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Wisdom and a Brief Confession
What Will They Say? (Complete Text, Subscriber Only)
Zach Lebowitz was in a bad mood: his younger sister, who was eighteen years old, had dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles to become a porn star. To shake off his confused depression which pursued him at home and at the office, he called to his aid his sense of lofty morality, his genuine and noble ideas – he had always been an open-minded liberal, supporting ideas like gender equality, tolerance, and free love, but these political views were of no avail when it came to his personal life and his sister’s sudden departure and chosen profession, and he always came back to the recent conversation he had with his aunt (a devout Catholic), who believed that his sister had acted wrongly and betrayed the family. And that was fucking with him.
His mother did not leave their Upper-East Side penthouse in New York City all day long; his aunt (who lived with them) kept sighing, crossing herself, and speaking in whispers. His father, a respected Democrat and member of Congress, would only mumble incoherently at the dinner table and began drinking heavily at night. In the apartment it was as still as though there were some one dead in a room. Everyone, so it seemed to Zach Lebowitz, looked at him enigmatically and with perplexity, as though they wanted to say, “Your sister is ruining her life and our family’s reputation. She only listens to you. So why are you doing nothing?” And he reproached himself for inactivity, though he did not know precisely what action he ought to have taken.
So passed six days without a word from Zach’s sister. On the seventh – it was Sunday morning – Zach finally received an email. The message’s tone was flippant: “Hey! How’s it going? Sorry I took so long to reply. But…” Zach fancied that there was something defiant and provocative beneath the informality.
“She doesn’t give a rat’s ass about her family,” thought Zach, as he went to his mother in her bedroom.
His mother was lying on the bed watching the television show, Girls, dressed in the same clothes she had worn for the past three days and drinking white wine. Seeing her son’s face, she rose impulsively, and straightening her gray hair, asked quickly,
“What? What do you want?”
“An email came…” said her son.
Zissel’s name, and even the pronoun, “she” was not uttered in the apartment. Zissel was spoken of impersonally, “In Los Angelis,” “Gone away,” etc. The mother’s face grew ugly and unpleasant.
“No!” she said, with a motion of her hands, as though to block a ghost that was attacking her. “No, I don’t care. I don’t want to know. Leave me alone!”
The mother broke into hysterical sobs of grief and shame; she evidently longed to know what was said in the email, but her pride prevented her. Zach realized that he ought to read the email aloud from his phone, as it mentioned his mother, but he was overcome by anger such as he had never felt before; he ran out of the room and kicked a chair.
“God damn it! God fucking damn it!”
He threw his phone against the wall, (which fortunately didn’t break because of the high-quality case he had purchased two weeks ago); then tears came into his eyes, and feeling that he was stupid, miserable, and to blame, he went out into the city streets.
He was only twenty-seven, but he was already quite fat. He wore expensive suits, chain-smoked, and suffered from a nasty cough. He already seemed to be developing the characteristics of an elderly bachelor. He never fell in love, never thought of marriage, and loved no one but his mother, his sister, his aunt, and his father. He was fond of a good meal and of talking about politics and exalted subjects. He had in his day received his Bachelor’s and P.H.D. in Economics from George Mason University, but he now looked upon his studies as though in them he had discharged a duty incumbent upon young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six. At any rate, the ideas that now strayed every day through his mind had nothing in common with the university or the subjects he had studied there.
Out in the city streets it was hot and still, as though rain were coming. The air above the avenues was wavering in the heat and there was the smell of asphalt and dust. He lit a cigarette and began to walk.
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Zach stopped several times and wiped his beaded forehead. He looked at the restaurants and stores, and twice almost ran into someone looking at their phone. And all the while he was thinking that this insufferable state of things could not go on forever, and that he must do something about it one way or another. He must stop his sister, stupidly, madly, but he must stop her.
“But how? What can I do?” he asked himself, and looked imploringly at the sky and the buildings, begging for their help.
But the sky and the buildings were mute. His noble ideas were no help, and his common sense whispered that the agonizing question could have no solution but a stupid one, and that today’s email was not the last of its kind. It was terrible to think what people were saying about his sister and his family!
At dinner it was only Zach and his father. As usual, the father’s face wore the bitterly resigned expression that seemed to say though he was embarrassed and ashamed, he would allow no one to insult him. Zach sat down at the other end of the table and began drinking a beer in silence.
“Your mother has had no food today,” said his father. “You ought to do something about it, Zach. Starving oneself is no cure for depression.”
It struck Zachary Lebowitz as absurd that his father should expect him to remedy the situation. He was tempted to say something rude to him, but restrained himself. And as he restrained himself he felt the time had come for action, and that he could not bear it any longer. Either he must act at once or fall on the ground, and scream and bang his head upon the floor. He pictured Zissel in a porno, moaning, taking cum shots to the face, riding a man like a cowgirl, and all the anger, bitterness, and humiliation that had been accumulating him for the past seven days welled up inside until it became too much.
“My sister wants to be a porn star,” he thought, “my mother will commit suicide, my father will lose his reputation and not be re-elected the next term…and all this because Zissel thinks she’s an independent woman who can do whatever she pleases!”
“No, I won’t allow it!” Zach cried suddenly, and he slammed his fist down on the table.
He jumped up and ran out of the dining room. In the study he opened a computer and typed, “Flight to L.A. from N.Y.C.” into Google. He purchased an airline ticket for a red-eye flight, hastily packed a duffel bag, and ran out of the apartment to hail a taxi.
There was a storm thrashing within him. He felt a longing to do something extraordinary, startling, even if he had to repent of it all his life afterwards. Should he kidnap his sister and take her home? But Zach was not one of those men who use physical force. He knew he would not kidnap his sister, but the idea was invigorating and propelled him on this impulsive journey.
A taxi stopped along the curb and Zach jumped in. He yelled, “Newark Airport!” and the taxi lurched away. He texted Zissel, “Purchased a plane ticket to L.A. You’re coming home.” He imagined how Zissel would try to justify her conduct by talking about being an independent woman, an adult, individual freedom, and about supporting herself however she wanted. She would argue about what she did not understand. And very likely at the end of the conversation she would ask, “And how do you have a right to tell me how to lead my life. What right have you to interfere?”
“No, I have no right,” muttered Zachary Lebowitz. “But so much the better…the harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere, so much the better.”
It was a sultry night. There was a traffic jam on the east side of Central Park. People were shouting and honking their horns. The sky seemed to suggest a downpour any second. Zachary stared out the window at the trees of the park. He had spent hundreds of hours in this park and knew every bush, rock, and path. Through the trees he pictured the carousal that he used to ride as a child with Zissel; he could picture it all down to the smallest detail, even the forms and colors of the beat-up horses. Near the carousal was the baseball field where he used to play catch. Near the baseball field was the boulder where he once fell off and broke his arm.
Above the park and the distant buildings a huge black storm-cloud was rising, and there were ashes of white lightening.
“Here comes the storm!” thought Zachary Lebowitz. The taxi was now at a complete stop in the middle of Central Park. There were red lights blinking and Zachary assumed there had been a car accident not far ahead. All of a sudden Zachary felt a wave of exhaustion. The storm-cloud and the car accident seemed to be signs advising him to go back home. He felt a little scared.
“I will bring her back!” he tried to reassure himself. “She will fight and talk about her rights and freedom, but freedom also means respect and self-control, and not indulging whims and passions. It’s not liberty, but awareness of others and logical consequences!”
The taxi was near the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. On the radio the song, “I’m ‘N Luv (Wit a Stripper),” by T-Pain was playing. “What a stupid song,” muttered Zachary. “Excuse me? Sir? Could you please change the song?”
“What?”
“Could you change the song?”
“Sure.”
Just then Zach felt a buzz in his pocket. It was a call from Zissel.
“Hello?” he answered.
“You are not coming to L.A.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’ll be wasting your time. I’m not coming home.”
“You…we…I’m coming…we need to talk and-”
“We can talk now. What do you want to know?” Zach paused. Raindrops began hitting the car. There was no anger in his heart now, nothing but fear and vexation with himself. What was he doing? He felt he had made a bad beginning with the phone conversation, and that nothing would come of it but useless bickering. Both were silent for some time. “Look, Zach, I appreciate your concern. You’ve always looked out for me. I understand it, and, believe me, I appreciate it. Believe me.”
Zach looked out the window and grimaced.
“But I’m old enough to make my own decisions. College would be a waste of time for me. I’m not going $200,000 in debt and sitting in classrooms learning shit I don’t care about. I’m not throwing away the prime of my life. And trust me, the feeling that you, mom, and dad would be upset has bothered me. But let me explain myself. I-”
“You can’t-”
“Let me speak, Zach. There wasn’t time to explain myself earlier. I’m doing a movie now and I had to fly out on short notice. It’s a touchy subject to talk about, but here it comes. I love doing porn. It’s been my dream for the past three years. All I-”
“Zissel! You-”
“Shut up! Let me finish. I really shouldn’t need to justify myself, but since you’re my older brother and I’ve always cared about you, I’ll talk. Really, Zach, I’m grateful to you. But you can’t force me to a lead a life that you think is right and respectable, when I would hate that sort of life.” Zissel talked in a quiet, steady voice, but was evidently agitated. Zach felt it was his turn to speak, and that to listen and keep silent would really mean playing the part of a generous and noble idiot, and that had not been his idea upon making this trip. He sat up in the taxi and said, breathlessly, in an undertone:
“Listen, Zissel. You know I love you and want you to have the best life possible; but this…this is just…awful. It’s terrible to think of you doing porn when-”
“Why is it terrible?” asked Zissel, with a quiver in her voice. “It would be terrible if I was hurting anyone else, but I’m not doing anything that-”
“You are hurting us, Zissel. Your mother hasn’t changed her clothes in three days! Your father can’t sleep unless he’s black out drunk. You know we all have an open mind, and tolerance for everyone, but you’re acting selfish. We’re all miserable and-”
“I’m selfish for trying to live my dream? For doing what I love? Just because you, mom, and dad are living in the past, blinded by traditional values, obsessed with how strangers think of you, slaves to public opinion, means I should cater to your prejudices? Just because my actions make people feel embarrassed doesn’t prove that they are wrong. Every important step one takes is bound to distress somebody. If I became a fashion model, mother would be angry too. What am I supposed to do? Anyone who puts the peace of their family before everything has to renounce the life of excitement and self-fulfillment completely.”
There was a vivid flash of lightening outside the window, and the lightening seemed to change the course of Zachary’s thoughts. He slumped into the cushion and began saying what was utterly beside the point.
“I care about you so much, Zissel. When you were little we would go on walks through Central Park almost every day. Remember that? It hurts me to think of you doing something like…like porn. Isn’t there something else you can do? Some other job? You deserve better. You deserve-”
“Here we go-” sighed Zissel. “What do I deserve, Zach? How do you know what I like to do, what I hate, what my plans are, everything that’s happened to me in my life? Your arrogance and your desire to control me are exasperating.”
“Why can’t you just…be a normal actress?”
“Because I hate normal acting, I’m not good at it, and there’s no money in it!”
“Can’t you at least try and-”
“No! I can’t try! I don’t want to and I don’t care! And unlike you, I don’t care what people say about me!”
During the conversation Zachary listened to Zissel and wondered in perplexity why it was that she wanted to be a porn actress so intensely. Their childhood had not been traumatic. They had never suffered or been in need of anything. Zissel had never exhibited any signs that she was a whore or a slut. Yes, she had dated a handful of boys at different times, never for more than a couple of months, but she had also spent long periods of time being alone. She was good-looking, elegant, carefree; she was fond of laughing, chatter, argument, a passionate reader; she had good taste in dress, in furniture, in books, and her personality seemed in direct contrast to the seedy underworld of the porn industry. She was intelligent and clever, had advanced ideas, but in her free-thinking one felt the overflow of energy, the vanity of a young, strong, spirited girl, passionately eager to be better and more original than others…what had happened to her that caused this desire to do porn?”
“She’s an obstinate and independent to a fault,” thought Zachary Lebowitz. “She’ll pay for her brash decisions one day.” But immediately upon thinking this, Zachary’s belief in the extraordinary loftiness and faultlessness of his own way of thinking struck him as naïve and even morbid; and the fact that Zachary had all his life followed the beaten path and done as he told came charging to the front of his mind. All of a sudden Zachary felt an admiration and respect for Zissel he had never felt before. He was conscious of a sort of power in her, and for some reason lost the desire to argue. Zissel cleared he throat and was about to speak, but Zachary interrupted her gently,
“Yes, you’ve always done…what you’ve wanted…but we’ve been wandering away from the point.”
“Okay. Then let’s get back to the point. I’m telling you, Zach, my conscious is clear. There’s really no need for me to prove myself. You, mom, and dad are free to hate me, cut me off, and disown me. I’ll survive. I’ll be all right.”
The taxi began to move again and Zachary’s heart began to beat in his temples. He sat up and said, “Hold on! Excuse me, sir! Pull over! Pull the car over!” The driver sighed and swerved the taxi to the shoulder of the road. Zach paid, stepped out, and began to walk.
“Well, I have to go,” said Zissel.
“No, wait, don’t hang up yet.” Zach’s hand was trembling and his eyes filled with tears. He knew that the conversation was over and that there was no use talking. The rain had stopped, but the air was damp and thick. He walked hurriedly on a dirt path towards the reservoir. “I…I won’t come to L.A. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Okay. Good.”
“If there’s anything you need…money….someone to talk to…don’t hesitate.”
“Thanks, Zach.” There was a brief silence. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.”
“Okay, do you have any idea…when you’ll be home?”
“No, I don’t. Goodbye Zach.”
“Goodbye Zissel.” She hung up. Not hearing Zissel’s voice caused Zach to immediately forget his previous admiration, and he told himself that she was unhappy. He told himself that she had made a ridiculous, irreparable mistake.
“I’ll visit her sometime and try to convince her, just not now,” he said out loud. But it sounded as though he were making a concession, and this did not satisfy him. To avoid bursting into tears he pulled out a cigarette and began to smoke. He walked into the darkness of the woods on the perimeter of the reservoir.
“I’m a baby, a pushover, a wimp,” thought Zachary Lebowitz. “I attempted to solve the question and save my sister, and I haven’t accomplished anything.”
He was heavy at heart. When he reached the reservoir he walked along the cinder path. But he wanted to sit and think without moving. The moon was rising and was reflected on the water. There were low rumbles of thunder in the distance. Zachary Lebowitz sat on a bench and finished his cigarette. He looked steadily at the water and imagined his sister’s future despair, her martyr-like pallor, the tearless eyes that would conceal her humiliation from others. He imagined her broke, unable to find a job, imagined his mother being admitted to a mental hospital, his father drinking himself to death, Zissel’s horror…His proud, superstitious mother would be sure to die of grief. Terrible pictures of the future rose before him on the background of the smooth, dark water, and among pale feminine figures he saw himself, a weak, cowardly man with a guilty face.
A hundred feet away on the right bank of the pond, something dark was floating motionless. Was it a dead body? Zachary Lebowtiz thought of the corpse that was discovered this past Tuesday in the reservoir, naked and decomposed. He stood up and walked along the path until he was leaning against the fence near the form. But all he saw was a piece of trash.
He walked to the bench, collapsed, and pulled out another cigarette. He inhaled the smoke and coughed. Then he looked mournfully into the water. And thinking about his life, he came to the conclusion he had never said or acted upon what he really thought, and other people had repaid him in the same way. And so the whole of life seemed to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was reflected and trash was left. And it seemed to him that nothing could ever set it right.
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Why can we never remember the moment before falling asleep?
Every night most us lie in bed waiting to be abducted by oblivion. All day we exhibit conscious power over our bodies (feed the pigs, floss ass after shower, don’t shit pants at board meeting) but at night we relinquish control to mysterious, subconscious forces that seem to “capture” our minds by surprise. It’s very strange, when you really think about it. One moment we’re thinking various thoughts (I can’t wait to be king, to pee or not to pee, what is the circle of life? when I was a young warthog) and the next thing we know it’s morning, with either a placid sunrise gently tickling our fluttering eyelids or a submarine emergency alert alarm punching our eardrums. Why can’t we ever remember the transition?
Most people believe that sleep is like a simple on-off switch. I am either awake or I’m passed out like Kendall Jenner after a long, arduous day shooting a vacuous horror film. Not so. While scientists are still struggling to uncover many of the secrets behind our re-charging bouts of routine unconsciousness, most of them currently agree that falling asleep is a gradual process. Our brains are not being suddenly wrapped and mentally-suffocated in an existential black-blanket, but different parts are shutting down at different times. This means you don’t technically start falling asleep when you flop on your waterbed next to Tina and close your eyes. The body is actually falling asleep, in subtle ways, hours before you slip into unconsciousness. That’s one of the reasons why doctors grumble, scold, and lash patients with their stethoscopes when they hear of erratic sleep patterns. Erratic sleep patterns prevent the body from shutting down smoothly and properly. And this is bad, cause we’re complicated, finite-ticking machines.
Even though falling asleep is a gradual process, one of the first parts of the brain to shut down/change functions, when we’re “ready” for sleep and lying down…the culprit behind our short-term loss of memory…is the hippo camping:
I mean, the hippocampus:
The hippocampus is located beneath the cerebral cortex (brain’s control center/consciousness), is part of the limbic system (emotion, behavior, motivation), and is responsible for memory (long-term, short term, and spatial navigation). In Alzheimer’s disease, the hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain to experience damage. People with Alzheimer’s often have an inability to form new memories.
The weird name (which is Latin) is derived from the Greek words “horse,” and “seamonster,” because it looks like a seahorse:
Hippocampus is required for the formation and recall, but not the storage of memories. It’s more like the memory processing center. Sleep is essential for the consolidation of a memory, so perhaps that’s why the Hippocampus “shuts down”/changes functions right away. Memory is essential for survival (sabertooth tiger near pond, Mate has brown eyes and dimples, don’t use three-leaf clusters on single stem as toilet paper), so it makes sense that this organ gets to work immediately. When we “go under,” it is believed the hippocampus switches from short-term to long-term memory focus (hence the short-term memory loss) replaying the events of the day for the neo-cortex (where long memories are stored) by reviewing and processing these memories.
I’m no scientist, but I wonder if, since memory is so complex and essential to survival, being asleep is the only way for us to deeply encode what has happened to us. And since this deeply-encoding process is so complicated and difficult, we can’t be conscious for it, since our consciousness would get in the way/take away energy/focus from the hippocampus. Reality is so complex and ever-changing that every night the Hippocampus needs to shout: “Alright everybody, chill the fuck out, relax, I gotta figure out what just happened today so the captain upstairs can get a new job.”
Keep in mind (pun intended) that the number of neurons in the adult brain (around 100 billion…coincidentally, the same number of stars in our galaxy and the same number of galaxies in the universe) does not increase significantly with age.
In fact, if we hit our head with a fist, a couple of neurons are “killed.” This means memories are not the result of new neuron production. What’s happening is long-term potentiation (LTP). LTP is the persistent increase in synaptic strength following high-frequency stimulation of a chemical synapse/recent patterns of activity. Here’s a diagram:
Memories are thought to be deeply encoded by modification of synaptic strength. I forgot what this has to do with my original question, but I think it’s just a good thing to know. Wait, did I already answer my original question? I think I did. I’ll have to read this over. Anyway, here’s a goodbye, warm-and-fuzzy gif:
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9 Things Others Don’t Know You’re Doing Because Of Your High Functioning Nihilism
Nihilism can be harmful and it’s not something to be overlooked. The worst problem is that a lot of people can’t understand the effects it can have on a person. They describe the person who is a nihilist as passive, lazy, irresponsible, a worthless clown, and indifferent.
If you are NOT a nihilist this list can help you better understand our lives. If you DO believe that all human endeavor is essentially meaningless and that we are ignorant specks of sand in the unfathomable universe, you’ll likely agree with the following statements:
1.) Decline invites to parties although you may want to go.
There are certain nights that you may have singled out on a Playboy calendar taped to your fridge (in one of your rare moments of motivated optimism). But when these nights arrive, nihilism rears its shrouded head, extinguishes any semblance of desire, and crushes your resolve. It can become so debilitating that you feel as if nothing exciting is happening in the entire world, especially not at Timmy’s birthday party.
You are aware of what is happening to you and you don’t want to become a burden where you are supposed to go (“BIRTHDAYS ARE JUST ANOTHER DAY TIMMY, JUST ANOTHER FUCKING DAY!”) – so you cancel everything.
2.) Secretly shrug off important life events that other people lose their shit over.
Whether it’s receiving a promotion, getting fired, buying a house, or getting kicked out by a landlord, you barely react to any of these occurrences. The truth is that everything is falling apart on the molecular level and the sun is going to explode, so why worry or celebrate?
You may forget a life-altering job interview, choose to eat Chinese by yourself on Christmas, fall asleep on the subway at 2pm and piss yourself, or spend ten hours watching “People are Awesome” YouTube videos in a dirty bathrobe. Whatever the case may be, people may get confused by the notion that you don’t care about anything at all.
3.) Go to bed early. Wake up late.
One of your favorite things to do is sleep. After another, uneventful, mundane 9-5 with your boss screaming, “You have no ambition you worthless bastard! My ten year old son could do a better job than you! I outta wipe that shit-eating grin off your face!” all you want is to submerge your mind in oblivion.
When the morning comes, you turn the TV and the lights off, wipe the Sriracha off your hairy chest, and curse the gods for bringing you into this empty world. When your nihilism has switched on (by any amount of reflection), you can’t do anything to switch it off, so you stand in the shower for 45 minutes until you almost develop a third degree burn.
4.) In every situation, the worst scenario makes you chuckle and the best scenario makes you sigh.
Instead of enjoying the moment how it is, or imagining riches and “success,” you can’t help picturing an asteroid colliding with the earth or a simple virus destroying humanity. If it’s a first date with a beautiful woman who is kind and intelligent, you can’t help but think, “Yup. Here we go again. Even if we end up falling passionately in love it will either crash and burn or wane into compromise and affection.”
If you get sick, you always manage to think: “FINALLY.” It’s as if your mind tricks you into thinking this petty suffering is the natural state of your crumbling existence.
5.) You forget things people say. Over and over again.
No matter how enthusiastically someone says something to you or how much bearing it has on your future, you forget it. That’s why you wear headphones at family reunions and, if people don’t know you, pretend to be deaf.
This constant mental fading and social withdrawal is borderline insanity, almost enough to be institutionalized, but not quite. You have to remind yourself that it is the old “nihilism ear-muffs” acting as a buffer, and that sometimes people can actually have interesting things to say.
6.) When someone shows concern about you, you feel surprised and suspicious.
If someone notices that you’ve been staring off into space for ten minutes without blinking, your nihilism becomes suspicious. The thing is, when someone cares about you in any way, it makes you suspect ulterior motives because why would someone ever notice an insignificant, mumbling zombie? A transient, purposeless ghost?
7.) You feel vaguely annoyed when the future comes up as a topic.
While most people look forward to the future and make concrete, exciting plans, your gray, hazy view makes you feel bored and weary. Oh, another Spider-Man movie? Wonderful.
8.) You unconsciously mutter senseless imprecations while browsing facebook.
“No way are all these people having THAT much fucking fun.”
9.) Often, you just don’t get out of bed…and parody bullshit, click-bait articles you find online.
—
Nihilism blunts most of your edge and destroys your drive for greatness. That’s why it’s a miracle if you function at all. Your state of careless indolence is a result of ceaseless contemplation on the ultimate futility of human action and the vastness of space and time…
—
So, please, don’t share this essay, not even with your stupid, best friend. Let it sink into the depths of the exponentially expanding internet swamp…
Cause it doesn’t fucking matter.
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Miss Tina Tinder, Lessons Learned, and a Horrifying Realization of my Shameful Past as a Boy Toy
Author’s note: This is a fairly intimate essay that I wrote in a notebook for my own attempt at self-awareness. I did not plan on ever posting this publicly. But the girl in this piece sent me a text not too long ago: When are you going to write about me? So I typed up my scribbles, sent her this essay (half as a joke), and asked her permission to post it. To my surprise, she said yes:
—
On October 1st, in the year of our lord 2016, I swiped right and had a match, a blinking heart, a glimpse of possibility. She was pretty, pale, and had a dog filter. Our initial conversation went something like this:
JW: Are you a dog or a human being? We have to get that question out of the way if this is going to go anywhere.
Tina: Last time I checked, human. Hahah I definitely need to stop using that stupid filter.
JW: It’s just confusing. I’m not trying to pick up somebody else’s shit on a date.
Tina: Hopefully you won’t need to.
JW: I’ll bring doggy bags just in case. You know how people put on a show on tinder.
Tina: I feel like I need a first aid kit and a can of pepper spray when it comes to tinder.
JW: Don’t forget your taser, blow horn, and portable lie detector.
Tina: Ahhhhh, the lie detector, that one I’d like to use.
Additional witty banter, subtle flirtation, innocuous questions, etc.
We exchanged numbers. Before we met a week later, we must have sent 10,000 text messages back and forth. They became quite raunchy and explicit (See James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacles). In my search for a serious relationship I deluded myself with this girl and wasted A TON of time. But through it all, I came to 3 realizations:
1.) I need to get the fuck off tinder (which I eventually did). And if you’re also hoping for a serious relationship, you should too. It’s an addicting, silly game. I’ve met married couples who met on tinder, but this outcome is extremely rare. The pool of people on this app has become too large, especially in NYC, and it’s infested with lust-hungry men who don’t have the balls to meet women in other ways, so they harass them out of weakness, and most decent women refrain from taking it seriously. Was I one of these men? Perhaps, in some sense. But I stupidly had the hope of meeting someone promising through this app. My excuse to myself was that I was too busy with working and writing that I didn’t have time to meet women in other, more organic ways. Tinder was so convenient, so easy. I could develop a fast, superficial relationship via texts while taking dumps in my apartment, or whenever I felt like it, then on my 1 day off a week meet up. On top of this, I’ve always been arrogantly proud of my texting skills. I can play with words and ideas all day. I’m better with words than I am at life. But all in all, it’s a waste of time.
2.) BEWARE: If you are above the age of 27, you are probably like me and have very little idea just how good the next generation is at texting. This is especially applicable for people with babies or young children. BE PREPARED. Tina has had a cell phone her entire life. She grew up playing this message game. I’ve never seen anything like it. Her speed and wit were incredible, seemingly beyond her years. A couple times I wondered, am I being cat-fished?
Because texting is its own language. How much you say, your ability to read and respond to sarcasm, how much to say, timing, balancing edge and lightheartedness, insult and compliment. This girl was on another level. My bias aside, the girl wielded her phone like a god.
3.) So why did I waste so much time texting this girl when I understood the superficiality of tinder? She wasn’t THAT special looking. Perhaps it was her nerdy-glasses look contrasting with her seductive, pant-less, mirror selfie? Perhaps it was her Midwest childhood combining with new girl in the big city persona? Perhaps it was her silly, youthful energy? I thought and thought and thought…then it hit me:
No, it wasn’t all that…
I’m just an egomaniac.
When Tina first started texting me she did something which I thought was natural at the time, but now I understand the insinuation in which she gripped and throttled my being:
She was J.W. Kash’s first, #1 fan. She read my blog posts and ASKED me about them in detail. She liked my writing. She wanted me to sign a book and send it to her. Right in the beginning of our conversation she stroked my ego like I was a cute, little kitten and it felt so…damn…good. In my arrogant, oblivious mind I unconsciously thought this was natural, DESPITE her being the first person in the past 6 years to give serious attention to my writing. I’ve received a compliment here and there, but nothing like this. Oh no, this flattery was unprecedented. And not only was she my first fan, she was an attractive young woman who liked to read novels! My Achilles heel! Days after texting, she was referencing my posts. So of course we must be compatible. Of course we want the same things. Of course she must be genuine and intelligent, because only genuine and intelligent people will ever enjoy my genuine and intelligent writing. Very sick and sad, but the bitter truth.
It was me who first crossed the bridge from texting to sexting. She was telling me about all the Netflix shows she liked. I replied,
“If you’re trying to Netflix and chill, just tell me.” Then I made some stupid joke about wrestling during breaks between shows. She asked about the nature of this wrestling. Etc.
I even downloaded Snapchat for the first time so we could send each other saucy snaps. Could my degradation have sunk any lower?
We picked a day to have lunch. I organized my schedule to make this happen. The night before our expected rendezvous she got drunk (I wish you were here right now so we could, etc.) and was hung-over the next day. For 8 hours she kept postponing out meet up, until she eventually canceled. This unreliability is a deal breaker for me, but the claws of fandom were already in. I willfully ignored it.
Tina even openly discussed how she wasn’t right for me, that she didn’t want anything serious while I seemed like a serious guy. “I just got out of a long term relationship a month ago, I just want to have fun. I just want to get high, party, and do stupid things. Why do you even like me? I’m such a mess. You’re gonna hate me.” This frivolous outlook on life has always struck me as foreign and odd. But I respected her honesty and, again, I couldn’t get over that she was my first, #1 fan. I even had silly visions of me rolling blunts and us going on a picnic in Central Park. I don’t even smoke weed anymore.
On a Wednesday night she was high in a bar in Midtown (she gets high every day.)
“Can I come over?” she asked
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t know, I don’t feel like it anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Do you really want me to come over?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so high. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not going to like me in person.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“I’m so nervous. I shouldn’t come.”
“Alright, don’t come. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.
“No, I want to come.”
“Alright, come.”
“What’s going to happen when we meet? I’m on my period, so we can’t fuck yet.”
“Okay. That’s fine.”
Eventually, I screen-shotted bus routes, texted the directions, and she took a bus at 2am to Staten Island. No surprise she got lost and ended up in the middle of the island, miles away from my apartment, at 3am. Her 360 rotating snaps had the captions: “I’m living in a horror film. Help.” I paid for a cab to pick her up.
When she arrived I went downstairs in my bathrobe, glasses, and flip flops to make a good first impression. No doubt I resembled a nerdy version of “The Dude,” from The Big Lebowski:
It was a strange experience. There had been so much build up for the past week that we both knew (and discussed) the inevitable let down of meeting in person. Both of our expectations had been wildly out of control.
In the elevator I looked more closely at her face. Her nose seemed restructured and the edge of her eyes were peculiar. Ah, yes, that would explain the frequent use of the dog filter. She did tell me that she was born with deformities and had experienced many surgeries (+25) growing up. I still thought she was pretty. In fact, I liked her MORE now that I saw her facial scars in person. I tend to be attracted to girls with scars, both inside and out.
In my apartment we sat on my bed and talked. I felt relaxed, but as usual spoke too much. I could tell she was disappointed in the dull reality of JW Kash. In person, I’m scatterbrained and boring. My writing and texting conveys a much more direct, confident, and interesting person. “Who’s this guy?” she seemed to be thinking. Despite her obvious disinterest, after 30 minutes I felt the urge to kiss her. The old mental battle: “You never know if you don’t try,” bombarded my thoughts. I made a move and she turned her head to the side.
“No, not yet.”
“Alright.” I sat back and we talked some more.
Then it hit me: what did I just I do? What am I doing? We can’t date. She’s told me already that she doesn’t even want to date! And if hooking up isn’t my main priority, why am I wasting so much time?
Tina talked about her crazy friends, getting high, her mean boss, her desire to become a groupie, the fact that her ex-boyfriend looked just like a famous rapper. She was a nice girl, but fairly self-absorbed. I refuse to ever judge someone quickly or harshly because of their age: people develop in different ways at different rates, progressing and regressing in turns. But I realized with Tina that we were on two, different planes. These planes were exasperated by the inherent inadequacy of conversation and the inability to express 1/100 of what we feel (opposed to brooding, reflecting texting). So much of real conversation is what you DON’T say. It struck me that she perhaps hadn’t lived enough “life” or had enough “experience” to really judge the superfluous vs. essential in a conversation. And I don’t mean “life-changing,” wild experiences, I don’t mean traveling the world, meeting the Dalai Lama, or seeing a family member die. I mean years of taking out the trash, years of mean bosses, years of being late and feeling anxious, years of waking up hung-over, years of washing dishes, years of paying bills, years of forgetting things, years of mundane, dreary shit. You can’t teach those years to anyone, they just happen. They shove your ego into a little corner and say, “Shhhh, quiet little one, the world is a lot bigger than you and your feelings.” Many people, like myself, resist this humbling, this deflation. Many people never experience it.
Tina and I hugged and she left around 5am. We would never see each other again, although she would text me sporadically over the next couple of months.
After the encounter I sat on my bed for another hour wondering what the hell just happened. I realized that the only way I could date Tina is if I reconciled myself to mundane conversations about how messy her room was and Chance the Rapper. Perhaps if we were high all the time it wouldn’t matter. Perhaps if we had tons of great sex it wouldn’t matter. I wondered: how many relationships exist out there where one person can barely tolerate the chattering of the opposite sex? Yet through other factors (physical appearance, wealth, comfortable social status, previous obligation, etc.) the person endures an incompatible personality. Tina WAS nice. Tina WAS physically attractive. Tina WAS adventuresome. Maybe I could deal with her self-absorbed, rapper-worshiping, partying-obsessed personality because of her other, positive traits? No, that wouldn’t be fair to her. All relationships involve compromise, but in the beginning there shouldn’t be such cold and ruthless calculation.
It was then I felt a wave of horror. Tina was almost the same number of years YOUNGER than me than my ex-girlfriend was OLDER. I began flipping through my memories, like an investigator scanning old files for an unsolved case, with the questions: “Was I MY ex-girlfriend’s Tina? Did my ex endure my self-absorbed, superfluous babbling for other things (well, he is nice, he is adventuresome, etc.)? Did my ex condescendingly look down on me and my youth like I was doing to Tina? I pictured moments of my ex sighing and rolling her eyes at particular things I said, getting annoyed and frustrated at my hopes and eccentricities. I pictured the end of our relationship and all my mistakes. Meanwhile, there I was in the middle of it all, a selfish waiter with literary dreams of grandeur. Someone who was barely paying his rent. Someone who struggled with restaurant work. Someone who was frequently late, severely sleep-deprived, and an idiot. Why did my ex tolerate such boyish traits and antics? Why did she stay with me for so long? She was a respected, hardworking professional in her field and had a group of loving, caring friends. Her apartment was clean and organized. She had a job that was 100x harder than mine, but rarely complained. And despite her belief to the contrary, she had her shit together. I did not.
I thought about my recent, juvenile criticisms of Tina, about my belief that she was self-absorbed and hadn’t experienced enough “life,” to be conscious of the superfluous. Then I remembered it was ME who was sending 10,000 text messages and saucy snapchats. It was ME who was waiting for a tinder girl at 3am in his bathrobe. It was ME who didn’t know what he wanted. The mirrors of life, with such bitter reflections, were being cruelly thrust in front of my contorted visage.
My god, I thought, as a glimpse of dawn appeared outside of my faded window, Was I once…a useless boy toy? Am I still a boy toy? Fuck. I need to get my shit together, fast, before it’s too late…*
*Author’s Note: It’s a work in progress.
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If You’ve Ever Been Called a Callous Monster or a Heartless Bastard by Someone Trying to Use you
Despite what they have told you, it’s a compliment.
Callous Monster: a phrase used nowadays to insult someone for their insensitivity towards a multitude of things. If you don’t let a co-worker pawn their work off on you because their child is sick or they have tickets to see the March Madness tournament (you don’t know which is the case), you’re callous. If you don’t laugh at a dumb joke during a party or sing along to “Sweet Caroline,” you’re weird and unemotional. If you don’t express your personal troubles or something that’s bothering you to someone else, or provide a shoulder to cry on, you’re insensitive. If your mood happens to be in a funk and you feel horribly depressed, but don’t tell anyone about it and unburden your feelings on those around you, you’re seen as unemotional, withdrawn, AND insensitive.
Let me tell you something that goes against everything people have probably ever told you. Being unemotional and insensitive to the world can be very, very helpful, especially since it allows you to better help those you love, and can actually be healthy, beautiful, and fulfilling in the long run. It’s a precious gift. Your ability to not let others use you for their own, selfish gain and not be pulled in a thousand directions by the fickle world’s ceaseless demands, or your rioting emotions, is a talent that not many people possess, therefore many people do not understand.
Never let someone’s craving, criticizing, and grasping negativity towards this callousness bring you down. We are all guilty of thrashing against something that is unfamiliar to us: something that is different. We are all guilty of wishing someone would help or like us for no reason at all (because we’re all inherently likable). But take pride in knowing that the people you love and care about, deeply, are those who deeply love and care about you, and that you are doing your best to be a good, kind, hardworking person in your little corner of the world. You know that if you love everyone, you love no one. You know that if you try to please the entire world, you please nobody.
This gift of yours was meant to be utilized. It would not be a part of your personality if you were not meant to use it. Because of this gift, you will change someone’s life someday, someone like you who is also insulted for being callous and cold, but is still quietly trying to make the world a better place.
You might be the person who ignores the homeless man begging for a nickel and 5 minutes of your time, because your friend of 20 years is in the hospital and you’re rushing there to talk with him about his life and console his pain. You might be the person who doesn’t spend that extra hour in the bar talking to a stranger about their broken past, because you have a little daughter at home who you’d like to teach the alphabet. You might be that person who doesn’t have children and hurries past rehab centers and homeless shelters on your way home. Why? So you can compose a song that’s so achingly beautiful it prevents someone fifty years in the future from killing themselves.
To feel everything with every single part of your being is either a meaningless phrase or a horrifying thing. If you “feel everything,” then you’re like a rag doll being torn apart in a storm. If you put yourself out there for others too much, you risk serious and wasteful abuse.
So embrace every part of your monstrous self. There will be people who criticize your lack of heart and call you, “The Fucking Tin Man.” Feel sorry for them. There are people who are dishonest. There are people who are manipulative. There are people who are conniving and malicious. And the one thing these people say to put you down is, “You don’t feel anything at all. You don’t care about helping others. You’re nothing but a narrow, heartless bastard.” I’d rather not feel anything at all than expect others to feel things for me.
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Breaking News: Existence of Rainbow Trees Blows Mind Of Man Who Believed His Capacity To Wonder Was Lost
Fort Dodge, Kansas: Morris Tremaine, a 76 year old retired, disgruntled accountant living alone in one of the least populated cities in America, believed he had seen it all. But last week while flipping through an abandoned book in a dilapidated diner, Morris came across Eucalyptus deglupta, or rainbow trees:
These trees are the only Eucalyptus which extend into the northern hemisphere. They grow in New Britain, New Guinea, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Their rainbow colors on the trunk occur because patches of the outer bark shed annually at different times. The inner, bright green bark darkens and matures to give blue, maroon, red, orange, and purple tones.
Morris was unexpectedly astounded at this discovery. He flashed back to his childhood days when he enjoyed coloring books. He remembered drawing a rainbow tree and his father saying, “What the hell are you doing, you little fairy? Tree trunks are brown. Now here’s a BB gun and go play outside and shoot some birds.” For 70 years, Morris never knew that something like rainbow trees could possibly exist. “What other crazy shit is out there in the world that I don’t know about?” he asked. Flying elephants? Velvet plants? Talking rocks?” At the time of this interview, Morris was holding a one-way plane ticket to the Philippines. When asked about his specific plans, Morris replied that he didn’t have any. His last comment to the interviewer was, “Even though I’m almost dead, I guess it’s never too late to go explorin’.”
Curious mind, subscribe below. I don’t send emails. Thank you:
I ain’t no hipster
I got plaid shirts
But I ain’t no hipster
I drink beers that’re bitter
But I ain’t no hipster
I quote philosophers on my twitter
But I ain’t no hipster
She says my beard scratches her
But I ain’t no hipster
I sometimes wear suspenders
But I ain’t no hipster
I prefer vinyl records over digital
But I ain’t no hipster
I listen to music that hurts
But I ain’t no hipster
I move into neighborhoods that are becoming bi-racial
But I ain’t no hipster
I shun things that are popular
But I ain’t no hipster
I own an old-fashioned typewriter
But I ain’t not hipster
I post links to poetry
on my facebook
Fuck.
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Crazy Jack Ma and his Behemoth Cyber Bazaar
During a 23 hour layover in Shanghai I finished an excellent book called Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, by Duncan Clark. Here are three reasons you might want to check it out:
1.) If you are curious about the rise of the internet, how it happened, the major players, the timing, failures, future, etc.
2.) If you agree with the statement: watch out for China.
3.) You like Forrest Gump and success stories.
For this post, I’m going to focus mainly on #3. We are living in an era of uncertainty in regards to politics, globalization, and how to save our declining environment. I believe it’s important and encouraging to follow the story of someone who had a strong, singular vision and achieved it, despite years of doubt and setbacks. In an era of impatience, it’s important to learn lessons from someone who waited decades for their chance to succeed. This someone is Jack Ma. He started Alibaba, an e-commerce company that provides consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer, and business-to-business sales service via web portals. It is the most dominant retailer in the world (surpassing Walmart in 2016), generating more revenues than Amazon.com and Ebay combined. When the company went public in 2013, it was the largest IPO in history, being valued at $25 billion dollars.
So how did a poor, country boy in China who looks like E.T. rise to become a billionaire who recently met with Donald Trump (promising to create 1,000 jobs in the U.S.):
who bought a soccer team for $200 million when he was drunk:
and who in 2015 purchased the $23 million Brandon Park Estate in New York’s Adirondack Mountains?
Yes, Jack Ma is everywhere. He is also strategic, charismatic, well-spoken, and wise. His favorite movie is Forrest Gump, who he frequently quotes in his speeches:
“People think he [Forest Gump] is dumb, but he knows what he’s doing.” -Jack Ma
“I am a very simple guy, I am not smart. Everyone thinks that Jack Ma is a very smart guy. I might have a smart face but I’ve got very stupid brains.” -Jack Ma
Where did these stupid brains come from?
Jack Ma was born in 1964 in Hangzhou, a city one hundred miles to the southwest of Shanghai. His birth name was Yun Ma, which means cloud horse. As a boy, he fell in love with the English language and literature, specifically readings of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he listened to on a shortwave radio.
In 1978, China launched the new “open door” policy in pursuit of foreign trade and investment. In 1978, only 728 foreign tourists visited Hangzhou. The following year, 40,000 tourists came to the city. Yun Ma saw his chance.
For the next 9 years, between the ages of 14 and 23, Yun Ma would wake up at dawn, teach himself English, and ride his bike to the Hangzhou Hotel to give tours to foreigners. He honed his communication skills. An American tourist whose father and husband were named Jack suggested the name and “Ma Yun” became known in English henceforth as Jack. I like that name.
“English helps me a lot. It makes me understand the world better, helps me meet with the best CEOs and leaders in the world, and makes me understand the distance between China and the world.” -Jack Ma
At one point, an Australian family who were visiting Hangzhou took Jack under their wing. One of the sons became Jack’s pen pal, and they brought Jack on a trip to Australia.
“Everything I learned in China [before the trip] was that China was the richest country in the world. Then I arrived in Australia and realized it was totally different. I started to think you have to use your own mind to judge.”
But despite his inner independence, Jack would face years of failures and struggle. His first job was delivering heavy bundles of magazines from printers to the Hangzhou train station. He was rejected when he applied for a job as a waiter in a hotel because he wasn’t tall enough. When he took the Chinese test to get into college, he failed the gaokao math section with a score of 1/120 and wasn’t allowed in. The next year he took the test again, scored better on the math section (19/120), but his overall school dropped and he still wasn’t accepted. Jack would later speak of failing the test twice as a badge of honor.
After the second failure, Jack sent out 7 job applications. They were all rejected. One of the applications he sent out to KFC and of the 24 candidates, he was the only one not picked.
Finally, in 1984, at the age of 19, Jack scored 89 in the math section (several points below the normal acceptance rate) and was accepted to a local university. He would be learning/teaching English at the Hangzhou teachers college. He taught there for 2 years.
After class, Jack worked part time on his first company called Haibo. Haibo means “Hope,” but has a literal translation of “vast like the sea.” Haibo was an English translation company.
First Encounter with the Internet
In early 1994, Jack was asked by the government of Tonglu County to assist as an interpreter. They wanted him to help resolve a dispute with an American company over the construction of a new highway. The American company had promised to build a highway between Hangzhou and Tonglu, but the negotiations were in a deadlock. Jack traveled to America for the first time.
In Las Vegas, Jack Ma was kidnapped. The American company he was investigating did not exist, his host was a crook, and he found himself in serious danger. The host wanted Jack to work for him and locked him in a hotel room. Jack escaped, won $600 on slot machines in the casino, and took a plane to Seattle.
In Seattle, Jack stayed with Bill Aho’s (a fellow teacher/co-worker) son-in-law. While walking around the neighborhoods, Jack would point at various houses and say, “I’m going to buy that one, and that one, and that one.” At the time, he didn’t have a nickel.
Bill Aho’s son-in-law (Stuart Trusty) had set up an Internet consultancy firm called Virtual Broadcast Network. Trusty showed Jack what the internet was. Back then, the Internet was mostly just a directory for governments and businesses, but Jack seemed excited. The first word he searched was beer. He found American Beer, German beer, but no Chinese beer. Then Jack searched ‘China’ and no data appeared. The seed was planted.
Back in Hangzhou, Jack set about building his concept of an online yellow pages. He named the business China Pages. During this time, he saw the dean of his school on a bicycle buying vegetables. The dean encouraged Jack to keep working hard at teaching. Jack saw a limit to ambition as a teacher. He told himself he would put everything towards this new venture.
In April 1995, Jack borrowed money from his relatives, including his sister, brother-in-law, and parents and started the Hangzhou Haibo Network Consulting (HHNC). His wife, Cathy, was the first employee.
But the problem was that nobody could get online in Hangzhou. It is difficult for us to imagine now, but Jack was telling businesses, “Give me your money ($1-2 thousand dollars) and I’ll put your business info into this invisible, magic place.” Jack would later say, “I was treated like a con man for three years.” When a business did agree to a deal, Jack would mail the website designs to Seattle for them to set it up.
In 1996, HHNC was near bankruptcy. The world wasn’t ready for the internet yet. Jack was too early. An additional problem was that Jack’s sites were too rudimentary. They were just directories.
In November, 1997, Jack left his company. “At that time I called myself a blind man riding on the back of blind tigers. Without knowing anything about technology or computers, I started the first company. And after years of terrible experience, we failed.” He started work at the government’s Foreign Trade of Economic Cooperation, which to me sounded very similar to The Ministry of Magic:
Jack was like a fish out of water, and had to bide his time until he could jump back into the entrepreneurial sea of China’s internet.
This chance came in 1999, when Jack founded Alibaba. He knew he was on to something big, would frequently give inspiring speeches to his few employees, and began filming all of their meetings. In early 1999, China had 2 million internet users and personal computers cost $1,500. The number of users would double in six months and reach 9 million by the end of the year. Jack and Alibaba were ready to ride the internet wave. In 2000, Jack traveled to Berlin and gave a speech on the internet in a 500-person auditorium to 3 people.
Most of Alibaba’s competitors at the time were business to business. Jack knew they needed to find their niche, and decided to stick to small businesses. Instead of focusing on the whales they focused on the shrimp. Jack says he found inspiration in Forrest Gump’s Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
Jack Ma said, “85% of the fish in the sea are shrimp sized. Who’s making money from whales? People are making money from shrimp.”
Alibaba grew (Goldman Sachs invested $5 million in the company), but the internet bubble was about to pop. Right before the dot com crash, though, another major investment by Softbank would keep Alibaba afloat. The investment of $20 million occurred because of a brief meeting between Jack and the CEO of Softbank, Masayoshi Son:
When Masayoshi was asked why he invested $20 million dollars after such a brief meeting, he replied,
“It was the look in his [Jack Ma’s] eye, it was an ‘animal smell’…it was the same when I invested in Yahoo!…when they were still only five to six people. I invested based on my sense of smell.”
Jack Ma would later describe Masayoshi as an “iron rooster,” which in Chinese is an idiom for “very cheap,” [you can’t pluck a single feather out of an iron rooster]. But this iron rooster believed in Jack Ma. A worker for Softbank said, “He’s [Masayoshi] crazy, but Ma’s also crazy. It’s very common for crazy people to like each other.”
The dot.com decline (2001-2002) were dark days for Alibaba, but they survived. Jack’s strategy was to “be the last man standing. If I had a hard time, my opponents had an even harder time. Those who can stand and manager will win eventually.”
But despite the setback, knowledge of the internet was growing. Between November 2002 and July 2003, an outbreak of SARS in southern China caused an eventual 8,098 cases, resulting in 774 deaths. But SARS also convinced millions of people, afraid to go outside, to try shopping online instead.
War Against Ebay
Ebay would try to become a major player in the Chinese Internet Market. Ebay would eventually lose the war against Alibaba. Here’s why:
1.) Ebay looked at their China competitors as enemies. Jack Ma had a different strategy: “Competition is the greatest joy…if you can’t tolerate your opponents, you will definitely be beaten by your opponents. If you have no enemy in your heart, you will be invincible in the world.”
2.) Ebay purchased Eachnet in China in order to compete, but maintained an arrogant, “leave-it-to-the-experts” attitude which demoralized the Eachnet team. China’s Ebay site looked foreign to local users. They didn’t even have a customer service number.
3.) Ebay didn’t know about the Chinese consumer. In website design, culture matters. In America, websites like Google are popular with their clean lines and uncluttered negative space. In China, this seems dull. Check out the old Alibaba site:
Commerce in China is very strange. Alibaba started with unconventional, non-standardized products. And they understood that individuals could be happy making 1 cent on a sale.
3.) Facing spiraling costs, Ebay’s Eachnet started charging fees to sellers, adding commissions on all transactions. Taobao (part of Alibaba) didn’t charge merchants or consumers to transact. Chinese merchants at the time were “allergic to paying fees,” and while Taobao’s free policy was dangerous, the site steadily gained popularity.
4.) Because of Eachnet’s charging policy they had to worry about policing, while Taobao encouraged interactions between merchants and consumers. Taobao even created a chat window.
5.) Ebay “moved” their hosting website from China to America. With China’s government firewalls, websites overseas took much slower to load. Furthermore, when the engineers wanted to change one word on the site, it would take 9 weeks. If they wanted to change a feature on the website, it would take a year.
6.) Ebay had an effective monopoly in the U.S. and was complacent. Meg Whitman, who was the CEO of Ebay during their war with Alibaba, would say years later: “It was not a market where you can take a product or system in the U.S. and export it to China.” As Jack said, “Ebay is a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose, but if we fight in the river, we win.”
7.) An emphasis on capital over people. Ebay invested 100 million into China, but Jack at the time just laughed, “They [Ebay] has big pocket, but we cut a hole in that pocket. Some say the power of capital is enormous. Capital does have its power. But the real power is the power of the people controlling the capital. People’s power is enormous. Businessman’s power is inexhaustible.”
Alibaba won the war. In 2005, a desperate Ebay condescendingly offered to buy Taobao for $150 million dollars. Jack replied, “No, we’re just getting started.” Then Ebay offered $900 million. Jack declined and the meeting was over. Later that year Yahoo! would invest $1 billion in Alibaba.
Today, Jack Ma is worth $28.7 billion dollars (according to Forbes, 3/1/2017). “A record $463 billion of business transactions were conducted on Alibaba’s retail platforms in the fiscal year through March 2016.” And last year, on “Singles’ Day” (a retaliation against Valentine’s Day which celebrates the country’s single population) the site recorded nearly $18 billion in sales in 24 hours.
If you still don’t believe it’s important to be aware of Jack Ma and Alibaba, while writing this essay I discovered a Business Insider Article written today on the same subject. Check it out if you want to learn more.
And if you’re wondering about the picture of Jack with the black lipstick and the tall mohawk…Jack dressed up as a punk rocker for a performance in front of 20,000 Alibaba employees at the company’s anniversary event/talent show. He came a long way from his Berlin speech in 2000 to 3 people.
And yes, Jack Ma is crazy. But as the wise Forrest Gump once said, “What’s normal anyways?”
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