Kayfabe and the American Dream (Ricky Weekly #49)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
I live by Alamo Square Park and the Panhandle, but I’ve been going to Raymond Kimbell Playground every morning to work out. So much better than doing it at home and I love the energy of an athletic field. If you want to join me like David did, lmk.
Thing on my mind:
Multi-parter today because too many thoughts.
Socializing during Covid-19
I read about how to make friends as an adult and the takeaway is basically you have to be proactive. Being passive only works if you have frequent encounters like in school or at the workplace. My frequent encounters used to be going to the office, dinners, happy hours, and hobbies like my basketball team. We don’t have any of that right now because of the pandemic, so we should all try to be more proactive. When I told a friend this, he said, “that’s like fighting gravity.”
The reason why it feels like fighting gravity though has a lot to do with the monotony of digital interactions compared to their IRL counterparts. I wrote about this last week, and I’ve thought about it more. I said Zooms are not appealing because the environment is overly controlled and the only interesting variable is the other person and the conversation, which vary too much in quality. I’m beginning to think that the people with an external monitor who don’t look at the camera when they’re on Zoom are doing it right because they are not expecting Zoom to be anything like an IRL hangout (BTW I hate those people). That gap in expectation is the source of “Zoom fatigue.” I also think if “Zoom bombing” were the norm and happened more frequently, it’d make Zooms more fun because a huge reason why we go out with friends is because the variable reward of “something awesome might happen.” IRL is full of surprises.
“Kayfabe”
I learned about the term “Kayfabe” two weeks ago through this article and watched some awesome videos about it to learn more. Since then, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it because it explains so much. Kayfabe is a term invented by wrestling to describe the idea that wrestling is presenting a fake reality but pretending it’s real, and everyone, including the audience, is in on it together because what matters more is that it feels real and feels good. This is why telling a crying wrestling fan, “hey you know it’s all fake, right” does nothing because it doesn’t matter. He knows it’s not real, but as long as it feels real, it’s meaningful. This explains Trump, celeb culture, startups, America, etc.
One thing I’ve wondered when talking to friends about our country is what happens if we actually pierce through the veil of the most important American kayfabe aka “The American Dream.” That collective delusion that we are all equal and that we can succeed in pursuing our dreams is probably what makes this country great, even though the fact is that this country has crazy inequality and terrible social mobility. On one hand, we need to confront the inequities in order to improve, on the other hand, it feels like we need to maintain the kayfabe to an extent because that’s our competitive advantage. Reminds me of my favorite quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
This graphic from The Economist is fascinating. Americans are way too optimistic about social mobility while the Europeans are way too pessimistic. Kayfabe in action.
Community software and podcasts
A friend sent me a newsletter about community software, which is apparently in vogue again because of the “Passion Economy.” Over the years I’ve seen people build community software (remember Ning?), but just think it’s a hard and bad business. Has anything changed? I think building a community passionate enough to adopt new community software to interact with each other is still very hard and rare, what seems to be new is we all have group chat apps installed. I’m in 12 Slack groups and 5 Discord channels and countless Facebook and Telegram groups, and I hate ALL of them. I joined them because the apps were already installed for work or friends, so the friction is way lower, but that also means I care way less and get nothing much out of them. Seems like what we have is a proliferation of “not-so-passionate” communities, and that doesn’t feel like an opportunity except for Discord, Slack and Facebook to grow even more.
Unrelated. Podcasting feels like early blogging right now (check out this classified page of people looking to promote their podcasts). A ton of people are starting podcasts and looking for an audience and there’s barely any discovery mechanism. Most people consume by subscribing and downloading using a traditional podcast client rather than “grazing” content on a discovery-focused platform. Spotify is doing a great job ushering in the future by focusing on discovery and de-emphasizing subscriptions, which is kind of like what Twitter did to Google Reader. BTW, if you use Spotify for podcasts, try this thing we built to see if we have overlapping tastes.
Piece of content I recommend:
San Francisco's $1 Billion Homeless Industry Is Fueled By Organized Crime and Compassion Politics by John Sung Kim and Thomas Wolf
I found this video on r/sanfrancisco. Only 4k views, but I listened to the whole thing and I learned so much about the homelessness problem in SF. It’s a video of a long-time SF resident and tech entrepreneur trying to learn about homelessness by interviewing a former homeless addict in recovery.
What I learned:
San Francisco wasn’t always like this. People who have been here for decades or grew up here have never seen it this bad.
We have close to a billion dollar budget to tackle the issue, yet it gets doled out to hundreds of non-profits with virtually no oversight. Last financial audit was five years ago.
85% of the homeless struggle with drug addiction.
The interviewee was a county worker and homeowner with a family, but became addicted because of opioids. Opioids got too expensive, so he turned to heroin.
There’s a difference between “affordable housing” and “permanently supportive housing.” SF has 11k residents in permanently supportive housing (eg SROs). Even though they’re housed, most residents in SROs continue to battle addiction.
Drugs in SF are sold by organized crime gangs coming in from Oakland. They’re everywhere between Van Ness and Hyde and don’t use drugs themselves.
150 people on general assistance move to SF every month because the county pays more than other counties in California.
There are more overdose deaths in SF than Covid and coronary deaths combined.
Our mayor is moderate, but powerless because of the progressive supes.
Our DA and police department are butting heads because the police will arrest drug dealers and the DA will let them go.
Based on this guy’s experience of living on the street battling addiction for several years, he thinks the city needs to get tougher on everything generally, with a focus on mandating treatment and long-term rehab to help people really kick the addiction. He paints a picture of how when he was addicted, he basically couldn’t help himself or make any good decisions, and it was hard for him to find help and if the help was too lenient he would’ve never gotten out of it.
Finally, I don’t know if this will catch anyone, but I realized on a recent walk with a friend that we might be in a long and drawn out depressive and anxious state. I’m guessing most of us don’t recognize it or talk about it, especially because it’s important to be resilient right now. If you feel this way, even if you don’t know me very well, reply to me and let’s talk on the phone or take a walk if you’re in SF. I’m sure it’ll help.
🤗
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “All social media is now parasocial.”