#but fuck this quote has kept me going more often than id care to admit

[strxngersmind]

im watching bo burnham's inside again and seriously considering getting "it's almost over, it's just begun" tattooed on my wrists on Monday...

don't ask me if im okay cuz i Dont know the answer 😀

#will i probably regret it? yeah! do i care? fuck no! #but fuck this quote has kept me going more often than id care to admit #so i Want it somewhere visible to me all the time #but then it will be visible to Everyone Else all the time too 💀 #then ill have to Explain it and bleh #but i dont wanna put it further up my arms cuz One. im always wearing rolled up long sleeves so i Rarely see my upper arms #and Two... potential sleeve space! i have a lot of tattoos planned! #im probably gonna get it anyways lmao #crow.txt

[incarnateirony]

You didn't ship Destiel until S13!? That really took me by surprise! In that case, thank you for defending the ship even if you didn't ship it, that's really nice and your meta made it easier to deal with the antis. And welcome to the Destiel side of the force! :)

Yeah, several people -- @dotthings off the top of my head, I really don’t remember who else -- literally witnessed the screaming fall into the dumpster.

Again, I really don’t know if I still consider what I do ~shipping.~ I have no specific demands for how their relationship continues from here, I just acknowledge it within the work. The difference that hit in S13 was welcoming that content instead of guarding myself against it because we got slammed with several consecutive bookends that completed an entire romantic arc and punctuated it with a far more impacting mirror of an endgame that didn’t even have said romantic arc to begin with, in Swan Song, so like??? what am I supposed to do? Just ignore it? Act like I can’t understand what just happened in front of me?

To put some perspective, I’ve been running SPN games for... a while. My most recent one was on a discord server that’s niche, but my prior one was on a giant multifandom server. I covered for Cas to keep his power levels in check to the story balance without like, making the humans irrelevant. My Dean at the time was hardcore shipping trash. His name was Chris, he was a bisexual dude in Chile, psychologist, good dude. But like??? it deadass annoyed me? How up Cas’ ass his writing was? The shippers that came in actually kinda annoyed me with trying to matchmaker them in game??? Like. I saw it, but I guess it’s the old “That’s not what the show is about” (which unlike how fandom whips it around, doesn’t mean it can’t exist at all, it’s the obsessive tunnel visioned focus that pissed me off because it kept railroading scenes)

But despite that, during and before it, I was yeah, defending it. Just because I wasn’t an active ~shipper~ didn’t mean I was cool with people stomping on people for very reasonably seeing the stuff my last post mentioned. I just kinda kept myself from investing because I know this old media song and dance too well and didn’t expect it to break, say, S10 levels. And then 11 happened. And then 12. And then--

Because no matter what this fandom says, Castiel’s alien mystified staring at Dean, while great chemistry in old seasons, does not actually compare to things like frequent lunch dates, need and love yous, mixtapes, Eileen being Sam’s Cas in 15.09 and so on. In the actual, not-head-up-ass-about-old-rewritten-content-meta’ed-15-times-over often fused to really bad hot takes on what people call queer coding. But I could respect that, say, the ramifications of swapping Cas and Anna roles to keep Misha around while Julie was bouncing out and getting uncomfortable naturally landed Cas in the hero’s journey goddess role, ala princess Leia if you will, the distressing warrior nondamsel rebelling against the empire and whatnot. But that doesn’t start or end at star wars, that’s thousands of years of human writing.

So while yes, the show heavily stripped the actual content that would have traditionally structured it romantic, people like seeing that x their chemistry early on-- not crazy.

And I defended it for years /to my wife/ despite my server vexations. On this giant dozens-of-thousands-of-users multifandom server not connected to any core fandom spaces and hosting innumerable fandoms and walks of life, I was the oddball out -- me. As a nonshipper annoyed by the crowd, often having 20-30 people logged into my channel at a time playing everything from early Cain to Benny to TFW to Wayward to *throws dart at board* whatever, of the hundreds of names that drifted through the game in sum (including player rotations, OCs and audience that just came to watch/read like a fic), you know how many antis we had?

Three.

One was my wife. so removing her, two.

Do you know how many shippers there were? 

Yeah neither do I, just, “pretty much all of them.” a few hung in “see it, don’t care, moderately annoyed” like I did. But this idea that the GA is a bunch of het-guzzling bozos that can’t do the same basic math all of you fucking did before you got here, just because some other dead-ass irrelevant ship composed entirely on leftfield interpretations to validate niche fandom ships -- that shit’s so far fucking divorced from goddamn reality.

As for my wife, yes. She was an anti. In fact long before I wandered into fandom social media (I think I actually jumped in around S12 bc I saw Dabb taking over and Bobo getting promoted and was interested in Yockey-- Yockey was the first person I tweeted at), I was on these servers, running these games, having these ARGUMENTS with my wife to be quite honest, because like, look, I get it, Destiel fandom can be weird and needy and over the top but they’re not crazy for what they see out of it. By Carver era it was classic subtext.

But she had followed Winbros for years not realizing it’s literally run by the real world becky and her BFFs that have tasteful POVs like “Misha Collins is cancer” “Dabb is a disease” and whatever else on their personals that proxy through their posts and motivations. She attended it on Facebook, which is THE goddamn conservative magafarm asshole platform and yeah, read a lot of shitty arguments. Yes, she picked up sayings like “it ruins the show”. Yes, she hated it. No, that didn’t mean I felt anyone deserved more than mild frustration for their behaviors at the time just because they were stuck in fanfic-shipping-fiction-over-romanticised-land and not canon-divergent-show-genre-complex-interpersonal-relationships fiction. 

She, too, cracked about the same time I did. I was more receptive sure, I saw it more sure, but after a mix of addressing some personal problems, making an OC that completely changed how her perception filtered Dean and Castiel working together, whatever-- and yes, 12.19->13.5. The night of 13.5, the final shot, as the screen went dark, she stared over her phone and, with tonal distaste, said “Oh. So they’re going there.”

Yes, it’s that fucking obvious. No, she didn’t admit that’s what did her in. Not until the end of the season, when she admitted she had been bullshitting arguments since early season 13 because, literally, and I quote, “otherwise Min wins.” -- which, if that comes by way of my own wife, I can only stare into the fandom camera at other people that have turned this show into a decade long money sink and have been divorced from the actual canon path for like minimum 3 years, maybe 6, yelling about it being wrong all the time, etc. Because on the internet, people convince themselves they have ownership and power, that their opinion of what the piece should be overrides even the creators, et cetera. Yeah. There’s a lot of disingenuous horse shit.

TLDR my wife fell into the dumpster and, as the flag of the end of our weird spats, and a birthday present, I made her this, since she IDs as Dean (OLD vid, has hiccup issues newer ones don’t)

So, yup, dat me.

To this day I still don’t read fanfics or browse fanart or any of that. I’ve never cared about that face of the fandom. I’ve never cared about making up rando ships, I’ve never cared about exactly how any given relationship plays itself out, I just enjoy the ride and address it as it does indeed play out. Most shipping culture still pisses me the fuck off with its dialogue, as I’ve made very clear. But because I’m acknowledging the text instead of denying what keeps happening more centrally and critically every year on screen, I’d be called a shipper. Because I’m tired of watching people spew logic even most children could pick apart in an endless roundabout of negativity, because I have no tolerance for absolute horse shit and fandom whining so I just lay out counters to bad talking points, I’d be called a shipper.

But 13.5ish is when I finally let myself start emotionally receiving the content rather than barring it off in a distant wall of exhausted old gay that knows their media too well. Why? Because it already completed and went above and beyond every element of the original way they painted the original goddamn endgame and I guess because I won’t set unfair bars against queer relationships and set them at Extra Hard Difficulty, I’m a shipper. IDK. This fandom fucking exhausts me. Fandom culture in general exhausts me.

[oneweekoneband]

DON’T STOP

It would be easy to assume that everything not only true but even possible to articulate has already been said. Or, alternately, that there is no reason to discuss it because it belongs to the past—the ugly, false past—and we are here to discuss the sparkling, honest present. Certainly in the seven years since, this song has been tackled from almost every conceivable angle in the various avenues where opinions collect themselves like rainwater in a gutter. And certainly we hear it differently now, knowing what we know; the darkness that always simmered thrillingly under the surface has slunk closer to center stage. Certainly that incongruously gorgeous, haunting bridge will never sound the same. You build me up, you break me down.

And yet. And yet I find myself coming back to it, and coming back, and coming back. There were days in the summer where I would decide to listen to the new album and instead, or first, play it through not once or twice but over and over, an album’s work of Tik Tok, insistently pressing itself upon me the way it did on all of us that year, our initial confusion over how to hear it giving way to understanding and joyful surrender. I had to reabsorb it, to give myself not a blank slate but context into which to understand the new. Hours and hours, like I hadn’t since that first fall, listening and listening: for what was different, sometimes, but often for what remained. Eventually, listening for what, after everything, I had to say—listening in fact for why I kept hitting play, just one more time.

DJ

I so badly wanted—we all wanted—to be able to say this year: look at what Kesha made now that she is free. And I still hope, one day, to say that—to shout it from the tops of fucking skyscrapers from a bullhorn, raining glitter on the streets below, to paint it across my arms, to throw a party in celebration and toast a Jello shot in honor of Kesha and her hard-won freedom.

But we can’t, yet. Her legal battle against the man who both abused her and produced this song churns forward unresolved; although specifics have not been made public, it seems incontestable from the available facts that he continues to financially profit from her artistic output. Delineating yet again the painful history of exploitation and injustice that has been revealed across headlines for the past several years would at this point be both redundant and contrary to Kesha’s own current public stance; we all know this awful, too-familiar story, and if she’s not going to speak further on the matter, neither am I.

Still it’s worth stating: Rainbow is not the album Kesha made once she was free. It’s the album she chose to make in spite of the fact that she isn’t. It’s an album of celebration that exists inextricably entangled with that from which it is breaking away. The physics of a rainbow reflect this: they appear to us not across cloudless blue skies but when we stand between the sun and rain.

Listening to Tik Tok now—a song I love, forged under a series of circumstances I would erase from time if I could—in an infinitesimal way, it feels like this too.

I’M ALREADY HERE

There’s a narrative that has emerged since the release of the album’s first single if not before, one succinctly encapsulated by Katherine St. Asaph: “that what Kesha escaped was not abuse but electro-pop, that in the minds of more people than would admit it, “Tik Tok” was as much of a sin as anything else [he] did.” You can hear this beneath Facebook threads and casual conversations about the album, the fact of her exploitation serving as absolution for her failures of old: look at what she can do now that she’s not being forced to make that Autotune bullshit, a retroactive forgiveness that rests on assuming Kesha herself, suddenly and newly revealed as both a victim and an artist, would never have made such trash on purpose.

And it’s true that she’s distanced herself from some songs, and complicated her relationship with others. In a New York Times Magazine profile last year, she said of the writing process for this one:

“I remember specifically him saying: ‘Make it more dumb. Make it more stupid. Make it more simple, just dumb.’ ” She tried, joking around with some lyrics she found silly. “I was like, O.K., ‘Boys try to touch my junk. Going to get crunk. Everybody getting drunk,’ or whatever, and he was like, ‘Perfect.’”

But even though no one could blame her, even though she’s shared her story such that her fans would more than understand, Kesha hasn’t renounced her previous work at large. She still performs Tik Tok live; three weeks ago, when that discordant riff filled Hammerstein Ballroom, we lost our fucking minds. And no one could have been there, with all of us shrieking along, watching her strut and dance and jump across the stage, watching her keep us at fever pitch, and still believed what was so often said about this song back when it first appeared—that all its magic stemmed from the clever manipulations of a savvy producer. No one could have witnessed her and still doubted what she told us from the very start: the party don’t start till I walk in. It was always her party, her world. Her voice even when it was splintered and caught, her words even when she wasn’t the only one writing them: these things belong to Kesha. This song is hers as much as anyone else’s; it always was. To act otherwise is essentially to recreate in part one of the conditions of her exploitation: the lie that her success always rested squarely on someone else’s shoulders.

It matters that we’re clear on this: Kesha has always been an artist. If you couldn’t hear that in Tik Tok—separate from personal experience, speaking solely of the recognition of deliberation and craft, the awareness of performance—that’s on you.

SEE THE SUNLIGHT

There’s an interview from that first round of persona-establishing press that I can never find when I need it. Kesha was asked about her relationship with her fans, one of those really standard softball questions on pop sites, and in talking about being overwhelmed by the response, she mentioned being approach by a girl who said that her boyfriend had died and Tik Tok was the only thing making her happy.

I think about that all the time. Partly it’s because it such a sharp and poignant expression of that John Darnielle quote that makes the rounds every now and then, about how some of the value of pop music lies in its ability to remind us of our own potential for joy. Partly it’s because at the time that I read it, it resonated so specifically with me. Kesha, like many of the things we love most dearly, came into my life exactly when I needed her: an autumn I remember always in darkness, shuttering into a winter I only saw from inside of my room. I hadn’t lost anyone, except myself; I wasn’t alone except that I believed myself to be. I was left tracing circles in the dust. And into this came Kesha, loud and like nothing I’d heard, thumping and slurring in a way that bypassed entirely my defunct brain and reminded me that I was still a body. It wasn’t that she showed me the way out but that listening to Animal on the train, in my room, first thing in the morning, at night when I couldn’t sleep—it made me feel temporarily like the kind of person who could find a way out.

I’m telling you this because Rainbow is an album, through its context and in its text, about surviving, about what it looks like on the other side of something that needed to be survived and what it took to get there; a rainbow, after all, is a symbol of survival, the promise that the storm has been weathered and soon we will step into something new. But for a lot of us, loving Kesha has always been in part about survival. And some of that is the pop-music-joy thing, the miracle of feeling for three and a half minutes at a stretch something other than whatever it is we are living through or with, and some of it is about the fact that loving anything with your whole self is a way of reminding yourself of the fact of your heart.

But there’s also always been something about Kesha that gave her that magic, for those of us who needed it. It’s almost funny, because Animal isn’t and has no ambition to be an album that inspires. It’s concerned with our titular creaturely selves, the hulking id that stalks through the night careening through desires and bad ideas, which is to say, yeah, it’s an album about going and getting shitfaced. I read arguments that it was glorifying a self-destructive party culture and rolled my eyes, thinking, she doesn’t even sing about, like, weed; I read, later, the idea that it was all some big ironic display actually highlighting the depressing nature of whatever I literally don’t care, and thought, that’s not right either; it didn’t at all align with what it felt like to actually listen to the album, to experience its gleeful crassness, its visceral thrills, the explosions of delight and pockets of laughter.

There are ways to be in on the joke without being above the joke. And that was the thing about her: she seemed to see things as they were. She said once that she wrote songs the way people talk over a drink, and that always rang accurate to me; damn, Jeannie, why you gotta tell the secrets ‘bout my sex life? still makes me laugh. Her hedonistic playground was by many standards really quite tame (dancing while wasted is practically the national pastime of twenty-three-year-olds); it came to vibrant life in her snarling, smirking delivery and in her affectionate details. One of my favorite lines is when she rhymes and I’m gonna get laid / and I’m not the designat/ed driver, because it’s funny but also because it meant that Kesha’s world was one like ours, with things like designated drivers and overpriced club drinks you were too broke to buy, and the distinguishing feature was attitude. It was fantastic, but not fantastical; it was intoxicatingly glorious precisely because she wasn’t pretending it was anything it wasn’t. On the title track she sang I am in love with what we are, not what we should be, and it always sounded to me like she was talking about our teeming human mess: in love, sincerely, not with an imagined perfection but with the tangibly imperfect—the puke in a garbage can, the drunk texts sent, the glitter on the sticky, filthy floor.

There is always power in honesty, in looking at the truth of things and plunging right in. There’s power in seeing the ugliness of life and deciding to love it anyway. When she said tonight I’mma fight till we see the sunlight, you could believe she knew what it might take, some nights, to make it through.

KICK ‘EM TO THE CURB

There’s one more thing, and then we will, I promise, get to the good stuff. When Kesha burst onto the scene in a cloud of glitter and whiskey, I had, as indicated above, a lot of time on my hands. I followed her early press pretty closely. In interviews and videos, I saw someone who was obviously smart, in ways that had nothing to do with her SAT score or Barnard acceptance; someone who loved animals and glitter and stupid dick jokes, and disliked the rules of decorum and when people were mean; someone a little weird in some ways, and refreshingly normal in others, whose weirdness seemed not like a put-on but like the outgrowth of a commitment to doing what she liked; someone who said some pretty fucked up things, and some pretty wise things, and some boring or stupid things, and a lot of really funny shit, most of which did not precisely take the form of a joke. I saw someone who seemed, ultimately, like someone I might know, someone I could easily imagine I might enjoy talking with over a drink or six (hey: I was twenty-three, too).

Kesha felt, in other words, completely legible to me. And it stung in odd ways to see how baffled she made other people: the things they assumed were an act, or a lie, that I found wholly plausible, the contradictions they perceived that felt to me like just the typical mismatched knickknacks of personhood. Years later I still struggle to find words for how crazy-making it was to see the endless head-scratching around the stupid fucking line, kick ‘em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger, the insinuations of irony or disbelief that someone of Kesha’s age and gender might use maybe the most iconic male sex symbol of all time as shorthand for exactly that. Like girls existed outside of culture, like it was so fucking hard to believe that they too might have a parent’s crate of records, or a cool older friend, or access to the internet and its many message boards, or any of the other rites of coolness we grant so easily to men. It would take a long time before I could articulate why it hurt, as a woman within a year of Kesha’s age who doesn’t give a shit about rock’n’roll but knows that Mick Jagger means sex, like, come the fuck on: it hurt to be confronted so starkly with the paucity of our collective imagination about women’s interiority. It hurt to be told, essentially, that aspects of myself and my knowledge that I took for granted were to many people so alien, so outside the bounds of any allowable feminine type, that they were literally inconceivable.

Now, of course, after the Dylan covers and the Iggy Pop feature, no one doubts Kesha’s rock cred. But I hate, still, that that’s what it took to get here. And I hate that this too has become part of the narrative of Rainbow, like we’re all finally seeing the authentic artist and actual human being under the ersatz mask of glitter and whiskey breath, instead of considering that maybe these things can coexist. That maybe the people you dismiss out of hand can also have complex inner lives; that a silly party girl can be other things on different nights, or even all at once. That same profile from last year included the following passage:

The problem was, she said, there was no balance. Every song was a song about partying, and yes, that was who she was, Kesha says that was definitely who she was, but she’s a real person having a complete human experience, and she wanted her album to reflect that. “To this day, I’ve never released a single that’s a true ballad, and I feel like those are the songs that balance out the perception of you, because you can be a fun girl. You can go and have a crazy night out, but you also, as a human being, have vulnerable emotions. You have love.”

You can have both; you can be many things. Of course Tik Tok was not, could never be, the entirety of Kesha, but no song ever is. That a portrait is incomplete, exaggerated, selective, doesn’t make it a lie, it just makes it art: a piece created, by someone, to express something. Kesha is showing now parts of her we haven’t seen, but we shouldn’t have needed to see them to believe they were there. Even before, she was never as simple as was often assumed; even on this song, she slides from bratty nasal tunelessness to tongue-in-cheek flirtatiousness, from fist-pumping marching orders to open-eyed vulnerability.

That’s a rainbow, too—not the transformation of light, but its refraction: a shift in angle that reveals that what appeared simple was in fact all along much more beautiful, and much more complicated, than you assumed.

—Isabel

#rainbow

[themoneybuff-blog]

The death of Anthony Bourdain: Thoughts on productivity, pleasure, and depression

Shares 141 Warning: This is a rare GRS post that contains salty language. If you dont like salty language, dont read this article. Anthony Bourdain killed himself Friday morning. So what? you might be thinking. Hes just another fucking celebrity who didnt know how good he had it. Maybe youre right. But his death has weighed heavy on me all weekend. On Friday morning, as I wrote the weekly Get Rich Slowly email, I thought about Anthony Bourdain. On Friday afternoon, as Kim and I worked in the yard, I thought about Anthony Bourdain. On Friday evening, as we soaked in our new hot tub with a friend, I thought about Anthony Bourdain. Yesterday, I thought about Anthony Bourdain. Today, I thought about Anthony Bourdain. Now Im writing this article as an act of catharsis. Maybe itll help me to stop thinking about Anthony Bourdain. The Depression Trap I believe Anthony Bourdains death touched me deeply for a couple of reasons. I was a huge fan. Since listening him read the audio version of Kitchen Confidential a decade ago, Ive loved his work. Parts Unknown was probably my favorite travel show: raw and real and filled with food. Bourdain connected with everyone he met. His joy for life was contagious and his mind was sharp.Like Bourdain did, I struggle with depression. All my life, Ive experienced periodic descents into darkness. The first time this happened, I missed five weeks of sixth grade. In the nearly forty years since then, Ive developed a variety of coping mechanisms but they dont always work. In recent months since the middle of March the darkness has deepened and I dont know why. (And just as I missed five weeks of school back then, Ive been unable to get my work done in the present.) Let me make it clear that I am not suicidal. Right now, the biggest symptom of my depression is my inability to get shit done. But whereas suicide seems strange and senseless to most everyone else, depressives understand the appeal even if wed never consider it personally. One of the many stupid things about depression is that the condition doesnt care how awesome your life is. It doesnt care how successful you are. It doesnt care how much money you have. Depression is not rational. If it were, itd be easy to think your way out of it. Paula Froelich, one of Bourdains ex-girlfriends, put it like this:

Bourdains death didnt just make me introspective. It also led to a couple of interesting conversations about pleasure and productivity and about what really matters in life. The Productivity Trap Friday afternoon, I received email from a GRS reader well call Michael: Im sure you saw Anthony Bourdain killed himself. This to me was a telling quote: When asked during a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal whether he ever thought about stepping back from the breakneck pace of a job that kept him on the road 250 days a year, he replied, Too late for that. I think about it. I aspired to it. I feel guilty about it. I yearn for it. Balance? I fucking wish.' Obviously I didnt know Bourdain personally, or even know much about him as a public figure, but I think that mentality is common: Once youve become successful, the thought of ever ratcheting back seems unthinkable. Obviously, suicide is rare, but I think this mentality is common among successful people they stay in an unhappy status quo simply because they have so much invested in their self-image and public perception of themselves as successful people. I think Michael is onto something. Ive seen this in my own life, in the lives of friends and family, and the lives of colleagues. They fall into what you might call the productivity trap. (Heres an article I almost linked to the other day about the productivity trap: If youre so successful, why are you still working 70 hours a week?) I have one friend, for instance, with an enormously successful career. He has a popular blog, a popular podcast, best-selling books, and even an annual conference that attracts attendees from across the planet. Yet hes never satisfied not with himself nor with anybody else. Hes always looking for ways to make things bigger and better. He seems unhappy with who he is and what he has. Hes written publicly about his struggles with mental illness, but he hasnt revealed its full effects. Its not just my friend. Its me too. I see this pattern in my own life, and its something Ive deliberately decided to approach more mindfully. Why do I want to have a hot tub or travel to Ecuador? Why did I repurchase Get Rich Slowly and how often should I publish here? Why do I keep agreeing to public speaking gigs? Do I really want these things? Are they aligned with my personal mission statement? Will they really make me happy? (Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no.) In his email, Michael continued: I think this is really the key to personal finance and early retirement actually stepping back and figure out what is important to you, and doing it, even if it seems like youre turning your back on a great career, or a nice house or whatever. That is the hardest part, which keeps most people in a life they dont want. They think I went to school X or work at company Y, so therefore I must live in this city or have that job or have that wardrobe and never ask themselves what, as individuals, makes them happy. The Pleasure Trap As our email conversation continued, Michael brought up another interesting point. He noted that our culture and this is especially true in the world of financial independence blogs is obsessed with experiences, such as travel. Yet in many ways, collecting experiences is no better (nor any different) than collecting things. Heres Michael again: [Bourdain] had the ne plus ultra of modern life: rich, famous, a job that 99% of the population would kill for, saw everything he wanted to see, ate everything he wanted to eat, Im sure slept with tons of women if that is what he wanted, took all the drugs he wanted. You name it, he had it. And, he hung himself in a hotel room in France, a twice-divorced man a continent away from his daughter and girlfriend. Im not bagging on him. I just think he illustrates something: A meaningful life doesnt consist of a series of cool experiences, or traveling or eating cool stuff. Bourdain did that stuff to an incredible degree, and it still didnt make him happy. I think that is what our society has forgotten. I feel like were always being told we should move a lot, travel a lot, be vaguely or overtly dismissive of the town or state we were born in, move for college and never move back homein short, basically be a free agent with fewer and fewer personal connections, or weaker connections. And, we get this [higher suicide rates]. [] I think this relates to personal finance. There is always this thought that thrift requires these huge sacrifices less travel, fewer new experiences, fewer new restaurants. But what if [these arent sacrifices]? What if irrespective of cost, that stuff isnt really a source of happiness? I mean, people accept that with respect to possessions nobody says a Cadillac or a 5000-square-foot home is the key to happiness but many, many people in our culture think new experiences are crucial to a happy life. It may be the opposite the continuity and free-time to invest in loving relationships may actually be the key to happiness. I told Kim about my conversation with Michael. Its the pleasure trap, she said. People fall for the lie that momentary pleasure equals happiness. But pleasure isnt the same as happiness. Shes right, of course. Happiness is like planting a garden, watching it grow, then enjoying the harvest. Pleasure is simply eating the fruit. Happiness is deeper and richer and longer lasting. Pleasure is fleeting; happiness is not. But happiness involves time and work and patience. Now, Ill admit: Im guilty as anyone else of falling into the pleasure trap, and in oh-so-many ways! I have to make a deliberate effort to look past immediate pleasure in order to consider long-term happiness. This often requires enduring unpleasant activities. Do I really want to go out in the cold and the rain to dig in the mud and plant my garden? No, not in this moment. Id rather sit in the hot tub. But if I dont plant the garden, Im sacrificing greater happiness in the future. Final Thoughts While I think that Kim and Michael are onto something the productivity trap and the pleasure trap are both real and both problematic I keep coming back to Anthony Bourdains battle with depression. During my recent road trip through the southeastern U.S., I talked with two friends who are fighting depression in their own lives. One friend has a spouse who cannot shake the condition despite counseling, despite exercise, despite a loving family. The other friend fights the condition himself and its led to weight gain and addictive tendencies. Therapy has helped some but its not a cure-all. As for myself, I havent yet returned to therapy although Im considering it. (Not so long ago, I spent a year working with a therapist to find ways to cope with anxiety and depression. It helped.) I want to stress again that I am not suicidal. But the depression has most definitely affected my daily existence, including my relationships, my health, and my work here at Get Rich Slowly. It sucks. It sucks. It sucks. But I know that itll get better someday. Shares 141 https://www.getrichslowly.org/death-of-anthony-bourdain/