You Can’t Always Get What You Need
Here is my riff on the Rolling Stones (a boomer thing):
You can always get what you want.
You can always get what you want.
You can always get what you want.
But if you try sometime, you just might find,
You might if you look real hard outside the box with an open mind get what you need.
In 2018, I signed up to conduct High Holiday worship in Bali, Indonesia. Leading worship barefoot, dressed in white shorts and short sleeve shirt I had the most unusual and meaningful worship experience. I might could write on that another time, but not now.
I had spent a lot of my summer preparing messages, classes and planning for Judi’s and my Balinese travels. Successful independent travel requires both advance planning and a large measure of spontaneity and flexibility. Being open to surprise is a great skill and joy for both of us.
During my Bali research days, I began noticing something. I was inundated with ads for women’s bras and panties. Every day, pictures of attractive half-naked women in multihued undergarments flashed on my computer screen. The pictures were PG-13 appropriate, not tit-illating per se (sorry, I just couldn’t resist—you would have written the same if you had given this some thought). Picture after picture of 25-year-old women showing off bras and underwear.
I thought to myself, “What the hell is going on here? Why am I receiving advertisements for women’s underwear?”
And then I learned something that I did not know. A company called Bali Bras exists out there somewhere with a website that sells women’s bras and panties. Good for me to know for my next life, but for now—not really a necessary item.
Somehow or another, my Bali, Indonesia searches were helping me admire attractive young women with the hope that I would, if I purchased their wares, end up looking just like them. Eventually, my internet girlfriends stopped beckoning me and I was returned to my more normal interests for men of my station—you know; Jewish topics, Alabama football, reverse mortgages, weight loss and prostate health—the stuff to engage 65-year-old retired rabbis from Birmingham. (By the way, I belong demographically to a small group of folks. There are not a lot of us 65 plus Alabama rabbinic retirees in circulation.)
I have since learned that algorithms brought the ads for women’s underwear into my inbox. So what exactly is this term, “algorithm” which we banter about? How does it work?
From Marriam Webster:
What Does Algorithm Mean?
The current term of choice for a problem-solving procedure, algorithm, is commonly used nowadays for the set of rules a machine (and especially a computer) follows to achieve a particular goal. . . .
Algorithm is often paired with words specifying the activity for which a set of rules have been designed. A search algorithm, for example, is a procedure that determines what kind of information is retrieved from a large mass of data.
This fascinates me. Some highly compensated genius or team of geniuses manipulated enough zeros and ones in a unique sequence to discern that my desire to know about Bali predicts that I have a need to purchase women’s undergarments.
Here are my takeaways:
1. The algorithmic world can make mistakes.
2. Women in bras don’t mean as much to a 68-year-old man as they did to a 14-year-old testosterone addled teenage boy.
3. There is a problem, a deep problem, in being constantly fed what you want. It is better to get you need.
In my opinion, the algorithm is one of the misfortunes of 21st century life. It creates in us unseen bunkers and reinforces our rabbit holes. The algorithm walls us up in our own little world of agreements and likes. The algorithm has me reading and interacting with people who are like me, who agree with me, who root for the same football team as I do, who share my politics and who believe the same religious truths that I believe. The algorithm is our mirror to the world, walling us in and shielding us from different points of view and inclinations and temperaments. The algorithm hurls us deeper and deeper inside our own little world of our unique likes and dislikes.
I suppose there is some good in that. It is good for us to easily access the internet dished up information about our interests and desires. The algorithmic internet helps us delve deep. But it restricts our going wide.
The algorithm deters us from being exposed to different viewpoints. How often do we encounter people who are really different from us and who can share intellectual, political or religious viewpoints that we disagree with? Rarely. Not often enough.
Personally, I find that I learn more by engaging, respectfully, with people who understand the world differently than I do. I know what my side roots for and what my side wants to achieve. I know well enough how to cheerlead for my team in the arenas, on cable news, in the sanctuaries and the sacred halls of academe. But what I know less and less is what other people, also intelligent, believe and treasure and why they embrace a reality different from mine. As a committed, blue state inclined Reform Jew, I know that I can learn about life and what I treasure when I encounter people who are not similarly inclined as me; thoughtful red staters, Orthodox Jews, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists. Even non-believers can teach me about religion.
The challenge is that the algorithms make these encounters more difficult to experience and they color our expectations. The algorithms divide us from each other.
Can there be a downside to the computer always giving us what we want?
Certainly, there are times when we would do better to get what we need.
And what we need, and what the world needs too, is for us to get away now and then from the sequential zeros and ones which attempt to sell women’s underwear to world travelers. We become stronger and more versatile when we can appreciate life’s perspectives that are different from our own.
The echo chamber is dumbing us down and we don’t realize what we have lost.
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My previous newsletter featured a discussion of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree between my granddaughter Eliana and her Happy Zaydee (me—Zaydee all the time, Happy as much as life will allow). Eliana’s grandmother and my life’s partner (Grandma Love You—Grandma all the time, Loves You all the time too) every the psychologically astute sent me this alternative story to the Giving Tree.
https://www.topherpayne.com/giving-tree?lightbox=dataItem-kd0usu10
Which one do you like better?
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I fell in love with Sheriff Barney Stone the first time I thought him up. What a character! In my novel, Take My Dog, the Brookhill, Mississippi Sheriff is a competent Southern civil servant. He is not really that busy. He doesn’t get paid too much. His responsibilities are fairly mundane. But as events unfold in Brookhill, Mississippi, the sheriff had to exert the most specialized and sensitive law enforcement skills. Sheriff Stone is missing quite a few of these. He finds himself way out of his league.
But to his credit, he is quite skilled at playing poker.
Please enjoy and stay tuned. Backwards and Forwards will appear, again, magically in your inbox in a few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note at backwardsforwards.newsletter@gmail.com.
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Whether we are going backwards or forwards, none of us is standing still. And successful people can move both forwards and backwards at the same time.
Until next time, shalom,
Jonathan