The Ven Commandments
An homage to literary greats of yesteryear
I remember a friend once telling me that he didn’t have a succinct way of explaining (or warning) what kind of person I am before introducing someone to me. I quipped that it would only take one sentence: “What happens when you cross Hitchens, unfettered internet access, and Office Space at too young of an age.”
Lost amidst my lionization of Hitchens is Martin Amis, a writer of equivalent stature though slightly less acerbic. While Letters to a Young Contrarian remains a seminal tome of my youth, naturally, this sphere brought the works of Amis to my feet. An interesting thing about novelists — honestly, they’re probably better essayists. The grounding in reality prevents the whimsicality of language straying too far from a tangible point. David Foster Wallace is much more digestible and pleasant when observing the banalities of a cruise than driving himself insane analyzing the metacognition of banality itself.
Amis and Hitchens represent a stylistic departure that is derivative of (and a reaction to) what I refer to as the Playboy school of writing. The prose is still shaped in a masculine manner, but departs from the mawkish attachment to physical form — libido is still explored intellectually, of course, but with a mocking, hoary tone:
“The magic and might of her own soft mouth … ” Erotic poets have hymned it down the ages, though often substituting the word “his.” The menu of brothel offerings in ancient Pompeii, preserved through centuries of volcanic burial, features it in the frescoes. It was considered, as poor Humbert well knew, to be worth paying for. The temple carvings of India and the Kamasutra make rather a lavish point of it, and Sigmund Freud wondered if a passage in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks might not betray an early attachment to that “which in respectable society is considered a loathsome perversion.” Da Vinci may have chosen to write in “code” and Nabokov may have chosen to dissolve into French, as he usually did when touching on the risqué, but the well-known word “fellatio” comes from the Latin verb “to suck.”
Well, which is it—blow or suck? (Old joke: “No, darling. Suck it. ‘Blow’ is a mere figure of speech.” Imagine the stress that gave rise to that gag.) Moreover, why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act? My friend David Aaronovitch, a columnist in London, wrote of his embarrassment at being in the same room as his young daughter when the TV blared the news that the president of the United States had received oral sex in an Oval Office vestibule. He felt crucially better, but still shy, when the little girl asked him, “Daddy, what’s a vestibule?”
Or take Amis’ biting review of Rhodes’ documentation of his sexual ‘Odyssey’:
HE might have done better to attribute it to the how-to culture of which, in this reviewer's opinion, he remains a fuddled plaything, throughout the book. It is evident in his sprucely nonjudgmental jargon: women who don't have orgasms are "preorgasmic"; boy-boy sex in a no-girls environment is "situational homosexuality"; taking a mistress becomes "opening [ a ] marriage" -- a marriage for whose foreseeable doom Mr. Rhodes prepares himself by reading a book called "Uncoupling." It is evident, of course, in the way he tries to turn G---- into a G spot, and in the misery of all "ecstasy programs" and go-for-it self-improvement manuals and no-problem personal-growth booklets, among which, if anywhere, "Making Love" confusedly and disconsolately belongs.
It’s interesting that Amis derides self-help as a genre, because criticism in general is self-reflection that lucidly describes the process of self-betterment rather than productizing it. The difference between the essayist and the self-help guru lies in the ‘lesson’ being in the narrative of the essay while the guru is selling a reductive, pre-packaged set of guidelines as an incomplete ‘cure’. Note that Hitchens’ three-part analysis of the self-improvement industry starts with the words “On the Limits…”
Two types of people tend to find self-help writing useful. One is the individual who simply has too much to do and has no time to deeply ponder the questions which have no answers. If you’re on-call to operate surgery or fix Bank of America’s penetrated firewalls, you probably don’t have time to dive into mentally-challenged drivel waxing poetic about the nature of thought itself (as I’m wont to say, if a guy brings up DFW unprompted, run.) The prepackaged “steps” to self-improvement are precisely what you need. Delete the lawyer. Hit Facebook. Gym up. The second kind of person desperately needs their worldview simplified. Too much time works against them — without rigorous cognitive filtering and quality maintenance, this individual gets lost in the weeds. Chemtrails, like ignorance, is bliss — chemtrails, unlike ignorance, get you soft-banned by Twitter.
What follows are my own twelve rules to life, perhaps in a similar manner to how a Hitchens would rechisel Peterson as opposed to the Bible.
1. Comb Your Hair
I like to say that Patrick Bateman had three good ideas: maintaining a great self-care routine, cooling it with the antisemitic remarks, and bludgeoning people who take restaurant reservations too seriously with an axe. A simple marker of self-respect is the state of one’s hair. How you look conveys your mentality about a lot of things, but at the very least, personal maintenance shows that your appearance matters to you. Note that this is not some Yankees-tier “no facial hair allowed” strictness, but meticulously unkempt hair is still worlds away from disheveled bedhead. Combed hair indicates that one is aware of self-care.
2. Maintain Sleep, Sunlight, and Exercise in that order
It’s no secret that sleep, if a drug, would be beyond “miracle” categorization. Likewise, even though mental conditions are barely understood, a pretty easily recognizable precursor to mental health trouble is disaffected sleep. Sleep is the lodestone of a healthy mind — by tracking your patterns and needs and shaping your schedule around these requirements (all of which can be trivially done with a phone or smartwatch), you’re taking better care of your health than any sleeping pill could do for you.
Sunlight and exercise closely follow in terms of maintaining a healthy mood, but fall short of the obscene restorative and nurturing powers of sleep. Certainly it’s possible to be a depressed bodybuilder in sunny San Diego, but getting the requisite sunlight to buoy mood is as simple as walking outside once a day or buying a happy light. Exercise is more of a commitment, which is why it falls below sunlight in the prioritization order — we’ve all had those workweeks where it’s just too much of a pain to go to the gym. But exercise is one of the best antidepressants — if you find yourself in a dour mood, it’s roughly as effective as taking a pill. Even on SSRIs, it’s generally recommended to exercise in conjunction with it.
3. Wear a Watch
I will admit this is a personal preference, but stay with me here. While #1 was about personal signaling, wearing a watch is outward signaling. Appearance contains two elements — what you do for yourself, and what others will see when they look at you. Signaling theory itself is a pet theory of a friend, but it derives from basic biology: you are what you represent to society. Similar to how true arrogance is expecting people to flock to your Substack due to its sheer quality rather than advertising it and encouraging people to read it, laconic indication that you are aware of your image and project how you want to be perceived goes a long way, as opposed to the narcissism that someone should figure out who you are through their own effort. Put simply, wearing a watch is the inverse of “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” — a horrible misunderstanding of how people actually work. There are billions of people in existence — why should someone care about you?
The beauty of a watch is you can effortlessly convey anything you want to with it. A boorish, feckless person might wear a Rolex Sky-Dweller, while a hapless trend-chaser sports a Royal Oak. A Hamilton Jazzmaster conveys taste and awareness of budget, but my favorites are the people who rock the Langes or the Credors, which operate by hiding in plain sight, and the true depths of which are only knowable to keenly discerning individuals.
4. Reply Thoughtfully Before Instantly
Let’s be honest, we all see the texts as soon as they arrive on our phone. But even when it’s not from someone who can’t help but rant over ten messages, it’s almost to our chagrin when we don’t reply instantly — and even when we do, the conversation becomes a chore, of sorts, as most people reckon with the fact that, like perpetuating a conversation during Zoom happy hour, it’s not really within their wheelhouse to write interesting texts instantly. This isn’t a big deal! Most people don’t write messages and emails and converse all day. It’s why I have at least a tacit (if not explicit) agreement with virtually anyone I message that they should feel free to respond on their own time, if at all — I don’t take it personally. Outside of time-sensitive texts, such as asking where someone is or if they want to go grab a drink, it’s simply not necessary to receive instant reaction along with a quality response, so if you have to pick one, the quality response should always win out over minimizing response time. Taking the time to keep your responses meaningful both frees you from staring at your phone constantly and the burden of “owing” a response. Your conversations and your screen time will be better off as a result, and it ties in to the general themes of introducing substantiality that follow.
5. Get off your Phone, Especially at the Bar and at Dinner
While lunch tends to be more impromptu and thus doesn’t fall under my purview, the conventional purpose of going to a bar or out to dinner tends to be a time set aside for animated conversation. Why, then, would you spend this time utilizing a distraction for when you have nothing to do? Beyond being an inefficient use of the allotted time, it’s also offputting — I wouldn’t explicitly say it, but I definitely don’t think that idly tabbing through Instagram stories or TikTok is more interesting than anything that could be conversed about, especially if I haven’t seen someone in a while. From a signaling point of view, it’s a clear sign that you don’t value the environment presented — it’s hard to think of a more insipid action at dinner. While I won’t fault anyone for going to their neighborhood bar to blow off steam and staring at their phone, when you are beyond drinking “with a purpose”, alcohol functions as an utterly incredible social lubricant, a chemical threshold-lowering of people’s normal conversational hesitancy, and for the detached individual, a way to make people more interesting. Consequently, if you’re habitually “going out” and not having interesting conversations, it’s kind of a waste. Certainly, you can’t always have a great conversation, but at least without your phone out, it won’t be due to a lack of trying.
6. Read Substantive Material
This one is pretty self-explanatory, but is so critical that it’s worth listing here. Put simply, material can, at best, be produced with two out of the following three: speed, quality, and depth. The signal-to-noise ratio in words becomes much better the less of a role speed played in its production. You can have quality content produced quickly, but it tends to be pretty shallow; you can have deep content produced quickly, but it tends to be abstruse and shoddily written, if not outright incomprehensible. Quality and depth is the best combination, but it won’t be produced quickly — thankfully, there is such a backlog of literature and writing historically such that there’s always good books to be found, but they won’t be topical.
The other substantiveness check comes from assessing the author’s ulterior motives. Certainly, everything has a commercial motive, whether notoriety or profit, but if that’s the driving motive behind even bothering to create the content, you can generally treat it as hogwash. The best kind of written work tends to be that which is a product of passion, of intuition, of an almost innate desire to get the thoughts out of their head, or to educate sufficiently as to spawn a discussion that can further one’s understanding of a topic. The lowest tier of consumption, of course, is outright propaganda — mainstream media, clickbait, social media. I cede the narrative to Hitchens, from one of my most commonly quoted refrains:
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. All the News That's Fit to Print," it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it's as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.
7. Frequently Assess your Exposure
One need not be aware of the finer details of burgeoning industry innovation and disruption to take into account general market trends, societal trends, and how it all impacts one’s bottom line. Short of going ‘innawoods’, one will have to participate in society — therefore it makes sense to monitor it.
Extrapolating from the principles of position management while trading, we arrive at a method of “taking stock” of where things are. There’s no need to read opinion columns written by Gladwellizing “experts” — taking stock of simple things like an inflation number (too high conveys a palpable sense of urgency, while too low conveys a lack of growth), an interest rate (which indicates the general risk taking level present), the league tables (which tell you how much debt-fueled activity is going on), and business trends (which tell you where the investment capital will flow) allows one to operate with reasonable assurance even if it doesn’t result in speculative wizardry. Beyond finances, it gives you an idea of what your average person will be hearing and thinking — people are generally very predictable. This information doesn’t necessarily need to result in manipulation, but can provide a solid basis for pushing forward or diverting conversation. The hardest part of conversation for the average person is generating topics, so a bit of pre-preparation and prediction on how it will flow goes a long way, and can help prevent unnecessary turmoil and drama. Maintaining a social portfolio requires a lot of skills present in maintaining financial portfolios, so why not do both?
8. Trust Your Instincts
It’s no secret that humans are bad with large numbers and probability, but while the efforts to streamline the efficiency of lives with statistics are laudable, you cannot algorithmically execute your own life. This seeming mismatch between the quantitative push and the principle that “statistics don’t apply to individuals in a population” is resolved as such:
Being “Brad” is more than cold-emailing or networking — rather, it’s about putting yourself out there so that, no matter how small, there is a nonzero probability of something happening. It’s starting a conversation with a stranger sitting next to you on a plane that turns into a job offer. In this scenario, of course, that small probability was related to surviving, which is not exactly the ideal way to roll the dice on the craps table of fate. But so many of us get caught up in the pathways of credentialism and formulaic ways of “working your way up” that we overlook the fact that very successful people take roundabout pathways to become what they are all the time. Anecdotally, the most successful people I’ve met did none of the HYPMS to “big corp” to HBS to the boardroom to the Hamptons pipeline. Of course, I know plenty of successful people that did, but this is the core principle: statistics do not apply to individuals in a population. This is not to imply that we shouldn’t think statistically, but rather understand the limitations on our instant decision-making it places…
The key takeaway is that the long-run statistics can only give you guidance rather than a guarantee on an individual decision. Your life is an n=1 instance. Allow the unexpected to happen.
The intuitive power of human pattern recognition doesn’t get enough love in the modern day beyond geoguessr compilations and chess. The speed with which the human brain can process a situation, filter out noise and produce a reasonable (if flawed) course of action is absolutely remarkable and irreproducible. You are the result of millenia of evolutionary processes that have honed your thinking mechanisms. While it is an admirable goal to try and surpass this with the aim of pure rationality, this is simply not a feasible manner to conduct your life without being insanely biased towards inaction. Sometimes, you just have to make a decision — rather than plunging forth because “the data told you so”, it’s alright to decide to go with your gut if you feel it’s right. Don’t discount this immense processing and snap-decision making power bestowed upon you — note that thinking “fast” came before “slow".
9. Never Send a Drink as an Introduction
We’ve all seen the movie scenes where the guy sends the girl a drink as an introduction. Though it’s a convenient plot device, it sort of omits the fact that George Clooney would never need to send someone a drink to introduce himself.
This isn’t to say that there’s something inherently wrong with paying for someone’s drinks or dinner, but rather it highlights that you don’t want the initial interaction to be transactory in nature. It’s like throwing out a bid in an empty order book — you’re unnecessarily providing liquidity, and you may not like what it results in. While a beer at a regular bar is relatively harmless, it rarely stays there, but escalates to a fancy cocktail or dinner before you even know this person at all. The only people you should be expecting to pay to meet are lawyers, doctors, and psychologists (and ladies of the night). Save yourself the scheming and do what Brad would do — just go talk to them.
10. Refining Taste Refines Personality
To put it another way, a little taste goes a long way. While there is a certain red-blooded appeal in sticking to the simple stuff (and you will never convince me that anyone is too good for McDonald’s or light beer), recall the all encompassing nature of signaling theory — everything you do conveys information about yourself. Ordering a macrobrew while at a sports bar during the big game is good in-group signaling, but ordering the same Budweiser at a nice cocktail bar would be bad out-group signaling. If we decide that we must play the society “game”, there are good and bad ways to go about this. The bad way is to just buy out the newest line of the newest fashion house, season after season. Generally, designer brands exist for people who make too much money and have too little time to spend it — but discerning taste in picking out the quality items enhances a wardrobe significantly. This is what the good way is about — knowing enough to sound knowledgeable without crossing into buffoonery, or picking out the right bottle of wine or cigar that enhances an experience, or having a unique cocktail order than starts a conversation between you, the bartender and your company. It shows substantiality, a dedication to improving oneself, and a certain type of self-confidence to postulate and put yourself out there — all very attractive elements in an individual.
11. Estimate Before You (Seriously) Date
Two semi-overlooked things about relationships are the opportunity costs involved in dating exclusively and the fact that a successful relationship requires both the right person and the right alignment of phase of life. Too often, this is sort of glossed over, and I’ve seen people end up dating someone for months that they clearly aren’t going to be able to sustain over the long term. A simple solution is present, in that it’s not required to predict the exact timeline of a relationship, which would probably lead to some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy if not outright destruction — pre-ordainment isn’t sexy — but taking a bird’s eye view and seeing the potential roadblocks and pitfalls and whether they are able to be overcome is a valid thing to do before exclusively dating someone. Dating someone is a levered trade, because not only are you removing yourself from the market, but everyone is also proceeding on without you. While I don’t believe in second-guessing or actively searching for better during a relationship, this is an easy calculation to do before hard-commitment.
12. Don’t. Assume. Liquidity.
I have talked about liquidity in many different ways, but my favorite definition is liquidity as the “friction between theory and reality.” Assuming liquidity is my catchall term for ignoring the fact that theory cannot be seamlessly replicated in reality. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably assumes liquidity. If a policy sounds great, implementing it as it sounds probably assumes liquidity. Avoiding the assumption of liquidity is certainly work and we can’t expect ourselves to catch all instances of it, but it skews a bit more anti-reactionary in a world that is very much reactionary. The hardest thing to do is roll back the systems that have been put in place — sometimes we should acknowledge that a stick in the mud is inefficient, but it’s worth looking before you leap.
With regards to Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, rest in peace.