John Keynes once said that “[by 2030] man will be faced with his real, permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him”.
How to not get bored, this was supposed to be the main challenge of the human race once technology had finished building a new Garden of Eden. At least to Keynes’ eyes.
As I am taking off from Honolulu, Hawaii, I can’t stop thinking about those words. Are we living in the Garden of Eden (or at least getting closer to it)? Or is the fast-paced society Keynes helped building fucking us over? And more importantly, am I even remotely qualified to answer these questions? Obviously not. But who cares, I have a story from Hawaii that fits the topic so...
Let’s start from the beginning: earlier this March I accepted an offer for another job (that I will start in May) which made me lose any motivation at my current job. I actually interviewed for another job because I had already lost some motivation at work, but that’s another story.
The point is that this month I did jack shit. As soon as I accepted the offer, I started ramping down from everything; new projects, new problems, new anything. I backed down. And the little things I couldn’t back down from, I wrapped up. Quickly.
It felt pretty good. It reminded me of a feeling I used to have in high school, a sense of freedom and lightness coming from knowing there is no more homework or tests to do, mixed with the excitement and desire for the coming summer (and all the adventures it brings to a 15 years old kid). Careless times. Happy times.
I wish there was something like school but long after school. Like when you are 35 or 40 or 50. A place where you must go, where you have homework and rules and you are stuck with other people in a room for 6 hours... but also where you can hang out with friends, where you can break rules and (safely) rebel against authorities since you know repercussions are small (if any). Which sounds a lot like being a public employee now that I say it out loud, or at least the stereotype of it.
Anyway, changing jobs also meant changing cities (my new role will be based in Menlo Park, when the office will reopen) and therefore stopping the search for an apartment in LA. So in a matter of a few minutes (the time to read and sign the offer), I found myself without anything to do: No work, no apartment hunting, nothing.
Had I lived in another place I would have spent my time playing tennis, seeing friends or something similar. But since I didn’t have most of my things (they are all in storage still) and I didn’t know anyone in town, I ended up spending my time reading on a sofa, playing chess (speed chess on chess.com, so much fun), looking at videos on Youtube. Not exactly a busy month.
So when I boarded my flight for Hawaii at the end of March, after three weeks doing nothing and with 10 days of vacation ahead of me, I thought about an old essay I read when in high school: Am I living in the Garden of Eden? Is my main challenge not to get bored? And why is this lady putting sunscreen before getting on a plane? (Yep, it happened.)
All these questions (except for the sunscreen lady one) however disappeared as I landed in Oahu (the island I went to). Warm but not too warm, full of fresh water (and therefore very green), with beautiful white beaches, an incredible fauna, great weather (all year long) awesome food and, most of all, a fairly wealthy society (which is what really distinguishes the state of Hawaii from other tropical islands), Oahu, felt, looked and tasted like paradise on earth, like a Garden of Eden.
Free of my existential questions, I was then able to dedicate myself to the main goal of that vacation: finding sea turtles. Swimming with sea turtles has been on my top 3 list of “natural things to do at least once in my life” since I was 4 (the other two are swimming with an elephant and doing a 7 days trip on a horse. I know, I am weird) and I was told Hawaii was one of the few places you could easily do that.
Unfortunately, seeing sea turtles turned out quite difficult. While very common in the summer, during the winter they generally hang around further from the coast and you need to either rent a boat or do a good swim to see them.
I spent the good part of the first week in Hawaii moving from one side of the island to another, snorkeling along beaches, asking locals and outspokenly complaining I was never going to find any turtles. To be fair, I also surfed, read, hiked, saw fishes, read and went out at night. But the core of the days were the turtles. Or better, the absence of them.
The peak of the disappointment (and the beginning of my story) arrived on an early afternoon when a guy at a snorkeling shop refused me to rent me a pair fins. He said he couldn’t, in good conscience, let me go snorkeling that day since the water was too rough and I was going to hurt myself. He was, however, willing to sell me fins which felt as hypocritical as it can get. I politely replied to “reconsider his sales techniques” and left. Weirdo.
Given the renting failure, we decided to leave the shore earlier and go take a look at the Pearl Harbor museum. We had spent a lot of time outside between beaches and hiking so some indoor space felt like a nice alternative, especially because we were getting pretty sunburned. (should have really learned from the lady at the airport)
As we got in the car though, we hit an insane amount of traffic: one way road, 10meters in 10minutes and it became clear we were not going to make it to the museum in time. It doesn’t matter, I said, we both watched the movie anyway (Yes, I kind of meant it). Let’s do something else.
We saw a turn a few meters down the road for a place called Green World Coffee Farm (GWC farm). Hawaii is fairly big when it comes to agriculture, especially for sugar cane (obviously), pineapples (I would have never expected what a pineapple field would look like -- see picture) and apparently Coffee (see pictures as well). So we took the turn and went to see what a coffee farm would look like.
Now, despite the name, the GWC farm isn’t actually a farm but more of a factory. Their main business is to buy coffee from farms all over Hawaii (and more), treat it and sell it to distributors. You probably couldn’t care less about this but I am still telling it to you because it helps justify the rest of the story.
So, as we get to GWC we incidentally meet with the founder (don’t get “corporate” ideas in mind, he is just an old farmer - see picture). It was a completely random event, we were looking for a garbage bin in the parking lot and he was looking for someone to talk to. I will call him “John” because I genuinely don’t remember his name.
John is in his late 70s, maybe even 80s, he was born in NJ and he moved to Hawaii in the 60s to start GWC. He really likes to talk to strangers about coffee so without us even asking, he started giving us a tour of the place: where do they store the coffee, where do they roast it, where do they package it and so on. You could tell this wasn’t his first tour because he had a series of jokes that he would deliver like a theater actor at his 200th show of the same play: he knew how to tell them, where to tell them and for how long to pause for the audience to laugh.
His two main jokes were about a picture of him holding “the biggest coffee bean” ever grown (which Julia says was a joke but I want to think that coffee bean was real -- see picture) and the name of the manufacturer of their coffee roasting machine, Diedrich, who he likes to think “died rich” because he was able to roast his own coffee. Not exactly Chekov but he was cute.
He also told us coffee has 2 main flavors: a base one and an ephemeral one. The base flavor stays with the bean forever but it’s not really exciting. The ephemeral flavor stays with the beam for 3 months after the bean has been roasted and 3 days after the bean has been grinded.
You should never buy grinded coffee, he said. When you buy grinded coffee, you buy something that was grinded months before and has already lost its ephemeral flavor. You can even test that. Just open a box of grinded coffee: you will immediately smell a marvelous flavor, the ephemeral one, that was trapped in the box at packaging time. Now wait a few hours and smell again, you’ll feel the marvellous flavor is gone and all you are left with is a different flavor, the base one, which isn’t even close to be as exciting. You should always grind the coffee right before using it. But nobody does that, they are all in such a rush they don’t have time.
That was it (I know, I ain’t Chekhov either). We left a few minutes (and pictures) after this tip and went back to our life.
We spent the remainder of our time in Hawaii (about 4 days) similarly to how we spent the first 5: snorkeling, surfing, eating out, paddle boarding and getting sunburned (should have really learned from the lady at the airport).
We did eventually find the sea-turtles though. One day, while driving along the coast, Julia suddenly yelled “What are those? Pull over!”. She had spotted a sea turtle swimming just a few meters from the beach.
I pulled over, poorly parked the car and ran on the beach where I initially saw nothing. Sea Turtles look a lot like rocks so it’s very hard to see them if you are outside the water. However, when Julia caught up with me (I ran quite fast) she insisted she saw a turtle sticking its head out the water and that I should go in. Convinced, I put my gear on and started swimming like an idiot along the beach (like I had done multiple times already).
Eventually, after 5-6 minutes, a turtle appeared right in front of my face. Out of nowhere. I actually got scared and yelled for how close it was...which scared the crap out of the turtle as well since it immediately dove down. It was quite a magical moment even if it lasted a fraction of a second. Luckily for me, there were many more turtles in the bay that day and we managed to see more.
Sea Turtles are incredible animals, very calming and relaxing. They swim very slowly, they eat very slowly, they lay on the beach and...that’s mostly it. They are like the hippies of the sea and they must be so damn relaxed. Good for them.
Anyway, we left Honolulu a few days after that afternoon, on April 5th, and “nothing else” happened in between.
I actually started writing this post at Honolulu’s airport (which is why this post came late) while waiting to be boarded for NYC. I thought about the sunscreen lady I met at the LA airport, about how she wanted to be “so ready for Hawaii” that she put sunscreen before even boarding the plane. And I thought she would have made a good story for this post.
What would she do before boarding for NYC, I wondered, chew a nicotine gum? Do a line of cocaine? I started laughing like an idiot. My mind makes me laugh on the stupidest things. Like, I imagined her similar to “Crazy Phoebe” getting ready to go back to Wall Street. Whatever.
As I was playing with the idea, some weird thing clicked in my head. I saw a guy in front of me reading a book called “Capitalism without capital” and Keynes' words came back to my mind.
Am I living in the Garden of Eden? Is my main challenge not to get bored? After 3 weeks spent playing chess online and 10 days looking for sea turtles in Hawaii, it would appear so. And even more broadly, considering how much energy I put in seeking “entertainment adrenaline”, it does feel like defeating boredom is my biggest challenge. After all, whether by opening Instagram/Netflix, planning a trip, searching fancy new restaurants and so on, we do spend a crazy amount of time (and money) trying to not get bored. So, are we?
Annoyed by this philosophical question coming back to me, I did some research and found that Keynes’ essay had been commented already by others.
Of the many comments I found, the one of Geoffrey West felt the most compelling: “Rather than being bored to death, our actual challenge is to avoid anxiety attacks, psychotic breakdowns, heart attacks, and strokes resulting from being accelerated to death. [...] Rather than feeling the luxury of time freedom, we’re feeling the burden of constant hurry.”
As I read that, something clicked again. I thought about the lady anxiously putting sunscreen before even boarding, about people settling for “base-flavor” coffee to save a few seconds of grinding (I don’t drink coffee but 99% of the people I know buy grinded powder not coffee beans so I guess it’s true), about me compulsively swimming across the beaches to find turtles. Apparently we are all in fucking short of time.
That’s the end of my March post. Maybe not an “exciting post”. I wasn’t particularly inspired, I admit. I liked the “Diedrich, Died Rich” joke though. I feel there is something there, something about this guy taking his time and die rich. I just don’t know where it is without being too cheesy.
As always, I hope you are happy, healthy, wealthy (if it matters) and that I’ll see you soon.
P.S.
"Funny enough", my next job will be in the attention economy. I accepted a position at FaceBook starting next May. I am not sure I will join it though. I confess being in a very particular status these days. I am starting to think corporate jobs are not really for me (that's why I lost motivation at my previous job) so I am taking a month out (April) to explore some potential alternatives. That's also why I am in NY now. Let’s see. Worst case scenario, I can always open a snorkeling rental shop in Oahu. I heard they are pretty bad at doing business over there.
P.P.S.
On April 16th, DeepFuckingValue will see his GME options contracts expire (which is a good thing). If GME holds its value until that day, he will be making approximately a 87k% gain from one single play for about 9M profit. (He has other positions that will bring him about 19M dollars more). History will be made.