There's a kind of guy who loves Marcus Aurelius's meditations.
I know two things about this guy:
Things are going wrong in his life, and he is handling those things very badly.
You'd think I'd love stoicism. I have anxiety, and I've done the therapy for it. I meditate. I get that a lot of the problems of the human condition are caused by grasping for impossible control.
But inside me there are two wolves. And while one of those wolves can sit and watch thoughts arise and fade away, the other wolf wants to solve its goddamned problems.
I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Mere Being, a monthly (ish) newsletter.
I spent most of July in Colorado, with a quick jaunt up to Minneapolis.
We are contemplating a move. I've moved a lot in my life. I'm not in the absolute upper tier of movers, but more than anyone I know socially. It's been especially bad recently; in the last 6 years I've lived in 5 different places. Most of those moves have been little intra Bay Area hops, with a quick jaunt for about a year down to Los Angeles.
This one's different. New state, new time zone, new latitude. From Zone 10b to Zone 5a. It's a big move. I haven't moved like that in about ten years, when I moved to Oakland for New York City.
It felt like I had stumbled into a separate dimension. My whole East Coast social media was orange with September, and there I was in the middle of a Bay Area second summer, somehow 3 hours off from everyone I knew. Everything seemed slightly the wrong angle.
The biggest reason for the move is a quick accident of social geography. We have an opportunity to be next-door-neighbors with one of my partner's oldest, closest friend. Another old, close friend lives within walking distance in the same neighborhood.
Why does everyone talk about moving near their friends, but no one does it?
I don't have a good answer to that question. I don't think any of the surface level answers you'd give if I asked you that question would get at it. I think it lives in the unconscious of our entire society.
I went to a workshop about how to Live Near Friends a few months ago. Besides information about the actual mechanics (here's what a TIC is, get a real estate agent who specializes in multi-family, it's dramatically harder to do this with more than 4 families for legal reasons) I had three big takeaways.
- Someone needs to be the instigator, and if you're here that's probably you.
- People take a few years to make this kind of decision, so start talking about it with everyone you might want to live near now.
- If you want this, you are probably going to have to move.
While we were in Colorado we dropped in on Superman. I don't have a lot to say about it except what I said when the movie ended:
"That was a movie made by a real human being with a real point of view."
It's not a lot of a point of view, but it's there. That's all I ask, from these things. They just need to not entirely feel like they're the product of an industrial machine. I need to be able to connect to the people who made the media.
I don't just watch movies to have an experience. I watch movies to have an experience that was made by a person.
James Gunn has quietly become one of my favorite directors after the last few years. Have you seen Peacemaker? Really fantastic. Really of the moment, without being excessively so. It's about, basically, a guy who's coming out of the DC Universe's MAGA, who was raised by a not-actually-super-powered Klansman, and has realized that racism is actually not a great way to live your life, and is trying to be better. The show does a good job of giving him some sympathy without letting him off the hook.
Why is this guy like that? And how does he get out of it?
And now, for something completely different: I really enjoyed this piece on how Chili's has used systems optimization to capitalize on viral moments
Basically they noticed that for most restaurants, when a dish go viral, they'd see a huge influx of customers for three to four weeks... and then those customers would all leave, because there was nothing else for them there. So they needed to be able to design and operationalize new dishes to respond to the trend in three weeks. This required streamlining their supply chain and their existing menu so that kitchen staff could learn to make a new dish within that window.
The thing that I of course find really interesting about this is that the process involves a lot of talking to people actually working in the restaurants and really considering their experience.
During our call, all Hochman’s gee-whiz energy was directed toward the small-bore changes that he feels, collectively, make the restaurant a better place to work. He likes to ask employees, “If you were CEO, what’s the one thing you would change tomorrow?” A server recently complained that whenever anyone ordered a plain cheeseburger, she had to tap the screen of her handheld tablet a million times: 86 LETTUCE 86 TOMATO 86 ONION …
They also staff their R&D differently from most restaurants of their type.
“All of us here in the test kitchen were operators and cooks in restaurants,” Paquette said. “That’s unique for a restaurant brand of our caliber. Most brands are bringing in professionals—you know, chefs.” I laughed at the mild disdain with which he said the word. “We are a ragtag band of operators.”
A few other good quotes:
If you’re a spy from Applebee’s or something, you will not be getting access to this room,” Bunn said. I believed him.
I was struck, in my conversations with Chili’s new executive team, by how uninterested they seemed in articulating any big inspirational message they’d delivered to the company. Instead, everyone just wanted to talk about the shrimp
Chili’s executives had told me they thought that Gen Z’s love of variety—their desire to sample everything—was a key to the chain’s success with young people, and my group agreed. “It allows you to be indecisive while ordering things,” Callie said
I keep waiting to start getting annoyed by young people but still, anytime I hear about Gen Z my basic reaction is, "Those kids seem alright." Someday!