Midlife Meditation

America has a survey problem. That's actually too broad. American businesses have the problem, though it's American consumers who do the heavy lifting. Businesses are hooked on customer satisfaction surveys, but it's consumers who are asked, multiple times a day, to fill them out. Transactions, interactions, casual contacts, small purchases--it seems everyone who's selling something, or helping consumers feel better about having purchased that item, wants our opinion on how the contact with the salesperson or customer service representative went. Every time I call Kaiser Permanente to schedule an appointment, I'm asked to stay on the phone afterward to take a survey on how it went. Any purchase I make from the Amazon Marketplace results in a deluge of emails pleading with me to write a positive review of the item. Grocery store and restaurant receipts come with offers for extra fuel points or a free side in exchange for taking an online survey. It seems everybody ...

"What are your superpowers again?" "I'm rich." And that, my friends, is why we have an idiot in the White House insisting that he is "like, smart" on Twitter. But I digress before there's even been an ingress. This essay was inspired by a tweet straight from the thumbs of the Chief Twit, but it's framed by a movie I saw a week ago: "Justice League." That movie is every bit as awful as you may have heard from those superhero completists unfortunate enough to have subjected themselves to it, but it does contain some saving graces, one of which is the brilliant casting of The Flash with a twitchy nerdy fanboy who can't believe he gets to hang out with his heroes--and yes, that's a device that was ripped off in its entirety from the introduction of the new Spiderman as a twitchy nerdy fanboy who can't believe he gets to hang out with his heroes in both "Captain America: Civil War" and "Spiderman: Ho...