Mission Driven Ritualistic Seshes

randa and harry talk flossing as world building

GH: Greetings hangers and chillers alike…as you can see we have made powerful rebranding upgrades in the new year. But there’s actually more to come. Next week we’re kicking off OPERATION H.O.A.M.K.O.S. More to come next week ;).

Unrelated: if ANYONE has information about a poly guy leaving a watch behind after having S with a girl in London PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let us know.

RS

good morning, harry. it is the new year so people are doing resolutions and goals and stuff. lots of people are saying that resolutions are toxic. a friend of mine made a very good point that i’d never heard – that in many cultures around the world, the new year actually happens in the spring which makes more bodily sense because it’s getting warmer and we feel more motivated to get active.

within all the resolution stuff, i’m writing to you specifically about habit formation. i don’t think i’ve ever intentionally maintained a habit for longer than a few months. i have been this way my whole life and have dabbled in countless tactics to combat my god-given tendencies to Riff and Vibe. 

for example, a few years back i downloaded this (now defunct) app called SPAR! that was like TikTok but for flossing and doing “butt lifts” (more below)–you would basically create a challenge that’s like “i will videotape myself flossing every day for 2 weeks” and if you miss a day you pay $10 into a pot, whoever flosses the most at the end of the challenge wins the pot. it looked like this:

in the wake of many failed attempts at habit formation, i floated this idea to clarissa…

…which i later found out an old friend was actually doing. her dom was making her send a photo of herself fully dressed by 9am every day or something, which scares me but also… Based

to ground us in the topic of this newsletter (hanging out and chilling), i have also dabbled in habit formation disguised as hanging out. remember reading club? i wanted to read more so i invited all my friends over to my house for SSR. we read in silence for an hour and then hung out and chatted after. (i recently learned that somebody branded and monetized this to which i say… damn i wish i tried that)

another version of this was my community fish share. i got 1.5 pounds of mystery fish every week and then invited ppl over to help me eat it. and as a result i cooked more and benefitted from the additional omega-3 fatty acids in my diet. your doctor might suggest fish oil supplements, but if Good Hang were a medical practice, we would prescribe a hefty dose of Fish Friday………….. 

so anyway my question to you, harry, is what sorts of things have you tried or heard of when it comes to establishing new habits? and also should i get a productivity dom?

HK

When i was in high school I had a very bizarre and useless therapist who lived in Palo Alto and had a pet bird who would squawk in the middle of our sessions. When the bird squawked too much he would throw a towel over the bird cage and say ‘oh no no no’ to the bird. 

This therapist suggested to me several times (each time thinking it was the first) that I read a book called Eat That Frog. The book is named after a quote attributed to Mark Twain that is actually kind of a bar: “If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.”

The thesis of the book was that you should take on the hardest thing first. This is incredibly dumb and useless advice…not because it wouldn’t work, but because anyone who had an internal capacity to act on that idea, would never need to read a book about productivity. It’s like a weight loss book having the first step be “become strong and in good shape”.

This is all to say that I think the productivity and self-help apparatus should be criminalized. Plenty of time to “bullet journal” when you’re in JAIL!!

To your point about habits as hanging out, you are talking about an MDRS, or Mission Driven Ritualistic Sesh. The holy grail of self-improvement. The MDRS is one of the most sought-after and difficult tickets in town. To be a part of one when it’s humming feels like you are floating. Here is a helpful graphic:

When I think of MDRS, I’m reminded of Camella’s ladies’ cinema club in the Sopranos. Like all things Sopranos (the greatest work of fiction in history) this bit does a great job of capturing what it feels like to kick a Mission Driven Ritualistic Sesh off. ITS NOT EASY.

Invariably, an MDRS hits an inflection point 3-4 weeks in, where the thrill of doing something vaguely intellectual and productive on a Sunday morning fades and we all yearn to be scrolling on our couch…I think most MDRS end here…and maybe that's okay.

But to do something truly special, you have to make it through the dip. After that, hanging out productively starts to feel easier than not hanging out…and that is the el dorado of productive chilling

RS

in our capitalist society, i fear the way to make it past the dip is to MONETIZE, BRAND, or otherwise stake your reputation on the MDRS… for example, friend of the newsletter

Katie O'Connell

has successfully created an MDRS (playing Euchre in Brooklyn) (which i think is cool) which has lasted at least 19 wks.

HK

At a 30-thousand-foot level, i disagree. I think there are plenty of examples of MDRS that have no branding and make no money. Not to brag but i was literally just at Tuesday basketball sesh that has been going on for almost 5 years. Our mission: get buckets. No money involved.

I do think though perhaps what you are talking about is the desire for a group sesh to be textured and rich and robust in the way that many actual brands and companies are trying to create.

In the current media environment, brands from Marvel to Statefarm to Chapo Trap House are building worlds whether they know it or not. Terry Nguyen wrote an excellent piece for Dirt breaking down this phenomenon - she writes: 

To contend with our ever-slimming attention spans, even advertisements are concocting persistent storylines with fictional characters and backstories to compel consumers into caring. Jake from State Farm has a mini-series on TikTok… A character with a singular narrative has limited branding potential. A world, by contrast, offers infinite possibilities.

I get why companies and creators alike do this, being part of a world is the last fun thing left you can do on your phone.

To get over the momentum dip in an early MDRS, the propulsive power of their being a textured little micro world is the perfect counter. A reading club doesn’t need a public-facing Instagram or a revenue stream, it needs an active group chat. It needs friends who can talk for 45 minutes at reading club but wouldn’t know what to say to each other at lunch on a Monday. Whatever feeling that is, the acute feeling of being part of a community, would be enough to get me to train for one of those ‘tough mudder’ races if that’s what the fellas were up to. 

Branding and monetizing is certainly a framework for building a world. It makes texture an active goal rather than a possible passive outcome, and I’m not even knocking that…Randa, you and I have had a blast sitting around riffing about branding for Good Hang…i just dont think its the only way. 

RS

i think what you’re describing - the acute feeling of being part of a community - is what happens when you feel an activity reinforces a particular identity. you seem to really identify with being a basketball player so you’re gonna keep balling… i waffle on how important it is to be an Intellectual or a Chef so i go through phases of doing intellectual and culinary type shit… we identify as thought leaders of hanging out so we continue building the world of good hang…

HK

I like what Drake likes