How Much Does Media Affect You
Epistemic status: just brainstorming, no conclusions even
Here are some things I believe:
- violent video games don’t make kids violent
- porn is probably fine in moderation, not good in excess
- watching horror movies is in general fine
- the wave of torture porn movies (e.g. Saw1, Hostel; sorry I’m reusing the word “porn” here but I’m referring to horror movies whose main draw is gruesome things happening to people, not porn) is a little troubling2
- Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and other big-budget TV shows might be peddling the same thing as Saw (essay that’s a bit extreme but in this direction)
- The News makes people think the world is worse than it is
- The News and Social Media cause rage and fear by rewarding it
Anyway, interesting ACX post about how, maybe when you’re sad, listening to sad music doesn’t actually help and you should just get yourself to listen to happy music. Experimental History continued speculation about set points. … Sounds like, if I may continue speculating, it’s not about the action you take, it’s about where your set point is. So like, if you want some adrenaline, you watch a scary movie, fine. You want more adrenaline, you watch a gruesome serial killer movie, you go “glad I’m not in their shoes”, your body regulates itself. The problem is if your set point for “amount of gruesome serial killers you want to watch” is too high?
But man, I don’t know; how does that explain Social Media and The News3? People have a need to get angry, The News offers them this? What happened before say 1900? Did people just get mad in public more?
Back to the core question: how much does media affect you? Maybe we can look at it in layers; imagine we’re all a cognitive, emotional, and archetypal layer (among others, I guess). Media can definitely throw your cognitive layer way off; read stories of crime every day and you think it’s everywhere. Media can sort of affect your emotional layer; certainly short term, at least. If you have to go console a friend at a funeral, maybe don’t watch Saving Private Ryan first (or Looney Tunes, for that matter). But it’s not likely to affect your long-term emotional set points. And media can’t really, hopefully, affect your really deep-seated stuff, your basic person-ness. (just walk away from the screen, like close your eyes)
ok I gotta admit, I actually kinda liked Saw. I think it gets a bad rap; most of the movie is about trying to find the killer, and the weird dilemma of: “what if he almost kills someone, but they’re grateful for it?” It’s not mostly about the killer doing gruesome things to his victims! (though there is that.) It sounds like some of the other films are much more pure torture-porn than Saw. But I gotta use it as the example here because it was kinda the biggest name in the whole 2000s torture-porn wave. ↩︎
Though maybe that was a wave that came and went? wp describes how it was mostly 2000s-early 2010s - though CW: even reading wikipedia descriptions of these films is pretty troubling ↩︎
the band was never the same after Huey Lewis left ↩︎
Budgeting: Where I'm At Now
I’ve figured some things out about budgeting. I’m not awesome at it, but I’ve learned some stuff. I hope it’s useful. It might be more useful if your monetary position is kind of like mine (always made enough money to survive and save for retirement/etc), and less so if you have to figure out how to make ends meet each month.
gosh I tried to make this into a structured post but nope it’s just gonna be a series of thoughts.
1. there are tiers
of knowledge about your money.
- I don’t even know what’s happening with my money. My savings keeps going up, or maybe I’m broke, either way, I don’t know why.
- I know where my money goes. I spend x% of my budget on y, etc. I can’t really do much with that though.
- I know where my money goes, and I make changes based on that, and my savings reflects my changes.
I’ve spent the last ~10 years climbing from stage 1 to stage 2. I’m not yet at stage 3. In theory, stage 3 is “budgeting” while 2 is just “knowing where your money goes” but I’m gonna call this all “budgeting”, for simplicity.
It’s still worth it to be at stage 2! For example, I could decide this year that we can afford a nanny. If I were still in stage 1, I’d have to shrug and go “well, I don’t know, that’s expensive.”
2. this shit’s hard
look, I’ve been a Math Guy since I was a toddler, I’m pretty organized, I have enough time and resources to think about it, and it’s still hard. Like I said, only stage 2.
3. everything should be decision-oriented
You might say “why even make a budget?” I think the biggest reason is to be able to make decisions about your life. Decisions like:
- I want to take Job X which will pay me less money; can I do so?
- We’re having a baby; how much can we afford to spend on day care?
- I really want to (do X/buy X) but not hurt my savings; what can I cut out in order to do that?
All budgeting should help you make these decisions! Everything you do, every bit of data, should help you with that. Draft CABs1.
4. categorizing should be easy
If categorizing is hard, you won’t do it. Everything should be clear what category it fits in. If it’s not, perhaps you have too many categories (e.g. Mint comes with one for “Entertainment” and one for “Amusement”, wtf). Or perhaps your categories are unclear to you: what does “professional development” mean? If I buy a new desk chair, is that “professional development”? The answer doesn’t matter, but it matters that you have a clear answer. Tweak your categories until you always do.
5. you have to build your own categories
Mint and Ynab and your bank will helpfully auto-categorize your transactions. Chipotle is “restaurants.” United Airlines is “Air travel.” Then you’ll look at an end of year report and be like “uhh I spent a lot on Restaurants, maybe I should bring that down?” and you’ll have no idea how to do it. They won’t understand that, for you, Chipotle is where you buy lunch for your whole office on Tuesdays and get reimbursed, Home Depot isn’t home improvement but instead where you buy instruments for your washboard-and-jug band, and United is usually for visiting your family but sometimes for vacationing to Hawaii.
Because everything should be decision-oriented, and because categorizing should be easy, you will have to make your own categories.
Imagine you had a category for “lunch at work”, a category for “fun nights out with friends”, and a category for “restaurants/bars to support my other hobbies”. You might then see that “lunch at work” takes $5000/yr and think “it would be worth $2000 for me to pack a lunch sometimes”, or “fun nights out with friends” takes $5000 and think “why don’t I invite them to my place once a month and shave off $1000.”
6. start budgeting before you need it
Because you have to build your own categories, it takes a while before your budget is useful. If you are a Young Professional making bank, you probably don’t need a budget yet. But someday you will want to make some of the above decisions, and it’ll really help to at least know what your expenses are, and you’ll be glad you put in the 3-5 years to make good categories first.
sidebar: everyone’s examples are moralizing and stupid
A million dimwits online have written articles like “daily starbucks costs $5/day! if you do that every day, it costs $1500/year! if you instead saved that money, you could buy a house…”
This is dumb. It’s easy to think about, which is why people write it. (much harder to write: “visiting your family 5x/year probably costs about $4000, including all your costs; what if you only do it 4x?") But it’s not how things work (you can’t go from daily starbucks to no starbucks, easily), and if you tell people what they should spend money on, they’ll fight you, and this whole exercise will feel forced and useless.
100% of this exercise should be empowering, not shaming.
Anyway.
7. categorize in real time
I used to try to categorize all my transactions at the end of every year. This was frustrating. First of all, a bunch of transactions are to “Amazon” or “Venmo”, and good luck categorizing those. Second, I trusted Mint with auto-categorization when possible, it was wrong a lot, and I’m sure I missed some of them.
Now I do them in Ynab whenever I think to, every few days, and there’s maybe 5 or 20 transactions, each pretty easy to understand, and I can even do stuff like open up Amazon and see what exactly I bought there. This is nice.
Mint/Ynab/etc also generate a lot of noise because they just track “all transactions”. For example, if I pay my $500 credit card bill, it’ll record a “-$500” on my bank account and a “$500” on my credit card account. Obviously neither of these is meaningful, I just shuffled money around. So I tag these as “transfer” and then just ignore all “transfers” in any report. Easier to do if I don’t wait until the end of the year.
8. here are my categories
They’re not perfect by any means but they are better than the defaults!
- Fixed Housing Costs (these are very hard to change, unless we move)
- Mortgage/rent
- Property tax
- Utilities (incl Internet)
- Home Improvement (these vary wildly year to year. Needless to say, it was crazy when we moved into this house)
- Hardware and fixing things
- Decoration and furniture
- Well-being, normal (don’t skimp on this!)
- Doctor
- Gym
- Well-being, woo (this has almost always been worth it, so don’t skimp on it either! sometimes individual instances are not so useful, like acupuncture for me, but the ability to explore woo things has led to some really big improvements)
- Bodywork/massage
- Transformational work
- Therapy (haven’t figured out where to put this yet, into normal or woo.)
- Daily life necessary evils (probably not worth skimping on these. e.g. I’d cut a lot of things before groceries.)
- Groceries
- Pharmacy
- Mobile phone
- Family
- Travel to see family
- Gifts
- Personal Care (I don’t love this category but haven’t figured out what else to do with it. Probably should combine with well-being woo and therapy)
- Hair
- Other personal care
- Discretionary Fun Around Town (obviously, this is where “stuff we could cut more easily” begins)
- Coffee shops
- Alcohol and bars
- Restaurants
- Entertainment
- Discretionary Buying Stuff
- TV/subscriptions
- Clothing
- Electronics & Software (this isn’t a great category actually - what is the software for?)
- Hobbies
- Amazon/target uncategorized (sometimes you can’t get em all)
- Discretionary world-a-better-place
- Charity (e.g. Givewell)
- Supporting things I like (e.g. a substack writer I like or a Patreon)
- Vacation
- Air travel
- Hotel
- Other vacation
- Car (ideally this would be as low as possible, I just am sad all about it)
- Gas
- Parking
- Uber/lyft
- Service/parts
- Bike and public transport (yay, anything I use here is fine)
- Bike and bike parts
- Bike shares
- Public transportation
- Kids
- Nanny/day care
- Babysitter
- Baby supplies
- Kid activities (zoo, museum, Gymkhana, birthday party)
- Other (These are mostly so I can ignore them in all reports)
- Transfer
- Interest income
- Paycheck (money in doesn’t matter, I’m interested in money going out)
- Fees (not many of these! I think only my chase sapphire reserve fee, which is probably approximately worth it.)
“CAB (Cards that Affect the Board) from MtG is such a a useful concept. The idea: draft mostly cards that are creatures or stop their creatures. Newbies otherwise end up with lots of “cool” cards that draw cards, deal damage to ppl, set up some cool effect but don’t help them win. ↩︎
How To Handle Bad Waves
Here is a mental process that happens to me a lot:
- X is a problem
- X is much bigger than me; I cannot hope to meaningfully affect X
- X will affect me at some point in the future
- (panic)
Some examples of X: housing getting ever more expensive, tech layoffs, the spread of return-to-office policies, shortage of good schools, climate change, spread of anti-abortion policies, widespread future coffee shortages.
If you think about all these disaster scenarios, it’s paralyzing1 But they’re real, you can’t just ignore them. Can you?
Turns out, mostly, yeah. Or at least, you can take them from the “this affects me” register into the “this is a problem that I hope the right people are working on” register. You’ll get baited into engaging, but at each step you must not engage. Hit da bricks.
an example: housing
Housing is always getting more expensive. We didn’t buy a house in the Bay; now if we ever wanted to move back, could we even? What about in Pittsburgh, what if we wanted to move to somewhere nicer, could we afford to? People will gripe about this constantly, often using the G word2, and bring up examples of a house that used to be $100k that is now selling for half a million.
This is candy to the fear center of my brain. “Wait that’s growing faster than our savings! What if we can’t live where we want??” Maybe I’ll go on Zillow and look at neighborhoods I thought might be affordable to us and realize - oh no, maybe for a house of the size we’d want, they’re not affordable, actually!
But the trick for me is, I just don’t have to think about this. We’re not moving anytime soon. When we do, we’ll look at what’s out there, and it doesn’t matter what it used to cost or how much it’s gentrified. We’ll figure out what we can afford and what our priorities are, and get enough of them.
Or hell, what’s the worst case? If Evil Gentrification Genie says “all houses now cost 10x what they did last year”, we could just never move. We’re fine. We have a fine house.
I’ve got to just stop playing the game. I’m not going to browse Zillow and get spooked. I don’t really want to kvetch about gentrification with you, but even if we do, I’m just gonna zone out. I don’t need to think about this, until it’s time to move.
is this useful to you?
I have no idea. This is my own mental trick. It probably is less useful if you’re in a more dire situation (e.g. homeless), or if you’re just not prone to anxiety from Bad Waves anyway. Also, it’s not perfect - you should probably maintain a little peripheral awareness. Like, if you work in oil-and-gas, you probably shouldn’t just stick your head in the sand and pretend that Peak Oil isn’t happening.
But my problems aren’t as bad as oilmen facing the end of fossil fuels, so Just Zoning Out is working pretty well for me.
And sometimes impossible! “We have to move somewhere progressive, in case we have another kid and need abortion rights. But not somewhere too expensive; what if we run out of money that we’ll need for schools? And somewhere with jobs, but also somewhere that’s not too susceptible to climate change, and and and” ↩︎
“Gentrification”. I wonder if I can get “g12n” to catch on ↩︎
- LeBron, Manziel, Atticus, Shackleton, or?
- How I think about investing money
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