If you want to see writing exhaustion, this is the series. After two pretty decent seasons, the show devolved through the ensuing six as if the writers had become deprived of oxygen.

Every time someone knocks on a door, the response is, “What are you doing here?” It’s not, “Good to see you,” or “How can I help you?”, or “Are you lost?” People discussing matters in a private office are interrupted with a solution or dramatic new information by a colleague simply traipsing in from the halls.

There are continuing confrontations and apologies, prefacing further confrontations and apologies, between and among the same people, often multiple times per show. People hard to reach are ambushed in the streets—outside their offices, at hot dog carts, in public garages—as if they were on a schedule and could easily be found. Similarly, people barge into private offices in other buildings without bothering to go through security or secretaries or assistants. And the person being accosted says, of course, “What are you doing here?”

All the women, from the stars and supporting cast to the extras wear stilettos all day long. I’m assuming the producers have a fetish about this. (And the clothing is out of Vogue and hugely out of place as office attire.)

I’m told they’re trying to conjure up a ninth season. If this appears on any of my streaming platforms I’m going to ask, “What are you doing here?”

• We’re seeing huge changes in healthcare.

•  About 25% of patients used telehealth last year, far exceeding the 5% who accessed care this way before the pandemic.

• Pharmacies with physicians present (like pet stores with vets present)

• Physicians in private practice greatly reduced.

• The share of doctors who worked in practices wholly owned by physicians fell from 60.1% to 46.7% from 2012 to 2022.

• More people seeing nurse practitioners

• From 2016 to 2021, the number of primary care physicians billing Medicare declined each year, from 142,000 physicians in 2016 to 135,000 physicians in 2021. 

• Physicians tell me that the paperwork, reimbursement bureaucracy, and corporate demands are terrible. Example: 5-8 minutes allowed for patient questions during visits.

• Some exceptions: dermatologists have modestly increased. There are no midnight emergencies for dermatologists.

• Faith in the medical establishment has been undermined by the conflicting medical and political decisions during and after COVID.

• Religious institutions, education, and medicine have all suffered damage to their integrity.

• Patient costs are rising in terms of copays and over coverage denied by insurers.

• The limited government data available suggests that, overall, insurers deny between 10% and 20% of the claims they receiver

• When I consulted with RI Hospital it started every year in the red by $14 million because they were required to provide care to indigents.

• Recent studies of medical errors have estimated errors may account for as many as 251,000 deaths annually in the United States, making medical errors the third leading cause of death.

• Sepsis is a leading cause of death in hospitals.

• Emergency room waits can be 12 hours and worse.

• It wasn’t all that long ago that doctors were not washing their hands between seeing patients!

• Cut your expenses: virtual assistants, subscription software, subcontracting (even in the Philippines).

• Move work to the client.

• Focus on advisory work, not project work.

• Increase number of sales.

• Increase amount of sales.

• Increase duration of client relationships.

• Increase solicited referrals.

• Create community evangelism.

• Produce new products and services for existing clients.

• Reduce marketing expenses.

• Reduce time waste (internet).

• Stop overdelivering/providing what wasn’t requested.

• Track your time in a journal.

• Get paid in advance.

• Never tolerate delayed payments.

• Focus on total days to cash.

• List and evaluate all possible expenses (e.g., office rent at home, medical).

When you have a great talent on stage, do we really need dancers, other singers, flashing lights, and magic tricks? What does Starbucks gain giving us all those choices in its own strange language?

Have you ever noticed how visitors from Europe are astonished at the size and number of our restaurant dinner courses? Have you ever tried to quickly find something in a car’s owner’s manual? Can you read all the menu options at Dunkin’ Donuts drive through window before the person in the car behind you becomes homicidal because they haven’t had their coffee?

Do you love being “pitched” to buy credit cards on airplanes (which probably all lower your credit score)? Can you really decipher the bond issues you’re asked to vote upon with their triple negatives and boiler plate language?

We tend to provide so many options to appear as if they raise the overall quality of our offerings. Or the lawyers insist we cover all the ground we can and leaver out nothing. Maybe the customers are at fault—do we need instructions that include “turn bike light on at night” or “do not eat or consume any of these pool chemicals”?

We don’t recycle all that wasted food. People bring home prodigious amounts, which they don’t finish there, either. Maybe we need to look at quantity in a new way.

To quote Miss Piggy, “Never eat anything you can’t lift.”

•The American Council on Education reports that 33% of universities and colleges have female presidents.

• In the Ivy League it’s six of eight. Several for the first time ever.

• The three women in front of the congressional committee were clearly over their heads, ill prepared, stunned, and soon reversed some of their testimony.

• We’re focused on identity, not talent.

• Boards used to seek academic excellence and a track record of outstanding leadership.

• Now they want the first woman, or minority, or trans person, or whatever.

• When Biden promised a black, female Supreme Court nominee, he found Ketanji Brown, by all accounts an excellent jurist.

• But he had reduced her to the “best black female” available, instead of the “best candidate available.” That’s demeaning.

• The Boston Association of Female Marketing Executives. Why me? Best role model.

• Your freedom stops at my nose, I think John Jay.

• When you advocate the mass murders of 9 million people, already attempted to begin with beheadings, rape, murder, and kidnapping, that’s well beyond my nose and yours.

• And it won’t stop there. It didn’t with the Nazis, or the Russians, or the Chinese or the Khmer Rouge. It doesn’t stop with any corrupt “ism.”

• A letter writer on a university faculty claimed that students know which professors will involve them in political indoctrination before they register for the course. This is the worst kind of sophistry.

• Students pay absurd tuition to understand how to learn and evaluate differing points, not to hear absurdist, Marxist views from people protected from consequences by tenure, another ancient artifact.

• The question is who’s running the asylum?

• Oh, and by the way, after the University of Pennsylvania president was forced to resign after her failure in Congress, over 500 Harvard faculty members signed a petition supporting their president. What does that tell you?

• It tell me she doesn’t have the spine to interfere with their provocation and indoctrination.

• The “safe zones” on campus certainly aren’t intended for Jews these days, are they?

I find the use of profanity is the last resort for the inarticulate. It’s supposed to be “daring” and “shocking” but it’s actually just lazy. I sometimes surf through the comedy channels and hear standup comedians simply repeating m…..f….. over and over. There is no intellect there, and intellect and pain are actually the basis for almost all real comedy. Putting profanity on a book cover is boring, but it beats trying to come up with an appealing title.

But most alarmingly, it’s simply entered the vernacular as adjectival alternatives. I hear parents in restaurants and at home over meals say s..t at in front of their kids. WTF is used by the more delicate, but it’s profanity nonetheless. Teachers and the “elite” often use it to show they’re “hip” and “down to earth,” which is the absolutely last thing they are. At my gym, where we have personal trainers, the music is very often rap with profound profanities, n….. for blacks, and “bitch” or far worse for women, yet there are black people there as well as women.

This is simply the communication evidence of an uncivil age, a greedy and self-centered age, where people want shortcuts to success with no restrictions placed upon them and no concern for a contribution to the society and well-being around them. Everyone is entitled, and if their entitlement doesn’t work out, then they’re oppressed, and then they protest for more entitlements.

This way lies madness.

As an optimist I believe we’ll recover. But I’m the eldest of the Baby Boomers, my father fought in WW II. We can send carrier groups to the Middle East and apply economic sanctions globally. We can use drones, missiles, and remote weaponry.

But we could never win the equivalent of WW II with our contemporary society because no one would want to make the sacrifices at home that were required.

They would simply say, “Fuck that.”

Have you ever wondered about how other people might see this society? The proliferation of “tip jars” when virtually no service is performed; the intense scrutiny of head injuries in football, while players who make great plays deliberately bang their heads together; cars that can go almost four times the speed limit, manufactured and sold despite it.

Why do we smuggle dogs into restaurants, refuse to merge in traffic, and think AI will become sentient and rule us when we still have to unplug and replug electronics as the primary repair principle? Laugh tracks, scripted reality shows, “influencers”: Why do we kid ourselves with this stuff?

I wouldn't mind Wolfgang Puck giving me advice on menu selections, but I resent my life trickling away while a waiter tells me his or her favorite dishes. Why do tennis and golf professionals require total silence, but quarterbacks, basketball players, and boxers do not? Why do we talk too much and too loudly in public areas, but we’re mute in elevators?

My guess is that people who borrow $300,000 to pay tuition to major in philosophy or history, which pay on average about $60,000 a year IF they can find a job, should really take more math courses. Why does an auto DUI not trigger a search for a boating or plane license? Can I lose my driving privileges at noon and take off in my Cessna for dinner?

Does the advice “don’t take this medicine if you’re allergic to it” really help if you’ve never taken it? Do we have a right to complain about uncomfortable seats on an airplane taking us cross country in six hours for $100?

What the hell is an “influencer”?

And then there’s kale….

The opposite of evolution is devolution. Merely moving forward in time chronologically doesn’t guarantee higher standards, better performance, or improvement.

Our speech has declined. People support this, claiming that speech must “evolve.” But does evolution include mindless, ubiquitous profanity, unintelligible statements, and confusing grammar?

The arts haven’t made great strides, and on television and in the theater we see a procession of diluted revivals and low quality spinoffs. Athletes showboat over a tackle when their team is down three touchdowns.

Service levels in most hotels are down, as they are on most airlines, and the latter fly smaller and smaller jets on longer and longer flights to make money despite passenger discomfort. Traffic is terrible in most large cities—incomprehensibly bad in LA— and if you replace every single internal combustion car with an electric car tomorrow, you’d still have the same number of cars on the roads with the same traffic jams!

Civility is lower than ever, with polarization creating terrible name-calling and an overall casualness, where clerks call customers by their first names and people wear ripped jeans and hoodies to upscale restaurants. There is an entrenched belief that a privileged few in government and in the media somehow have the right to dictate to the rest of us how to live our lives.

And we’re trapped in identity trumping talent, where merit and ability take a back seat to making sure gender, race, and ethnicity are “fairly” represented. (Yet this doesn’t occur in sports, where owners, players, and fans simply want the best talent available to win, no matter who that talent may be.)

Why do people immediately leaving a church service proceed to cut you off in the parking lot or, immediately before it, park in “no parking” fire zones?

Don’t you think Bernie Madoff’s entire family figured out he was crooked and simply ignored what they knew? Politicians curry favor with popular positions but then feel free to change positions once elected and safe. The pandemic was, I believe, dishonestly manipulated by politicians and the medical community which led to more illness than necessary, harsher restriction than required, and more public acrimony than would otherwise have been the case.

Learn here examples of why both John Denver and Nancy Pelosi have been inauthentic.

False praise is far more harmful than honest, negative feedback. If you lie enough on your resume, you eventually begin to really believe the lie, which is why business executives, military leaders, and academicians often face humiliating ousters late in their glorious careers. President Biden has been caught in lies about awards he claims to have received and his class ranking in law school

People blame third parties rather than being true to themselves. “It was the officiating.” “It was the weather.” “It was cheating.”

Being true to yourself requires that you know who you are, and not pretending to be someone else, better, different. Are you attentive to others or self-centered, true to yourself or painting a false picture, creating fiction?

Finally, learn about the institution that I think is the most hypocritical university in the country.

According to Google, the average college/university tuition in the US is $26,000 a year, but they range up to nearly $90,000 per year.

We know this, these are statistics.

Philosophy majors in the US make an average of $62,000 per year. The same for history majors. English majors average $56,000. All teachers in public schools average $65,000 (private schools $50,000). We know this, these are statistics.

Apart from a very wealthy family supporting you, how much debt can you incur and pay off (while paying for housing, insurance, raising a family, etc.) in what amount of time given your loans and your intended occupation?

If you can’t make those numbers work without defaulting on loans or begging the government for help that others didn’t receive, maybe you need to rethink college. Or, at least, private schools.

And, of course, maybe the government needs to rethink a ridiculous system in the public sector, at least, before it implodes.