, a 300%+ increase over what I was paying in Brooklyn.

… Unless I amortize over a two year period, which then makes it a less painful $360/month, or $2,600 a month all in. I mean, this is what I figured when I incurred the expenses to begin with: that I’d be there for a couple of years and then either be madly in love and cohabitating with my future baby daddy, or making more money and thus ready to upgrade to something with, like, granite countertops.

I never thought that I might be actively looking to substantially decrease my income.

So, that’s the crossroads I’m at. Bite the bullet and say sayanora to $8,700 but potentially curb expenditures for the next year, or pay the $300 sublease renewal fee and keep finding people to sleep in my bedroom that I can kvetch about on my blog.

* sigh *

The first principle of adults behaving badly

Why come humans be makin’ bad decisions?  Why do we stock up on Bad Idea Jeans?  I’ve got a theory.

As mentioned earlier, I was tipped off to a lecture by Mr. Dr. Professor Tyler Cowen entitled “What Should You Worry About” delivered to an audience of New York City Objectivist types a couple of weeks ago. As Mr. Dr. Professor Tyler Cowen attempted to get through his list of (a) things we worry about too much and (b) things we worry about not enough, and why, I began to wonder if there might be a thread connecting some of the dots.

• We save too much
• We are too willing to pay too much for healthcare
• We are in a subprime situation*

Of course, given that my Buddhism is enjoying a renascence not unlike my mathematicism, hypothetical thread is admittedly potentially fruity-rooty and not markedly different from perhaps stating, “These Events Are All Things That Happen To Humans! Hark! Now Where’s My Red Carpet?” Fine.

This heralding angel (!) did not get an opportunity to sing her inquiry to Mr. Dr. Professor Tyler Cowen because the grand poobah of the evening’s Social Interactions, a festively-panted Victor Niederhoffer, tour-guided the microphone to folks I suspect are Regulars. But this was their party and I was just a high-heeled interloper, I decided, so rather than jumping up and hovering near the podium for twenty-some minutes to ask my question (the strategy employed by a baby-faced undergrad), I figured I would just run my hypothesis by MDPTC as he signed the book I was about to buy (and which I have since flown through and am currently on p. 167, which contains the subheading “Superbia,” and yes you should buy it).

Unfortunately, brightly be-pantsed Neiderhoffer, who based on data collected prior to the kickoff of Social Interacting seems to be lactose tolerant if not loving, hurriedly drew the book-signing portion of the evening to a close so that MDPTC and his amused and sparkly-eyed wife could get on a train back to the DC area.

So here are a few observations sparked by MDPTC’s talk, and my hypothesis regarding that which, underneath it all, might be connecting the dots. And while I can no longer pose the inquiry in a co-located, real-time manner to MDPTC, surely in aggregate all of you good-looking, pants-optional readers have opinions.

I suspect there is a correlation between:

• We save too much
• We are too willing to pay too much for healthcare
• We are in a subprime situation*

So, for starters: we save too much. We forget that our earning potential is likely to increase over time (A sub 2V). We deny ourselves immediate gratification and instead save for a future event that we may never live to see (A sub 1V). We put off the pleasure, put off the pleasure, worry worry fear now, put off the pleasure. Life can be lived tomorrow.

My theory is that this kind of behavior springs fundamentally from the following, A sub 0: It’s difficult to authentically experience the rich fullness of this moment.

For seconders: we are too easily swayed to fork over scads of cash for physician-encouraged medical “fixes”. Sitting butt-naked save a tissue-thin robe in front of a fully-clothed MD, we feel vulnerable. **  And this vulnerability in the face of a theoretically objective unbiased party? Oh, these immediate reminders of our often-ignored mortality make us want to preserve and extend life no matter the cost (A sub 2H). But of course, soon as we get our clothes back on and take the elevator down to the street we’re off to buy a corn dog for 99 cents from Nathan’s Famous, happily ignoring the fact that we only get so many heartbeats.

Ignoring our mortality is a convenient method for sub-optimally managing our allocation of time at t=NOW. We don’t fully live today and instead put it off for the future day that we may never see (A sub 1H).

But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing… The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

– Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

And my theory is that this kind of behavior springs fundamentally from A sub 0: It’s difficult to authentically experience the rich fullness of this moment.

Thirdly: we want really big houses. We delude ourselves into thinking that the area under The Big House happiness curve is larger than it is, and so we git git git with the frenzy and finance a McMansion or the remodeling of the one we have with a big ole’ HELOC (A sub 2S). You know, because, keeping ourselves busy acquiring stuff for our big houses distracts us from the fact that we have sub-optimally managed for the expenditure of time = now (A sub 1S)… because …

It’s hard for us to authentically experience the rich fullness of this moment (A sub 0).

Now, I can’t figure out how to resolve the tension between A sub 1V and A sub 1S, and how this might relate to thug calculus, but really I’m wondering if you think there might be a common first principle — A sub 0 — that results in the above-mentioned three observations.

A0: It’s difficult to authentically experience the rich fullness of this moment

• A1V: We minimize the enjoyment of the very real today and save with the intention of enjoying a theoretical tomorrow
• A2V: We forget that as t –> ?, earning potential –> ?
• A3V: We save too much

• A1H: We don’t live fully today and instead put off for the future day that we may never see
• A2H: Immediate reminders of often-ignored mortality make us want to extend our lives regardless of cost
• A3H: We pay too much for healthcare

• A1S: Buying stuff keeps us busy from the fact that we are not optimally managing our time expenditure
• A2S: We think a Big House will make us happier than it actually will
• A3S: We are in a subprime situation

??? Hark? Singing? Red carpets?

* Hmm, this could be fun to announce to self when entering any venue that looks grimy. “Uh, oh; we’re in a subprime situation.”

**  Hmm, marketing idea: require all customers to walk around your store butt-naked save a tissue-thin robe and watch sales skyrocket! I mean, you know, assuming you can get any of them in the front door.

I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em

I had the great fortune to be tipped off to the existence of NYC Junto — a fascinating bunch of mostly white, mostly male Ayn Rand fans — when Mr. Dr. Professor Tyler Cowen spoke there a couple of weeks ago. Almost immediately upon arriving, during the bullet point that the group refers to as “Social Interaction” (and I will simply let the need for that two word description hang heavy in the air), I moved into cultural anthropologist mode. This is the stance I normally adopt when I am new to a setting so that I can feel like less of an outcast.

In any event, as the evening progressed — wait, no — as the evening digressed, I took more mental notes on the interaction styles of many present. It was during a run a few days after the experience that the following occurred to me:

I, of course, should note before anyone gets defensive that this is an observation made with bemused approbation (as opposed to judgy-wudgy cooler-than-thou-ness). Frankly, anyone that can be mapped to any portion of this line Libertarian to Autistic inclusive likely reminds me fondly of many a fine classmate at the Academy.

I should also point out that, while I grew out of my brief affection for Ayn Rand before my eighteenth birthday, I heart market-informed solutions to social ills.

On effecting real change, poor people or otherwise

My incentive for working on a very long marketing strategy playbook that I’ve been crafting for the past two weeks or so is to quickly read three blog posts from my feedr once I finish a few slides, which is how the following ended up on my radar during the work day:

From a post by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh in The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog: The Price of Advice: Chronicles of a Young Philanthropist, Part III:

… the donors had very rigid ideas concerning the capacity of poor people to change their behavior. When they met poor families (in Chicago and New York), they expected that their money would have magical powers. I exaggerate only slightly.

They believed that poverty was largely a result of resource deficiencies and organizational inefficiencies: if the poor had more money and their service providers could simply manage their giving more efficiently, change would happen. None placed much emphasis on feelings of self worth, [emphasis mine] the long-term nature of behavioral change or, most important, that staying above water is itself an accomplishment for a poor household. Everyone modeled their expectations after their family business or other corporate workplaces where they saw the “bottom line” motivate people to meet certain standards of achievement.

As I really need to get back to this deck, here are two quick thoughts:

• This is exactly why I am a big, big fan of Yale & Harvard-educated lawyer Brooke Ritchie’s relatively new organization, the Resilience Advocacy Project. By empowering youth and helping them to understand the law as a tool that protects them rather than punishing them, and by helping these kids feel like their own change agents / architects of their own future, the intention is to plant vital seeds of self-worth in order to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. “Teach a man to believe he is worth a new suit” vs. “Buy a man a new suit” if you will. (Fine print: I’m more than just a fan; I’ve signed on to help Brooke hone and refine RAP’s positioning and messaging strategy; ending what I refer to as trickle-down f*ckonomics is key, IMHO, to ending ongoing psychological and financial poverty. Helping people to help themselves is one of my deepest passions.)
• The thing is, even if you aren’t poor, in order to effect true change in your life, you cannot do so by simply addressing surface issues. You need to dig deep and get into root causes, first principles, step one, and find the very first line of code where things started to veer off track. This, of course, requires an awareness of said root causes. Before you can own your pipes, you need to know that your pipes are there, know what they’re made of, and know a little bit about that which sullies them.

Back to architecting an NPV-maximizing conversion funnel throughput strateg-ery.