When I got back from New Orleans, I took a shower and I noticed the water pressure wasn’t as good as it was at the hotel. Before the trip, I hadn’t had a single thought about the water pressure in my shower, but now I was aware of it and it wasn’t passing muster, so I bought a new shower head that promised good pressure. I was excited about upgrading my shower, and I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of the new shower head. When it came it, I installed it, but I have one of those extender arms that raises the shower head, and it broke while I was adjusting it. Now I have to go out to Wal-Mart to re-buy the same shitty Chinese-made extender arm. Just my luck!
But hold on. I had also bought a usb-to-toslink adapter in the same order, so I installed that, and it didn’t work, either. No audio output at all, but one thing at a time. Frustrated that nothing was going according to plan, I drove to Wal-Mart to get the new shower extender arm, but I couldn’t find one. I’ve seen them in Wal-Mart a zillion times, but here all of the sudden they are no where to be found. The clerks are next-to-useless, and honestly, by now I’ve just learned to avoid asking a Wal-Mart clerk anything at all. I went to Lowes, but same thing. Nothing. So, I return home empty-handed, and I check the web sites. As it turns out, my local Wal-Mart was just out of them, but they were fully stocked one town over. By now, I’ve got a couple of hours into this and both of these things were just supposed to work, at least when I imagined things that how it went, but here I was no closer to a upgraded shower.
I can’t get audio output out of the toslink adapter. It was glowing red, and everything on the sound settings looked right, but no sound. I tried it on another computer. Same result. I tried it on a Windows computer. Same result. So, I ruled out the computers. That left me with the adapter, the toslink cable, or the receiver. I have the luxury of having a second working receiver, so I tried it on that one, and no audio, so that ruled out the receiver, thankfully. That left the adapter and the toslink cable, so the next morning I drove to Wal-Mart a town over and bought the new extender arm and the new toslink cable. Interestingly, both of these items have something in common. I bought both of them at Wal-Mart, and I replaced them with identical items from Wal-Mart. That’s Wal-Mart. I can’t think of anytyhing more Wal-Mart than that.
I tell all of that to get to a couple of points:
Hedonic Adaptation is Relative
I could have kept trucking with my shower head, but I decided to upgrade. The upgrade itself, with the new extender arm, cost about $40, so this wasn’t an expensive operation, but it also didn’t need to be done. I could have left it alone. Let’s say that there’s a spectrum of showers, with ten being the best imaginable shower, and one being an ice-cold trickle of water. I could practice some insane levels of voluntary discomfort by just taking a cold shower, you know? Let’s do beds. Ten is the best bed imaginable. One is sleeping on the ground. I can get some discomfort out of sleeping on a couch; I don’t need to sleep on the ground to get my discomfort. Do you see what I am sort of driving at here? That it is all very relative.
One could live like a billionaire if he focused his attention to the areas of life that truly matter, like sleeping or showering, that upgrades in these areas make sense because these things give us higher quality of life. I can buy the best mattress I can buy, and it can be really good. Good sheets. A nice pillow. Even a billionaire can only spend so much money on upgrades here because there’s an upgrade ceiling; one doesn’t need to be a billionaire to sleep like one or to shower like one. I’m not sure what to call this category of things. These are still externals, but they are higher value or preferred. A need exists. I need to sleep. Let’s say I can spend money on a mattress up to a point that I get the most comfortable mattress possible, and from there forward the cost comes from qualities that have nothing to do with comfort, say silver molecules are doped into the memory foam to prevent bacterial growth, just frou frou stuff. I think Seneca would be for getting the best possible mattress that satisfied the need, but nothing beyond that. The need can be maximized. Simultaneously, he would probably say something about attachment, that we ought to enjoy the mattress while simultaneously recognizing that we don’t actually need it, that it is an external and can therefore be taken away. Stoicism is this dance, or wrestling match, between the rational mind and the mammalian layer that just wants to bond, man. It just wants to curl up in a nice warm bed. The other category is externals that are still preferred, but they don’t pay the same dividends. At the end of the day, a car is a machine that enables me to go places, and any machine that did that would be fine. I an upgrade to a corvette or whatever, but I’m still using a conveyance machine that mostly just sits in my driveway like 95% of the time. I’m not getting a great deal of value out of upgrades there. Likewise, I pretty much only use my phone for text and calls, and to a lesser degree I use it to browse the web and a handful of other things, but to me my PC is still my primary interface for all things Internet, so I’m not going to get a lot of value out of buying the most expensive phone. These sorts of upgrades seem to be more about status and dopamine than anything else. Food would be an interesting study here. I’m not sure what maximizing the need would look like here, but I can spot extravagance when I see it. Irvine writes about how the stoics found the joy derived from simple fare to be top shelf, but all I’m asking about here is the spectrum, with one being, I’m not sure. A food that is just absolutely basic but still a food, but ten being the best food ever? It sort of breaks down here, doesn’t it? No one is going to derive stoic joy from eating bad food.
Killing Superstitions
The second point is about superstition. I have endeavored to eliminate superstitions from my thinking, from my general engagement with reality. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of them, but I noticed one that I held quite sincerely, and it is karma, essentially, this idea that there’s a cosmic order or some kind that evens things out, morally speaking, as in, if I do a good thing, I get good karma points, and if I do a bad thing, I get bad karma points. I am unsure how I noticed it, meaning, how it came under scrutiny, because before it just operated invisibly, as a part of my natural attitude. With me, it is a mix of petty luck, good and bad omens, trends to the positive or trend to the negative. It is like having a good thing happen, a lucky thing, and then thinking I need to go buy a lottery ticket. That’s how it gets its expression, in little thoughts like that, but like I said, these are most sincerely believed little things.
In the case with the shower head extension arm and the fritzing SPDIF adapter, my mind generates a pattern that I’m snakebit.
Luck. Karma. Santa’s naughty or nice list. God and heaven, how if I do XYZ, God will keep a record of it and I’ll get on the list.
These ideas are so deeply embedded, I would guess just about everyone has them in some for or another. I don’t have a greater insight here other than I’m learning to spot these errant thoughts, and I can then question them. In the case of the adapter and extender, I just noted the thought that these things were connected in a greater sweep of general back luck I was experiencing, and then I reminded myself how truly silly that was, that those things aren’t connected at all. It isn’t a high priority fix, but a slow untangling over time. I think superstitions are inhibitors. Maximum freedom requires getting rid of them.