#4: Three Things I Enjoyed This Week
a podcast about choice blindness, a poem about community, and the joys of dog watching
Hello to Friday, and to you! It’s the day before the coronation in London. I haven’t noticed as much preparatory bunting as I’d expect, but I’m sure tomorrow will be both strange and resplendent.
Watching dogs
If there’s one thing staying near Hampstead Heath has taught me, it’s that I’m not above crouching down to photograph strangers’ dogs. I’ve finally nailed a 5-mile loop around the park, which takes me past gaggles of dogs tethered to a dog walker’s outstretched arm. The lucky ones frolic leashless, dipping into ponds or chasing each other through the brambles. Watching dogs is a guaranteed pick-me-up. I have a goal to greet people the way dogs do. I don’t mean sniffing your butt (unless you ask nicely…), but in the spirit of their the tail-wagging, tongue-jangling approach that signals their open-heartedness.1 What would life be like if I greeted the world this way?
“In the House With No Doors” by Sarah Kay
My brilliant friend Cat sent me “In the House with No Doors,” by Sarah Kay, saying it reminded her of the opening to my essay about community. When Cat sends me a poem, it always grasps my heart and squeezes it out like a damp rag over the sink. Just read this part:
In bed, you say, Goodnight! in one direction
and someone says it back, then turns and passes it,
so you fall asleep to the echo of goodnights down the long hallway
’til it donuts its way back around to your pillow.
Someone is doing a load of laundry,
if anyone wants to add some extra socks?
Someone is clearing the dishes,
someone has started singing Gershwin in the backyard
and you can’t help but harmonize,
and for a moment what you always hoped was true
finally is: loneliness has forgotten your address,
french toast browning on the stovetop,
the sound of everyone you love
clear as the sun giggling through the window,
not even a doorknob between you.
I love what Kay says about writing this poem:
I have an annual tradition which involves a large group of friends gathering together in a small house for a weekend. We are too old and there are too many of us to justify the way we cram into this tiny house—filling every corner, sleeping on couches and floors, and staying up too late, but it is a giddy, joyful weekend that refills my heart’s fuel tank for the whole year. This poem came out of imagining a world in which this was not a rare brief treat, but a state of togetherness I could inhabit.
Petter Johansson on Choice Blindness
I got many interesting responses to my tradwives piece from Monday. More than a few readers wrote me to say that they were affected by this paragrah:
The tradwives, Fleabag, and me—we’re not that different. The tradwives are choosing a form of stability in the face of what they see as society breaking down. Fleabag wants to be told what to do because the myriad choices of adulthood are painful. I’m “choosing” to look at all of this as a way to make sense of how confusing and difficult life can be.
The next day, Becca Rothfeld published a piece about tradwives on her Substack, a fête worse than death. Something is in the water! In her piece, she dismisses people who defend tradwives through the lens of choice, which she sees as negative outcome of “choice fetish[ism]” rebranded as liberal feminism, saying that it’s important to draw moral distinctions. Of course, I think what tradwives proselytize is problematic and wrong—focusing on choice is not a defense of their lifestyle—but I can still see that they are operating under the belief that they are choosing. Just because choice is a construct doesn’t mean that choices can be excised from analysis. I guess what I am stuck on is the idea that some people can make “real” choices while others are just problematic recipients of societal beliefs.
Anyway, I listened to this excellent interview on the Social Science Bites podcast (which I’ve written about here) with researcher Petter Johansson, who studies choice blindness. It’s easy to think we are choosing, but his lab’s work investigates how we are less aware of why we make our choices than we think we are. In fact, we make the rationalizations for our choices post hoc. The concept of choice is, in many ways, a fallacy. Listen to the episode to learn more, and check out the Choice Blindness Lab’s research here.
People who say that dogs “don’t smile” are evil, joy-haters and I don’t want to hear from them.