![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Peanut butter and chocolate
Feb. 17th, 2026 10:46 amI’m always amused by the number of tasty things that involve two or more beans in combination. Peanut butter and chocolate, for example, but today I made some pinto bean brownies, so that’s cocoa and pintos. My favorite fancy coffee for many years was a soy mocha no whip, while I never ordered it as anything other than a soy mocha no whip, I referred to it otherwise as my “three bean drink”. We don’t necessarily think mmmm beans, but we do think mmmmm coffee and mmmm chocolate and mmmm peanut butter but those are all beans.
If you DO think mmmm beans, good for you and it would be nice if we could reframe beans so that more people could think like you.
Because sometimes two things that taste great individually ALSO taste great together, I got to thinking whether any of my thought tricks might actually compose well. I started with XKCD’s Is It Worth the Time, which has been next to my desk for many years now, iterating through a series of formats (taped to the wall, in a crappy frame, in a better frame, in a better frame with the hover text included, etc.). And then I added Basic Needs Theory. Maslow, of course, is famous for the pyramid, but the idea is not new to Maslow (he never claimed it was) and I specifically dislike Maslow’s formulation because of words like “hierarchy”, pictures like the “pyramid” and the concept of “self-actualization”. As a practical matter, the people most likely to know about Maslow are most likely to be ignoring much more important needs (like getting enough sleep) while talking up “self-actualization”.
With those two concepts in my mind, I overlaid them on top of each other to see if anything “popped”, and sure enough, things did. The first thing to “pop” was sleep. Sleep takes up _so_ much of our life that it’s the thing people are most tempted to reduce in an effort to get more time for other activities. It _looks_ like everyone else has been trying to make sleep much more efficient for a very long time, because it looks like it under XKCD. Now, I could have gone, well, fuck. People shorting themselves on sleep in the name of efficiency is what you get when you compose maslow and xkcd and it’s clearly the wrong choice so never mind. But I didn’t. Instead, I immediately thought, “aha! This is why it’s so important to have a good wind down routine, and to take care of your shit earlier in the day, and to practice acceptance and focus on process instead of outcome. Because when you lie down to sleep at the end of the day, NOT having that good wind down, NOT having addressed the important things earlier in the day, NOT having the ability to accept reality and Outcome Focus will all fucking come for you and prevent you from sleeping. At. All.”
Pausing to reflect, and to do a little light googling produced all kinds of hilarity. Acceptance is present in Maslow’s hierarchy, but as a social need (being accepted by the group). Some people talk about self-acceptance as coming from getting up to self-actualization, but there is an absolute shocking lack of acceptance of reality anywhere in sight. Which, given that Maslow’s hierarchy is about _motivation_ makes perfect sense. On some level, if you accept the world as it is, where is the motivation to change it?
I don’t know if I have any larger point here. This isn’t a new theory — none of these are new ideas. This is just me noodling around with a couple of flavors that I like regularly, to see if they taste good together. And the answer is, mmmmm. Also, I bet I can improve on this.
I’m reading _Spilling the Tea in Gretna Green_ by Linzi Day, having finished _Market Forces_. I hopefully will get around to writing some kind of a review at some point. The next novel doesn’t come out for a few months. I’m really happy to be reading fiction by a new author and enjoying it, writing about random thoughts that have nothing in particular to do with family, politics or the house project, and experimenting in the kitchen. Some of this is surely getting past Imbolc, but I think a lot of this also has to do with changes in my social life. I’m really excited to be going to a party at a new friend’s house later this month and meeting lots of new people. It’s fun seeing my picture in a school newsletter next to another new friend.
And honestly, that Bad Bunny half-time show was really great. I haven’t watched the Superbowl, the ads or the half-time show on purpose for several years, but I do some social media and bits and pieces of the show were all over the place on my feed since the Superbowl, and it was absolutely delightful in every way. Benito brings the light and the joy.
If you DO think mmmm beans, good for you and it would be nice if we could reframe beans so that more people could think like you.
Because sometimes two things that taste great individually ALSO taste great together, I got to thinking whether any of my thought tricks might actually compose well. I started with XKCD’s Is It Worth the Time, which has been next to my desk for many years now, iterating through a series of formats (taped to the wall, in a crappy frame, in a better frame, in a better frame with the hover text included, etc.). And then I added Basic Needs Theory. Maslow, of course, is famous for the pyramid, but the idea is not new to Maslow (he never claimed it was) and I specifically dislike Maslow’s formulation because of words like “hierarchy”, pictures like the “pyramid” and the concept of “self-actualization”. As a practical matter, the people most likely to know about Maslow are most likely to be ignoring much more important needs (like getting enough sleep) while talking up “self-actualization”.
With those two concepts in my mind, I overlaid them on top of each other to see if anything “popped”, and sure enough, things did. The first thing to “pop” was sleep. Sleep takes up _so_ much of our life that it’s the thing people are most tempted to reduce in an effort to get more time for other activities. It _looks_ like everyone else has been trying to make sleep much more efficient for a very long time, because it looks like it under XKCD. Now, I could have gone, well, fuck. People shorting themselves on sleep in the name of efficiency is what you get when you compose maslow and xkcd and it’s clearly the wrong choice so never mind. But I didn’t. Instead, I immediately thought, “aha! This is why it’s so important to have a good wind down routine, and to take care of your shit earlier in the day, and to practice acceptance and focus on process instead of outcome. Because when you lie down to sleep at the end of the day, NOT having that good wind down, NOT having addressed the important things earlier in the day, NOT having the ability to accept reality and Outcome Focus will all fucking come for you and prevent you from sleeping. At. All.”
Pausing to reflect, and to do a little light googling produced all kinds of hilarity. Acceptance is present in Maslow’s hierarchy, but as a social need (being accepted by the group). Some people talk about self-acceptance as coming from getting up to self-actualization, but there is an absolute shocking lack of acceptance of reality anywhere in sight. Which, given that Maslow’s hierarchy is about _motivation_ makes perfect sense. On some level, if you accept the world as it is, where is the motivation to change it?
I don’t know if I have any larger point here. This isn’t a new theory — none of these are new ideas. This is just me noodling around with a couple of flavors that I like regularly, to see if they taste good together. And the answer is, mmmmm. Also, I bet I can improve on this.
I’m reading _Spilling the Tea in Gretna Green_ by Linzi Day, having finished _Market Forces_. I hopefully will get around to writing some kind of a review at some point. The next novel doesn’t come out for a few months. I’m really happy to be reading fiction by a new author and enjoying it, writing about random thoughts that have nothing in particular to do with family, politics or the house project, and experimenting in the kitchen. Some of this is surely getting past Imbolc, but I think a lot of this also has to do with changes in my social life. I’m really excited to be going to a party at a new friend’s house later this month and meeting lots of new people. It’s fun seeing my picture in a school newsletter next to another new friend.
And honestly, that Bad Bunny half-time show was really great. I haven’t watched the Superbowl, the ads or the half-time show on purpose for several years, but I do some social media and bits and pieces of the show were all over the place on my feed since the Superbowl, and it was absolutely delightful in every way. Benito brings the light and the joy.