Around Christmastime, there’s become something of a tradition in the city in which I currently reside, and perhaps in yours as well. It goes like so: in any neighborhood which seems to be at all prosperous and highly trafficked, find a public square. In that square, set up a half-dozen tented market stalls, and if there remains any space for innocent passersby to pass by innocently, set up some more tents until there isn’t.
This is all for the benefit of late-season gift-purchasers, to offer them the opportunity to stroll through the makeshift alleys and get something obligatory as they wander along. These tent-markets serve their purpose with great zeal, and so too do a number of their proprietors.
It’s a common enough practice for a store attendant to seek out and address a shopper that I must assume it actually sells items, that somewhere out there is somebody who desperately wants to be directed to the butcher’s counter but can’t be bothered to follow the signs or to track down an employee.
Such an impulse, a directive, a charge, is doubled and redoubled when you’re the operator of a small tent selling scarves or cuckoo clocks or tee-shirts with ironic-but-not-too-ironic slogans emblazoned across the chest. You’re fighting with every other proprietor or proprietor’s pawn for attention, a fact that I’m sure only becomes more salient when considering a) the rent and b) the short lines of people queueing up to buy hot chocolate, celebrity caricatures, and public transit posters are all very much within eyeshot.
So, when I walked through the square at a brisk pace, listening to music, I was unsurprised if mildly annoyed that one of these vendors called out to me, and managed to catch my attention before I waved him off and kept walking. The goods in question were hot sauces or playing cards or hand-cut puzzle frames or something, doesn’t matter, but as I cranked the Inoffensive Trendy Musical Artist back up and kept walking, that annoyance lingered.
I didn’t mean to be rude, but I didn’t know what more I could have done to communicate that whether or not I was interested in a purchase, pointing out the opportunity was a mildly unwelcome distraction.
And I was enlightened.
I walked into a menswear store sometime thereafter, and was asked if I needed anything, young man, or something along those lines, and while the descriptor was technically accurate, it grated. Something about the context, maybe, that made it sound like a diminutive, like I didn’t fit, and while I wasn’t insulted, I was momentarily irked.
And I was enlightened.
And one can go on for days and days in this manner, listing out quasi-grievances, but that doesn’t accomplish anything besides establishing that they will persist beyond whatever complaints are leveled at them. Description doesn’t solve problems.
I was sitting on a bench some time ago, preoccupied mainly with staring into space. At just about the same time, a group of two or three others had gotten onto the bench, and it wasn’t a scenario in which any of us could easily move.
So I busied myself with my customary thinking-about-nothing, and happened to overhear the gist of the conversation taking place beside me: one man was holding court about real estate. In fact, he took a call mid-conversation, and his end went something like this: ‘yes, well, it’s an 1X-year-old building, and it’s 1X,000 square feet in a Mediterranean style, but we’re remodeling it into a more modern style. I can show you others.’
If we had known each other even a little, I might have asked him why the building constructed 1X years ago wasn’t modern enough, or how the Mediterranean style had come into disfavor, or what a Mediterranean style entailed in such a project, and what elements would be preserved and which discarded.
As it stood, as we sat, being strangers, I had no such inroad, and could only speculate that it sounded foolish. Why take apart a perfectly good building? What could be so wrong with it that the expense remotely justified itself?
Fashions change, I suppose. Like, this video about Myspace was made by someone or other more than a decade and less than two decades ago. Same timeframe, obviously out of date. In the same year Myspace was founded, the NBA draft class wore these suits:
Have you ever tried to strike up a conversation with someone based on apparel, and just gotten a blank stare in return? A Nirvana shirt, a NASA hoodie, a jersey personalized with the name of the star player from any team that’s made it to a Champions League in the last fifteen years? Sure, everything gets ironed out in the wash; ‘ah, it just looks cool, well—’ but you’ve missed a step, somewhere, and it takes more effort than otherwise to build a rapport.
When talking with a friend, I remarked ‘it’s impossible to be overdressed,’ and the reply was ‘well, you can be overdressed, right?’ I was forced to concede that yes, it’s possible, but I don’t hear much about dress-code-overachievers having committed a grievous offense.
Though what even has a dress code nowadays? Funerals, nuptials, and… the club? Everywhere else, the sweatpants crowd batters down the hatches. You let somebody wear a t-shirt one time, and from there it’s a race to see who can be the most comfortable. Trick question. Everyone is comfortable and no one is comfortable. You feel?
I’ve played board games in which it’s very important to conceal whether or not you’re about to win the game, and usually the more important it is to do this, the more of a ‘game problem’ it is. If there’s imperfect information, to make it interesting, it’s balanced out with perfect information. The victory points already scored are listed on a tracker, or the pool of resources is public, or the board state is as good an indicator as the cards in hand.
Even then, people will read this very differently; when I play a game, I want to try and win it. I’m not especially sympathetic to the belief that the number of goals scored matters if you don’t win the game, or that the player with the most provinces has achieved anything without securing the entire empire.
As player A, then, in a decent-enough position, if I have to convince a player B who thinks this way, it’s like trying to steer a cloud. No fan, no favorable wind, it’s just a matter of temporarily getting in a mindset where the point-EV is a consideration above and beyond the win-loss binary.
Just as the enemy’s gate is down, there are no points for second place, yet if you don’t meet these misguided people where they are, you’ll never be able to formulate a compelling reason for them to further your chances of victory.
So I thought about a way to phrase it in a useful way, one that’d come across as beneficial, and over the next few turns I continually managed my point total. I was behind, but not so far behind that I had no shot at all, and every other irrelevant-to-me place was still to play for. Whether or not I was convincing was a factor, and to be convincing was an interesting challenge.
Nevertheless, I found it a little frustrating to have to format each tactical idea in a frame I considered inapplicable, however willing the counterparty to cooperate.
…And I was enlightened.
Orion