good morning it's tuesday today's video
is three videos three ways of
approaching something i'm thinking about
poetically politically and then
personally there's a kenneth coke poem
called you want a social life with
friends that my late friend amy cross
rosenthal introduced me to over 20 years
ago it begins you want a social life
with friends a passionate love life and
as well to work hard every day
what's true is of these three you may
have too i used to think that even
considering such trade-offs was mere
laziness that if you just worked hard
enough you had plenty of time for work
and romance and friendships and
everything else but on a very basic
level time spent with family is time not
spent working and time spent writing
novels is time not spent writing videos
i am making these choices as an
individual all the time but we are also
making them as a society there are costs
and benefits to the 40-hour work week
and costs and benefits to a school year
with eight weeks of summer vacation and
for those of us fortunate enough to have
a measure of individual choice those
choices are not laziness they are a fact
of being alive and if i think i'm
transcending cost-benefit analysis
somehow by doing it all i'm still making
choices i'm just making unconscious ones
11 years ago i made a video exploring my
profound hatred of the us penny and i do
still very much hate them the reason we
have money is to store value and
facilitate the exchange of goods and
services and pennies don't do any of
that they would be worthless except that
each penny cost the u.s mint almost two
cents to make so they are worth much
less than nothing arguments in favor of
keeping the penny that for instance
ceasing to mint them would somehow
increase inflation are provably false
because many countries have eliminated
similar coins without any problems
including the united states which
eliminated the half pence when it was
worth around 30 of today's sense but of
course one of the reasons i hate pennies
is that hating pennies is simple the
penny is the rare cost that has no
benefit or at least very little benefit
and there's some part of me that craves
these straightforward outrages which do
seem to flourish online where discourse
discourses conducted primarily via memes
and short videos and brief bursts of
text but the thing is the most important
issues we face from monetary policy to
expanding healthcare access cannot
really be boiled down to here's how to
have a lot of benefit at absolutely no
cost pennies can which makes them
attractive but not particularly
substantive and so my current take on
pennies is that pennies are ridiculous
but also easy and almost everything that
is really important is at least upon
close inspection neither ridiculous nor
easy i've been thinking a lot about cost
benefit analyses partly because we are
inside of a pandemic that demands a
constant exhausting stream of both
personal and societal cost-benefit
analyses but partly for more personal
reasons several months ago i started
taking a new medication to treat my ocd
and it's been very effective i am not
losing many hours to obsessive worry or
compulsive behaviors i do not feel
gripped by dread or despair etc but
there are also some downsides including
some weird ones like i cry all the time
at everything and have for my entire
life being a crier is like part of how i
understand myself except that in the
last few months i have completely lost
the ability to cry which is not as
pleasant as it might sound because while
i don't like being terribly sad i do
like being able to access the full range
of human emotions now for me at least
the benefits of this medication far
outweigh the costs but i have to
acknowledge that there are costs i'll
tell you what though when i do finally
cry it's going to be a barnstormer like
lock the doors there's an eruption in
this home my point though is that the
fact of a cost does not negate the fact
of a benefit so to summarize pennies are
simple and life is complicated and
treating life like pennies doesn't work
it doesn't work for me personally anyway
and i don't think it works for us
societally hank i'll see you on friday