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Let It Go, Let It Go
That Frozen song had a lot of wisdom and was deeply hooky. Today in, I really need to Let It Go, Let It Go: books that are so terrible, and I’m mad, because I had such hopes for them.
I’ll get to the specific trigger later, because I’ve been trying to deal with this in specific for a really long time and last night, I finally realized that I need to deal with it on a general level. It’s not about any ONE book; it’s how I emotionally respond to this entire experience that is the problem. And I’ve been validating the wrong part of my reaction.
I’ve been reading a long, long time now, and I read quickly, broadly and deeply. You can sort of see how, Reality Being Reality, that over time, I would experience an increasing dissatisfaction with reading material in general. First, old people become cranky for a variety of reasons. Second, a lot of stuff in general is crap. I mean, the _good news_ is I really like the way younger people (young end of millenials and younger) think about things, and I’ve been enjoying the trend, so this is NOT a Kids These Days rant. It’s really more along the lines of, Please Stop Publishing New Books By Old Farts type of rant.
I have also, over the years, gotten better at assessing books without fully committing to reading them. I make sure that in the case of non-fiction, the authors have some credibility (look at their background, read interviews with them, read articles by them, read an excerpt from the book). I make sure I understand that whatever the book is about / arguing about is something I care about, and that I have no particular compelling reason to believe that the book is taking an Earth is Flat / Birds are not Real type of position WRT that topic.
But despite all this, sometimes I still accidentally read books that are really terrible. I’ll grind through longer than I should, hoping it improves. I’ll put it down and revisit it in hopes that maybe I was just in a terrible headspace when I tried the first time. I really do try, because if a book made it this far for me, I _wanted_ it to be a good book.
And therein lies the problem.
I need to put down my illusion of the book I wanted, and make further reading decisions based on the Reality of the Book I Am Reading. It’s _just_ like a relationship. You’re not friends with, coworkers with, a parent, sibling or child of the person you _wish_ you were with. They are who they are, and the sooner you accept that, the better.
OK. I don’t need to ramp up on the emotions of OMG it’s so terrible I can’t even. It just is. And here’s the latest.
_The Great Demographic Reversal_ is about demographics and economics. The wish: I wanted a book about demographics. The reality: the authors are economists. The problem: they have been humping their thesis for five years, and the fact that it finally happened, kinda, doesn’t mean that their explanation is correct. The specific problem: economists measure what they can measure, and then they act like they are measuring something that is meaningfully the same. If you are out there hiring people with a particular skill set, experience, capability, then you know that all labor is not interchangeable. And if you are over 50, you know that what a worker can do in 2022 is wildly different than what a worker can do in 1972, in ways that make _every_ worker able to do things that it used to take multiple workers to do. And some workers are so amplified by technology, that they can do things you couldn’t do even with millions of workers.
Of course, that would all seem to have an impact if you are looking at how the changing demographic composition of a population will affect inflation. And yet, they totally ignored that. Their inflation prediction did _happen_, but not for the reason they had.
Oh well.
I’ll move on now, and remember to stay away from the economists again for a while. Maybe. Maybe I’ll go read a lot of economists, because it’ll be so easy to assess them now versus in the past. *shrug*
I’ll get to the specific trigger later, because I’ve been trying to deal with this in specific for a really long time and last night, I finally realized that I need to deal with it on a general level. It’s not about any ONE book; it’s how I emotionally respond to this entire experience that is the problem. And I’ve been validating the wrong part of my reaction.
I’ve been reading a long, long time now, and I read quickly, broadly and deeply. You can sort of see how, Reality Being Reality, that over time, I would experience an increasing dissatisfaction with reading material in general. First, old people become cranky for a variety of reasons. Second, a lot of stuff in general is crap. I mean, the _good news_ is I really like the way younger people (young end of millenials and younger) think about things, and I’ve been enjoying the trend, so this is NOT a Kids These Days rant. It’s really more along the lines of, Please Stop Publishing New Books By Old Farts type of rant.
I have also, over the years, gotten better at assessing books without fully committing to reading them. I make sure that in the case of non-fiction, the authors have some credibility (look at their background, read interviews with them, read articles by them, read an excerpt from the book). I make sure I understand that whatever the book is about / arguing about is something I care about, and that I have no particular compelling reason to believe that the book is taking an Earth is Flat / Birds are not Real type of position WRT that topic.
But despite all this, sometimes I still accidentally read books that are really terrible. I’ll grind through longer than I should, hoping it improves. I’ll put it down and revisit it in hopes that maybe I was just in a terrible headspace when I tried the first time. I really do try, because if a book made it this far for me, I _wanted_ it to be a good book.
And therein lies the problem.
I need to put down my illusion of the book I wanted, and make further reading decisions based on the Reality of the Book I Am Reading. It’s _just_ like a relationship. You’re not friends with, coworkers with, a parent, sibling or child of the person you _wish_ you were with. They are who they are, and the sooner you accept that, the better.
OK. I don’t need to ramp up on the emotions of OMG it’s so terrible I can’t even. It just is. And here’s the latest.
_The Great Demographic Reversal_ is about demographics and economics. The wish: I wanted a book about demographics. The reality: the authors are economists. The problem: they have been humping their thesis for five years, and the fact that it finally happened, kinda, doesn’t mean that their explanation is correct. The specific problem: economists measure what they can measure, and then they act like they are measuring something that is meaningfully the same. If you are out there hiring people with a particular skill set, experience, capability, then you know that all labor is not interchangeable. And if you are over 50, you know that what a worker can do in 2022 is wildly different than what a worker can do in 1972, in ways that make _every_ worker able to do things that it used to take multiple workers to do. And some workers are so amplified by technology, that they can do things you couldn’t do even with millions of workers.
Of course, that would all seem to have an impact if you are looking at how the changing demographic composition of a population will affect inflation. And yet, they totally ignored that. Their inflation prediction did _happen_, but not for the reason they had.
Oh well.
I’ll move on now, and remember to stay away from the economists again for a while. Maybe. Maybe I’ll go read a lot of economists, because it’ll be so easy to assess them now versus in the past. *shrug*