Welcome to the Rubesletter’s holiday gift guide!

I know, I’m late. We’ve already missed Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Snarky Subject Line Sunday, Thirsty Thots Thursday, and Wu-Tang Wednesday. But don’t fret, I’m here now to tell you EXACTLY what to buy this year.

What’s it gonna be? Gadgets, books, a candle that smells like Chris Martin’s armpits? Nope, this year I’m advising you to buy NOTHING!

Bah humbug vibes, right? But c’mon, you don’t have to participate in this annual Santafied e-commerce freak show. We all know the holiday season is a grift when corporations don the mask of religious ritual in order to “celebrate” the only thing we truly worship in our culture: profit. You’re allowed to step off the hamster flywheel. I give you permission.

(Flywheel is a marketing thing, right? I keep seeing it mentioned amongst tech go-getters, but I refuse to learn because I’m afraid it’ll result in me putting a 🚀 emoji in my bio.)

Supply chain gang

Let’s reframe this supply chain crisis. It isn’t actually a crisis, it’s a gift. (A gift! Ironic, eh?) It’s a reveal of just how much crap we have in our lives that gets shipped to us from overseas because we can tolerate slave labor as long as it’s an outta sight/outta mind kinda thing.

Plus, we don’t actually require all these plastic trinkets; the kid is just going to toss ‘em aside in a few days anyway. Keep Marie Kondo in mind. If the recipient’s not going to hold it up and want it in six months in a joy-sparking way, then don’t bring it into their home in the first place. Consider the wisdom of Mitch Hedberg discussing flyers:

(And damn that Marie Kondo, she’s changed me forever. I can’t stomach chintzy acquisitions anymore. All I can see is how they’re going to wind up in swirling in some trash pile in the Pacific.)

Are you experienced?

“But my family will hate me!” Honestly, they probably do already and a couple of knickknacks ain’t gonna change that. But okay, I’m not saying you can’t buy anything. Just stop buying stuff and start buying experiences instead. Get tickets to a play/concert, plan a vacation, dine out on something delicious, etc.

An added bonus: Experiential stuff gets you out of the house. Remember leaving the house? It’s starting to feel like humanity crawled out of caves merely to wait it out for a few centuries and return to man caves; all we needed was to upgrade from those drawings to Disney+ in HD.

Let’s come clean on consumerism. We’re junkies and this incessant desire for more stuff is an addiction. Just like the Sacklers got us hooked on opioids, Bezos has us hooked on leaf blowers, massage chairs, and digital picture frames.

(Tip: Digital picture frames are uberweird. Let me sit on your couch without having to look at dozens of rotating photos of you guys on vacation. No one liked vacation slideshows the first time around, back when they came via slide projectors. Nothing’s changed.)

The buy-more manipulation never ends; the machine leaves us perpetually unsatiated and wanting. It’s the lube that lets corporate executives deliver growth to shareholders and gets the corporate-controlled media clicks and ad sales. Corporations: They’ve got just the right ocean water to quench your thirst!

Years ago, the mystic Terence McKenna saw through it and explained how to reclaim our minds:

We have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow…You are giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.

That is all cultural diversion and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, and your fears...And we are told no, we're unimportant, we're peripheral, "get a degree", "get a job", get a this, get a that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

More is a disease

We need to examine our unnatural attachment to neverending growth. It’s easy to blame corporations, but we’re the ones assigning them a mission to expand incessantly in an attempt to vacuum up every last monetization opportunity. They’re like those robot hoses that scrub the bottom of pools until all the algae is gone.

Meanwhile, us consumers can’t get enough of the retail therapy seratonin button in our minds. Give it to us newer! Faster! Bigger! With our food, we fiend for the bounty of steroids, Miracle Gro, and pesticides while ignoring the poisonous underbelly and harmful side effects that ride shotgun alongside them. With our stuff, it’s the same mentality.

Psychiatrist Howard C. Samuels explains how more is a disease:

In our society, in all Western cultures, everything is about bigger, better, faster. We rely on external things to define us. We all want more. Yet all we really need are shelter, food, air, and water. Maybe you need a nice dog or a garden to work in….Monks who chop wood and carry water do so for a reason: repetitive action, even petting a dog or a cat, releases endorphins and serotonin in our brains. It feels good. We don't need the newest Audi. We don't need a bottle of tequila that costs two hundred dollars. We don't need an amethyst credit card that buys us more crap. We need a sense of self-worth, one that comes without price tags, and is not based on the value of our possessions.

Appropriate growth

We rarely hear about appropriate growth, the organic kind you see in nature, the kind that involves occasionally saying “enough,” the kind which requires loss as well as accumulation, the kind that buys a new pair of shoes only once the old pair’s worn out, the kind that emerges naturally from the bottom up as opposed to the top-down version mandated by Q4 earnings reports. Screw the shareholders; be a shareholder in your own life. Give yourself the gift of freedom.

We can even make it political. (Because everything’s political now, right?) Want to fight back against China? Then embrace the supply chain crisis as a way for us to stop bankrolling Xi and his minions. Besides, it’s weird how protectionist “America First!” mooks are the ones who love shopping at Walmart the most. Where the hell do you think all the cheap crap there comes from!? Hating China and shopping at Walmart is like being a Nazi who defends Woody Allen.

Alright, I get it. You’ve got the itch. You really need something. OK, here it is. The ultimate gift. It’s what I always recommend. An ice cube tray that makes big ice cubes.

People get irrationally excited about big ice cubes. It’s the cheapest way there is to make folks think you’re fancy. Of course, it’s just frozen water in a slightly larger shape. But hey, the heart wants what the heart wants.

Just be sure to use my Amazon affiliate link up above. If y’all buy 297,532,873 of these trays, I’ll finally be able to pay off my student loans.

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Quickies

🌀 Time's announcement of its Person of the Year is notable because it's that moment every year where we all come together and think, "Oh, Time Magazine still exists?"

🌀 We should give kids who stay off social media lack-of-participation trophies.

🌀 If the subject of a documentary is also one of its producers then it is not actually a documentary, it is an advertisement.

🌀 The nice thing about the Adele record is you don't have to actively try to listen to it; it'll just happen to you eventually.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

How to write a good joke: Write a ton of bad jokes and hope a good one slips through the cracks.

December 11th 2021

7 Likes

🌀 LOL at these celebs defending Jeremy Strong against that New Yorker profile that did nothing but help him. People love it when actors are a bit wacko (see: Penn, Day Lewis, Phoenix, etc.). Freak flag buzz like this is him leveling up.

Vooza @voozahq

Workers should fight to unionize. And I know this from watching the effectiveness of police unions. Cops get away with murder, yet Amazon drivers can't get away with going to the bathroom.

December 14th 2021

1 Retweet3 Likes

🌀 I'm ready for NBA coaches to wear suits again. There's nothing less "casual Friday" than Thibs screaming in a fleece.

🌀 They say there are 7 levels of hell, but that was before corporations came up with the virtual holiday party.

🌀 Left wingers want to protect people. Right wingers want to protect property. The reason is left wingers don’t own property and right wingers aren’t around people.

🌀 Woke folks always complain about the unearned confidence of white men, but it's why we get jobs we don't deserve (and higher salaries). So it's kinda the secret to our success and maybe worth considering as a strategy. Unearned confidence: Try it!

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Duel!

December 8th 2021

6 Likes

Videos

Mask Down: I fear people don’t understand how breathing works.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

What I think when I see your mask covers your mouth but not your nose

December 13th 2021

2 Retweets4 Likes

Making choices: I’m wrong all the time. Once I accepted that, it was liberating.

rubymatt

A post shared by Matt Ruby (@rubymatt)

Documentary: Flashback to my mini-doc where I mention big ice cube trays:

5-spotted

1) The creative value of not fitting in explains how art movements have always been led by contrarians.

Work that is original won’t often fit in. At least not in the beginning. This is a good thing…Throughout history, art movements have always been spearheaded by a bunch of contrarian people who went against what the previous one did: the impressionists wanted nothing to do with the romantics, the cubists didn’t want to ever be associated with the impressionists, abstract expressionists loathed any comparison to cubists or impressionists, pop artists reacted against the dryness of abstract art.

2) Excerpt from Derek Sivers’ book Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing (via Josh Spector). I've led most of my life this way yet never heard it explained quite like this.

Do something for love and something for money. Don’t try to make one thing satisfy your entire life.

Each half of your life is a remedy for the other. You get paid stability for part of your day, but then need creative time for expression. So you push yourself creatively, expose your vulnerable art to the public, feel the frustration of rejection and apathy, and then long for some stability again. Each half is a remedy for the other.

Related Rubesletter: Ditch the hustle and screw the passion: An ode to punching the clock.

3) TikTok’s algorithm tries to get people addicted rather than giving them what they really want. Guillaume Chaslot, the founder of Algo Transparency, a group that’s studied YouTube’s recommendation system, on TikTok’s harmful effects:

I think it’s a crazy idea to let TikTok’s algorithm steer the life of our kids. Each video a kid watches, TikTok gains a piece of information on him. In a few hours, the algorithm can detect his musical tastes, his physical attraction, if he’s depressed, if he might be into drugs, and many other sensitive information. There’s a high risk that some of this information will be used against him. It could potentially be used to micro-target him or make him more addicted to the platform.

The hottest craze on TikTok: The micro-target our children's minds challenge!

4) Inside Gucci with creative director Alessandro Michele. Great 60 Minutes piece.

Sharyn Alfonsi: When we were watching you with the models you would say, "Bella," if you liked something. And then if you were really happy you said, "Stupendo." What's the difference? How do you go from "bella" to "stupendo"?

Alessandro Michele: Bello is-- that it's working. Stupendo, it means that it's mesmerize you. It's-- it's something that look fabulous, you know? 

Sharyn Alfonsi: Do you feel it?

Alessandro Michele: You feel it. We feel it both, you know? Not just me the model, and the people. It's-- it's mysterious. But when you got the look, you got it.

Sharyn Alfonsi: And if you don't have it?

Alessandro Michele: You must change in a very quick way.

Was also interesting to learn the Italian word for hoarder/pack rat is cumulatore.

5) David Cross on the Bible. A rare example of when the setup is the joke.

Back when the Bible was written, then edited, then rewritten, then rewritten, then re-edited, then translated from dead languages, then re-translated, then edited, then rewritten, then given to kings for them to take their favorite parts, then rewritten, then re-rewritten, then translated again, then given to the pope for him to approve, then rewritten, then edited again, the re-re-re-re-rewritten again...all based on stories that were told orally 30 to 90 years AFTER they happened…to people who didn’t know how to write...so...

Also, I can never shake this Cross joke that sums up life in NYC perfectly:

Thanks for reading. Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know what ya think. Always love to hear from Rubesletter readers. ✌️

-Matt

P.S. In NYC? Early warning: The next edition of my Misguided Meditation show will be Jan. 22. Ticket link here ($5 off with code “breathe”).