Savor

(There’s an app for that.)

[EDITOR’S NOTE. Two things here:

1) Thousands of people read Bully Pulpit faithfully every week, for which Bob and the small team at Booksmart Studios are most appreciative. But we’d be even appreciativer if you’d also share, comment, restack, share and also share. It is vastly important for the reach of the Bully word.

2) Bob has just finished writing a book three years in the making. It’s about Serbia, so there is not a huge scrum among publishers to get rights for it. Thus, having some time on his hands, Bob has begun another project, a hybrid memoir/self-help book filled with life advice drawn from his up-and-down many, many years on earth. What follows is its fourth chapter. See 1) above.]

We used to make fun of my late father-in-law, Bud Cain. After a round of golf or a construction job around the house, he’d draw down a cold Iron City lager and say, “Bobby, I believe this is the best beer I’ve ever had.” It’s not that he enjoyed a glass of cold beer. He enjoyed the living fuck out of that particular glass of cold beer. And the next time the same. Yeah, he’d get teary eyed at a wedding, and thrilled when his Steelers won the Super Bowl, but his capacity for transcendence in between major glories was unrivaled. “Have you ever seen a sunset so beautiful, Bobby?” “No, Dad,” I’d reply, for my own private (and condescending) amusement, “there has never been a sunset like that.” Later, his sons and I would have a big laugh about it.

You know what? Fuck us. Jaded us.

Not to belittle, say, summiting Everest, or hitting a casino jackpot, or baby’s first steps; those are peak moments. But if you live to be 75, and you count a moment as one second, you will have 2.4 billion of them. Which is, you know, the majority. Contained among them are countless simple pleasures and achievements to savor, from a cold beer, to unknotting a necklace chain, to a joke that undoes you, to a nostalgic song, to a satisfying bathroom visit. (Documented, by the way, in the Annals of Gastroenterology. Don’t laugh. It’s a thing. And consider the alternative.) Life is chock-a-block with tiny, not especially enduring satisfactions and triumphs, each a glimpse of the glorious. One of my great regrets, along with not playing a musical instrument or being Edward Hopper, is letting these moments sublimate, barely noticed and insufficiently appreciated, into the ether. Listening to Bud wax ecstatic at a polish-sausage sandwich was like Lord Byron admiring a babe.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies …

Bud wasn’t one much for lyric poetry, but I can approximate how kielbasa stirred his soul.

The sausage rests there on the plate
Spiced and salted, meat in casing
O, joy my palate’s pregnant fate
Hunger pangs so soon abasing
Obliterating pain and hate
The bun as well is quite amazing

It is by no means a unique observation that we should cherish the simple joys, to take time to smell the roses. Alas, that hoary advice — if you ask me — hasn’t much taken hold. We are all so busy racing through our hours and day, seeking satisfaction from our jobs and social lives and errands and sports, we tragically neglect to live in the moment. Crazier still, we make little attempt to create the conditions for some proper savoring. And the people who do, wine aficionados, say, tend to contaminate the moments with their suffocating pretension. Me, I like a fine wine and a Michelin-star restaurant as much as the next bloke, but spending so many years with Bud Cain has given me the gift that keeps on giving. Yesterday, I had a Whopper with fries. Yeah, I wolfed it down like … a wolf, I guess, but I literally sat in my parked car muttering, “Oh, my God. This is so fucking great.” Because it was. And it made me happy. Friends, you can never have too much happy.

Last night, I streamed an Irish cop procedural called “Blue Lights.” It isn’t a Shakespeare sonnet, or a Beethoven piano sonata, or even “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the “Thriller” video or Groundhog Day. But the writing and acting are phenomenal. And I sat there on my sofa, often with a big-ass grin on my face, sometimes at just a gesture or expression from the remarkable actors, or a fragment of dialogue that was funnier or more human in four words than any entire passage you’ll find in this book. In other words, not passive consumption but excited, active audiencing. It’s the same for me at art museums and ballgames and dog walks and casual interactions with strangers.

I learned this from my father in law, who so often — no matter how commonplace the interlude — stood one ladder rung below ecstasy. So what makes you grin with delight? Think about it, and engineer those things into your life.

Even in the entertainment cornucopia that is the modern era, that imperative has always been easier said than done. Until about 10 years ago, so much of life came at you on other people’s schedules, and at best uncurated for you. If you happened to catch a sunset, or a good show came on, you were probably busily en route to a markedly less magnificent and life-affirming destination. But now we have the capacity to be fed some of our favorite things directly to our phones, where they sit quietly waiting for us to dig in.

Yes, I’m speaking of social-media apps, and, yes, social media is a terrible, swift double-edged sword. Yes, it is addictive, causing irreparable harm to our society and societies around the world. Yes, it was made explicitly as an electronic drug to trigger a feel-good dopamine release in users’ brains to make them crave more and more and more. Yes, it is causing great harm to children, and has fed the bigotry, delusions and lies of zealots, steering democracy to the very brink. Yes, its algorithm feeds you only what you’ve shown interest in, no matter how dishonest, malevolent or cruel. In many ways it is a blight on mankind.

But you can say the same about nuclear energy, the automobile, painkillers, CCTV, capitalism, religion and, for that matter, books. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Big seller. Every year. Likewise The Turner Diaries. (And about 7,000 James Patterson novels, which maybe aren’t evil, but do we really need them?)

The point is, many of history’s most profoundly valuable inventions have a dark, destructive underbelly — but also priceless benefits. Social media, when used responsibly, is one such. For me, it is the AutoBudCain. Details coming right up, but first a brief voyage back in time.

In 2007, working on an article titled “Listenomics” and a book that grew from it, I was in Tel Aviv to visit a software company called Taboola. Its innovation fascinated me: a recommendation engine for video sites that surveyed your selection history, then populated the right rail of your page with thumbnail links to videos on similar subjects. Maybe woodworking, maybe rollercoasters or curry recipes, whatever. If you watched someone cook Aloo Matar, you’d see a list of others for Chana Masala, Katsu and Thai Panang. The technology was an advancement over “collaborative filtering,” which offered, for instance, Amazon Shopping suggestions by serving you choices by other shoppers with profiles like yours.

In Israel, I felt like I was an eyewitness to history. And I was, like Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant Igor. Because soon the monster was out of control.

First, Taboola took a left turn and deployed the technology to serve users clickbait “content,” luring them down rabbit holes of shitty ads. Twenty years later, that’s still the biggest part of its $1 billion+ business. It’s gross.

But much worse, this algorithmic solution to feeding content anticipated Facebook’s notorious EdgeRank system, which synthesized user engagement and subject relevance to create millions of feedback loops for, sure, woodworking but also demagoguery and worse. It isn’t a lie detector, it is a lie projector — and an addictive one, to boot. Mark Zuckerberg’s hundreds of billions of dollars are the blood money for savaging human civilization.

But … but … but … in the past decade my initial enthusiasm has been partially — and not meagerly — redeemed by my video feeds and yours. My jam is singers I’ve never heard of doing American Songbook standards with stunning virtuosity. Lucy Thomas and Stella Cole, for example. I hang on every note. I also get fed a lot of standup comedy clips — among them superstar Nate Bargatze, but also much less famous comics and video sketch artists like Emily Catalano, Mark Simmons, Ismo Leikola, Julie Nolke — and excerpts from British comedy game shows. Plus the odd juggler, rope jumper (Lauren) and quirky jazz dancer (Peachey). Plus clips of live jazz and dance performances from the 40s, 50s and 60s. Plus a precocious, bespectacled little Irish kid named Jacob just weighing in on life. Plus great auditions from the global “_____’s Got Talent” franchise. There’s a 13-year-old girl named Courtney Hadwin and a musical theater singer Sidney Christmas whose audition videos I’ve watched at least 50 times each.

There are probably 30 regular subjects in my feed, and I consume them like chocolate truffles. Not like stuffing myself with popcorn, mind you, but truffles — each delightful video slowly, sweetly melting in my mouth.

I’m a big reader of fiction, but sometimes I lay my book aside for an entire hour or more and just treat myself to serial delights. Every one of them in its way thrilling, reminding me, in case I’d forgotten, of the countless glittering jewels that our world affords us. Like a cold beer after an exhausting day, joy on demand.

Better still, it leaves you with a heightened sense of awareness and gratitude for the rewarding moments in your day-to-day life that you’ve tuned out amid the commotion of the rat race. Look at those kids playing on the sidewalk. Awww! Look at that funny sign in front of the church. (“Acting perfect in church is like dressing up for an x-ray.”) Look at that ’57 Chevy!

Look at that sunset. I think I’m going to pull over, just to take it in.