Manson's Bag o' Dicks, Revisited

Sometimes when I get an idea in my head it just percolates there for awhile like a background task that just consumes random cycles while the CPU is off doing more useful things, and I randomly come up with further points of analysis that weren't there when I originally started thinking about it. That's what we have going on here. Some might say that this is a mild form of OCD, and I probably wouldn't disagree too vehemently; as I said in the previous post, thinking about shit is what I do - and I am one hell of a rabbit-hole spelunking master, sometimes to my detriment, to be sure - but I consider it a skill much more than a hindrance.  Anyway, before I get too far astray, let's get to the point - after a background reexamination of Manson's FYON (see Mark Manson Can Eat a Dick for context), I've found two additional flaws in it.

Before we get to that... an erratum on the first post: I said that 3M and I had gone out 8 times. It was actually 9 times. I think the 8th was probably the one that sunk the Bismarck, so I just unconsciously chose to skip over it when counting... And now back to the show.

First, we should recall that the genesis of Manson's FYON is not out of any great wisdom derived from an examination of personal relationships. It came from how an acquaintance of his judged business proposals. FYON is an attempt by one guy to apply some other guy's rule of thumb from the business world, where the primary measure of success is the simple quantitative difference between profit and loss, to something which cannot be viewed in terms of transactions, dollars and cents, and ROI.¹ I don't know about the rest of you motherfuckers, but I already get treated enough like some random cog in a great machine by society at large, government, corporations, and the delivery person that brings my Instacart orders. I don't want my friendships or romantic relationships to be governed by the red and black on somebody's balance sheet.

Hell, I don't even want the "rules of business" to be applied to my government. If you think that experience² in the business world automatically makes you a successful politician, then you've been living under a rock (at least in America) for the last two years. King Donald thought he was going to come in and act like the CEO of America, Inc., and we all see how well that has been working out. Anyway, my point is that FYON is like classifying all your relationships as either hot dog or not-hot dog. But you can't eat a relationship....

Why the hell are we so wiener-normative in this society in the first place?

The second new chink in the FYON armor is our inherent differences in modes of expression. This is something of an offshoot of my first criticism of FYON, which is that it is all about self-centered instant gratification, but I think it's also a bit different. I am going to cite Chapman's Love Languages (which is also more self-help garbage to a certain extent, but I give it credit for actually being more human than FYON and more understanding of the differences between people and the complexity of interpersonal interactions) as a reference point. The basic idea of LL is that we express our feelings for people in different ways, and we value different kinds of expressions of feelings in different ways. Put another way and with a concrete example, if you say "I love you" to someone, you might think that it has the same meaning and impact to them as it would if they said it to you, but in fact they might not place the same level of importance on these words as you do. They might cook you an elaborate dinner with candles and music and flowers and such and think that they are conveying all of the same depth and breadth of feelings to you as you were trying to convey to them with your words. What you have then is one of those terms that the tech community has borrowed from some other field - in this case, electrical engineering - an impedance mismatch.³

Put simply: what you have is not what you want.

For devotees of the cult of FYON, this is an immediate sign to run for the door. And maybe the rest of us who don't follow that bullshit or who are trying to deprogram ourselves from its deleterious effects might sit back and say "well, good riddance to bad rubbish!" Yeah, maybe. But here's the thing that FYONites are missing:

THIS IS A SOLVABLE PROBLEM.

How? It's simple. You talk to each other. Wow, novel concept, right? Speaking to another human and, even more importantly, LISTENING to them. You don't just throw up your hands in defeat at the first sign of discomfort or because you've been waiting for something to happen that just hasn't. On Everything's Different, High Contrast asks, "Where are the trumpets?" What if you're too busy listening for trumpets that you never look up and see the aurora? Let me say it again....

THIS IS A SOLVABLE PROBLEM.

Unfortunately, as a former classmate of mine once said, the difference between theory and practice, in theory, is seldom as great as the difference between theory and practice, in practice. The solution to this problem is a simple one, but the implementation is often quite challenging, and this is what I think scares the FYONites. Hell, it probably terrifies the shit out of most people who aren't followers of Mr. Manson - because, frankly, it is kinda scary.

For this to work, it takes a willingness on the part of both parties to be legitimately open and honest with what they are feeling or not feeling and why. This takes time. It takes thoughtfulness. It takes vulnerability. It takes an appreciation for the feelings of the other person and a basic sense of their value and a desire for understanding. It takes fucking effort - and that's where we lose all the FYONites who are too busy looking for hot dogs.

As with everything, I make no claims of universality; Immanuel Kant can shove the categorical imperative right up there with that bag o' dicks, and I'm just trying to sort my own shit out for when I come back to read this again in a few years. You can't save every relationship by having a conversation (or many conversations) about it; our friends used to give C and me a lot of shit for how much we talked about our relationship - which is kinda funny because we also got complimented by a marriage counselor for talking to him before we got married due to our different desires with respect to the production of minions. Not every relationship is worth saving in the first place. Sometimes you're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic no matter what you or the other person say or do, and you can't force someone to feel something that they don't.

BUT...

If someone is offering you the aurora when what you really need is a trumpet, it's on you to tell them that you'd really appreciate a little horn (get your mind out of the gutter!) here and there. If the other person cares about you as much as the aurora would indicate, then they should find a way to bring some brass to the orchestra, just as you should try to appreciate those lights in the sky for what they are. If you don't both make the effort to appreciate what you have and give what is needed, then maybe you don't care as much as you think you do, or maybe it's just irreconcilable impedance mismatch and you move on. That's one possibility, sure, but another possibility is that you learn more about each other and deepen your mutual understanding and you work it out. Hell, maybe you discover synesthesia (why the fuck is my spell-checker so brain-dead as to not recognize this as a properly-spelled word?) and go full-on multimedia with lights AND trumpets. Who knows? Take a chance and see what happens.

1. OK, to be fair, I suppose you could view your relationships like this. For example, if you partake in the services of escorts, those are fundamentally transactional at the end of the day; you give them money and they give you <whatever> for some set amount of time. Nobody ever said that it was impossible to rent some fake friends, and maybe some of those friends-for-hire even develop some legitimate feelings, but for our purposes, this kind of interaction is excluded from discussion. Most people aren't shelling out hundos for the services of a high-end escort or gigolo.
2. It is debatable just how much business acumen King Donald actually has, but one thing that I do think he is a master of is working the system to his advantage. As a human, the guy is a bag of shit, but as a CEO who gives no fucks for the spirit of the law, one could say that he was objectively successful. Yeah, he declared bankruptcy some nonzero number of times, and I think some people would point to this as a series of failures, but if you think about what corporate bankruptcy actually allows you to do, it's kind of a brilliant Machiavellian use of the system against itself. I don't want to digress on this footnote too much, but anyone who was around during the real estate crash in 2008 might want to reflect on why it is deemed socially acceptable for a corporation to declare bankruptcy and give a middle finger potentially valued at millions or billions of dollars to the rest of the world but people who walked away from their ridiculously-underwater mortgages were viewed as deadbeats.
3. In electrical engineering, an impedance mismatch occurs when the input impedance of an electrical load does not match the output impedance of the signal source, resulting in signal reflection or an inefficient power transfer.