James F. Richardson's Blog, page 4
December 5, 2024
Episode 12 - The Modern Friendship Ecosystem
In modern America, most of us live in a post-family society, no matter how often we call Mom. The structure of our everyday lives, social policies, and many other forces make family a low priority for most Americans.
Therefore, we have learned to rely ever more on our friends. Friends help us find our soul mates, job opportunities, emotional comfort, an…
November 30, 2024
The Labor Shirking American Kitchen - The Greatest Social Trend No One Talks About

Let’s face it. Millions of Americans spent more time cooking this past Thursday than on any other day of the year - in our nation of cooking minimalists. Yet, the day before Thanksgiving is one of America’s biggest days for restaurant take-out.
Why are we overcome with kitchen laziness the day before the country’s biggest cooking day?
We have no kitchen stamina. That’s why. And there are guests in our home who expose our lack of stamina in meal prep.
How did we get here?
Every once in a while, a consumer lawsuit reveals an underlying, slow-rolling social change that has re-defined most of America’s middle and upper-middle-class homes (~75% of the population). In this case, it’s a trend we’ve entirely forgotten because we’re so dependent on it.
Recently, a Miami woman sued KraftHeinz for $5 million because her microwaveable Velveeta mac-n-cheese cup took far longer than 3.5 minutes to prepare. This is a false labeling lawsuit. - "The statement of 'ready in 3 1⁄2 minutes' is false and misleading…”
Convenience foods. Wow. They remove the labor of cooking almost entirely and often reduce cooking to a simple heating process of varying lengths by appliance type.
Frozen Prepared Foods requiring only heating, for example, are a ~$20B market segment in the U.S.1 And growing. Boxed meal kits, including mac-n-cheese, are an even larger segment. Then, there are the fresh meal take-home options from the supermarket deli. If you scan the various places in the store where you buy something to avoid anything approaching real cooking, the total ‘no-cook’ meal market probably amounts to 15-20% of our food-at-home spending. Maybe more.
We don’t eat convenient meals at home daily but definitely do every week. And some, like my teenage son, do eat them daily. I eat them daily for lunch. God Save the Retort Pouch. I’m way too busy to make a sandwich.
The issue we Americans have with cooking is our total insecurity about it. This insecurity is not overblown. For many, it stems from a) lack of domestic skills transmission after the 1960s (when Home Economics faded away in public high schools) and b) our worship of culinary celebrities who intimidate/fascinate us. According to the Hartman Group, only 16% of adults today classify themselves as ‘capable cooks.' ’2 What?! My four great-grandmothers from New Hampshire would be wide-eyed in horror, reading this.
Convenient, labor-saving food products started with Hormel tinned meat in the late 19th century, a technological breakthrough that sold primarily to frontiersmen, explorers, travelers, and the military. Hormel canned meat was salted and pre-cooked, so you could shove your spoon in the can and eat the meat. Wow.
Just. Eat. The. Meat.
No skinning. No butchering. No seasoning. No roasting. No baking. No wait.
Then, there was the great frozen meal revolution of the 1960s.
Then, the microwaveable frozen meal revolution of the 1980s.
Then the microwaveable handheld frozen revolution of the 1990s brought cook times down to 2.5 minutes. Hot Pockets is the key brand here. My 14- year-old son consumes roughly 1-2 truckloads of Hot Pockets a year. Hey, why are you laughing?
Then, in 2013, Sandwich Bros. of Wisconsin launched a new line of frozen pita pocket meals that reduced the heat time to 90 seconds with their yummy Chicken Melts (available at Costco).
Now, wait! I’m not done yet.
I now know a founder who has created a fantastic precooked Tamale that nukes hot in 30 seconds! It turns out that tamales have just about the perfect molecular composition for a “rapid thermal runway,” as they say in food science (I’ve waited ten years to deploy that phrase casually in a sentence, folks). Whoa, dude.
Are we reaching the singularity of convenience in hot meal prep time, folks? The singularity will occur at home, if anywhere. Even the 24/7 ready C-store roller dog requires you to walk/drive there. How presumptuous of my time!
Scratch cooking still happens, but it’s on a long-term decline when viewed from the perspective of empirically counting meal occasions (and how they were prepared). Glib polling surveys dependent on respondent recall tend to overestimate scratch cooking because Americans have relaxed their definition of “cooking” quite a bit since my great-grandmother’s era and because we cannot recall habitual behavior accurately in surveys or interviews. We inflate ‘desirable/admirable’ behaviors in our memories.
Years ago, when I spent most of my days wandering the pantries of America, I learned straight from the mouths of working Moms that convenient meal prep was about a meal with a low cognitive burden more than quick meal prep.
“Easy” beats “quick.”
Cognitive ease beats any other product attribute on specific occasions when the ‘cook’ is emotionally drained/wasted/brain fogged.
The ultra-quick, heat-in-package frozen products I mentioned above win on cognitive burden AND time. Boom. Boom. $20B in sales and climbing.
However, in a society where recent technologies of information and package distribution have raised expectations of consumption speed and timeliness (see above), it shouldn’t surprise anyone that someone would be pissed at the bogus claim of 3.5 minutes of prep time on Velveeta’s packaging. It is absolutely bogus if you’ve ever made one of these microwaveable cups.
It’s just odd for someone to think they should be able to obtain more than a refund.
Or is it?
Does Maria have a broader point? Don’t. Insult. The. Consumer. Thy. God.
Condescending to the consumer is, unfortunately, hard-wired in many of these processed food companies. Oh, the things I’ve heard in my career.
Look, folks, if you’re going to point to the Holy Sacrament of Convenience, make sure you really are convenient.
Thirty seconds is the new bar for heat-n-eat foods. Someone keeps moving the bar. Always. Moving. The Bar.
Oh hey, if you want two Walking Tamales for lunch, you can eat the first while heating the next one. Now, that’s some adept anti-cooking.
BOOK UPDATE -
My slow-rolling book PR efforts led to a great conversation with Calgary-based therapist Furkhan Dandia this week. Here’s the topical outline we covered:
00:00 Introduction and Guest Background02:09 Cultural Shock: India vs. USA04:04 Social Isolation and Community Dynamics10:15 Mental Health and Career Challenges16:08 Western vs. Eastern Mental Health Perspectives23:59 Struggles of Urban Migration in India25:29 Surveillance and Social Pressure27:00 Victim Mentality and Social Mobility30:25 Role Models and Hope36:42 Affirmative Action and Education44:30 Concluding Thoughts and ResourcesHave a listen on Apple podcasts and enjoy!

Frozen and Refrigerated Buyer Magazine, August 2022, page 6-8 cited on Statista.com
2November 27, 2024
Episode 11 - Part Five
Americans have slowly adapted to a “fun” approach to friendship that maximizes our ability to be noncommittal and minimizes any sense of reciprocal obligation to our friends.
Overburdening our spouses and partners has resulted from treating our friends as ‘entertainment.’
It takes a lot of work to fight against all of this.

November 23, 2024
Late Blooming Alpha Males In Trouble

I came of age in the latter half of the 1980s. Like most nerds, I was also an anxious, socially awkward kid. But I was NOT shy. If you got me talking, I might go on and on and on…and on. God help you. I still excel in the lost art of talking at people, so I never really qualified as shy by any definition you pick. If you want a conversation with me, however, it will probably be painful…for you.
I rant with the best of ’em.
Dating was a miserable experience on the front end because the culture at that time (1980s and 1990s) still asked men to do the romantic chasing. Women who chased men were becoming more common but struck most guys as creepy (is this a scam? Does she just want my sperm?). This was the cultural code of the time. And it did not work for me at all. Why? Our society asked hetero-men to front all the emotional risks in initiating relationships (i.e., potential rejection). And my Aspie brain was not built for social rejection. It also tended to obsess about what was never going to happen. I had not yet concluded that modern dating is essentially a volume game for many people. Eventually, you’ll find a match in the ugly sock drawer.
The modern phrase for my predicament is - “dude has no game.” Indeed, my first two girlfriends selected me. Perfect. It’s how I preferred it at the time. I lacked the alpha male’s sexual confidence.
Passivity is not the stuff of suitable matches, however. In reality, both people need to filter and select. Yet, this requires maturity, not just what Joseph Campbell once referred to on a PBS special as “the zeal of the gonads for each other.” Unfiltered horniness leads to loads of one-sided selections and failed relationships.
The two times I tried to ‘chase’ a female as a young adult according to the dominant masculine code were a total emotional disaster..for me. The women involved then cited When Harry Met Sally and wanted to be my platonic friend. Of course, they did. Of course. I moved on eventually.
My passive social awkwardness was deemed sad and pathetic by the standard of the time. As an upper-middle-class young adult, I was also expected to have even more refined soft social skills (e.g., Richard Gere, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Ryan Reynolds). These subtle communication skills are critical to romance and career networking. But Americans, historically, are notoriously brash and unsubtle (if you ask citizens of classical civilizations like India, Indonesia, China, and Japan)—especially American men. Think Teddy Roosevelt or George Patton. Or Robert Duvall’s famous performance in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now - “God! I LOVE the smell of napalm in the morning!”

Unsubtle. Very. These were the male role models the media incessantly fed me as a child. I watched, terrified that I would be asked to perform this level of aggression despite my completely awkward persona.
Romance has always been a mating ideology of the Euro-American social elite, originating in the late Medieval aristocracy of Western Europe, especially France.1 Oh, those fussy French! The code of romantic courting is full of subtlety that my particular brain is not great at deploying. I can appreciate it passively in film but not execute it like a neurotypical peer or a French Cassanova. My social skills still align more with Clint Eastwood and Al Pacino’s crude, profane masculinity than Ryan Reynold’s nonbinary, whatever it is. Eastwood seems much easier to pull off for any hetero male of my generation. His alpha male approach has just one skill continuum - aggression/dominance. I’ll come back to this in a bit.
I was not completely hopeless in love, but I relied on attracting very tough, emotionally thick-skinned women (e.g., Tom Boys) who do not need routine validation and verbal stroking and who can handle a vigorous intellectual debate. This approach was possible, yes, but statistically unlikely in a random sample of women. Most humans, men and women, need tons of validation on an ongoing basis to feel comfortable in their relationships.
I just never need this myself. It’s an Aspie superpower in an alienated, individualistic society. And a massive liability in the 21st century.
The Triumph of the Romantic Couple And Subtle Soft SkillsMy romantic awkwardness pointed to a broader inability of mine to manage complex social relationships in an individualistic society like ours. American civil society hands young adults enormous amounts of autonomy in complex life decisions long before they have any real wisdom to manage them independently. And because the rules of work, friendship, and dating keep changing all the time, the elders are not as effective as they used to be, even when consulted.
In graduate school and my first full-time desk job in the aughts, I fumbled around trying to figure out what people wanted me to do, especially the disinterested professors and passive-aggressive managers I encountered. Clients were a complete mystery in their indirect communicative subtlety. Just say what you want! For fuck’s sake!
Modern urban life for the educated involves a pretty high standard of social interaction, and I did not understand it. This standard is built around at least four principles that are not intuitive to working-class men, American men born before, say, 1960, or neurodiverse grumps of any age like me.
This standard has four principles I can discern (at least):
asking for what you need in relationships
conversing with high emotional intelligence
setting clear standards/boundaries (because society will not)
defending those standards/boundaries (because society will not)
Re-read that list. These are the social skills many of us now associate with highly secure, emotionally confident middle-aged adults (40 plus). It takes decades of ‘autonomy’ to master these skills because our society does not actively manage relationships from the top down (except at work). The elders are not that involved anymore in your personal life (unless you share everything). We tend to fumble around for years, even if we are neurotypical.
Moreover, women have a major edge because they have always been socialized to have higher empathy and, therefore, higher EQ. This is critical to managing highly subtle social interactions like corporate meetings or romantic dates.
When you are bad at the above four skills, like I used to be, you tend to have a passive relationship style that applies to any relationship in your life, from dating and work. I know this was my case. I did not make demands of those in authority or communicate intentions well with peers. I did not know how to soften my criticism. I trusted authority to have my best interests at heart without communicating them, something possible only in a highly conservative, slowly changing society. And when relationships floundered, I would suddenly exit stage left. Silently. I would flee. There was no structure to block my flight, sit me down, talk constructively, and redirect me.
But running from people is not setting boundaries. It’s avoidance. Our society lets people run for years if they want to. Watch Five Easy Pieces for a tragic depiction of what unending, autonomous male flight from reality looks like.
The Late Blooming Alpha Male is Now DatedIt took me until about age 32 to finally develop a ‘normal’ 20th century, highly autonomous, alpha male orientation to the world, the idealized one preached to me in film, media, and among male role models I had available to me. Finally, I was willing to select and ‘chase’ women and deal with the rejection appropriately. I was willing to set boundaries at work and not just run from conflict. I was willing to do ego battle at the workplace and seek promotions. I stopped taking shit from colleagues. I outmaneuvered them to get what I wanted from the boss.
The passivity of my 20s was gone. Living in India and almost getting killed there three times had a lot to do with my newfound social confidence.
The problem is that this transformation released my inner alpha male, who had always been hiding amidst the social awkwardness. He was the guy who came out in all those intellectual arguments and rants, and “HE” was very happy to be out and about all day long. My inner “Dirty Harry” was not that socially skilled—just aggressive and intimidating. Oh dear.
My trajectory then crashed into a much larger social trend unfolding across American offices in the 2000s - the co-edification of the modern white-collar workplace. Although women started entering white-collar work in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, they did so in male-dominated organizations. By the 2000s, this was changing fast in many fields (e.g., marketing, sales, market research, project management, insurance, accounting, etc.). Gender ratios reached 50/50 or 70/30 female: male by the 2010s in various fields like mine.
In a female-dominated workplace, the dated model of aggressive alpha masculinity rapidly became uncool—at work and elsewhere. Mine was aided and abetted by Aspie neurology and very hard to change, however. It took me a long time to realize what was irritating some female colleagues. I still have difficulty switching my interactional code to “co-ed.” I tend to see the whole room as male unless it’s a very expensive corporate workshop I’m leading.
I remember distilling my predicament into one pithy phrase, quietly sitting alone in my office:
“I finally got the courage to act like the crude alpha male women wanted to date in the 1980s to find out they can’t stand them at work in the 2010s.” FUCK!!!!
If that isn’t confusing to read, you must be neurotypical. I still can’t understand why the same aggressive confidence is sexually attractive at the bar AND ‘egomania’ at work. I’m missing something in my analysis, I’m sure.
I do understand the difference intellectually. It’s the difference between how women influence the interactional codes of very different social spaces (work and love). Work has bureaucratic tools to contain ‘inappropriate’ male aggression, much like a conservative Yanomami village in the Amazon jungle. For the latter, male aggression is for interclan battle, not for your relatives, wife, and children.
My solution to my late-blooming Alpha status was to fire myself and give the women in the office their historically earned reprieve. After all, it was now their social space. Social dominance has consequences, like elections.
I work for myself now and irritate only my wife, kids, and dogs.
Don’t forget to grab my new book for friends or family this Holiday Season…

Romantic marriage has only been a broad, middle-class norm in America since the end of WWII. Prior to that, marriage was an incredibly practical, socially managed channeling of normal sexual energies. Most of the elders in my parents’ generation (born in the 1930s/1940s), for example, did not date more than 1-2 individuals before getting married in their late teens and early twenties. Many married their first serious boyfriend or girlfriend. Huh? The idea of having a series of placeholder relationships before settling down makes no sense to them (still) and hence they had little guidance to offer us about things like ‘recreational sex.’ They were also not believable sources of advice because they had dated so little. Dating really was a means to a rapid marital end for them. They thought adding ‘romance’ was enough modernization.
(This is why today’s Gen X and Millennial parents have switched to a proactive coaching model of parenting (which sometimes goes too far). They want their kids to avoid their own years of dating fumbles and silliness.)
November 20, 2024
Episode 10 On Food Sensitivities and Potlucks
The final chapters in Part Four of Our Worst Strength take us deep into the murky world of dietary intolerances, aspirational diets, and calling a “potluck” to avoid dealing with the B.S. caused by trying to cater to the former.
Who could possibly keep track of the latest ingredient aversion in our friendship network? This would require a virtual admin,…
November 16, 2024
I Won a Book Award and I'm Tired
I won an award! The lovely folks at the Best Indie Book Award picked Our Worst Strength for 2024 Best Nonfiction-Social Sciences. I appreciate all the hard work that goes into any award-granting process. So many books. My Lord. So many. And this is the most competitive indie press award there is.

While my new essays cook longer in the oven, I’d like to reward new subscribers with a taste from the archives.
So, I’ve unlocked these issues for the next week. Enjoy where “my” imagination goes…
And hit that “Upgrade” button, if you’re moved to do so.
Oh. All paid subscribers now get access to the audio edition! New episodes come out weekly until I reach the end. We’re already into Part Four - How We Came to Eat Whatever, Whenever. The true pork belly of this tome.

November 13, 2024
Episode 9 - Part Four Begins
America unleashed the phenomenon of on-demand eating whenever hunger strikes. We also created a processed food industry that provides cheap, ready-to-eat snack foods and disseminates them everywhere.
Eating whatever, whenever is the critical driver of obesity in America and requires a lot of planning to thwart. A lot.
Most of the media explores what we …
November 9, 2024
Social Fragmentation And the Trump Win

To understand what happened this week empirically, let’s examine the math behind this week’s election. I will apply the dual lenses of a corporate market researcher AND anthropologist.
Here we go!
~172M adults voted last Tuesday1
265.8M adults (18 ) lived in the U.S. as of the end of 2023.2
Around 65% of eligible adult voters participated, although this percentage appears to have dropped slightly since the 2020 federal election.3 By how much? By 2% of the VEP (i.e., the 265.8M adults). This may seem negligible to readers, but I’ll show why it’s not too tiny to matter in the current cultural era.

OK. So, what happened in the Presidential vote?
Only 84% of ballots had a presidential choice4 (some folks only care about local problems)
Only 28% of the eligible U.S. population voted for Trump to be in power5
In the popular vote, Trump won by only 3% of those who marked a Presidential choice. 8 million individuals provided Trump with the nationwide population margin to win.
In reality, the Presidential voting margin in only 6-8 states really mattered this week.
This is NOT a mandate in any statistical sense of a majority, and it does not qualify as a social science generalization (i.e., “America” voted for Trump. It did not.)
While voter participation has been up in recent Presidential elections, it was much higher in the 19th century, when 90% of the population was white and ‘man-only.’6 We still have a voter participation problem operating at scale.
~8 million voters cast critical votes for Trump allowing him to win the Electoral College
But ~5 million voters did not show up this week vs. 2020 (!)
Had these apathetic voters shown up, Trump’s national margin could have shrunk a lot (or perhaps grown)
Small swings in apathy and emotional pull can and do routinely decide Presidential races in the country today.
We deal with victory margins amenable to large-scale consumer marketing playbooks developed by leading consumer brands (e.g., Tide, Oreo, Bounty).
These marketing campaigns use research to isolate the most potent emotional argument to attract the largest brand-aware consumers to repurchase. Leading brands routinely develop campaigns to win back “lapsed” consumers for a tiny bump in sales volume. These campaigns may be executed in just 1-2 media channels and invisible to the general public. An effective Superbowl ad sometimes fits into this category, moving a tiny group of Americans to do something soon.
This commercial marketing work is similar to Russian interference on social media platforms or right-wing podcasts in terms of appealing to tiny population segments.
These population segments matter to flat billion-dollar consumer brands trying to grow by capturing 50-100 basis points of market share from a competitor. These kinds of segments also matter to today’s Presidential candidates. It is easier than ever to design ten campaigns aimed to inflame emotion in 10 unrelated groups where there is a variable you can manipulate to cause fear.
However, most pundits and political scientists are examining the usual demographic variables to isolate who contributed to Trump’s eight million-dollar margin.
Here’s just a taste of the usual demographic thinking:
9% swing from Catholics to Trump vs. 2020 7
Rural counties in Georgia swung hard to Trump8
Ethnically diverse (i.e., black and immigrant-heavy) counties swung hard in Michigan9
Counties with a majority black population swung to Trump10
Hispanics swing to Trump big in Arizona, and the SW11
Why would some immigrants, Catholics, Arizona Latinos, and African Americans in black-majority counties shift toward Trump’s populism? These folks appear to have nothing in common whatsoever.
The problem with this line of thinking is that demographics are easy to measure. Respondents self-identify readily with these big buckets because we are trained to do it in adulthood and by the US Census forms we fill out every 10 years. However, tiny sub-segments of large demographics can not be explained by generalizations of that demographic itself. This is flawed social science thinking.
All of the tiny voter ‘swing’ groups listed above could have something else in common unrelated to their position in these large demographic groups. Or there could be an intersecting variable (an internal continuum of disagreement) linked to something these groups have in common. We have missing variables we can not account for that most likely explain why sub-segments of blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants swung to Trump.
So, we can create demographic variable descriptions of WHO swung, but this does not explain WHY they did. This is a common fallacy repeatedly encouraged by political scientists, even authors with big audiences on this platform. It is also common among the average, poorly trained consumer insights executive at large consumer brands. It encourages sloppy stereotyping of Hispanics, Blacks, and immigrants, among other things.
The analytical problem we face is much more profound. It lies in our lifestyle-fractured society. I’ve recently written a book about how America’s actual glue as a nation is the desire to maximize personal autonomy (i.e., something only tiny religious communities -Mormons, the Amish, Mennonites, and cults—heavily disparage).
This has led to an explosion of lifestyle diversity, dividing local communities, neighborhoods, and even households.
Parallel to this macro-trend, in the past 100 years, we have become more socially isolated and less involved in community activities. We simply socialize in person far less than we did decades ago.
Our leisure time is primarily spent in individually curated behaviors (recreation and media consumption), not collectively organized events.
Media is a primary disintegrating agent here. Television is so cheap at 75 pennies per hour that it has overtaken our leisure time to an incredibly problematic degree. The spread of internet-based smartphones then accelerated the effective reach of very niche alternative media. Podcasts have become a potent force in the past decade, and many of them deal with alternative political ideologies and theories. Many are spewing total nonsense from the perspective of a well-educated American. Substack is filled with nonsense publications spreading non-science, bullsh*t, and conspiratorial junk thinking. Some routinely hit the Top of the Science Leaderboard.
Substack’s owners exemplify the apotheosis of America’s belief in radical personal autonomy, fueling the spread of niche beliefs and whipping up emotions that activate small, influential population segments.
A campaign no longer needs CNN or Fox News to swing 8 million voters. Increasingly, that’s NOT where the undecided or swing voter will be found and manipulated.
It’s right here on Substack or within Joe Rogan’s listening audience.
Without shared information sources, America steadily disintegrates further.
My best guess is that the demographic swing groups listed above each received messages designed to inflame extreme segments of each group on just one issue.
Pro-Life Extremist Catholics - Since a minority of Catholics are very pro-life, then use ‘candidate’ Randall Terry’s vile ads featuring pictures of fetal and infant corpses to shock them into action the next day.
Resentful Middle-Class Immigrants - We know there is a minority of legal immigrants who are very annoyed by illegal immigrants gaining quick access to jobs when “I struggled hard to do it legally.” This is often a condescending class argument within these groups when you poke around. So, the intersection of middle-class resentment and immigrant identity becomes critical.
When a bad faith actor behaves like a consumer marketer, the goal is to deploy emotion-laden stories to motivate low-think ballot-filling. We know that fear and humor are the primary drivers in consumer marketing, though consumer brands skew towards humor because their objective is to maximize reach in the target segment. Political ads tend to stoke fear as the critical emotional variable because fear aligns with imaginings of external threats to one’s niche lifestyle or beliefs. And fear motivates a smaller group to act immediately. Humor is more memorable than motivating.
Also, voting to protect yourself is vastly more compelling than voting to reform society (an abstraction).
The former has an immediate, albeit largely imagined, payoff. Not the latter.
America’s current political system is polarized, yes, but it is the fear-based manipulation of tiny, extreme population segments that will continue to determine many races at many levels.
This stoking of fear runs in parallel to the high baseline anxiety many of us feel due to the extreme lifestyle fragmentation all around us. If you don’t know what to say to your neighbor because you know they are gay or voluntarily childless or atheist, that mundane awkwardness exposes many of us to fear-based manipulation from bad faith media sources. When the world is genuinely confusing us, it takes little to push some into high anxiety right before election day.
This is why I quietly support the unthinkable - tighter control of content on media platforms, including this one. This could reduce the volume of fear-based misinformation, bad-faith content, and trust-dissolving content fed to tiny adult groups with only one purpose - to direct them to vote for one person (without telling them directly to do this). It could also focus on restricting this content only in the last month before an election to neuter its power.
If we want a less volatile, functional federal government (and I recognize that many Americans do not like this), we must control the last-minute fear-stoking sent to tiny, vulnerable, and extreme audiences via the Internet. We must reign in the unhinged long tail of alt media, where the problem lies.
I do not expect this to happen. Ever.
The cat and genie are both out…
1I’m using the % reported by the University of Florida’s Election Lab in a recent Foreign Policy online article and the US Census 18 population, or the Voter Eligible Population. The latter is the standard for tracking voter participation. https://foreignpolicy.com/projects/20...
2I used the latest American Community Survey data from the US Census. The monthly Current Population Survey would be slightly more accurate, but not by much.
3I’m using the same Voter Eligible Population standard as Professor McDonald does in this chart. However, this is not a definitive result. https://www.electproject.org/national...
4~147M marked a presidential choice according to the latest tally on Google.- https://bit.ly/40EoapC
572.7M Americans voted for Donald Trump, according to the latest online tally housed by Lord Google.
6https://www.electproject.org/national...
7According to exit polling collected by Fox News on election night, Catholics across the country swung 9 percentage points in Trump’s favor. 52 M Catholics - * 10% = 5.2M voting adults. It’s not abortion, though, since only 16-22% of Catholics favor pro-life legislation.
8https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/n...
9Ibid
10Ibid
11Ibid
November 6, 2024
Episode 8 - Informal, Noncommittal Fun
In this episode, loyal listeners will complete Part Three of my tome! I just upgraded my studio to Shure equipment, and you can probably hear the difference. Wow. Every twinge of my larynx is now yours to savor…God help thee.
Chapter Fifteen - Modern Recreational Worlds
Robert Putnam was right when he chronicled the decline of formal voluntary organizatio…
November 1, 2024
The Cold Water Plunge of Repatriation

I did not fight in the Trojan War before my return to America in 1999; that’s true.
I did not return from abroad to reclaim my beautiful wife, Penelope, constantly besieged by aggressive suitors after my twenty-year absence.
I also did not return in disguise to establish the loyalty of my wife and son. What?!
Odysseus was from an honor-based warrior society. I am not. Au contraire, I hail from shameless, individualistic America.
Like most modern graduate students in anthropology in the 1990s, I returned from the field alone to a society designed to promote personal autonomy in historically unprecedented ways that I’m sure Odysseus would find bewildering to navigate.
These people have no honor. No shame. They chase money like baby sea turtles trying to find the ocean.
And, even though I’d been gone barely three years, like Odysseus, I had to rebuild my life after living abroad. I returned to an urban campus in Madison, WI, where almost all of my friends and acquaintances before fieldwork had moved on, headed to the field, taken jobs, or simply vanished. I could not even track down 2 to 3 colleagues to whom I had spoken a lot. I still have no idea what happened to them. Social networks change fast in urban America, unlike in Odysseus’s era. We seldom acknowledge this weirdness and how it dislocates us emotionally.
I discovered that repatriation either happens to you, for good or ill, or you can take charge of it. My experience fell somewhere in the middle of this duality. I came home determined NOT to descend again into an alienated, friendless state of being that preceded my fieldwork.
India had massively boosted my social confidence, healing me in ways it took years to realize.
I recently talked about all this and more with Doreen Cumberford, host of the podcast Nomadic Diaries. Doreen spent decades living in the Middle East, an achievement I can not top.
Some of my favorite quotes from our discussion:
Leaving the U.S. and experiencing India helped me recognize I demanded too much from American society and encouraged me to actively work on building friendships.
As other students of modern friendship are making clear in their work, friendships require active maintenance in modern life because you don’t just repeatedly bump into people inside tiny social bubbles. There is little formal structure at all supporting friendships or relationships. This is partly because we do not NEED friends to do basic things for our survival or advancement. Everything is incredibly voluntary, if not non-committal.
The price of high autonomy is that we must be highly intentional about every relationship, or it will wither away. This includes our parents and siblings, too. After all, everyone else is also experiencing similar autonomous desires.
After I returned to campus in early 2000, I used the Milwaukee swing dancing scene as a proxy for a small village to force friendships into being through repetition. It worked much better than doing nothing, which had been my unhelpful approach in 1994-1996.
Despite committing social faux pas, I felt more at ease due to the culturally ingrained support system.
I’m used to offending people here, so why not in India, too? Why not export the awkwardness for all to enjoy? I discovered that mere interactional weirdness or faux pas did NOT cause people to stop interacting with me. The level of tolerance for weird folks was much higher than I ever perceived in America. Only if I violated local rules of reciprocity and respect did anyone shun me. And, yes, that did happen due to my youthful and American miscalculations.
If I was an awkward foreigner, most embraced me regardless. This was partly due to my relentless obsession with speaking “pure Tamil” without sprinkling in any English words, which is “right kind of weird” in Tamil Nadu (unless you’re trying to impress a potential bride/groom). That behavior alone charmed nearly everyone I met.
I almost burst out laughing once when visiting one family for an interview. Their teenage daughter muttered derisively to her mother right before me: “He’s weird. ”
It's good to know I’m also NOT cool in Tamil Nadu, India. Boom!

America's autonomy-focused and consumer-driven society quickly dissolves relationships.
Like some small towns in America still, my entire experience of southern India, urban and rural, was of dense social networks where individuals spend their whole lives in the same village, village nexus, or city/town. When people introduced their friends, most had been friends for decades or since early childhood. Wow. This included highly educated people, who, no matter how far they traveled for a degree (including abroad), returned to their natal social networks because this provides enormous mental well-being, even if the same ‘village idiots’ are at the coffee stall every afternoon. That, too, provides comfort.
We often forget how incredibly transient many Americans have become in the States. Americans move roughly every five years, an average driven by singles and extreme movers (military families).1 This episodic moving easily disrupts participation in social networks in ways that social media does not lessen.
The most important thing I realized about repatriation is that those who have not lived extensively abroad can NOT understand, so don’t ask them to.
It's unreasonable to expect family and friends will fully understand one’s experiences abroad, as it’s unreasonable to expect them to without having shared those experiences.
This is one of the more lonely aspects of coming home, as it was for Odysseus, with his many experiences of war, deception, and seduction by dark and sinister forces, all of which his natal family had never experienced.
This is why it is essential to find other repatriated souls who can be your emotional allies. During the same period, my ally was an American history student in South India. Burdening your parents or siblings accomplishes little and will only frustrate you. It’s no different for those like Odysseus, who return from war.
The repatriated adult feels very alone in their memories and confusion. It takes them time to re-center and move on.
Please listen to the episode on your favorite platform for the full conversation.
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