Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.  Today's video is 3 videos, 3 ways of approaching something I'm thinking about: poetically, politically and then personally.  There's a Kenneth Koch poem called "You Want a Social Life with Friends" that my late friend Amy Krouse Rosenthal introduced me to over 20 years ago.

It begins "You want a social life with friends, a passionate love life, and as well, to work hard every day. What's true is of these 3, you may have 2." I used to think that even considering such trade-offs was mere laziness, that if you just worked hard enough, you had plenty of time for work and romance and friendships and everything else.

But on a very basic level, time spent with family is time not spent working. And time spent writing novels is time not spent writing videos. I am making these choices as an individual all the time, but we are also making them as a society.

There are costs and benefits to the 40-hour work week, and costs and benefits to a school year with 8 weeks of summer vacation. And for those of us fortunate enough to have a measure of individual choice, those choices are not laziness - they are a fact of being alive.  And if I think I'm transcending cost-benefit analysis somehow by doing it all, I'm still making choices, I'm just making unconscious ones.  (1:14) Eleven years ago, I made a video exploring my profound hatred of the US penny, and I do still very much hate them. The reason we have money is to store value and facilitate the exchange of goods and services and pennies don't do that.

They would be worthless except that each penny costs the US Mint almost 2 cents to make, so they are worth much less than nothing. Arguments in favour of keeping the penny, that for instance, ceasing to mint them would somehow increase inflation are provably false, because many countries have eliminated similar coins without any problems, including the United States which eliminated the half-pence when it was worth around 30 of today's cents.  But of course one of the reasons I hate pennies is that hating pennies is simple. The penny is the rare cost that has no benefit, or at least very little benefit, and there is some part of me that craves these straightforward outrages which do seem to flourish online where discourse is conducted primarily via memes and short videos and brief bursts of text.

But the thing is the most important issues we faced, from monetary policy, to expanding healthcare access can not really be boiled down to "here's how to have a lot of benefit at absolutely no cost". Pennies can, which makes them attractive but not particularly substantive. And so, my current take on pennies is that pennies are ridiculous but also easy, and almost everything that is really important is at least, upon close inspection, neither ridiculous nor easy.  (2:40) I've been thinking a lot about cost-benefit analyses, partly because we are inside of a pandemic that demands a constant, exhausting, stream of both personal and societal cost-benefit analyses, but partly for more personal reasons.

Several months ago I started taking a new medication to treat my OCD and it's been very effective, I am not losing many hours to excessive worry or compulsive behaviours, I do not feel gripped by dread or despair, etc, but there are also some downsides, including some weird ones, like I cry all the time at everything and have for my entire life, being a crier is like, part of how I understand myself. Except that, in the last few months, I have completely lost the ability to cry, which is not as pleasant as it might sound, because while I don't like being terribly sad, I do like being able to access the full range of human emotions.  Now for me at least, the benefits of this medication far outweigh the costs, but I have to acknowledge that there are costs. I'll tell you what though, when I do finally cry, it's going to be a barnstormer - like lock the doors, there's an eruption in this home!

My point though is that the fact of a cost does not negate the fact of a benefit.  So to summarise, pennies are simple and life is complicated and treating life like pennies doesn't work, it doesn't work for me personally anyway, and I don't think it works for us societally.  Hank, I'll see you on Friday.