One of the things I see coming up is a class of young adults who 1) have money that they would like to exchange for goods and services, but 2) aren’t really familiar with the process of exchanging that money for services. For example:

“People keep telling me I should hire an accountant because I’m an artist and all of my income is from freelancing so my taxes are super complicated, but I don’t know how to hire an accountant.”

Or, most recently, an example I encountered today of someone who wanted to hire someone to clean their home, and was willing to spend money to make it happen, but didn’t take the steps to make that happen because they were unsure of things like whether they would have to provide cleaning supplies, and whether they would have to be home during the house cleaning.

The following advice assumes you’ve already gotten past the step of doing a Google search for “Chicago housecleaning services” (adjust this search query as needed depending on your location and the service you are looking for), and have the names and phone numbers of several local businesses that purport to offer the service you are interested in. Perhaps you have also read some Yelp reviews to see which of the businesses you’re considering are most liked.

In nearly every case, if you’re not sure how to hire a business, you can phone the business in question and they will happily spend any amount of time answering your questions. This applies to hiring house cleaners, accountants, lawyers, personal trainers, birthday clowns, and nearly every type of service-based business.

Most of these businesses realize that part of their clientele will be “first-time customers who have not participated in this kind of transaction before,” and they will not be surprised if they receive a phone call from you saying, “I am interested in the service that you offer, but I don’t fully understand how it works, could you please explain it to me?”  Many of these businesses spend tons of money on advertising to acquire people like you as customers. When you did a Google search for “Chicago housecleaning services,” you were probably shown advertisements from companies in Chicago who offer housecleaning services. Those businesses spend a sizable amount of money each year to show ads like that to people like you. If they’re willing to spend money to advertise to you, you can be reasonably assured that they will gladly spend 15 minutes talking to you on the phone to acquire you as a customer. (Acquiring you as a customer represents a value far beyond the immediate sale. If they successfully sell their housecleaning service to you and the first cleaning goes well enough that you decide to hire them on a monthly basis, and if that relationship continues for the next 10 years until you move to a new city, your lifetime value as a customer is measured in tens of thousands of dollars. Smart businesses, which are generally the ones you want to do business with, understand that your willingness to spend many thousands of dollars on them over the next 10 years is largely contingent on whether the person that you speak to on the phone is helpful and willing to guide you through the process of becoming their customer.)

Businesses want to make it easy for you to give them money. If there is some barrier like “I would give you money but I don’t know how the process of hiring a house cleaner works,” they will gladly spend several minutes knocking that barrier down in order to make it easier for you give them money.

This is why so many businesses offer a “free consultation,” which sometimes entails things like sending a person out to your home to give you a quote for housecleaning services, or setting up an appointment for you to talk to a CPA at the accounting firm because the assistant who answers the phone doesn’t know the answers to all of your accounting questions. Look at it from the business’s perspective: you have just called them on the phone and said, in effect, “I am thinking of hiring you, can you spend some time explaining to me why I should hire you, and how I should go about hiring you?” Of course they will be willing to take you up on that opportunity. (The reasons for why businesses are willing to spend the time to “sell themselves” to you this are similar to the reasons why you, when offered a desirable job, are willing to put on a suit and travel to an office to spend an hour talking to an interviewer about why you are qualified for the job they’re considering you for. Most people do this without worrying too much about “wasting time” that they aren’t getting paid for; it is simply a part of doing business.)

Another question I sometimes see people struggling with is not knowing how to ask questions of a business or professional because they don’t know all of the jargon. You can explain your situation to them using normal words and they will figure out what exactly is needed to assist you. This is part of their job. You probably have done some version of this if you have ever worked a customer service job. At Walmart, there is an area of the store that employees will sometimes refer to as “FDD” (Frozen-Dairy Department). Walmart customers don’t walk up to someone with a Walmart vest and ask, “How do I get to FDD,” they say things like, “Where’s the ice cream section,” or “I’m looking for cream cheese.” (Walmart employees, for the most part, will not seize on this as an opportunity to condescendingly say, “excuse me, what you’re referring to as ‘the ice cream section’ is in fact, the Frozen-Dairy Department, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, ‘FDD.'”) It’s okay if you, as a customer, don’t know all of the lingo associated with the thing you are asking about. Part of the reason that they have a job is that they have information that the customers don’t, and it not every customer who walks in the door is going to know all of the jargon.

If an accountant mentions a 1099 and you don’t know what that is, you can ask. If you’re hesitant to ask a question because you’re not sure if it’s relevant, say to them, “I’m not sure if this question is relevant, but…” and then ask your question. The same applies for providing them with information: If your grandparents just gifted you a large amount of cash as a college graduation present and you’re not sure if your accountant needs to know about that in order to do your taxes, you can just say, “By the way, my grandparents gave me a $2500 check as a gift, does that affect my tax situation? Do I need to tell you about stuff like that?” (The answer, if you’re wondering, is “You can receive up to $15,000 gifts per year without having to pay any taxes on those gifts,” but no accountant will think you are dumb for not knowing this; most people don’t know it, so why would they assume that you would know it?)

Note that all of the above is intended to describe local service-based businesses, and if all of this is new and strange to you, it’s probably because most of the businesses you’ve interacted with so far operated by selling goods with relatively low margins: that is the business model that Walmart, Best Buy, McDonalds, etc. operate on. As stated before, if you have a good relationship with a house cleaning service and decide to keep hiring them over the next 10 years that you live in your current apartment, they stand to make many thousands of dollars, and will be happy to spend 15 minutes on the phone talking to you in order to make that happen. This is probably not true of e.g. Walmart: if you call Walmart to ask about the features of a $60 gadget they are selling, Walmart stands to make maybe $10 from that sale, and thus is considerably less interested in paying (and training) their associates to spend 15 minutes talking with you on the phone explaining all the features of the gadget you are calling about; the employee you talk to at Walmart is probably interested in ending the call as quickly as possible. Your local big box retailer has a business model that is based around performing transactions with thousands of customers per day and maybe half a million customer interactions per year, which can sometimes lead to a feeling that you, as a customer, are insignificant and easily discarded. It would be a mistake to assume that all businesses operate like this: your local CPA is almost the complete inverse of Walmart, as they have a business that operates on working with several hundred clients over the course of an entire year (maybe several thousand clients a year if they are a firm with multiple tax preparers).

There’s a huge audience for stories that involve characters who solve problems using wit and intelligence rather than force and physical strength, particularly in written fiction. Part of this, I suspect, has to do with the fact that the audience for written fiction mainly consists of people who enjoy and spend time reading books, which is usually seen as an intellectual pursuit. People who read books for entertainment are usually the kind of people who identify more with Bruce Banner than with Hulk. We’d like to solve our problems by being clever and adroit, rather than transforming into a giant green monster and solving our problems by smashing them.

We have an easier time empathizing with characters who are like us, and a story about character who solves problems using the same skills that we possess feels validating. The issue is that there are a lot of situations where Hulk is better at solving problems than Bruce Banner, and if you want to construct a story where every problem can be solved with wit (and no problem can be better solved with brute force), then you’re going to have to warp the events (and sometimes the logic) of the story in the service of that goal, because that’s not always the way the real world works. And a lot of times, this has the effect of making stories more about using a very narrow idea of intelligence, rather than actually approaching problems rationally.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from a scene in the movie Sneakers (a delightful 1992 thriller and heist movie about cryptography and espionage) where Robert Redford’s character goes to steal a cipher device from a researcher’s office. After socially engineering himself past the front desk, he finds his caper brought to a halt when the door to the office is protected with an electronic keypad. He radios the guys in the surveillance van and says, “Anybody remember how to defeat an electronic keypad?” Because this is a thriller about computers and cryptography, we expect them to come up with some kind of backdoor solution to breaking this lock, the cyberpunk equivalent of “recite this magical incantation and the lock will open for you.” The audience waits in tense silence as Robert listens to the voice of the computer guys speaking into his earpiece and mutters to himself, “Alright, that might work.” And then he takes a step back and kicks down the door.

This is what actual intelligent problem-solving actually looks like. In this scene, the crew identifies the fact that when snooping around in an old academic research building, it’s easier to kick an old wooden door off its hinges than to try and defeat an electronic keypad. They do the smart thing, which in this case is to use physical force. And I (and most viewers) are delighted by this moment, in part because you see the thought process behind it: Robert Redford encounters a problem, asks the computer guys to solve it for him, and they realize that real problem is not “How do I hack this electronic keypad,” but “How do I get to what’s on the other side of this door.” This moment of hesitation is important, because if he had just marched up to the door and kicked it down without taking the time to consider the optimal solution, he would feel less like a smooth operator executing the perfect heist, and more like a Jack Bauer who just charges into situations and resolves them with force.

It can be easy for stories to fall into the trap of breaking things down into a dichotomy of “brains vs brawn,” as if any energy spent doing physical tasks subtracts from the energy that would otherwise power your brain, but in fact a lot of the times the smartest thing to do is to punch the bad guy, or kick down the door.

The dichotomy of “brain vs brawn” suggests that these two are somehow mutually exclusive, and it feels like an example of a common fallacy where people see real-life skills and talents like some kind of tabletop RPG stat sheet where you have a finite number of points to distribute, which means that any points invested into things like charisma and strength necessarily subtract from stats like wisdom and intelligence. In reality, “talent” is not an evenly distributed thing; at best, it seems like athleticism and intellect are orthogonal, as plenty of people seem to have both in great abundance. (At my high school, the class valedictorian was also a star player on the high school baseball team.) There are also lots of smart people who have realized that investing time in their health and fitness is a smart use of their time, and usually the most fit people are the ones who treat optimizing their health as a worthwhile undertaking. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that physical fitness and mental performance are positively correlated in a number of ways: for example, cardiovascular health affects brain function, and so engaging in physical exercise increases your mental fitness, rather than draining away a finite number of stat points from intelligence to boost your physique.

Kicking down the door may be intelligent, but it does not always live up to the romantic ideal of intelligence, which is less about actually making the best choice in any given situation, and more about believing “reading books is a better use of your time than sports, scientists are always better at solving problems and winning conflicts than linebackers.” This partly feels a bit like concession to the fact that the crowd of people who read for recreation tend to be the same kind of people who spent much of their youth indoors reading books rather than flipping tires on the football field, and people like reading stories that serve and flatter their own sensibilities. But to be charitable to this line of thinking, it is true in the aggregate that people who engage in intellectual pursuits tend to do better: education is correlated with things like higher income, longer lifespan, most of the things that we’d define as “higher quality of life,” and more generally, “winning.” The issue is when you take that general idea (“the person who had a good SAT score tends to have a better life outcome than the person who spent high school playing sports associated with head trauma”) and try to apply it universally to every situation, you wind up in bizarre situations where people would rather try to hack the keypad instead of kick down the door.

The convenient thing about fiction is that the author can simply fail to introduce the sort of problems that would be best solved by a well-placed kick. (If you want to have a story about hacking the electronic keypad lock, just make the door out of some kind of reinforced material that can’t easily be kicked down.) In fact, it’s possible for an author to create an entire setting based on the idea that people who are more intelligent (here defined as “reading lots of books”) always win. I suspect that a major reason why “kid goes to wizard school” is so popular as a trope of fantasy that is that it’s essentially created a genre where studying and reading books makes you more capable of dealing with violent conflict. In general, bookish and studious people rarely intersect with violence, and when they do they tend to find their skills poorly matched for dealing with violent conflict, but a wizard school setting allows for a logically consistent story about a character who is a brainy academic who also solves their conflicts with with superior force. In this case, we don’t have to choose between being Bruce Banner or being the Hulk. The wizard doesn’t have to trade their intelligence for strength; the wizard becomes a powerful combatant by burying their nose in books.

The issue with a character who solves their problem just by studying is that when they acquire that skill and then apply it to solve a problem, they’re not really demonstrating intelligence, they’re demonstrating expertise. The wizard’s power appears to be the triumph of brain over brawn, but this is true only in the most superficial sense of what is meant by “brains.” A wizard who defeats his enemies by throwing fireballs at them is not really showcasing his intelligence, even if his method for learning to throw fireballs involved reading a lot of books.

Intelligence is powerful because it transcends expertise within a single domain. It’s also narratively useful, because it would feel unrealistic for a character to be an expert on every single problem that they encounter. You can mitigate this somewhat by creating a story about an ensemble cast of experts who are capable of dealing with anything that comes at them (which is the level on which heist stories like Sneakers operate), but there’s something about the ability to solve a problem in a simple and elegant way that just sings to us, precisely because it bypasses the need for expertise. You could spend hundreds of hours studying this field to become expert enough to overcome problems in the conventional way, or you could be clever, think outside the box, redefine the problem into terms that you’re equipped to deal with, and kick down the door.

I just watched the Netflix Death Note movie.  Some thoughts (spoilers for both the movie and the manga/anime included):

If you were expecting a faithful adaptation, there’s a lot to take issue with. The movie is more about emotions and revenge, rather than logic and justice as the manga/anime was. “Light” and “L” are definitely not the characters that people were expecting coming from the anime/manga.

I don’t really consider myself a “purist” when it comes to adaptations, and I would actually be okay with the decision to tell a story about emotions/revenge rather than logic/justice if it were done well, but it’s not. Even when people behave “irrationally” and are driven by emotions, there’s a limit to how much stupidity you can tolerate.  The biggest example is how Light never makes any attempt to hide the death note, even after L just told him face to face that he believes Light is Kira.  I don’t expect Light Turner to be as smart/prepared as Light Yagami (who devised a way to hide the death note in a hidden desk drawer way back in episode 2, before the investigation ever started), but you would think that after L tells Light Turner “you are the prime suspect,” he would at least devote a little thought to hiding the murder weapon.

Plot holes (and other contradictions)

Even the ending of the movie, which I actually liked, has a big plot hole that can’t simply be explained by characters acting emotionally/irrationally.  The ending of the movie culminates with L sneaking into Light’s house and finding a page ripped from the death note with names written down on it.  Then, L picks up a pen and contemplates whether to write Light Turner’s name on the page that was torn on the death note, taking revenge on Light for killing Watari.  While this would be out of character for the version of L we seen in the manga/anime, I think this is actually an interesting conflict for the more emotional version of L we see in the movie, and it also plays with the theme of revenge, which the movie seems to be based around. However, this scene is completely undermined by the fact that L did not know what Kira’s method of killing was.  He finds a paper that has a list of criminals, and a description of how one of them dies.  Okay, that seems like the kind of thing a killer might keep (a “hit list”), but there seems to be no explanation for the fact that L, who knows nothing about the death note or its rules, is immediately able to conclude, “If I write Light Turner’s name on this sheet of paper, he will die.” ((I’m ready to be proven wrong on this if someone wants to tell me why I’m wrong; I only watched the movie once and I have no desire to go back and rewatch to confirm that L didn’t know how the death note worked, although I don’t see how he could have given that the notebook was never in police custody.))

This reminded of a scene from the anime, where the investigation team is watching Higuchi (the Yotsuba killer) as he goes through some files to discover Matsuda’s name (the file he actually finds is a decoy with an alias, planted by the police).  Higuchi pulls out the death note and writes the name down, and the first response of the investigation team is, “Wait, why isn’t he killing him?  Why is he just writing the name down?  Is he just recording his name to kill him later?  But why would he do that when there’s such an urgency to kill him?”  It’s not until Higuchi starts screaming “Why won’t he die?” that the investigation team deduces that perhaps writing down names is Kira’s method of killing.

Another issue, not so much a “plot hole” as a missed opportunity: there’s a point at which Light suggests that he might write Ryuk’s name in the death note.  Ryuk tells him that the last person who tried this died before they could finish writing the name (the implication being, “If you try to kill me, I’ll kill you faster.”)  But the first rule of the death note clearly states, “The human whose name is written in this note shall die,” and Ryuk definitely isn’t human, so the possibility of Light killing him with the death note shouldn’t even be on the table.  (Even if Light did bring up the idea out of ignorance, a better retort for Ryuk would be “try reading rule #1 again,” rather than threatening to kill Light.)

I could go on, and I’m sure that in the coming days and weeks, someone will put together an hour-long Red Letter Media-esque video pointing out all of the various logical contradictions within the movie.  However, I don’t think that the movie is ruined by a confluence of small problems so much as every part of it is dragged down by one glaring problem:

Light’s agency (or lack therof)

My biggest gripe with the movie is how it feels like Light is stripped of any sense of agency.  It was one of manga/anime Light’s defining characteristics.  Light Yagami was smart, ambitious, ruthless, but most of all, he was proactive: the plot of the anime advances at a rate according to his choosing.  It is Light who chooses to pick up the death note after seeing it drop from afar, it is Light who chooses to write the first name down to test the death note’s powers, it is Light who decides to start writing hundreds of names in the death note without any outside prompting, it is Light who decides to kill Lind L. Tailor, it is Light who chooses to kill the twelve FBI agents, it is Light who chooses to turn himself into the police to set things into motion to kick off the “Yotsuba” mini-arc, and so on.

In the anime, Light is a character who does things.  In the movie, Light is a character who has things happen to him.

In the movie, Ryuk basically “chooses” Light by dropping the Death Note right next to him when no one else is around. It almost feels like Light Turner is tricked or coerced into using the death note by Ryuk, who tells him, “Go on, if my appearance seems unbelievable to you and you think this is all a dream…why not try writing a name down?”  Even if Ryuk wasn’t actually trying to mislead Light, consider this: when a supernatural nightmarish being that surely has other powers (such as the power to inflict death) descends upon you and makes a strongly-worded suggestion that you do something, can you really say that you chose to do it of your own volition?  Lest we’ve already forgotten, anime Light started writing names down well before Ryuk showed up.  In fact, when Ryuk does show up in the anime, he’s impressed that Light has managed to fill five pages of the death note, already having killed hundreds of people.

Light Yagami seems barely fazed by Ryuk: Light drives the action, and Ryuk is just along for the ride.  In the movie, it feels like Ryuk is the one who drives the action at the start, and Light Turner is just the person he decided to drag along for the ride.

To put it into Campbellian terms: Light Yagami steps across the threshold entirely of his own volition.  Light Turner is dragged across the threshold kicking and screaming. Literally.