I'm Not Using My Brain Right Now So You Can Fool Me If You Want To

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is a slog. Not because it's dry or uninteresting but rather because you have to pay attention.

It's not that Thinking is hard to read, but you have to take some time out of your day to do it. It's not something you pick up while you're commuting to work or otherwise distracted because you'll have to read passages again and again. Which is kind of the point of the book.

Kahneman explains that our brains have two "systems," "System 1" and "System 2." To simplify, System 1 is intuitive and unconscious and System 2 applies the rest of your brain to what System 1 perceives. And most of the time, System 2 is a lazy piece of shit who goes back and screws up everything.

As an example, Kahneman opens with a simple question: If a ball and a bat cost $1.10 and the ball costs a dollar less than the bat, how much do each cost? You probably almost automatically answered $1 and 10 cents, which is wrong, because that would be 90 cents less. The correct answer is $1.05 and 5 cents. Most people get this question wrong, probably because they're busy or otherwise distracted and because unless we're really sharp and on it, our brains just suck, and no amount of 5-Hour Energy can ever fix that.

It's a slightly depressing prospect, or at least slightly humbling — if we can't really rely on our ability to rationally work through simple problems, then what of bigger, more important things? Don't answer that.

And to be fair, Kahneman doesn't attempt to do that, which is a little frustrating, but understandable — that's not what he's setting out to do. But if there's one thing Jonah Lehrer taught me, it's that we should demand more from popular scholarly writing, and less of ourselves; sometimes you want Kahneman to lob up some policy softballs for us to glom onto; tell us what to think, what we need to know, you know? Because as it stands now, sometimes Thinking comes off as a 400-some-odd-page parlor trick.

That's not to say that the book is not really fascinating and entertaining and that Kahneman is probably a hoot to talk with at a cocktail party, but in all seriousness, I was sometimes itching for more wisdom about how this insight can be applied to the world — more than just noting that most (90 percent!) of rail projects cost more than was projected and end up serving fewer passengers (the "planning fallacy").

The other thing I'm curious about (maybe Jonah Lehrer can elucidate this point) is why? Which is to say — and I don't think Kahneman explained this, or at least even mentioned it — what anthropological purpose does it serve for us to think so poorly? Maybe it doesn't have to serve a purpose, but it's such a feature of our brains that you start to wonder. And that's really dispiriting, when you think about it.

I remember some teacher at some point in either middle school or high school advising us on standardized test-taking strategies, saying that when a question seemed like a trick question, we shouldn't overthink our answer and instead go with our "gut." (And I'm lucky I never interviewed for a smart-person job, what with all those stupid questions they ask.) Like a lot of bad advice, I never forgot it. And that's part of why Thinking, Fast and Slow never stopped blowing me away.

Satisfice It To Say . . .

There's a thing people do when they reach some sort of milestone where all of the sudden they're really engaged by certain topics, where conversation about stuff like gas water heaters, the optimal level of collision coverage or male incontinence becomes really engrossing and the players turn very animated. It's this thing where someone's like, "I just had a guy come and lay tile," and the other person will be like, "Oh, wow, what kind of grout did he use?" and basically if you don't have a bathroom — or care about owning one — you're kind of like, "Can't we just talk about the latest episode of Homeland or something, you know, important that I might actually care about?"

All of which is to say, when I started reading Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough, the one thing I couldn't get out of my head was how this writer — who is a single parent with a young child — found the time to write this book.

The point of the book is not that she's a single parent but rather that she's single, period. And that the reason she's single, she explains, is that she spent too much time before she got old and mommed being a big bitch about who she would or wouldn't deign to go out with until one day only 50-plus men would ask her out.

But for the first 100 or so pages I could only perseverate on the fact that even as a single parent, she had all this time to go interview groups of women and men in bars, visit with matchmakers and dating consultants and generally do this gumshoe investigative reporting about how women in their 20s and early 30s are, before they know it, in danger of becoming old and single, or at least only attractive to prospective AARP members. Seriously, even with a nanny or or whoever, how do you write an entire book? Because all I can find time to do when I'm home with Monkey is answer a few emails and maybe finally brush my teeth at some point mid-morning — either that or eat. It sucks. And that's why I'm up doing bullshit at 2 a.m.

It was highly distracting — You can speed date and read Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb 800 times a week? Like, how? — until I finally gave in and figured that there's probably some boarding school somewhere that accepts 18-month-olds. That and I got totally sucked into Gottlieb's pitch-perfect self-deprecating style, which evokes much less scorn than straight-up pity and really does work as a tale that cautions.

The genius thing about its utility as a cautionary tale, for guys at least, is how much dudes (and bros and, yes, even jabrones) can root for this lady to tell these bitches what we've been trying to say for years, which is that they're sure as shit not gonna get any prettier, which will only make it that much harder to check out of that miserable relationship with that dickhead financial services scum once she discovers he's been cheating on her for, like, the eighth time or whatever, which is why she should lock up a good thing now — i.e., this — and give the bald, the poor, the fuzzy asses a chance — one, lousy, goddam chance — with a beautiful baby for once, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son.

The message for the intended audience is I guess a little different, which is roughly something along the lines of when high-achieving children have been groomed to expect only the best in their education or careers, it is only natural for her to expect "the best" in her relationships as well, which is why women carry around a giant laundry list of necessary characteristics for a mate, a list comprehensive enough to ensure that no man could possibly work, or if one does, he has approximately 48 million potential women to choose from. And so women spend their optimal mating years either ignoring basically good solid men or (and) going after men who aren't good matches for them and then all of the sudden the 32-year-old who gets asked out more times each week than there are days in the week becomes the 38-year-old who guys — i.e., the solid, upstanding marrying kind of guys — wouldn't ever want to bother with.

It's common sense, but like so many self-help or self-helpful books show, there is a big market to be reminded about common sense. I should add, though, that part of the book's power is that it's — I think at least — calling out common sense that people with sense don't want to hear or think it's bad to mention, which probably accounts for much of the negative reaction to the book (or at least the provocative title). I didn't read the negative reaction because a) I don't really give a fuck what some no-sex-having bitches think when they're confronted by the truth and b) I actually don't think the book is saying what people think it's saying (though the provocative title of that and the original article don't help assuage people's skepticism).

There is a funny point in Marry Him where Gottlieb interviews some of the men in her life who probably were "good enough" but who she never ended up with. One in particular — who she was friendly with and who she says she probably should have ended up with — talks about his "settling" in ways that seem a little depressing. Maybe that's a gender thing? It's noticeable that the book's female examples generally describe feeling a stronger and stronger connection with the schlubby men they settle for but this guy — who marries a "bland" lady — simply starts focusing on other qualities: "'She's bland in ways that aren't important int he big picture,' he said. 'I'm a talker, and I love the banter, and I'm intense about things, and she's just not. It mattered more when we were dating. It still would be nice to have in a spouse, but it has so little to do with the day-to-day of marriage that it matters very little now.'" I hope this guy is a composite because his wife should be pissed the way she's described in the book.

Another small thing that you start to notice after a while is how Gottlieb is usually very careful to note that there is always "physical chemistry" in whatever settled couple she uses as an example. It's noticeable because she sort of seems to add it in as a parenthetical a lot, which makes you question how often it's actually there. You know, like, if you keep having to mention it, etc. . . . At the very least I wondered if it's not maybe always there and doesn't it sort of undercut the argument? Those are unknown unknowns though.

Ultimately, Marry Him succeeds in two ways: One, it's a huge literary feat that you, the reader, somehow by the end of the book start to feel your heart hurt for this person who is not such a huge jackass that she didn't understand that having a child via sperm donor in her late 30s wouldn't lead to dimmed dating prospects but that she — like all of us — kept holding on to this idea that she could still feel a spark with someone who was the love of her life. You feel for her. And then she admits that she is turned off by a match she is presented with because he went to San Diego State. And you're, like, wow, you're kind of an idiot, because while I'm sure the California public higher education system is under great financial stress right now, the difference between SDSU and UC-Berkeley is not that great that you shouldn't be able to just suck it the fuck up. I mean, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son you come off like a hose beast. To continue One (above), you read this selp-helpful book thinking she's going to triumph at the end with a real nice guy and then when she doesn't it's such a huge muted-trumpet moment that you almost — not quite! — feel teary-eyed when you hear that the Mr. "Good Enough" she finally found, after hundreds of pages of trials and travails and child-neglect, was forced to move away for the good of his family. It's written very smartly that way.

Two (I nearly forgot what "Two" was) — and this is a message that Atlantic editors probably care like not at all to emphasize, which is why Gottlieb is somehow vilified — is that ultimately Marry Him is about being kind. In this case, to dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house and take their sons to soccer practice. On behalf of dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house, I want to personally thank Gottlieb for encouraging hot young chicks to get real about some of these dandies they insist on bringing home and instead indulge in the dark arts of the League of Bald-Headed Men. Thanks bro! We owe you (a bunch)! She's like a more useful Foundation For A Better Life, in that with FFABL, all I get is some jock to pick up the books I dropped in the hallway; with Gottlieb, at least I get some yoni out of the deal, you know? Seriously men, she's doing some Yeoman's work up in this heeze.

I Am Charlotte Sometimes

Back when men were boys and bisexuals existed — in 1985, I guess — it was OK to write about rich kids. I don't know when this stopped — The Official Preppy Handbook was in print for a while there — but in this economic climate especially, the last thing I want to do is ponder how a bunch of prep school jacktards perceive the world.

Such is the milieu that greets those who crack open Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction.

I always love the book review trope that sketches out [blank] [blank] and [blank], takes a paragraph break to let you take that in, then introduces the title of the book with a word like "such." Maureen Corrigan's NPR reviews hew to this cadence exactly, which is probably where it first sunk in.

Attraction follows some rich kids during their fall term at a fictional(ized) Northeastern liberal arts college where they sex, drug and abort fetuses. I seem to remember a time, not long after 1985 even, when it wasn't cool to reveal oneself as a rich kid. Maybe it was the rough-and-tumble neighborhood I grew up in, or maybe my peers had a sharp sense of self-hatred, but I just don't remember that being a thing.

Now maybe Rules actually exemplifies this psychology, which is why the characters are written as such jabrones. That's a take I haven't thought of until just now, except I'm still not sure why we should waste time thinking about them in the first place.

I should step back a little: My initial response to The Rules was wondering whether all the culture that existed in the 1980s came from rich kids, and well, what's that about? because fuck these people. It makes it look like everyone during the Reagan era acted like the cast of Gossip Girl or something. It just seems nutty to construct novels about teenagers. Today we have Lauren Conrad for that.

But Ellis (or Easton Ellis?) isn't enamored with the characters, and Of Attraction exposes how meaningless the characters' lives are as they pinball through their fall semester. The novel has this mid-1980s "grittiness" to it, where sex scenes are "painfully real" and rich people use the N-word in jokes (seriously, was that joke in the James Van Der Beek movie adaptation?). But he's also got this Evelyn Waugh-type satirical streak happening, which often gets lost amidst the full-frontal vérité. I was flipping through the book looking for one particular part that was actually funny and couldn't find it, though if you squint there are some other parts that qualify.

Part of the problem is the first-person conceit: The chapters, such as they are, flit around from the first-person perspectives of three main characters (with some extra characters thrown in there). We already know they're all clueless twats, so there's a built-in obstacle that obscures a lot of the satirical moments. Ideally, this would be third-person — or at least follow one character in the first person — so the satire would shine. As it is, it reads like a thought experiment, or maybe a first draft: Good background for the main story.

The story itself, such as that that is, has a few mysteries that emerge but which are never answered. Which, in my layman's opinion, sucks donkey dick: I know it's a "thing" to screw with our "expectations" about "literature," but come the fuck on — give us an ending, for reals. Because he was building up to it and then let us down worse than a French film, except then you're supposed to skulk out of the theater thinking you "got" it.

A final word about the morality in Rules Of — if you take away the first-personness (which you have to, unless you want to go down a rabbit hole of semi-autobiographical sleuthing), it's kind of incredible how heavy handed it all is. The drugging, sexing and fetus aborting is so over the top that you kind of start gravitating toward Flannery O'Connor, thinking that BEE is telling us something about this lost generation.

Now perhaps kids at Bennington really did do that many drugs — it was the 1980s, I suppose — so maybe he's not telegraphing anything about that. But the discussion about abortion comes off as so grisly and uncaring that you can't help but think that he's moralizing a little there — which makes it a fundamentally conservative work (like Flannery O'Connor). I only saw American Psycho, and slept through most of it (me, not him — I drank sangria beforehand), but that's the point of that satire, right? That a logically hyperbolic extension of American culture is that . . . [Wikipediaing that book] oh yeah, totally.

So ultimately it comes to this, BEE. Come on board with "consumer culture"! You do have an iPhone, right? It's high time you overpaid for coffee, rent or whatever else you have with you that makes life bearable in Texas, because it's 2012, baby, and the only middle class people left are in the Mountain or Central time zones.