Break it Down

When I was a kid, my parents splurged, and bought the (at the time, rather expensive) Encyclopedia Britannica. My father had wanted to own it himself as a child, though the purchase was clearly mostly for my benefit, as the heavy volumes lived in my room, taking up the entire bottom rows of my three bookshelves. And, frankly, I loved it. As anyone who, in the years since, has fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole can attest, it’s remarkably easy to get engrossed in random encyclopedia entries, whether on how the Tower of Pisa got its famous lean, or on the mechanics required for a snake to swallow and digest animals (including whole people) wildly larger than itself.

The Britannica was divided into three parts: the Macropaedia, which had long-form articles on major subjects; the Micropaedia, which had shorter entries on a far wider array of topics; and, my favorite, the Propaedia, a single, relatively slim volume.

Let’s say you wanted to construct an encyclopedia. Where would you start? How would you decide which topics to include? Britannica’s answer was the Propaedia, a taxonomy of all the world’s knowledge. Like the phylogenic tree of life, it started from a single root, and sub-divided endlessly: ‘Matter & Energy’ split to ‘The Universe’ then to ‘Galaxies & Stars’ to ‘Extragalactic Radio Sources’ to ‘Quasars.’ ‘History of Mankind’ broke into ‘The Modern World’ then to ‘Western Europe 1500-1789′ to “The European States’ to ‘France’ to ‘The Age of Louis XIV.’ I spent almost as much time poring over that single volume as all the others combined. I loved the structure, the organization. I loved the way it linked across seemingly disparate fields and bodies of knowledge. I intuited, even at a young age, that the better my framework for the big picture, the more easily I would be able to understand, retain, and connect all the details.

These days, I’ve been thinking about the Propaedia a lot, as I’ve been spending much of my time working on the algorithm for Composite. The idea is simple: if you’re a professional athlete, or a movie star prepping for a role, you have an excellent, experienced, and educated coach who designs a workout plan, a nutrition plan, a set of lifestyle changes, etc., all tailored specifically to you and your goals. And those plans, plus accountability to the coach to help you actually stick to them, tend to yield extremely impressive results, as a trip to the ballpark or cinema illustrates.

The rest of us, however, just go for a run, copy workouts from fitness magazines, or hire trainers at local gyms whose primary credentials usually include having played D3 football and being great at yelling “it’s all you, bro, it’s all you!” None of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, work quite as well. So, fundamentally, Composite is about leveraging the power of AI (as well as technology in general, plus recent research in sport science and behavioral medicine) to let everyone get the pro athlete/movie star custom treatment—and results.

Composite’s algorithm is a neural network, so it will evolve over time, continuously improving its prescriptions as it learns from members’ results (as measured on things like blood panels, body composition, and benchmark workout times). But, to set the algorithm up, we had a sort of Catch-22: you can’t train a neural net without a ton of data, but because there’s never previously been a use for that kind of data in the fitness world, it doesn’t really exist (at least not in a central, digital way).

To get around the chicken and egg problem, we’ve had to do some heavy lifting, initially building the algorithm using GOFAI (“good ol’ fashioned AI”), setting the symbol weights entirely by hand. Doing that, in turn, has meant coming up with taxonomy after taxonomy after taxonomy. We’ve had to reduce all possible, beneficial exercises, all possible nutritional approaches, all training periodization structures, all healthful lifestyle changes, all stretches and mobilizations and pre-hab movements, etc., into meaningfully structured trees.

Which, on the one hand, is kind of bananas. But, on the other, has been absolutely the best part of the job. All of those taxonomies have gone through a crazy number of iterations already, and I still regularly jump out of bed at 3 AM to scribble down an epiphany that sends at least one of them straight back to the drawing board.

Each time I work on those taxonomies, I think back to the Propaedia. And I’m still not sure: did all that time perusing it change my brain and how I look at the world? Or did it just so perfectly fit the way I already saw things, and gave me a master class in structured thinking, done rigorously and at scale?

Either way, that book was the best thing I could have had sitting on my bedroom shelf. And I wonder if my own future kids, skipping around Wikipedia, but unable to hold in their own hands a single, unifying big picture, won’t be missing something beautiful and important as a result.

One is Silver

Early last year, I read that Kushner’s Angels in America would be coming back to Broadway, and realized I’d never actually seen either half of the play (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, staged separately but part of a single whole), on stage or even on TV (via Mike Nichol’s famed HBO adaptation). Nor had I even read the play. So, I got a copy, and banged through it in a single evening. And while, in some ways, it felt totally dated—an artifact of an earlier NYC where AIDS was a new and ascendant threat and being gay and out meant something very different than it does today; in others, it was totally prescient—in its choice of villain, for example: the closeted yet AIDS-stricken New York attorney Roy Cohen, who famously mentored the (rather constitutionally similar) Donald Trump.

But, in short, Angels blew my mind. And it led me to search out and try to fill other lacunae in my cultural literacy—first more plays (like the Shakespeare and Chekhov I’d missed; so many Richards, so many melancholy Russians shooting themselves), then onto novels (ones I truly loved, like Ishiguro’s perfect Remains of the Day and Proulx’s sly The Shipping News, as well as others, like Updike’s Rabbit Run, that I found easier to admire than enjoy).

In the process, I also stumbled across an original copy of Sartre’s What is Literature, a book both off-putting and deeply fascinating, which gave me a lot of food for thought in my fill-in-the-blanks reading quest. Though it’s a meandering polemic, one of the points on which Sartre seems particularly insistent is that books are written from a cultural context to an audience that shares that same context. And, therefore, that when we read things years down the line, from our new context, we invariably have a different, much paler experience than the author intended. Or, in other words, that my catch-up reading is a waste of time. Because, as Sartre at one point puts it, “bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked. Works of the mind should likewise be eaten on the spot.”

On the one hand, I take Sartre’s point. As I noted, my experience of reading Angels would have been quite different were I a young gay man in NYC in 1992. And I’m sure, generally, that there’s something far more visceral, far more alive, about engaging with art that, in turn, engages the very world you inhabit. Yet, on the other hand, I also suspect Sturgeon’s Law—”90% of everything is crap”—is optimistic. And since, over time, a sort of Darwinian winnowing occurs, while what people still read from 5 or 50 (much less 500) years ago may indeed be dated, it’s also likely to be better than most of what you can pull off the ‘new and noteworthy’ table today.

So, for the time being, I’m trying to hoe a middle road: I’m still working through the endless list of all the great works I’ve somehow missed, but alternating them with the most promising of current releases. Because, with apologies to Sartre, it seems to me that it’s choosing solely one or the other that would be bananas.

Culture Consumption

Plucked Chicken

When it comes to getting haircuts, I have a few simple rules: I look for barber shops, not salons. I don’t pay more than $20. And ideally, I choose places that have a revolving pole out front, straight razors on the wall, a pile of old Playboys in the corner, and a cadre of regulars who sit around for hours discussing the best boxing fight they ever saw. (Cf., Coming to America.) Ridiculously enough, I’ve discovered this almost always yields a better haircut than what I’ve received in fancy spots for literally ten times the price.

On the other hand, when things go wrong with this approach, they can go quite wrong indeed. Like this past week, when I made an emergency stop at a new barber. I had gone literally months since my last trim, and when the urge to have it sheared suddenly hit me, I couldn’t wait.

I sat down in the chair, and the barber asked me how long I wanted the sides. Or, at least, that was my understanding. But, as is often the case with my rules, there was a bit of a language barrier. In fact, he was actually asking me how long I wanted the top. I realized as much from his first trimmer swipe, which went not above my ear, but rather straight down the center of my head, leaving me with an inverted Mohawk.

Perhaps from my shocked expression, the barber appeared to suddenly realize the miscommunication, too. “Oh,” he said somberly, “this isn’t what you wanted at all.” Still, what was done was done, and there’s no use crying over spilled clippings. I laughed and told him, no, it wasn’t, but that he should nonetheless just buzz away. It’s only hair, I told him. It grows back.

So, now, my hair is very, very short. Military short. Went out yesterday and bought a lightweight baseball cap to run in because you can see my scalp and it’s definitely going to burn otherwise short. And, more positively, so short that my already brief ‘styling routine’ – combing my hair after I shower – has now further reduced to doing absolutely nothing, because at this length even combing doesn’t matter.

I don’t suspect I’ll be going this short again any time soon. Instead, I’m planning to wait a couple of months (until it reaches a point I’d previously have considered my “I just got a pretty short haircut” length), to get it shaped up a bit, and to roll forward per usual from there.

But I’m also kind of glad this happened. Because, for years, I’d wondered what I would look like with a buzz, but had always been too much of a wuss to actually find out. Now, I know. And while, to be honest, it’s not what I’d call my best look, I can also say, modesty aside, that I still look pretty damn cute.

Exploits

How to Make Lemonade

Over the past couple of years, I’ve faced a handful of major personal disasters. And, in response, I’ve floundered through a wide array of coping mechanisms. Some worked well; others, not so much. In the hope that I can save you some pain, here’s what I learned through that experience, the things that were actually helpful in carrying me through difficult (and sometimes exceedingly difficult) stretches of life.

But, first, let me start with what doesn’t work: numbness, rage, and despair. That said, at least in my own case, when shit hits the fan, they’re my inevitable first response. For some initial period of time – hours or even days – I’m completely numb. Then I alternate like clockwork between feeling wildly angry and wallowing in misery. Neuroscience research suggest it takes at least an hour for your brain to recover from even minor slights and setbacks. And, at the other end of the spectrum, Judaism “shiva” – the period of intense mourning after the death of an immediate family member – at seven days. So, based on the severity of your disaster, find somewhere in that range: no less than an hour, no more than a week. During that time, cycle through raging / despairing / feeling numb (or whatever else you personally default to) without chastising yourself. Just let it rip. Then stop, because it isn’t actually helping, and do this instead:

Envision the Future.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust as a prisoner in several concentration camps, losing his entire family along the way (so, in short, he had it worse than whatever you’re dealing with) said, “with the right why, a man can survive any how.” In his case, the ‘why’ was the drive to write a book about his experience, to share the psychological insights he’d gained with world. (And if you haven’t read the resultant Man’s Search for Meaning, go do that now.) But the specific why doesn’t matter, so long as it’s extremely compelling to you, and at least a year or two (and possibly ten or twenty) in the future. I recommend strongly that you commit your why to paper, whether it’s a (to use Jim Collins’ famous phrase) Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal that you’re excited to pursue, or just a detailed description of a better future – where you’ll be, with whom, what you’ll be doing, what you’ll have done. Whatever it is, write it down, and then re-read it frequently. At least daily at first, if not more. Tell yourself that’s what you’re gunning for, that’s what on the far side of this current, seemingly unsurvivable mess. Use that ‘why’ as your north star, and let it carry you through.

Then Focus on Today

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “there’s no burden so heavy it can’t be carried until nightfall.” So, as Sir William Osler advised, “live your life in day-tight compartments.” Thinking about that distant-future ‘why’ will buoy you up. But thinking about any future short of that – how you’re going to make it through tomorrow, or the next two weeks, or the next year and a half – will drive you into the ground. You project your current misery forward, multiply its weight by all those future days, and are sure there’s no way that you can possibly deal with all the unhappiness you see stretched out ahead. But as the Zen Buddhists say, thinking you can’t survive another second of a pain you’re feeling is a lie; you survived this second, so you can survive the next, too. So make that your focus: surviving one more day. Make it into bed, this evening, in one piece, and call that victory. Worry about today today, and deal with tomorrow once it arrives.

Get Moving

First, literally. Especially right after something terrible happens, I’ve found that walking is the very best thing I can do. My mind may be reeling, but just taking step after step after step seems to slowly dissipate some of the overwhelm. Similarly, going to the gym, and working out hard does more for my mood than almost anything else. But after that, get your brain moving. When things go wrong, I usually feel like I’m facing an endless number of problems, all piled up on top of one another. But, in fact, while your problems may be terrible, they’re also finite. So when everything is crap, I start by making a ‘cloud list’ – an inventory of everything that’s a problem in my life at that moment. In my own experience, and for the people who I’ve helped do this during their own crises, just making a concrete list, seeing it down on paper, helps a surprising amount by itself. Then, for each problem, figure out a first thing or two that you can do in response. Some problems can’t be ‘fixed,’ but for all of them there’s still some concrete, positive action you can take. You have terminal cancer with three months to live? Fine; draft a plan for how you’re going to make the most of those three months. Similarly, for some problems, the action might be a long-shot Hail Mary, unlikely to even work. Which is also fine. You’ll still feel hugely better knowing you’re at least going down swinging. But, in short, find something you can do, and start doing it. In my experience, forward motion helps more than anything else.

See the Moon

One of my favorite poems is a Haiku by Basho:

Barn’s burned down.
Now,
I can see the moon.

Or as an old cowboy couplet has it

Two men looked out from prison bars;
one saw the mud, the other saw stars.

Sometimes, life sucks. And I wouldn’t suggest pretending otherwise, becoming a mindless Polyanna. But eventually, after you let yourself rage and despair, after you find your future ‘why,’ focus on today, and get moving, the only other thing you can do is to start looking for what good there still is in the world. Sitting surrounded by the ashes and embers of your burned-down barn of a life, at some point, you have to look for the moon. To be honest, I’m still puzzling out the best way to do that, the best way to snap myself back to seeing the glass as half-full. Often, just reading that Basho haiku does it for me. And when that doesn’t work, I’ve also had success with giving myself a daily journaling assignment: for a week (or even a month), starting with the prompt, “[Disaster x] is the best thing that ever happened to me, because…” and forcing myself to complete the page. But, at the end of the day, it comes down to making a choice: deciding that you’d rather focus on whatever is positive in your life, rather than the negative that’s been weighing you down.

That’s the four-step plan that works for me. So now, when things go wrong, I may still be launched into a first stretch of numbness and rage and despair. But even then, I know there’s a reliable path out the other side.