From the Archives - Lake Tahoe & Mount Rose Epic Ride

Introduction

If I still raced, I’d file race reports with my bike club and then post them here. Since I don’t, I like to do epic rides instead, and report on them. Lately I’ve done nothing epic at all, so I’m running a very old ride report from my archives. You should treasure this as a rare glimpse into the exclusive inner sanctum of an elite cycling community. (Full disclosure: it’s not so different than my typical bloggage, but man, I gotta try to keep your attention lest you wander off to watch “reality” TV.)

Pre-Tour-of-California Lake Tahoe/Mount Rose Ride Report – May 18, 2011

Since I didn’t even race Mount San Bruno this year, much less anything else, I’ll have to make do with a ride report. Three of us (C—, N—, and I) did a fairly epic ride near Lake Tahoe the day before what would have been Stage 1 of the Tour of California had it not been abruptly canceled literally at the last minute, with all the pro racers staged at the start line. (Why was it canceled? You’ll just have to read on to find out.)

The tale begins, of course, with dinner the night before. On the way up to Tahoe our family dined at a rather good taqueria called Talavera Cocina Mexicana. It’s on Solano Ave. Yes, you read that correctly: the little place like half a mile from our house. We got such a late start, we ended up setting a new record for how soon into a road trip we stopped for food. I had a carnitas burrito with cheese and guac. It was big and, well, tasty enough. Alexa had the mushroom quesadilla which was really the star of the show. Happily, the mandatory Parental Tariff policy stood me in good stead.

The morning of the ride, at 6 a.m., I had a PBJ: Alvarado bread with Adams organic peanut butter, the salted kind of course—not like the heinous, inedible Deaf Smith unsalted brand I grew up with, which came in like a 5-gallon drum and was so runny we called it Quicksand because you’d lose knives in it, so every time you got to the bottom of the drum there would be like six knives—and my mom’s homemade apricot jam, which is nirvana.

It was pretty chilly when we started at seven, and the spray from riding through several large puddles got my leg warmers wet. So I was cranky (like Hank with his diaper from that old TV ad). We tooled clockwise around the lake for a while and then headed into Nevada and took a left on Highway 431 at Incline Village. This highway took us up over Mount Rose, the summit of which—at almost 9,000 feet—is the highest pass in the Sierras (and higher than the Col du Galibier in France, though you shouldn’t for a moment think that Mount Rose even deserves to lick the Galibier’s foothills). My form was, as we in the suffering industry say, “El Crappo Grande.” I think that’s partly because I never seem to ride at my best in the cold, and partly because I’d donated two units of red blood cells about two weeks before and my marrow hadn’t yet replaced them all. Also, I suck.

N— dropped us climbing Mount Rose, and his reward was to have to wait around in the cold wind for us, all the heat leaving his uninsulated body. C— and I added insult to injury by asking him hang out a bit longer to snap our photo. He seemed just a bit tetchy about this, which warmed me from the heart outward. I’m small like that. It was 41 degrees up there but at least it wasn’t raining. You can see it was windy, though: look how the wind is puffing out our jackets (I hasten to point this out so you won’t think we’re just fat).

Happily, it warmed up a bit as we descended. We stopped somewhere to take a leak and fill our bottles, and I asked a friendly-looking fellow traveler for directions. He looked strangely familiar, so I gave him a big smile just in case I’m supposed to know him, but he totally gave me the silent treatment. He seemed really distracted and in fact wouldn’t even look at me. I peered over his shoulder into his road atlas for a bit before realizing it was just a book.

Naw, I’m just messing with you, I never thought it was an atlas. Of course nobody would rely on me for directions; C— had mapped out the whole thing beforehand. He said to watch for Joy Lake Drive, onto which we hung a right. This was supposed to connect us to … well, I never actually got to find out how it was supposed to connect up, because at the gate to a, well, gated community we encountered a stubborn security guard who wouldn’t let us through. He had a walrus moustache and a walrus physique and immediately made me think of the Pink Floyd lyric, “It’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.” He gave an impassioned speech about how the filthy rich people living in the McMansion compound were so tired of the thousands of cyclists streaming through their community, burning their homes to the ground, enslaving their wives and children, and littering, that they closed the gates and won’t let any more of our kind through. He said there was a great bike trail, though, and gave us directions that showed him to be either dyslexic, stupid, right/left colorblind, or maliciously faux-helpful.

So we had to backtrack, up the No Joy road we’d come down, and then continued on to Highway 395, where we headed south into a brutal headwind (surpassed only by what C— dragged a few of you through last week). I would provide a map of our route but C— won’t grant me permission to follow him on Strava. [Note: over fourteen years later, he still hasn’t granted me access.]

My strength by this point had decayed from hopeless to lugubrious and it was all I could do to suck C—’s wheel, shamelessly and parasitically. It was inhumane how little work I did, but that’s okay because C— has been training a lot and seemed to be punching through the wind just fine. We got into Carson City and C— had a general idea there was some really cool bike route to take, but we couldn’t find it, and then we happened upon another cyclist. “Which way do we go?” C— asked him. The guy responded, “Where are you going?” If there’s a such thing as the polar opposite of a tautology, this was it … a notion I pondered stupidly for the next hour or so.

Thus, we ended up riding right through the main drag in Carson City, and a drag it was. The wind was ripping the flesh off our faces. As we passed a used car dealership with all its dumb balloons straining against their strings in the wind, I wondered if there were a convenient way to end my own life. Falling off C—’s wheel would have probably done the job, but not swiftly nor mercifully. Plus, I’d have died hating doing something I loved, which just seemed wrong, so I chose life. Life without parole, it seemed like. We stopped at a mini mart for water and some guy said, “You guys heading over 50? You got a long haul there.” We acknowledged that indeed we were totally screwed (though we used a more polite term). As the guy headed out the door he said, “Have fun in the race tomorrow.” As if.

So we headed west on Highway 50 over Spooner Pass, which those familiar with Spoonerisms might call Pooner Spass, thinking they’re funny or clever. It started off pretty badly because the wind still seemed to be in our faces, but then it shifted and we had a tailwind. Wow, what a relief. It didn’t help so much, but it left me free to drop off both N—’s and C—’s wheels without dire consequences. I’d have liked the company, of course, but at least I didn’t have to hear the squeaky chain that one of their bikes had, which was almost loud enough to drown out my wheezing. At one point I had to turn around because I accidently littered. Eventually I reached the top. Don’t we all? Here we are at the Spooner summit.

There’s not much else to say except the ride went on and on. I started to feel okay by the end, probably only because I knew I was almost done. I was barely coherent. When I tried to talk, often I would say the same word twice, like a strange form of stuttering. C— pointed out that on this bike path were painted instructions saying to ride right, walk left, which he felt was a very poor idea as it would lead to head-on collisions if heeded. At first I didn’t even know what he was talking about—I thought he was warning against slime in the puddles—but when I finally heard him right I thought his point was that it was backwards, that you should ride left and walk right, and only after several minutes did I finally grasp the lunacy of the instructions: it wasn’t a single rule applied to both directions, but actually one lane dedicated to riding and one two walking, regardless of direction. Dang. Anyhow, at 117 miles, with 8,400 feet of climbing, this was my hardest ride of the year.

During the ride I consumed four large bottles of energy drink, two energy bars, and four doughnut holes. The doughnut holes I bought on a whim at 7-Eleven at our last stop. By definition doughnut holes have zero calories, being nothing but a void, but I bought them anyway because they looked kind of tasty in a grotesque guilty-pleasure—nay, shameful-pleasure—kind of way. N— had totally bonked and actually looked sick (in fact his skin was slightly green, like a Vulcan’s) so I can’t tell if it was in the spirit of helpfulness or schadenfreude that I offered him some of the doughnut holes. He declined. I offered again. He declined again. I saved a couple for my daughters, along with the two Hostess fruit pies I’d bought but didn’t end up needing, probably because I’d just pounded a 20-ounce Coke.

Dinner was the gastronomic equivalent of an extended hip-hop mash-up where every single rapper on the planet jumps in to freestyle on the mic. While the men were out riding, the womenfolk had spent the entire day cooking. (This probably sounds sexist, and it’s an exaggeration, but after the beating I took on the road I need to take steps to rebuild my masculine dignity.) There was spinach lasagne, two kinds of enchiladas, salad (though I didn’t eat any), fruit salad (ditto), a big ham, and some other stuff. Then there were individual pumpkin pies with whipped cream, two kinds of ice cream, those weird cookies that have big chocolate disks pressed into them, and the mandatory parental tariffs I took of my kids’ Hostess fruit pies from earlier. I just sat there for like two hours straight eating plate after plate. (My wife has rightly pointed out that if I weren’t so thin, this kind of eating would be a truly disgusting spectacle.) As if C— hadn’t done enough work on the ride, he did the dishes while I just sat there. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for organizing the weekend and doing all the work.

The original point of this trip was to watch the opening stage of the Tour of California, but the strangest thing happened the night after our ride: it freaking snowed. As in, hard, and for a long time. In fact, Highway 80 was closed for a while. Look how much accumulated on my car, and how surly this has made my daughter. (Actually, this is her default expression. In fact she’s stoked because our cabin came equipped with sleds.)

The racers nevertheless assembled at the start line, but the snow showed no sign of letting up and they managed to organize a revolt. The organizers made noises about changing the start time and location, but ended up just canceling the stage entirely. Someone needs to remind Mother Nature that it’s May, and this is California. Oh well … at least my pals and I got a good ride in.

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Ask an O.G.

Dear O.G.,

I think driving a stick shift is a total O.G. move and should be respected. My wife says that for me to prefer this “outdated technology” is an “affectation” (her words). What do you think?

John A, Seattle, WA

Dear John,

I have both kinds of car. It’s useful to know how to handle a manual transmission if you ever plan to rent a car in Europe. I also happen to think driving a stick shift is more fun, but it’d be hard to cite that as an advantage to someone disinclined to learn. The important thing is that you mansplain the manual gearshift process to your wife, using terms like “synchromesh” and “double-clutch.” That should get her off the subject so she’ll stop insulting you about your “affectation.”

Dear O.G.,

How are you, a middle-aged white man, gangsta? I can’t believe you call yourself that.

Leslie H, Dallas, TX

Dear Leslie,

The “G” does not necessarily mean gangsta, or even gangster. I wouldn’t even say the “O” is necessarily for “Original.” And the name wasn’t my idea … you should talk to my publisher. (If you can get him to listen to you, I’d love to hear how you accomplished that.) By the way, this is by far the most common question I get. My eyes are rolling as much as yours, believe me.

Dear O.G.,

I’m guessing you’re a vinyl guy, huh?

Amanda T, Los Angeles, CA

Dear Amanda,

Actually—and I hope this doesn’t destroy my O.G. cred—I’ve never owned a record player. I remember a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the ‘70s (outdated even then) that my brothers let me mess around with, but for playing music I had nothing but cassette tapes until I was an adult. CDs came out when I was in high school. The first one I encountered was in my school locker; I was turning the jewel case over and over in my hands trying to figure out what the hell it was when my locker partner happened upon me and burst out laughing. I did buy a CD player when I was in college, but it was to replace the one I borrowed from a pal (so I could play borrowed CDs) which I unfortunately broke. I didn’t start buying my own CDs until my early twenties, but again, that’s not because I ever had records. (Well, I had one: the John Williams score to “Star Wars,” which my parents bought me to play on their stereo.)

Now, if a music lover still has the record player he bought as a teenager, and all his original records, plus perhaps a few select purchases to round out his collection, I’d consider that O.G. But when wealthy people buy modern turntables with multi-layer plinths, decoupled motor systems, and carbon fiber tonearms, and painstakingly replace their CD or MP3 collections with pricey records, that’s more of an epicurean thing than O.G. (Not saying it’s bad, mind you. Just not O.G.)

By the way, if you meant something else by “vinyl guy,” such as attire, you’ve got the wrong guy!

Dear O.G.,

Nothing says O.G. more than a real appreciation for a good wine vintage … am I right? As the oenophile I imagine you to be, what are your favorite harvests?

Terrence H, New Haven, CT

Notwithstanding my very sincere insistence that the G in “O.G” doesn’t exactly mean “gangsta,” I’m really not sure how a fine wine aficionado could be called O.G., even though a respect for tradition is inarguably O. In any case, I’m sorry to disappoint … I don’t know the first thing about wine (though I have tried my level best to fake it).

I’m guessing there’s pretty good overlap between wine and coffee lovers, so I will go ahead and share my opinion about O.G. coffee (even though nobody’s asked). First of all, its polar opposite is the Keurig, which ought to carry as much stigma as chicken nuggets. I consider pour-over to be the best way to make coffee. Until the 1950s it was the main method, but then instant coffee became hugely popular during the convenience-addicted post-war era. That lasted until the ‘70s when cheap electric drip coffee makers became available. Pour-over is becoming more popular, maybe even hip, but I think I can make the case that it’s pre-‘50s O.G. I grind my beans by hand (so I don’t wake up the whole family with the earsplitting noise of an electric grinder), and I use a cone made of porous stone, which isn’t an old technology but sure feels old.

Dear O.G.,

What is your absolute favorite O.G. move, and why?

Far and away the most satisfying O.G. realm for me is using—exclusively—a traditional double-edged razor. This is a product that’s far cheaper than its modern equivalent, does a better job, is better made, looks nicer, and is produced by companies that clearly have no interest in glib, glossy marketing. I’m so fond of my O.G. razor, I wrote an ode to it which you can read here. Thanks for asking!

Dear O.G.,

Getting back to an earlier reader’s question, about music on vinyl: for someone who doesn’t own a record player you sure seem knowledgeable about the modern technology. Do you know whereof you speak?

Keith W, Chicago, IL

Dear Keith,

Not at all, actually. You caught me … I’m a total poseur.

Dear O.G.,

What’s more O.G.: classical art (e.g., Old Masters) or pop (e.g., Warhol, Lichtenstein)? Obviously Leonardo da Vinci was a rockstar, but then, that’s so long ago. Is there an expiration date on O.G.?

Tricia P, San Francisco

Dear Tricia,

I think an endless debate could be had among those two art schools, not to mention all the other ones (e.g., modern, postmodern, contemporary) that would claim they’re the most O.G. I do not want to venture into that fracas. But I think the more important distinction, particularly because so much art isn’t seen in museums, is between human art and A.I. “art” as the latter starts to replace more and more real work, from street fair posters to advertisements to crap you can buy on Etsy. I’m sure you can already sense my position on this; for a full discussion, replete with a drawing challenge I issued to both ChatGPT and my daughter, click here. Suffice to say, A.I. can never be O.G. It’s the antithesis.

Dear O.G.,

I happen to know you’re a veteran cyclist. How does this mesh with your O.G. approach? Do e-bikes, electronic shifting, and disc brakes make you throw up in your mouth?

Robert S, Thousand Oaks, CA

Dear Robert,

I’ll start with your specific examples and then address the bigger picture. I think e-bikes are not only just fine, but probably inevitable for most of us … they may well extend the number of years (and hopefully decades) I can continue to ride. I’m also completely in favor of non-cyclists buying e-bikes for transportation, because even if e-bikes don’t honor the purity of traditional cycling (can you sense my “blah blah blah” here?), they do mean fewer cars on the road. Sure, go on all you want about what a menace these unskilled but fairly high-speed e-bikers present, but I’ll take a 15 mph impact from a 40-pound e-bike over a 25+ mph impact from a two-ton car. (It’s not like e-bikers have cornered the market on roadway incompetence and inattentiveness, after all.) But I will assert two caveats: 1) no kid should ever ride an e-bike (details here), and 2) e-bikes shouldn’t be allowed on nature trails (see here).

Moving on to electronic shifting, I do think it’s a solution looking for a problem, and though I’ve given it two solid auditions (click here and here) the earth didn’t move for me either time. But my next bike will surely have it (it being the new normal), and people seem to like it well enough. Same with disc brakes: I love them on my mountain bike, you can run carbon rims, blah blah blah damn, I’ve even boring myself here.

All this being said, these new road handlebars that flare out, and the goofy brake levers that stick out like chicken wings … they’re hideous. And what’s with the weird fork crowns on BMC road bikes? They look like the fork on a cheap mountain bike! Aesthetics are being sacrificed at the altar of performance and that’s just anti-O.G. So many modern road bikes so dorky, they can even make a guy like Julian Alaphilippe look like a dweeb.

You know who was the O.G. road racer, with a perfect bike to match? Bernard Hinault.

(Don’t even get me started on Jonas Vingegaard’s aerodynamic helmet.)

Dear O.G.,

I think part of being O.G. is just sticking to your guns and not following along with the status quo, like how Eminem won’t use Auto-Tune. Do you live by this kind of credo?

Wanda R, New York City

Dear Wanda,

I think there are two fundamental ways to buck the status quo. You can either observe the conventional wisdom, evaluate it, and decide to reject it—like Eminem—or you can be oblivious to modern trends and just bumble your way along doing whatever seems to work. My favorite example of the latter is my dad, who—despite having been a college instructor in Boulder, Colorado during the late ‘60s—was totally unaware of Birkenstock sandals and, decades later, after failing to observe three huge surges in their popularity, totally thought he discovered them, like they were some obscure thing.

Often I do stubbornly defy the status quo. I think I was the only teenager in Boulder in the ‘80s who didn’t have an earring; I never used Biopace chainrings on any of my bikes; and I eschew all social media (except, begrudgingly, LinkedIn), all in defiance of the norm. But other times I’m willing to follow the status quo but only after considerable delay, out of sheer ignorance. For example, in matters of music, I’ll be barely aware of a band or singer for many years until finally I start to wonder who it is I’ve been hearing, and hearing about, for so long, and then I’ll investigate. I discovered Eminem in 2003 (four years late), Sublime in 2011 (fifteen years late), and The Black Keys in 2023 (twenty-one years late). In the latter cases, I wasn’t defying the zeitgeist … I’d just fallen behind. You might say I was O.G. in the sense of “Oblivious Guy.” (Of course it’s hard to remain ignorant now that we have Spotify. I have a love/hate relationship with it … the ad hoc selections it plays after the end of an album often trick me into listening to really anodyne, soulless stuff for oddly long periods before I suddenly think, “What is this crap!?”)

I wouldn’t say I consider this late-or-never tradition a credo, but it does affect my life. Probably the biggest single effect of finding my own way, without regard to conventional wisdom, was choosing to major in English despite everyone around me (even then) assuring me that with that lowly degree I’d never get a real job. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, as I discuss at length here. (My younger daughter is currently earning her English degree, with minors in Art and Philosophy, and I couldn’t be more pleased.)

As for the day-to-day effects of this approach, a big one is how much I use the public library. I just looked at my loan history from the Berkeley library, and in the last 144 weeks I’ve checked out 289 items (books, movies, CDs), for an average of two items a week. That doesn’t even include what I get digitally through Kanopy, Libby, and Hoopla (details here) and from the Albany Library. In a society that’s thoroughly embraced Amazon, streaming platforms, and video games, I think libraries are 100% O.G. And yet I know plenty of adults who don’t even have a library card.

Dear O.G.,

What’s the point of clinging to all these established ways when A.I. is obviously going to change everything over the next decade or so? Preferences that might seem old school and noble now will just become outdated, outmoded, outmaneuvered, and over. Not to be a dick about it, but I think this has to be said.

Ron B, Atlanta, GA

Dear Ron,

You sound like the blowhards gleefully predicting the demise of printed books based on competition from e-books like the Kindle. Society needs a term for people like you … technophiliac, or maybe digitopian. Look, I won’t deny that A.I. is a powerful tool for making many tasks more efficient, but that’s not a purely good thing. I’m all for ChatGPT helping me with HTML scripting or making DNS routing changes, but its essays are a) inferior to a real writer’s, and b) dumbing people down. The very word “essay” is from the French essai meaning a trial, attempt, or test, deriving from the Latin exagium, a weighing or examination. The point of writing an essay is to explore an idea, create and test hypotheses, and ideally learn from the effort even as you’re crafting something others can read. The point of a teacher assigning an essay isn’t to educate herself on a topic via her students’ papers; it’s for the students to grapple with the difficulty of writing and improve their brains. At least, that’s my O.G. perspective. In a shocking New Yorker article I read recently, a college professor interviewed several students at top universities about their blatant use of A.I. to write papers for them, and the success they’ve had (at least, from a grade perspective) in doing this. Here’s a crazy example:

A sophomore at Columbia studying computer science told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so I just put it in [to an A.I. platform] and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

These students might think they’re pulling a fast one, but what happens when they graduate and still don’t know how to think? How are they going to impress anyone during a face-to-face dialogue—whether it’s a job interview or a cocktail party—when they don’t have ChatGPT to generate insights and pretty sentences for them? No less an O.G. than the rapper Ice-T (whose fourth studio album, “O.G. Original Gangster” helped popularize the term), rapped about the problem of school dropouts trying to sound impressive:

How you gonna drop science? You’re dumb
Stupid ignorant, don’t even talk to me
In school you dropped Math, Science, and History
And then you get on the mic and try to act smart
Well let me tell you one thing, you got heart
To perpetrate, you’re bait, so just wait
Till the press shove a mic in your face…
And they ask you about the game you claim you got
Drop science now, why not?

Notably, he wrote that song in 1989, before an A.I. existed that could enable a useless student to fake his way through school. Sure, modern A.I. can help you get a degree, or program a computer, or write a basic email, but it’s not going to make you an interesting person. Ultimately, thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move.

Dear O.G.,

That last response? And your conclusion, “Thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move”? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s pretty much the cheesiest thing I’ve ever read. I think in your case O.G. stands for “Old Geezer.”

Dana A, Albany, CA

Dear Dana,

I know. You’re right. You got me. I’m tired. I should really edit my stuff before I post. Looks like that pompous, overblown sentiment slipped past my publisher,  too. Sheesh.

An O.G. is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an O.G.,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2025 Tour de France Stage 14

Introduction 

This year’s Tour de France started off really well, with an exciting first couple weeks. I’ll recount those as part of today’s albertnet coverage of Stage 14, a day of massive climbing in the Pyrenees. I’m not going to lie: Tadej Pogacar (UAE – Team Emirates XRG) is once again making the GC (i.e., overall) competition boring AF. (If you’re not familiar with the abbreviation “AF,” go ask a teenager.)

If this is your first time reading one of my blow-by-blow reports, be advised that I am not a professional journalist, which means I don’t worship brevity, I don’t always stick to the point, I never bite my tongue when a rider is doped or being dopey, and I’m not bitter about being poor. And today, during a lull, I plan to have the uncomfortable conversation (okay, monologue) about whether Pogacar could possibly be clean.

Tour de France Stage 14 – Pau to Luchon-Superbagnères

As I join the action, Lenny Martinez (Bahrain Victorious) is cresting the hors categorie (i.e., goes-up-to-11) Col du Tourmalet, solo. You can tell he’s a great climber because a) he’s rocking the polka-dot jersey of best climber, and b) he’s first atop the Tourmalet, duh! He’s either starting to put his jacket on, or plans to ride the entire stage no-handed as a stunt, determined to make this Tour interesting.

The big news the announcers are recapping is that the rider sitting third on GC going into today, Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step), was dropped and decided just to abandon the Tour. This is called grit. This is called humility. This is what it means to have a work ethic. Wait, I’m getting confused. Actually this is the absence of these things, obviously. In this replay, Evenepoel waves off the cameraman.

Rumor has it Evenepoel is abandoning because I hurt his feelings in my coverage of the Dauphiné last month. Is there anything to this rumor? Well, it’s been well established that most of these riders do read albertnet, some of them even while riding or racing. (By “well established” I mean I assume this to be the case.)

Behind Martinez, a couple minutes back, is a group of sixteen riders including the American Sepp Kuss (Team Visma - Lease A Bike) and Valentin Paret Peintre (Soudal Quick-Step). As Martinez takes this wet descent very cautiously, Kuss and Peintre drop the rest of the chasers and start closing the gap to Martinez pretty quickly. I guess descending no-handed just isn’t very aerodynamic.

Martinez reaches the base of the Col d’Aspin, still riding no-handed. You gotta admire his pluck. He must have made a bet with someone he could pull this off, and is sticking to it even at the risk of losing the stage.

The two chasers are working well together and have the gap down to less than a minute now.

Just over a kilometer from the summit of the Aspin, Martinez  is still riding no-handed.

Back in the main peloton, Pogacar’s UAE team sets tempo at the front, keeping this gap down. They’re apparently worried about Tobias Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility), the highest-placed rider on GC, who sits in eighth place overall, “only” 10:36 behind Pogacar. Is it that that’s not enough of a gap to protect Pogacar’s yellow jersey, this group being about four minutes behind? Or is it that UAE has decided Pogacar needs to win every single remaining stage of this Tour, just to further ridicule the sport after his total domination of this Tour, the Dauphiné, and the classics season?

Martinez summits the Aspin and gets max KOM points, plus a €9,000 bonus.

Kuss and Paret-Peintre catch Martinez on the descent and the three begin the Peyresourde. Martinez has evidently given up on his bet, and has his hands on the handlebars for the first time all day. He looks pretty dejected. Meanwhile, Kuss fights with something stuck in his teeth. I hate it when this happens. Your tongue gets all sore trying to get that food particle out. It’s distracting.

Most of the rest of the chase group has caught the three leaders. Not far behind is Simon Yates, one of Kuss’s teammates.

Now Thymen Arensman (Ineos Grenadiers) attacks the group! Only Martinez and Johannessen can stay with him. And now they’re dropped.

Back in the main bunch, UAE continues to drive the pace, with their rider Pavel Sivakov really suffering. They’re bringing down the gap to the chase group considerably.

Arensman takes the summit solo, unless you count my cat who is clearly jealous of the attention this race is getting.

Martinez beats out the others for KOM points, experimenting with riding one-handed to see how fast that might be. Seems to be working for him.

Behind, the chase group has split in two, with Kuss in the second group.

As the riders take the final descent before beginning their assault of the Luchon-Superbagnères climb, I’ll fill you in on what’s gone down in this Tour so far. Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) won the first stage, which was one designed for the sprinters. Stage 2, also a sprinters’ stage, was incongruously almost won by Pogacar, whose lust for wins is insatiable. Only Mathieu Van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) was able to best him, and barely. Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) won stage 3, and then in stage 4—a lumpy route that should favor a breakaway—Pogacar overhauled Van der Poel in the final sprint and won, which isn’t at all weird for the best climber in the world. Stage 5 was a 33-kilometer (20.5-mile) time trial which Evenepoel handily won, with the big news being that Pogacar took second, just 16 seconds behind, utterly destroying his main rival (to the extent that he even has one), Team Visma - Lease A Bike’s Jonas Vingegaard, who finished all the way down in 13th, 1:21 behind the winner. This result put Pogacar in the yellow jersey. The next stage was won by Ben Healy (EF Education-Easypost), who is a total baller. Pogacar won again on stage 7, just ahead of Vingegaard. Stage 8 was flat and Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) took it. Stage 9 was also flat, and unexpectedly exciting because Van der Poel broke away with a teammate over 100 miles from the finish, and then went solo with, I don’t know, ten miles to go. He almost held off the chase but was caught less than 700 meters from the line. Heartbreaking! Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) took that stage.

Things got interesting on stage 10, with a group of five riding clear and staying off to the finish. Its best-placed GC rider, Healy, couldn’t manage a second stage win but took enough time to snare the yellow jersey, becoming the first Irishman since Stephen Roche in 1987 to wear it. Simon Yates (Team Visma - Lease A Bike) won that stage. The commentators were questioning why Yates didn’t drop back to help Vingegaard in the GC battle behind, but I think the answer is obvious: nobody can beat Pogacar anyway, so the team might as well go for stage wins when it can. This is of course sad, for a team built around the GC, but it’s the reality of the sport right now.

Stage 11 was cool too, because a two-man breakaway barely managed to hold off the peloton, in addition to Van der Poel, who went after them solo and very nearly overhauled them in the last kilometer but fell tragically short. You should check out the finale not only for its nail-biting finish (my spoiler notwithstanding) but also because the Eurosport announcer yells, “A stupid, stupid person on the left!” referring to some crazy fan who ran out into the road waving a flag, and who gets chased out of the way and then full-on tackled by a race official. It was one of the real high points of this Tour. Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X Mobility) took the stage, a first for his rinky-dink Norwegian team.

Back to the action: as Arensman tackles the final climb solo, Mark Soler (UAE) drives the pace for Pogacar. They’re not far behind the chase group now, and on a climb this long they may well catch everybody, so we can be treated to another boring and devastating attack from Pogacar. It’s almost impossible to imagine Vingegaard even trying to attack him … the Dane hasn’t had the legs at any point during this Tour. That’s not a dig against him, by the way. His legs are great, they’re just not superhuman-space-alien.

Getting back to my recap, Stage 12 was the official start of the boring AF phase of this Tour, with Pogacar predictably attacking and soloing to victory. Remember how that used to be exciting? Before it became rote? He took over two minutes out of Vingegaard but it might as well have been twenty. The next stage, a 10.9-kilometer (6.8-mile) uphill time trial, was super boring, with Pogacar winning again, taking another 36 seconds out of Vingegaard, who not only showed the futility of his GC hopes but wore a breathtakingly ugly helmet.

This helmet became the big news of the day. Lamenting it, I texted my online race correspondent, “Vingegaard needs to be punished for that awful TT helmet. What a disgrace.” My correspondent replied, “Loser helmet.” I responded, “Yes, and a failing rider. Sad.” Then a friend emailed our bike team saying how his wife, seeing a bit of the race footage, “said [Vingegaard’s] helmet reminded her of a cartoon character from Fat Albert , which show she watched as a kid,” and attached this photo:

Another guy on our club replied, “That character is Dumb Donald.  And, well, Jonas looks dumb in that helmet.” Fair point. That being yesterday’s stage, this concludes my recap. 

And now the yellow jersey group has both chase groups in its sights, and will surely catch them. I’m not sure 2:33 will be enough of a gap for Arensman by the end, if things heat up in the GC battle.

The chase groups now merge, with only 20 seconds on the main group.

It’s time to talk about doping. Could Pogacar possibly be clean? Last year he won both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France, which is generally considered impossible in the modern cycling era; the last rider to achieve this was the famously doped Marco Pantani all the way back in 1998. This year, Pogacar rode a full classics schedule, winning the Tour of Flanders, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, La Flèche Wallonne, and taking second in Paris-Roubaix, second in the Amstel Gold Race, and third in Milan-San Remo (a true sprinter’s race). Then he absolutely dominated the Critérium du Dauphiné, taking the overall and three stage wins and making it all look easy. His improvement since 2023 has been astonishing. This year he did the Hautacam climb almost a minute and a half faster than Vingegaard did it in 2022, and only 30 seconds off the all-time record set in 1996 by Bjarne Riis (aka “Mr. 60%,” referring to his ski-high EPO-fueled hematocrit). My rule of thumb is: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

But that’s not my entire case against Pogacar; for that we need to look to his UAE team director, Mauro Gianetti, who was investigated for doping as a rider after having a major health breakdown during the 1998 Tour of Romandy and spending ten days in the ICU. A teammate of Gianetti’s at that time, Stéphane Heulot, speaking to a reporter ten years later, spoke candidly about Gianetti, who had retired and moved on to managing the Saunier Duval team: “Doping is so ingrained in certain managers, like Gianetti, that they can't conceive of cycling any other way.” Ironically, Heulot asserted this while serving as the PR manager for the Saunier Duval team. (Presumably not for much longer.)

As described here, Saunier Duval’s results bear out Heulot’s skepticism: “In 2008, [Gianetti’s] team’s rising star, Riccardo Riccò, was arrested after testing positive for EPO, the blood-boosting hormone. Gianetti’s Saunier Duval team quit that year’s Tour and Riccò landed a 12-year ban.” Another rider on that team, Leonardo Piepoli, who’d already been kicked out of that Tour for “ethical violations,” tested positive for CERA the next year. Then, in 2011, Gianetti managed the Geox-TMC team, whose unsung leader Juan José Cobo came out of nowhere to win the Vuelta a España (beating no less a doper than Chris Froome), only to have his victory stripped years later due to “irregularities in his biological passport.”  So you do the math: a rider whose exploits seem extraterrestrial rides for a team whose manager had been investigated for doping as a rider and went on to head up two different famously doped teams. Hell, Gianetti even looks like a villain.

Okay, back to the coverage. Félix Gall (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team) attacks the yellow jersey group! It’s a good move, but unfortunately he looks like a jackass because his handlebars are so narrow. It’s like something you’d see in a cartoon.

Gall goes straight past the chase group.

Gall sits ninth on GC, 11:43 behind Pogacar. So UAE might give him some leash, if they decide they can’t set up Pogacar for yet another stage wine. Did I mean win? Yeah, but I’m going to leave it. Even the word “win” has become boring. Adam Yates leads the chase for UAE.

Gall has 26 seconds on the group behind. He’s about two minutes behind Arensman, with five kilometers (three miles) left. He may have a shot … Arensmen looks like he’s really suffering, shoulders rocking.

One of the commentators just mentioned how strong Arensmen is on the long climbs, citing his “diesel” engine. This is commentator shorthand for how diesel engines, designed for compression ignition, utilize a much higher compression ratio (typically 14:1 to 25:1) compared to gasoline engines (8:1 to 12:1). This higher compression is crucial for igniting the fuel without spark plugs. Glow plugs, however, are typical in diesel engines. The metaphorical implication for cycling ought to be fairly obvious to just about anyone.

Back in the GC group, Vingegaard attacks!

I’m not sure it deserved an exclamation point because he’s already looking back, just assuming Pogacar easily handled it. You can always tell when an attack is in vain, when the attacker is looking behind instead of ahead.

Florian Lipowitz (Red Bull – BORA – Hansgrohe), who started the day in fourth overall, is trying to match the pace. Lipowitz is a baller, having taken third overall in the Critérium du Dauphiné last month and getting second in this year’s Paris-Nice. And with Evenepoel out, he’ll most likely make the podium and get the Best Young Rider award in this Tour.

Lipowitz is dropped, and Pogacar takes the front. And just like that, the two GC contenders overhaul Gall. Gall must have detonated.

Now it’s a matter of Arensman hanging on for the win. He should do it, as he’s got plenty of time, and if Pogacar is content to sit on Vingegaard, the two will just blob along until the end and not make up so much time.

As Arensman reaches the 1-kilometer-to-go kite, it looks like he’s peeing.

Arensman gets the win and does the “I can’t believe it” victory salute.

Now Pogacar will wait for the right moment to crush Vingegaard, who continues to look back.

Ah, and there Pogi goes. He easily overtakes Vingegaard and demolishes him in the run to the line.

Now Vingegaard is being interviewed, before he’s even had a chance to climb off his bike and put on a big puffy sweatshirt.

INTERVIEWER: Well, you attacked at least, which I think is kind of cute.

VINGEGAARD: To be honest, it was a hard day. One of the hardest mountain stages I’ve ever done.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean “to be honest”? Do you normally lie during interviews? And would you expect me to doubt your assertion that it was hard?

VINGEGAARD: Congratulations to Arensman, he had a great ride today, and it’s nice to see somebody distinguish himself in some way, as opposed to what I did, which was just a half-assed attack with a lot of looking back, which you can see is all I’m capable of.

INTERVIEWER: Since you referred to today’s winner by his last name, instead of “Thymen,” I’m gathering you two aren’t friends? Would you say you lack for friends in the peloton in general? Kind of an introvert? Do the others bully you?

VINGEGAARD: If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to go find a big puffy sweatshirt.

INTERVIEWER: Yes, go be alone now. Go find an armchair and a throw blanket and bury your face in a literary novel.

If you’re new to this blog, I should caution you that I tend to play fast and loose with these interviews. When they become boring, I tend to ad lib a bit. But Vingegaard really did say “to be honest, it was hard,” and did congratulate Arensman. Though not to his face. So maybe he is shy.

Now they’re interviewing Arensman.

INTERVIEWER: So, you won today. Obviously. How did you do it?

ARENSMAN: Well, I had good preparation—

INTERVIEWER (INTERRUPTING): Meaning you doped.

ARENSMAN: It’s my first Tour, I had to be patient, it was already amazing to be second on the Andorra stage—

INTERVIEWER (INTERRUPTING AGAIN): No it wasn’t.

ARENSMAN: Come again?

INTERVIEWER: It wasn’t amazing when you got second on that stage. It was perfectly inevitable. Somebody always wins, somebody is always second, etc. Had you won, I guess that would have been, well, remarkable, though really probably not amazing. Now, Martinez trying to do the whole stage no-handed, and managing to move into the KOM lead in the process … that’s amazing.

ARENSMAN: That’s not even true. You talk dog farts.

Here are the stage results. You can see Pogacar took four seconds out of Vingegaard in the final sprint.

And here is the new GC. Everyone moves up a spot because of Evenepoel abandoning. Lipowitz is now solidly in third, having taken around 40 seconds out of Oscar Onley (Team Picnic PostNL) today.

Now Arensman mounts the podium. I have noticed that the ASO is gradually returning to the podium girl tradition. For a good while, there would be just one podium girl, usually a fairly plain one in a very modest outfit, and not very close to the podium, with a dumpy middle-aged man on the other side, closer to the podium. It was like the organizers were distancing themselves from the tradition. But they’ve been gradually moving the podium girl closer to the stage, and putting a male model on the other side. This podium girl is watching Arensman and trying not to look perplexed, but he’s just standing there, not knowing what to do … she’s surely thinking, “Dude, aren’t you going to put your arms up?”

For the most part, they’ve also abandoned the tradition of the winner getting kisses from the podium girl. The rider instead just accepts the flowers with an awkward little head nod. The exception is Van der Poel, who either didn’t get the memo or can’t be bothered to comply. Each time he’s been on the podium in this Tour he’s given the podium girl kisses, and she hasn’t seemed to mind, and has in fact looked, to me, pleasantly surprised. The last time this happened the cameraman, thinking quickly, panned to a flashy blond woman in the audience, presumably Van der Poel’s girlfriend, to get her reaction. She was pretty chill about it.

Pogacar gets another yellow jersey and another stuffed lion. This podium girl is a real professional, managing to look legitimately happy when she must be freezing her arse off in that sleeveless dress while the podium dude is in a wool suit and Pogacar has a nice thermal cap.

And now Lipowitz gets his white jersey for Best Young Rider. I hope he doesn’t get signed as a domestique by UAE or Visma … I’d like to see him challenging the perennial favorites in the years to come. Note the mismatched blue of the podium guy’s suit vs. the podium girl’s dress. Funny story there: that’s actually a bridesmaid dress she almost threw away but saved for some reason, and now she got to wear it here!

Now they’re interviewing Pogacar.

INTERVIEWER: It looks like you practically phoned it in today, until your sprint where you once again humiliated Vingegaard.

POGACAR: The team did a super good job, I’m really really happy.

INTERVIEWER: When I asked you last year about carbon monoxide rebreathing, you denied any knowledge of it and replied, “I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m just uneducated.” But then a day later, after your team admitted doing it, you seemed to suddenly remember and said, “I didn’t quite understand the question. It’s not like you’re breathing exhaust pipes in a car. It’s just a simple test to see how you respond to altitude training.” Doesn’t that seem like backpedaling?

POGACAR: Arensman deserved this victory with a super good race.

INTERVIEWER: I see you’re not going to answer my question. Next I suppose you’ll be talking about the weather.

POGACAR: If my nose were a little less clogged I would be really happy with today’s weather but when you’re a bit under the weather it’s kind of, this kind of weather, it doesn’t help, but always, when it’s like this, I have the legs.

INTERVIEWER: Are you literally claiming to be absolutely dominating this Tour even while you have a cold? Seriously?

POGACAR: I think I hear my mom calling.

Obviously I made up a lot of that, but a journalist really did investigate Pogacar’s (and Vingegaard’s) practice of carbon monoxide rebreathing, and you should click that link above. Note that in this case I recorded Pogacar’s words as close to verbatim as I could (until the end). He really did say he’s under the weather. Sheesh.

Well, that’s about it for the 2025 Tour … barring some catastrophe, Pogacar will win it in boring AF fashion. Best case, Vingegaard can at least get a stage win. Or a stage wine. Or maybe just another stage whine.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Why Is Gratitude So Difficult?

Introduction

Right off the bat, I get that the title of this post probably annoys you. I’m surprised you’re even here, honestly. Something about having our capacity for gratitude challenged is just off-putting. You may well ask, who am I to position myself as some kind of authority on this?

Who am I?

I’ll freely acknowledge that in terms of managing to feel grateful, I’ve got it pretty easy, being a homeowner in the Bay Area. Worldwide, the median annual income (adjusted for local buying power) is about $5,000-$6,000 a year; something like 93-95% of the population lacks a college degree; about 26% lack safe drinking water. Compared to so many, I’ve had a very charmed life, and what suffering I do experience (e.g., via cycling) is voluntarily self-inflected, which seems the height of privilege. That said, in my  experience gratitude doesn’t always track along with good fortune, and even in my relatively upscale community I don’t have to look far to find people who are anxious or uptight.

[Art by Copilot, to try it out.] 

An example

Here is my poster child for the capacity to be tetchy or ill at ease despite advantageous circumstances. Many years ago, I won an award at work that came with a cash bonus. One of my colleagues, though he seemed happy for me, confided that his wife was pretty upset, feeling like he should have won the award. On what grounds she supposed this, being entirely absent from our workplace, I have no idea. Nevertheless, I wanted to make things right, and invited my colleague and his wife to join my wife and me at Chez Panisse, one of the fanciest restaurants in the Bay Area, on me. My colleague reciprocated by bringing a really nice bottle of wine. As the waiter fussed over the bottle, and employed a strange decanter designed to optimize it somehow, and during the long process of letting the wine breathe etc., it looked like a truly splendid evening was unfolding … but my friend’s wife was getting increasingly agitated. The problem was, she admitted, she was worried about the wine. But she didn’t really elaborate. What was this worry? Worried she wouldn’t like it? Worried that it wouldn’t live up to everyone’s expectations? Worried that everyone would like it but her? Whether she feared the wine might reflect badly on her and her husband, or threaten her epicurean cred, or she just hated to be disappointed, or some combination of these and/or something else entirely, I have no idea. But the magnificent wine had practically become a curse.

So what?

This post explores why it’s hard to focus on the positive in our lives. It turns out there are several tangible reasons that we don’t, supported by science and psychology. I’ll describe these, and then explore what we might do about it.

Reason  #1: negativity bias

If our view of the world tends to be less than rosy at times, we can somewhat blame human nature, or to be more specific, the way our species has evolved. In the essay “Negativity bias,” in the great essay collection This Idea Is Brilliant, the columnist Michael Shermer investigates how the negative packs a bigger punch. Here are a few of his examples: negative stimuli command more attention than positive; pain feels worse than no pain feels good; there are more ways to fail than succeed. He provides this theory:

Why is negativity stronger than positivity? Evolution. In the environment of our evolutionary ancestry, there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction to negative events. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good, then taking a gamble to improve them a little was not seen as worth the risk.

Obviously, biological evolution cannot keep up with societal progress. Most of us don’t live among warring tribes anymore (bickering political parties, sure, but nobody is sacking our village). It’s up to us to challenge our negative impulses, and to remind ourselves how much progress has been made and how different modern life is than the human experience over the last 300,000 years. But it doesn’t appear we’re very good at transcending our evolutionary instincts.

Reason #2: relative deprivation

Our feelings of satisfaction and happiness don’t really depend on our absolute situation—that is, whether we have basic needs met like food, shelter, and safety. As everyone knows, we evaluate ourselves and our lives based on how we’re doing compared to our neighbor. In general we don’t have to look very far to see people in our communities with nicer stuff, and coworkers who outrank us. The temptation to feel relatively deprived is always with us, and it can be hard to get over it. In the essay “Relative Deprivation” (also in This Idea Is Brilliant), Kurt Gray, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, explains this tendency:

The yearning for relative status seems irrational, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We evolved in small groups where relative status determined everything, including how much you could eat and whether you could procreate. Although most Americans can now eat and procreate adequately, we haven’t lost that gnawing sensitivity to status. If anything, our relative status is now more important. Because our basic needs are met, we have a hard time determining whether we’re doing well, so we judge ourselves based on our place in the hierarchy.

Let’s put together these two human tendencies: negativity and relativity. If we have a biological reflex to judge ourselves vs. our neighbors, that’s bad enough—but because of our negativity bias, we focus on the endless array of seemingly higher status people instead of those beneath us, and moreover instead of appreciating how well we do live and how much we’ve achieved in our own right. To put it more succinctly, we’re negative to begin with and will never lack for ways to feel inferior.

Reason #3: emotion contagion

Once again, I’ll cite an essay in This Idea Is Brilliant. (This book contains 205 brief essays, most of them concerned with scientific concepts pertaining to our daily experience.) June Gruber, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at CU Boulder, in “Emotion Contagion,” explains, “Emotions are contagious. They are rapidly, frequently, and even at times automatically transmitted from one person to the next.” She cites Charles Darwin, who pointed out that this contagion is “fundamental to the survival of humans and nonhumans alike in transmitting vital information among group members,” and points out that it’s “in the service of critical processes such as empathy, social connection, and relationship maintenance between close partners.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, when emotion contagion hops geographies and goes virtual, it is not necessarily in the service of communities anymore, and becomes a less precise social tool. Gruber goes on to say:

Faulty emotion-contagion processes have been linked to affective disturbances. With the rapid proliferation of online social networks as a main forum for emotion expression, we know, too, that emotion contagion can occur without direct interaction between people or when nonverbal emotional cues in the face and body are altogether absent.

What emotions, in our modern smartphone-addled society, would you say are the most likely to spread? I would say envy, pride, and outrage would be in my top five. Sure, some goodwill is shared as well, but remember: we humans have a negativity bias, and a tendency to compare ourselves unfavorably to others … a perfect recipe for feeling bad online. Meanwhile, the algorithms that determine what to show us are geared toward the feelings that are most likely to trigger forwards, comments, etc., so they’re not making any effort to keep things light or positive. Our reactions train the algorithm, and in time it begins to train us, in a cycle of perpetual irritation that doesn’t strike me as conducive to gratitude. Emotion contagion seems to be morphing from a largely healthy community-building trait to a way for tech companies to monetize some of our more annoying tendencies.

I guess I should acknowledge that it’s not just social media at fault here. It’s how we choose to use the Internet, and how we ourselves decide what’s important enough to share. I base this on a cursory examination of my most polemic albertnet posts and which of these have the most page views. Since I don’t imagine all that many people find my posts via Google, most of the traction my posts get is through being forwarded. Here are my top three positive and negative opinion pieces, and the number of page views they’ve notched. Notice how it’s the more negative ones that get forwarded the most:

Positive:

• Election Result: It Will Be OK - 265
• Has Any Good Come From the COVID-19 Pandemic? - 201
• 10 Reasons to Cut Barbie Some Slack - 643

Negative:

• Velominati’s “The Rules” – Brilliance or BS? - 4,145
• The Problem With Soccer - 3,890
• The Case Against Margolis & Liebowitz - 2,088

(Happily, albertnet is not primarily a platform for serious polemics. None of the above is among my top ten posts. Only the first two negative ones are in the top fifteen. None of the others is in the top thirty.)

To make matters worse…

Okay, perhaps you, gentle reader, are not some status-seeking, insecure person who wastes a lot of time on social media and frets over not getting enough likes and comments. You’re the sort of person who looks beyond himself or herself, and worries more about the state of the world and your fellow human. Perhaps you’ve grown frustrated by this essay and how ungenerous my opinion of you seems to be. Well, congratulations: you’re probably in the most difficult position of all.

How’s that? It’s because you may feel a responsibility to educate yourself about what’s going on in the world, and to try to make a difference. And that means you read a lot of news. Unfortunately, the news is not good. I almost wrote “the news right now is not good” but actually, it’s never been good. If it were good, it wouldn’t be news. “EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY” read no headline ever.

We don’t even get the headline “MANY THINGS ARE IMPROVING.” That’s the opposite of news, even if it happens to be true. In his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, a cofounder of Doctors Without Borders, points out that journalism doesn’t exist to document steady progress. It highlights the negative, exacerbating the pessimistic tendencies I’ve already discussed. Consider this observation by Rosling:

       In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine:
       “Flight BAO016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.”
       2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.

I’ve already blogged about our responsibility to defend ourselves from the onslaught of bad news, bitter perspectives, doomscrolling, etc. Now I’d like to address the growing habit of grousing to our friends and family about all that’s wrong with the world. I suppose that we feel as though we’re doing this to be responsible citizens, to show that we care, and to get the word out that we should all be doing something about these problems. But what, as mere citizens, can we do? Let’s be honest with ourselves: is our grousing always (or even usually) in the service of some specific call to action? I doubt it. I think it’s generally a result of—wait for it—1) our negativity bias, and 2) our desire to elevate our relative status by showcasing our excellent knowledge of the issues.

What is to be done?

To address the central question of this post—why gratitude is so difficult—I think we can find a way forward by having more compassion for ourselves in this realm. If you sometimes struggle to feel grateful, it’s not you—it’s us. We’re hardwired for negativity, and for making comparisons with others that often leave us feeling inadequate; meanwhile, modern vectors for emotion contagion exacerbate the problem.  Beyond compassion, let’s consider how to combat this situation and specifically address these three factors.

For this I’ll turn to yet another essayist: Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff. My favorite among his 100 micro-essays is titled “Think of What You Have Instead of What You Want,” and offers this advice:

In over a dozen years as a stress consultant, one of the most pervasive and destructive mental tendencies I’ve seen is that of focusing on what we want instead of what we have. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how much we have; we just keep expanding our list of desires, which guarantees we will remain dissatisfied.

At first blush this seems to be about material possessions, and thus about showing off with, say, a flashy new car to enhance our status. But it’s more than that, because a lot of what we want is for the world to be better, for people to be better, for more social justice, and all kinds of other things that we can never have or at least never bring about. So satisfaction seems impossible if we continue to focus on what we want. Being dissatisfied, we lack gratitude.

So what’s the secret to shifting our focus? As I see it, the critical component of wanting is the human capacity for counterfactuals, which is to say we are very good at imagining a set of circumstances that is different from reality. I mean, sure, my cat can do this, in imagining a full food bowl instead of an empty one, and thus hassles me at mealtime, but this assessment is as unsophisticated as operant conditioning. She feels hunger and knows there’s a way to satisfy it. But she doesn’t dwell on this want; once her belly is full, she’s happy as a clam and goes off to wash and nap. Suffice to say she is not preoccupied with anxious thoughts (have you ever known a cat with insomnia)? But we humans take counterfactuals much further, such that we are constantly—almost as a reflex—measuring the delta between how things are vs. how we think they ought to be.

This continuous assessment  generally does us no good, of course, because it’s informed by our negativity bias and our persistent dread of relative deprivation, and is exacerbated by how enamored our tech-driven society is with data and all the ways it can describe things: how many thumbs-ups, thumbs-downs, likes, re-posts, rankings, ratings, views, impressions, etc. The urge to measure ourselves, our lives, our personas, and our society against some hypothetical perfect version has never been stronger.

Consider dating. You used to meet a single person somewhere somehow, have a reaction to him or her (the real person, not a curated version), and might decide to get to know him or her better, gradually, via a series of dates … a non-targeted exploration. Following this path, you might be surprised to realize you could actually be attracted to a dog person who likes to play cards and eat barbecue, even if you’re a vegan cat person who reads novels. All this is to say, people used to focus on the actual person—i.e., how things are. Online dating, on the other hand, trains people to swiftly evaluate and usually reject an endless stream of candidates based on their profiles—creating a focus on counterfactuals, always imagining a (hypothetically) superior prospect. I suspect (though I’ve never dated online, having met my wife years before the Internet) that online dating is a good example of modern society taking us in the wrong direction—as if evolution hadn’t already caused enough trouble.

To wrap up, I’m proposing that, following Carlson’s “small stuff” advice about focusing on what we have, not what we want, we fight this growing impulse to compare the actual with the ideal. As negatively biased, socially insecure people susceptible to emotion contagion from every corner, we must protect ourselves from the assessment impulse. We need to recognize that negativity is a bias that no longer protects us; that social comparison is bound to cause hard feelings; that a thousand ways to measure something doesn’t always amount to a single good reason do so. So taste the wine with your tongue, not your discernment, and see if you can’t just enjoy it.

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