The Top Ten Reasons List-Form Articles Suck

1.  They report no actual information.

2.  They don't require an intelligible (or intelligent!) human being to write them. As long as you have an opinion and access to google, congratulations on becoming a published author.

3.  They rely on pixilated .gifs and .jpegs to make their point, instead of using reason and language.

4.  They usually intend to be really funny, but they’re not.

5.  Your Facebook news feed is swarmed with them (keeping you from other really important stuff) because they pop up again every time someone comments, likes, or shares.

6.  You're reminded of the stupidity (or hopefully it’s just boredom) of the general public and worse yet your own Facebook friends, since people do in fact think it’s necessary to share such “articles.”

7.  A semi-interesting headline draws you in and then you're immediately let down by the lack of content and thought put into the actual webpage (note: refraining from calling it an article at this point).

8.  They’re usually the type of lameness you can’t even laugh at with mockery or chalk up to amusement when bored at work.

9.  It’s painstakingly obvious when the writer is either bragging, reminiscing, or ranting. List-form articles generally thrive on one of these three key ingredients.

10.  Many times they can’t even make it to their tenth point and conclude on an odd or random number, which is just annoying.

Heart vs. Head

Jonathon Haidt's The Happiness Hypotheis, which I've mentioned more than once on this blog, makes several references to "the elephant" and "the rider." He uses the metaphor of an elephant rider to explain what might be difficult to conceptualize about the mind. Plato inspired his choice of metaphor: 

In days gone by this mind of mine used to stray wherever selfish desire of lust of pleasure would lead it. Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony of control, even as a wild elephant is controlled by the trainer. -Plato, Phaedrus

Sigmund Freud compared the id and the ego; Carl Jung compared the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious; David Hume compared passion to reason; and what I've found most easy to understand is the non-fancy comparison of emotion and intellect used by William Irvine in On Desire. All of these dualities summarize what I'm trying to get to the bottom of in my own life: the heart versus the head.

As a brief background (because I can't stand to think of it anymore, much less write of it): I'm in love with someone who I shouldn't be in love with. This is not to insult his character in any way; he is a great person with whom I am completely infatuated. It's just that this obsession is unmerited, and it's starting to tick me off. As I said, he is lovely, but to put it simply, the extreme degree of my love is unrequited. It's not that I'm overlooked, I have a chummy way of charming him as well. But (to stay brief) he is happy to be alone.

A friend lent me On Desire after about five too many glasses of wine and a strewn-too-long conversation about how the chapter on love and attachments in The Happiness Hypothesis forever changed my outlook on relationships. My friend handed me Irvine's book, told me he thought I would love it, and then I put off reading it for about two years. (It happens.) My first clue:

Falling in love is the paradigmatic example of an involuntary life-affecting desire. We don't reason our way into love, and we typically can't reason our way out: when we are in love, our intellectual weapons stop working. Falling in love is like waking up with a fever. We don't decide to fall in love, any more than we decide to catch the flu. Lovesickness is a condition brought upon us, against our will, by a force somehow external to us. (12)

Irvine quotes Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know." Great. I'm screwed!

Falling in love is not the only instance in which our desires choose us. We crave things out of thin air all the time, but instead of speculating, we just fulfill the desire. Right now I'm craving the last two cookies from a batch I made this week-- coconut, walnut, and chocolate chip. They are delicious! I'm not at all hungry. My emotions desire to feel pleasure, so my intellect is directing me toward the dopamine-inducing chocolate and sugar.

The fourth chapter of On Desire introduces emotions and intellect as the wellsprings of our desire. Emotions are the source of our hedonic terminal desires (69). They are our constant desire to feel good for the sake of feeling good. They have no agenda, and emotions are stubborn. Intellect will usually form our nonhedonic terminal desires. Because they are nonhedonic, they are typically inconsequential, like my desire to tap my foot as I'm writing. Intellect does have an agenda as it is most useful when it's forming our instrumental desires: necessary desires that act as steps to achieving the terminal desires created by our emotions. In the above scenario, my desire to eat cookies was an instrumental desire created by my intellect, as it knew this would end up with some endorphins and please my emotional desire to feel good.

So how do I whip my intellect into shape and convince it to override my emotions and get over this dude I can't stop thinking about? It's not going to be easy.

The desires formed by emotions are highly motivated . . . emotions can effectively veto desires formed by the intellect. [But only] sometimes, if our willpower is sufficiently strong, our intellect can override desires formed by our emotions. The intellect's best strategy for dealing with emotions is to use emotions to fight emotions. The intellect might point out, for example, that what the emotions want would in fact feel bad, that what they want may feel good now but will feel bad later, or that although what they want will feel good, there is something else that would feel even better. (71-74)

Wala! I'll just imagine over and over again the heartbreak that would ensue following a relationship with a person who doesn't want to be in a relationship. The guarantee of future heartbreak should surely prevail. But it doesn't; I've been doing that for months.

Why does the intellect play second fiddle to the emotions? . . . For the simple reason that [emotions] refuse to fight fairly. [When emotions deal with intellect, they] don't us reason to gain its cooperation. They wear it down with emotional entreaties. They beg, whine, and bully. They won't take no for an answer. They won't give the intellect a moment's peace. (76-7)


My mom says sometimes I just gotta follow my heart and I'll know what to do. So far that's what I'm left with... to be continued...

Bangin' Banana Bread

If you want to be cool like me and bake some awesome banana bread then this is what you should do:

Bangin' Banana Bread

Ingredients:

2 large or 3 not-so-large just overripe bananas

1/2 cup (1 stick) margarine

2 eggs

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 1/2+ cup all-purpose flour

cinnamon

1/2 cup walnuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Soften margarine and combine with both sugars in a large mixing bowl. Stir until smooth.

2. Add eggs and banana. It's helpful to cut the banana into smaller pieces if mixing by hand. Stir until smooth.

3. Add vanilla and baking powder to the top of the mixture. Begin adding flour, half a cup at a time. You'll need just over 1 1/2 cups. Mix until smooth.

4. Add walnuts now if you want them.

5. When the mixture is smooth, sprinkle cinnamon evenly over the top. Fold the mixture over the cinnamon. Repeat once.

6. Pour into prepared loaf pan. Bake at 350 for 50 or 55 minutes.

BANGIN'!

(this is not a joke)

I loved this article about the potency of teen creativity! I came across one of my old sketchbooks recently. I used it in high school as my creative writing journal (a class my friends and I relentlessly discredited... we were super disrespectful to the teacher, too, sorry Mrs. Dowd). But most of my time was spent drawing instead of listening to Dowd or actually writing, and I thought to myself: I was so much more creative in high school! Here is one I made in 2004, I was trying to merge an eye and a landscape, the iris being a lake and eyelashes as flowers.

Kate Spade Bangles

Obsessed with these. Both of my brothers are musicians, and growing up I would listen to The Clash CONSTANTLY through the walls that separated our bedrooms. And who wouldn't want a preppy bangle that quotes Beastie Boys? Kate Spade. www.katespade.com.

Back in Starbucks. I've mastered the art of pretending I belong here; I approach the barista and tell her I'm not ready to order yet, I'd like to get "set up" first. Code for, "I don't drink coffee; I'm using your establishment to get out of my tiny apartment and feel more connected to the world." But I'm instantly annoyed that at at noon on a Monday, every prime computer location is taken. Does no one else work? It's by chance I have today off. I like to sit facing the street because I can watch cars at stop lights and see people walking around with intention. However, there is a perfect window spot: the corner. I'm on one end, but the wrong end. Everyone can see my computer screen and I'm right by the door. I know they aren't looking, but still it isn't a prime situation for someone like me. 

I want to revisit my previous post. My aggravation with Jonathon Haidt's decision to feminize pronouns seems borderline uncalled for, considering I withheld information that would have damaged my argument: I know that most therapy patients in fact are female. Why would I keep this tidbit of knowledge secret? Because I believe that the reasons why most therapy patients are female are influenced by gender biases from society. (And also because my inner lawyer was looking to support a specific argument, pp. 63-66 of The Happiness Hypothesis).

In America and in many other societies around the world, females are commonly viewed as being the emotional gender while males tend to be viewed as strong and deserving of respect. I can only report on what I know, and since I grew up in America this is where my thoughts are based. We grow up watching cartoon and television sitcoms portraying women as emotional. In cartoons, women are shown with fleeting thoughts, as floozies, or as being argumentative. In sitcoms and in movies that are not intended to be particularly influential, women cry after a break up while men go out and party. Women sort out problems in relationships while men ignore them, and women "snap" under pressure into either a fit or tears or fit of rage. It is not surprising then that women seek therapy more readily than men in a society that has preconditioned them to believe they need more help, and for men to be less likely to seek therapy in a society that has preconditioned them to believe that they do not need help. For women and girls, crying is a socially accepted coping mechanism. It is acceptable for women to display an array of emotions from glee to satisfaction to anger to sadness. It is different for men. The most (I'm very inclined to say the only) socially acceptable coping mechanism for men and boys is anger. For other emotions, the "strong and silent" route is taken quite a bit. This is why anger management courses consist predominantly of men, and most therapy patients are female. Not rocket science, right?

I still don't agree with the use of feminine pronouns to describe therapy patients. Even if most therapy patients are female, they are not all female, and this is implied when such pronouns are used consistently in a book on psychology. This type of repeated descriptive language will only further the societal imbalance that men and women already feel; consider a male therapy patient reads a few books in hopes to better himself and finds that every reference to therapy patients uses "she," "her," and "hers" as pronouns. How is that man going to feel? He will probably feel even more uncomfortable about seeking therapy than he likely already did. Defending male therapy patients may sound silly. But that's the problem! All I'm trying to say is that in an effort to lessen the gap between gender expectations one should not change the common use of "he," "him" and "his" to "she," "her" and "hers;" this will only flip flop the sexism, not help it! I would prefer to read "his or her" or "theirs" any day.

I just got really turned off by page 28 of The Happiness Hypothesis... I've recommended this book to so many friends and have already read most of it in excerpts or jumping around chapters, but in my attempt to read it beginning to end I ran into the sentence,

...for every patient seeking help in becoming more organized, self-controlled, and responsible about her future, there is a waiting room full of people hoping to loosen up, lighten up, and worry less about the stupid thing they said at yesterday's staff meeting or about the rejection they are sure will follow tomorrow's lunch date.

Really? I can't believe the words I see on the page. So all therapy patients are female?

Update on February 28: Haidt uses feminine pronouns throughout The Happiness Hypothesis. I'm not sure why. Does anyone have any insight as to why a writer would use feminine pronouns instead of using gender-neutral options like "his or her" or "their"? I see why writing "his or her" could be slightly annoying to both the writer and the reader if this type of factual statement is used often (as it is in this book). But why not use "they" and "their," and furthermore why use feminine over masculine? It's just nontraditional, and can actually be offensive (as it was to me the first time I came across it). The only good reason I've come up with is that the prediction was that most readers of The Happiness Hypothesis would be female. This is probably true; most psychology students are female, as a professor of psychology Haidt knew that. But I'm still not sure I'm sold on changing all the pronouns of an entire book to the feminine. Anyway, this has gone too far, it's not bothering me so much anymore and I still love the book.