Pink Air

Movement

In retrospect, I can see that it was too much to expect a Republican Joy Division. The Republican party is too far gone. It has become...get ready...a rabid, senile, sclerotic rat, backed into a corner by its own paranoid visions, simultaneously choking on and excited by the bloody froth in its mouth leftover from chewing off its own limbs.

But outside the Grand Old Guignol itself, a few reflective conservatives are gathering their thoughts. Distancing themselves from the abuse of power, corruption and lies of the party itself and to varying degrees willing to acknowledge the failures of, well, just about everything over the past eight years, this brotherhood (it is too small, too soon and too male to call it a movement) is groping its way back to first principles and in the process, rediscovering the idea that human frailty is not something to be ashamed of. It is the basis of reasonable politics.

David Brooks stumbles across this idea every twelve months or so, in last year's defense of institutions and this year's reminder that we can't be protected against everything. (Though he promptly forgets again, as in this week's description of the Tea Party movement as passionately "disgusted" by things they appear to be merely uninformed about and afraid of.)

But Andrew Sullivan gets right to the point in The Conservative Soul:

All conservatism begins with loss. If we never knew loss, we would never feel the need to conserve, which is the essence of any conservatism...these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us.

He excoriates the Bush administration as incompetent fundamentalists who lost sight of classical conservatism's acceptance of loss, frailty and consequent politics of doubt. In doing so, he seems pretty darned close to Tony Wilson's description of Joy Division as the band who turned punk's "Fuck you" on itself in order to say "I'm fucked."

It may be that Sullivan's existential sense of fuckedness is reinforced by the fact that he is not just conservative, but Catholic, gay and HIV-positive as well. When the cultures you call home officially condemn you as a low-life, you might develop a complex. And though it could be a simple failure of rhetorical technique, there does seem to be a touch of Stockholm syndrome in his bizarre attributions of support for Saddam Hussein and anti-gay posturing to Democrats. (This is particularly puzzling coming from a former editor of The New Republic.)

I am a big fan of failure, so a Republican platform based on human frailty and the inevitability of loss could be engaging, interesting and even somewhat seductive. But while I'm waiting for the sirens' call of a more reasonable right, I'm not holding my breath.

Post-absurd

When I saw this ad, I immediately thought, "It's Happy Fun Ball!" (And the You Tube comments show that I wasn't the first to have that reaction.)

Then I began to wonder, what comes after reductio ad absurdum? The reduction has gone all the way through absurdity and shot out the other side in a shower of hilariously deadpan side effect shrapnel.

Maybe the pharmaceutical industry is banking on (and the banking industry is farming) a simple familiarity effect. We see something over and over again and the rough edges and qualifiers get sanded away. What remains is a general sense that what is familiar has social authority and must be credible.

This is similar to, though not identical with, the findings of Norbert Schwartz and his colleagues who have found that repeated exposure to claims leads us to remember them as true even if they are clearly identified as false when presented. This effect is especially strong among older people which may help explain why drug warnings don't have the alarming, self-defeating, absurd effect that they might.

So, in summary:

• Do not taunt Farmosilec
• Farmosilec may cause genital deformation, kidney failure, death and cannibalism (in that order)
• Farmosilec should not be handled by carbon-based life forms
• Farmosilec may cause disorientation and temporary blindness to patent(ed) absurdity
• Ask your doctor if Farmosilec is right for you

EVERYTHING MUST POST!!!

I'm surprised to see that I haven't posted anything in three months. Surprised because I write posts every day. I just don't finish most of them because I can't torture them into something interesting. So this is my year-end clearance of peevish, parochial, pooped ideas destined to remain half-baked:

• I've been trying to get through Gödel, Escher, Bach for the tenth time in thirty years and I think it's finally beginning to sink in. Isomorphism, metaknowledge and the insidious worm of self-reference are all regular elements of interestingness.

• It seems that all three energy (née gasoline) companies have decided that pastel graphics make the best camouflage. I wish that at least one of them would cut the oily "Let's all join hands to find a solution" crap and try to make a case for what they actually do rather than pretending that they've been into this alternative energy thing all along. Alternatively, they might at least reconsider funding the American Petroleum Institute's ham-handed efforts to discredit global warming and protect the industry from the market forces they claim to champion.

• The New York Times regularly trips over the inherent conflict in being the newspaper of rich liberals. The angry and uncomfortable response to a recent memoir on hiring a maternal surrogate is just one of the visible blossoms of a tension lying dormant in the regular juxtaposition of complaints about Bush's Iraq policy and the Hampton Jitney schedule.

• The muted response to Obama's Nobel speech reminds me that no one wants to hear gray and that the "wisdom of the American people" (or any large group with the right to vote) is largely a statistical phenomenon based on hindsight and the damping effect of averages.

• The animated film voiced by celebrities has become the workhorse of the Hollywood economy. Abraham Ravid at Rutgers has written a number of interesting papers on the relationship between stars, costs, ratings and profits. One of the big takeaways is that while studios make their reputations with star-driven R-rated movies, they make more money from PG and G films.

• I notice that TypePad has changed its welcome message to "Share what's interesting to you." As with Twitter, interestingness is the most compressed way to measure the worth of communication. I'd also like to discern an implicit shoutout to the easily derided and incredibly undervalued habit of navel gazing.

• Like all great religious texts, the Ikea catalog inspires both microscopic devotion to detail and telescopic contemplation of a well-ordered universe. Schismatics struggle over which version of text or typeface most accurately represents The Wørd, but most of us are just looking for a guide to lead us between the sins of poverty and tastelessness. I recently purchased the Ikean Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of three founding works of modern Swedish design. Published between 1899 and 1931 by a cross-generational network of feminist socialist art historian architects (more or less), they lay out the assumptions and objectives behind Ikea and Swedish design in general.

• Winning the Nobel Prize, like being a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist, is not so much an individual achievement as a categorical denomination. Whatever they may have been before, Nobel winners immediately become "Great" whatever they were befores, and as their work  becomes History rather than work, they gradually lose the vestigial tail of "chemist" or "writer" and become simply "Great" or even "The Great (insert name here)". But frankly, I don't care. The Nobel means about as much to me as the Grammy since the Nobel Politburo let Jorge Luis Borges die without a trip to Stockholm.

• You don't often see Dutch examples on those lists of mistranslations like Ladies are requested not to have children in bar and The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. This poster outside de Bijenkorf department store is one of the rare English language errors I've seen in Dutch advertising. The lack of a "the" deflates the claim from "We have a lot of desirable brands" to "We have an indeterminate number of brands, each of which might be desirable."

• Walking through the mighty Powell's Books in Portland last week, I was reminded that browsing isn't always virtual. A great bookstore is an 3D, immersive interface for searching a universe of information and book covers are like small banner ads, each one using its  limited area to convince you that what's behind it is worth paying for and thinking about. Which makes bookstores a good place to think about interestingness and how to communicate it. I've noticed that different sections have different interestingness quotients.

Take horror. This is Waterstone's in Amsterdam. Nothing looks especially interesting because it all looks the same: black. If you peer into the darkness, what you see aren't individual books, but author franchise blocks: Barker, King, Hamilton, each with a common cover design, which gives the impression that all of any particular author's works are the same. Carrie, Christine and Cujo are just interchangeable King units.

The lack of differentiation makes the horror section look fairly uninteresting. It's difficult to find any attentional purchase on such a uniform surface. It also makes it seem that nothing new is happening in the field.You could say that genre fiction like horror or romance isn't really trying to interest anyone, but simply to meet the expectations of those already interested in the form.

• Trivia comes from Latin tri/three + via/road meaning the place where three roads meet, but the etymological route from "three way intersection" to "unimportant facts" isn't entirely clear. It could be that it came to mean vulgar and commonplace, literally "street." (as in "Damn, girl, those nasty hair extensions are so trivial!") It could also be based on the noticeboards at such intersections along the Roman road network where travelers could post notes and news tidbits. Or it could derive from the trivium, the three simpler elements of the liberal arts taught at medieval universities.

  They may be unimportant by definition, but trivia are often addictively interesting. And interest in the trivial can be appealing when expressed with a sense of humor and perspective. Perspective and humor indicate consciousness and consciousness is interesting. And the most reliable indicator I know is wit: contextual, non-literal humor.
  The problem for advertisers is, consciousness doesn't easily scale. Nor does wit (Stephen Fry's growing ubiquity and declining weight notwithstanding.) That's why wit is a sign of individuality. It is impossible for a committee to produce wit. And even harder (i.e. labor intensive) to produce it consistently and repeatedly. This is a problem that marketers should be interested in. Computers using filter combinations might be one approach. Neural networks another. In any case, the mass production goal of making one thing (one campaign idea, one product, one thought) over and over again in order to achieve consistency and economy of scale is less and less useful. Stock music, stock photos, stock anything is unconscious. It tells you: nobody home here.

• As Chuck Klosterman micro-famously noted, Billy Joel is an odd rock star because his greatness has nothing to do with coolness. Which means that you can like his music without wanting to be him. Joel's constant theme is loneliness: painfully sincere, grandiose, terribly uncool loneliness. I feel the same way about John Cougar Mellencamp. I don't identify with him. I don't wear denim. I don't think I'd ever even go to one of his concerts. But I think his bleak and hopeful songs are often magnificent. (Note to marketers: Stop showing me what you think I look like and start finding out what I'm interested in.)

• My official shortlist for the Pantheon of Interestingness. Not just people who were interesting, but champions, explicators, avatars and trailblazers of interestingness itself. We stand on their shoulders:
• • Montaigne. Navel-gazing leads to the invention of the meandering essay
  • Erasmus. Wit, perspective and gentleness in a time notably lacking in all three
  • Marcel Proust
  • Walter Benjamin
  • Brian Eno
  • Jorge Luis Borges
    

Eighties

I haven't read a newspaper in a month and I feel much more relaxed. When I was in the U.S. last summer, I read three papers a day and everything I read made me feel bitter in one way or another. But it's my own my fault. Nobody forced me to wallow in the nihilistic, know-nothing nincompoopery¹ of the theatrical troupe formerly known as the Republican party. Or to ask passing strangers, "But isn't it actually stupid or worse for a heavily armed public servant trained to defuse situations to arrest someone simply for being arrogant?"

When I feel bitter, incredulous, lazy and self-pitying all at once, I like to listen to Killing Joke. Which is not surprising given that their music is, not fascist, but proto-fascist. Their energetic dirges and invocations of millennial apocalypse to cleanse the earth of human soil would have been beer hall favorites if the electric tuba had existed in 1923. And what with Jaz Colman flying off to Iceland to await the Apocalypse and/or record Scandinavian Black Metal bands, his quizzical sympathy for the Germans of the Sudentenland, the musically and ethically spurious claim to be free of all nasty American influence including the Blues (um, about those electric guitars...) and just generally sounding like flaky assholes a lot of the time, it's not surprising that some have imputed actual fascism, but in fact they're just motivated by a common feeling of having been cheated by the people in charge:

You can apply the killing joke to everything. Imagine a soldier in the trenches in WW 1. He's just been told to run over and gain, say another 15ft of land and he knows he's going to die, and he suddenly thinks that there's some fat cunt back in Westminster controlling his life, and he feels a bit of a mug. That feeling is the killing joke.

An otherwise random WWI reference makes perfect sense from this perspective. As does their mystical kinship with Rammstein, the fantastical bog men spawned from the long buried guilts and resentments of the East, who are also regularly accused of fascism. Both bands are built from the same cultural and psychological stuff that fascists whipped into an unstable explosive: the revanchist "stabbed in the back" myth, neo-Pagan calls for cleansing destruction, the cult of anti-Reason, easy and equal contempt for democracy and communism. Variations on this recipe recur throughout history² and regularly blow up in their maker's hands because they aren't really sustainable political systems. They're anger management tools, like punk.

I suspect that both Killing Joke and Rammstein know this. Both have, with varying cogency, refuted accusations of fascism. But if you don't believe their words, I think exculpatory evidence can also be found in their musical behavior:

1. Their music is funkier, rockier, just much better than fascist art.
2. The leering chuckle of Geordie's vintage golden Gibson ES and leather pants (and pretty much everything about Rammstein) owes a lot more to the transvestite theater of Weimar than Nuremberg.
3. Both bands are familiar with the myth of Götterdämmerung
4. And maybe for that reason, they both exhibit a wistful sense of distance from the apocalypses they claim to welcome. They're not so much Armageddon's cheerleaders as its jesters.

And even if they were Nazi agitators, the audience of black t-shirted 40-somethings at last year's Pandemonium show, our nodding bald spots scattering the stage lights like stars, would be in no condition to answer The Call. Certainly not that late at night. Why can't they start these nostalgia concerts at a decent hour anyway?

-------------

1. Source: Will-I-Am Safire, the nonpareil of noisome Nixonian nastiness.

2. I often imagine Killing Joke's "Eighties" applied to the 1380's and the Peasants Revolt³, another one of those times when people felt cheated by their leaders, except for the boy king Richard II who, inevitably, betrayed them. It might sound like this.

3. Chumbawamba (who else?) recorded The Cutty Wren, a folksong that actually has been attributed to the Revolt.

Bad service 2.0

Blogs are a dime a dozen. Bad customer service experiences are about the same. So blogging about bad customer service is worth (0.1/12)² or about 0.0000694 USD. But I'm going to run through my recent experience with Dell anyway because it was bad in an interesting way.

My Dell beamer smoked and died about two months ago. After ruling out lung cancer, I checked the lamp which seemed fine, but I replaced it anyway. Still nothing. The beamer was almost four years old, so out of warranty, but had been used for only about 60 hours, a small fraction of its estimated service life. I called Dell service and was told, "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do." I went to the Web for possible solutions, but found instead a number of people complaining about similar problems and similar Dell response.

So I sent Dell an email explaining that I knew the product was out of warranty, but that it seemed defective and given their recent efforts to improve their fairly abysmal service reputation, maybe they would have a look at it. Nope. Out of warranty. But "thank you for choosing Dell." Fair enough, I responded, but no, thank you, I will not be choosing Dell again.

Here's where the "service" kicked in. For the next month, I received a series of messages from Dell, seemingly desperate to get in contact with me. Emails and the occasional unannounced call bounced around between Amsterdam, Maryland and Bangalore, trying to find the best time and number to get in touch. Twice, I waited by the phone for scheduled calls that never came. Eventually, they tracked me down here in California and when we finally met, voice to voice, they said (wait for it): "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do."

But they wouldn't leave it at that. I explained again that I knew it was out of warranty and didn't claim any legal right of redress, but that I still didn't think happy thoughts about Dell. I was passed to a supervisor and then a manager who, with increasing levels of authority and solicitude, repeated the same thing: "Out of warranty."

There were some interesting digressions. Like when the supervisor tried to sell me an Epson beamer for $649.99 (Supervisor: "That's a great discount." Me: "Umm. No, it's not. I'm looking at it on Amazon for much less. And why are you trying to sell me something at this point anyway?" S: "I'm not trying to sell you anything.") And when the manager said, "If only it were less out of warranty."

I kept saying, "Look, you're saying it's out of warranty. I understand that. But I still don't like Dell and will not buy a Dell product again. That's just the way it is." This seemed intolerable to them, but marginally more tolerable than actually fixing the thing. Finally, the manager offered to "take this to the engineers." I doubted they would spend much time thinking about a discontinued product, but it seemed to make him happy.

After hanging up, I went back to the Fortune article on Dell's efforts to improve customer service and it's funny. They talk a lot about communicating via social networks and product co-creation and monitoring online chatter: Dis the company in a blog or a Facebook group, and someone from a crack response team may even chime in, if only to let everyone know that Dell cares. They seem to have confused communication with service. "We're listening. And calling. And emailing. And Twittering." They don't say anything about actually making better products and standing behind them. Bad service on Twitter is still bad service. That's my 0.007 cents worth. Thank you for your time.

Don't blink

Robert Burton's On Being Certain could be described as the anti-Blink. While Gladwell's book suggests that our intuitions are right more often than we think, Burton's argument is that we aren't right nearly as often as our intuition tells us we are. More precisely:

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

Each book is the flip side of the other. Both tell us that quick, reflexive, primitive brain circuits make a lot of decisions for us which we then explain or explain away with more rational justifications. But Burton's is the better book.

Maybe it's the Asperger's talking, but the idea that you should "trust your feelings" has always struck me as useless. Which feelings? (Okay, to be fair, Blink is about specifying the times when you should trust your instincts, but the gist is that intuition is underrated. It's not.) At the level of consequences, gut-level certainty is much more destructive than doubt. And personally, I've always been an outsider to that moment in the creative development process when everyone seems to converge on one approach as being "right" and team feeling takes over from discussion. Intuitive, creative leaps are necessary to get anywhere and a sense of rightness is politically and emotionally useful, but certainty, particularly in a field as socially-determined as advertising, is a fairly certain sign that you're wrong.

Interactive effects are the future

Brian Eno once said something like, "Effects are the future." Since I can't find the exact quote, I get to make up what he meant by it.

Computers get a bum rap from many artists, partly because machines have long been assigned the wrong role in the creative process. They were touted as substitutes for human judgment which demeans both machines and humans.

What computers are good at is storage and variation without prejudice. This means that, like a creative ad agency, they produce a lot of weird and trivial stuff. But every so often they make something that is interesting: valid, beautiful, useful, unexpected, out of the blue, sensible, open to competing interpretations, concrete, emotionally resonant, inspiring, generative, worth thinking about. And as Paul Arden said, a few of those usually make up for all the other crap.

I've been using Ableton Live for some time now because I find it relatively easy to produce things I find interesting with it. That is largely because I focus on the accretive, almost geological, application of filters and other sorts of effects rather than trying to produce interestingness ex nihilo. I tend to start with a simple melody or rhythm, then add or subtract multiple effects and connect them via a few parameters so that there is a little bit of feedback going on. A little bit of interaction between the elements of a mix is important because it means that the ultimate result is coherent. The ear perceives a relationship between the sounds even if I didn't put it there explicitly. And coherence is what distinguishes an interesting result from a beautiful mess.

A few days ago, I discovered Motion, Apple's motion graphics program contained in Final Cut Studio. I now divide my life into Before and After Motion. Motion uses visual effects in a way that is similar to Live and other music software. With just a few filters exchanging a little bit of information over and over again, something big and complex and interesting can pop out. And since Live and Motion can also exchange some information, you can create interesting synesthesias with just a few clicks: Download Synesthetic mandala

The fact that this looks like an animated Grateful Dead logo begs the distinction between interesting (active) and mesmerizing (passive). In fact, there is some discussion among educational psychologists as to whether interesting material actually requires less active attention than boring material. It seems likely that we process interesting things more deeply, creating a mental model of the relationships between the parts which we can then manipulate, trying out variations not explicitly defined in the original material, rather than simply applying more attention to interpret it verbatim as we do with boring material. Which means:

1. As a brand holder, you want people to process your messages at this deeper level. Interestingness is much more powerful and inexpensive than effective frequency.
2. Interesting brands are brands that people find it easy and pleasurable to generate variations on. Generativity is a way to measure interestingness and should be a core brand measure.
3. We learn and create by generating and trying out possible variations on things. Like computers. And neither humans nor computers are demeaned by this shared characteristic.

Miners

Like planning, data mining (AKA KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)) is kind of leaning over the edge of facts to select from a set of more or less risky possibilities. So besides being something that planners might find useful, it's also a field that planners might find interesting, in part because KDD's efforts to automate the process of finding the most valuable among the huge number of patterns discernible in any large database has led them to contemplate the nature of interestingness.

There is no standard definition of interestingness among the miners. That would go against their gritty and perverse nature. But there is wide acknowledgment that interestingness is central to their task (“Data mining can be described as the process of finding interesting patterns in large databases”) and that it is usefully decomposed into a number of sub-criteria:

Interestingness differentiates between the "valid, novel, potentially useful and ultimately understandable" mined association rules and those that are not--differentiating the interesting patterns from those that are not interesting. Thus, determining what is interesting, or interestingness, is a critical part of the KDD process.

Different authors produce different lists of criteria...

...but in general, the miners' blueprint of interestingness overlaps to a surprising degree with intuition and my more scribbly formulations. Novelty, validity, surprisingness, range, peculiarity(!) and utility are all there, each one intriguing if not entirely self-explanatory (I see that as my job), and the "ultimately understandable" criterion is consistent with the observation that delayed comprehension can be more valuable than immediate understanding. At least, it should make us reconsider our definition of comprehension.

Insights into interestingness are everywhere, but data mining offers an especially rich, data-driven yet thoughtful lens through which to view and address our own interestingness management issues. What makes "Just Do It" such a concise, surprising, useful idea to so many people? What contextual knowledge ("domain expertise" in minerspeak) is required for a campaign idea to be novel rather than just weird? "Novel, surprising and peculiar, yet valid, useful and ultimately understandable" could describe a leverageable pattern of purchase behaviors mined from the slag of last week's retail numbers. It could also be a critic's response to Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz or a viewer's take on a chocolate ad featuring a musical gorilla. Each of these things is worth minding and potentially valuable because first of all, they are interesting.

Overconfident

Last week, I accidentally erased some of Jen's email as we were trying to diagnose a previous problem. I still don't know exactly how or why it happened, but I do know when. I deleted an old account that was somehow serving as the Library setting for her current account. Jen hates deleting anything, so she asked, "Are you sure we should do this?" and I  quickly responded, "Sure. You don't use this account and there's nothing in it."

I also remember feeling impatient. I don't feel frustrated or anthropomorphize broken gadgets into bad guys. It's more like being eager to tinker and find out what works. It's fun to figure things out and machines are figureoutable. You may stop looking, but you can be sure that an answer exists. That's why I repeatedly disassembled our phones as a child and prepared for work in the IT department at Morgan Stanley by reading about medieval Italian banking and the nature of electricity. (This is an excellent site if you're interested.)

Mac Repair salvaged what they could, but in the end, I permanently erased two weeks of Jen's mail. My only defense is that I was in some sort of engineering fugue state. Men in particular seem susceptible to these outbreaks of blind overconfidence, especially when it comes to traditionally masculine topics, which makes us (among other things) worse investors than women.

While we were waiting at the repair shop, I happened to be reading a kindlet that contained one of Captain Bligh's last messages sent from the Bounty and I think it works as a general credo for Male Pattern Overconfidence:

My little Ship is in the best of order and my Men & officers all good & feel happy under my directions.

Immanent domain

There was a point in "Going Dutch," Russell Shorto's critical appreciation of our adopted country's social welfare system, when I thought he was about to recognize a pervasive quality of Dutch culture that I've always felt, but never seen clearly expressed. Interestingness often feels like the revelation of something we already knew subconsciously, so I was prepared to be interested when I read:

It’s true that I have grown to appreciate many aspects of this system. But honesty compels me to reveal another side. There is a mood that settles into me here, deepening by degrees until its deepness has become darkness...Something about this place rekindles the existential rage of my youth. Why are we here?

"Existential" is a word I often use to describe Dutch culture, confusing natives and immigrants alike, and I'd hoped that someone more articulate was about to clarify my meaning for me. But Shorto's essay glances off that target to bury itself in the broad backside of Dutch collectivism, consensus and conformity. True (and at times annoying) enough, living here is sometimes like an extended visit to the DMV. "What makes you think you're so special?", translated into Latin, could easily be the national motto of the Netherlands.

But there is a powerfully individualist flip side to Dutch culture, visible even in the well-known admonition to "just be normal" that Shorto quotes, like most people, incompletely. The full saying is: Just be normal and you'll be crazy enough. The Dutch system is based on an existential appreciation of the basic weirdness of everyday human existence. It attempts to minimize the common material wants that typically fuel market economies and make people more fearful, competitive, rushed, violent, status-oriented, more crazy, than they need to be. Like Freud in reverse, the Dutch system is designed to remove the sources of common unhappiness and free the individual to ask, "Okay. If I'm not here simply to survive, why am I here?"

That question, as strict and bare as the interior of a 17th-century Protestant church or "the calm, bland streets and succession of broad windows giving views onto identical interiors", leaves you stranded with yourself in a way that might very well inspire an existential rage in someone who believes that individual value and happiness are dependent upon being special in some way. I think this is one of the reasons why ex-pat bitching sessions inevitably resolve into complaints about Dutch "service." There's always a whiff of "Don't these people know who I am?" in the air. (A phrase which, translated into Latin, could easily be the national anti-motto of the Netherlands.)

Dutch culture doesn't exactly deny the possibility of individual transcendence. But it does make you wonder. Maybe that kind of happiness, if it exists at all, just isn't something you can pursue.