9 Trivial Goods

If the rules of alchemical compatibility were the only factor which dictated the formation and decay of relationships, then relationships would be— if not pleasant— fairly orderly. The process of getting to know someone new and deciding whether you like them would be a straightforward gut-check, a trial period and a verdict rendered on the timescale of your pertinent pathology. This is not, obviously, how human relationships work.

That’s not to say that human relationships are particularly complicated, and therefore impenetrable to solve. We actually only need one other tool to predict the course of interpersonal relationships: trivial goods.

“Trivial goods” refers to wealth, physical attractiveness, and trivial interestingness. Wealth, straightforwardly, refers to money; it also refers to the kinds of connections and positions which generate money. Physical attractiveness is just that, physical beauty. Trivial interestingness is a composite of the factors which go  into making a person universally interesting: intelligence, exotic life experiences, unusual or impressive hobbies, impressive accomplishments, refined taste, that sort of thing.

It’s important to note that trivial interestingness doesn’t subsume things like being “nice”, having a “good” personality, or having  a “good” sense of humor. This isn’t because these things aren’t important in forming relationships, but because they are much more subjective— ie, more relational— than the trivial goods are. In fact, these things are almost entirely accounted for by the alchemy of pathological compatibility.

Four things need to be kept in mind about the way trivial goods function within the Framework.

Firstly, they are held to be absolute, not relative. That is to say that when someone is measuring your trivial goods— we might say, assigning you a “trivial value”, at the risk of rendering the jargon too tortured— they don’t really judge you on the basis of the other people in your milieu. They “score” you on these things in a vacuum, automatically, and without factoring in why they’re judging you. This judgment only becomes relative when they are forced to choose between you and someone else for some particular purpose, something which doesn’t actually happen all that often outside of romantic relationships.

Secondly, trivial goods are impactful because they are legible and universal. They’re legible in that they can immediately be ascertained within the space of a single interaction. They’re universal in that they are always a benefit to a person, all else being equal— no one will ever value you less for being more attractive, wealthier, or more interesting.

Thirdly, trivial goods are additive, not multiplicative. Like everything else in the Framework, there are no knock-on effects or chain reactions. This means that, for instance, having more wealth doesn’t automatically make you more physically attractive. You might be able to buy better clothes, get plastic surgery, or hire a personal trainer because of your wealth; but these things make you more attractive in an additive, absolute sense, unrelated to other people’s perception of your wealth.

Fourthly, trivial goods do not experience diminishing returns, and are functionally uncapped. People will always give you more leeway if you get more trivially attractive, even if you’re already more attractive than everyone else around you. This is because, as I said above, most decisions about who someone chooses to get along with are not a zero-sum game. (When it is combined with 3c’s extreme fear of aging and death, this fact goes some way towards explaining why celebrities who are widely renowned for their beauty persist in chasing the plastic-surgery dragon,).

With these four principles in mind, we can see how trivial goods function within the Framework. They act as a sort of “default” vector for decision-making, when a person is unable to determine how much they actually like someone (ie, their pathological compatibility). They really only come into play in two circumstances:

A: At the beginning stages of a relationship ( during the first few weeks of back and forth interaction), when you haven’t had time to get a sense for the other person’s personality

B: In a failing relationship, when the less trivially attractive party is looking for reasons to put up with the more attractive person’s incompatible behavior, and the more trivially attractive party is assessing the amount of leverage they can exert over the other.

It’s also important to note that which trivial goods are most salient obviously depends on the type of the relationship in question. Trivial interestingness is most salient to friendships, attractiveness is most salient to romantic relationships, and wealth is most salient to professional relationships; however, there’s enough cross-pollination in human interactions that all trivial goods will come into effect to some extent in every relationship— ie, you’re more likely to keep a beautiful person around as a friend, as their beauty will reflect well on you even if it doesn’t appeal to you directly.

Combining this with the alchemy of pathological compatibility, we can predict the course of any given relationship, all of which follow a standard-enough pattern.

1.  Two people meet. They decide how much to engage with each other on the basis of the degree to which they each possess trivial goods. The ratio of how much they lack the kind of socialization the other party will provide to how trivially attractive they find the other party determines whether they interact with each other again.
2. Over the course of a few weeks of interactions, they get a sense for whether the other person is compatible with them on the 2nd level. If they are compatible, they will interact more deeply; if they are incompatible they will enter into the “failing relationship” format described above.
3. Over the course of a few months of interactions, they get a sense for whether the other person is compatible with them on the 3rd level. If they’re compatible, they’ll interact more deeply; if they are incompatible, they’ll enter into the “failing relationship format” here as well
4. If both trial periods  have turned up “compatible” as their result, then their relationship will grow more entrenched up to its logistical limits (as laid out in the previous chapter—  married, roommates, close friends, mentor-mentee, business partners, etc).

Most people find the notion that all interpersonal relationships are this simple— and that they are founded on such a shallow basis— reprehensible. It’s not difficult to understand why; most people are less attractive than they’d like to be, and find this idea, that the thing that “really” matters is something they don’t have, disturbing. If you find yourself in this camp, I’d like to take this opportunity to recontextualize all of this stuff a bit. I hope that, by doing so, the notion that these shallow characteristics have a huge bearing on the course of your life will cease to be oppressive, and might even feel liberating.

Keep in mind, all of the trivial goods are valuable because they’re simple. They’re so simple that they’re almost subducted beneath the layer of our cognizance; “What makes a person physically beautiful?” is a difficult question for most people to answer,  but everyone knows it when they see it, as though it’s self-evident. It’s not self evident, like any value-judgment it’s the product of a logical process somewhere in your mind; but that logical process is so quick, and founded on principles so fundamental to the way you see the world, that digging into the guts of it and figuring out what’s actually going on is extremely difficult. (I’m certainly not going to attempt it here.)

This simplicity means that trivial goods are extremely fungible. If you set out to intentionally acquire them, it’s straightforward to succeed at doing so. That isn’t to say that it’s easy, or that it doesn’t take a degree of willpower; but the methods aren’t unclear. To wit:

• For Wealth
  • Work harder
  • Seek better-paying jobs
• For Physical Attractiveness
  • Lose weight
    • I will explain my own weight loss method in a companion piece, “The Sugar-Free Diet”
  • Work out
  • Get a better haircut
  • Measure your face shape with a tape measure, follow a guide on what to ask your barber for
  • Develop a sense of fashion
    • In my opinion, 8/10ths of this is just losing weight; the remainder is knowing what to avoid. I can’t speak to women’s fashion, but for men, avoid:
      • Straight-washed jeans
      • Blocky running shoes
      • Cargo shorts
      • Plain hoodies and T-shirts (unless they’re in a pastel or minimalist color)
      • If worst comes to worst, just pick a mannequin at a trendy store and dress like it.
  • Fix any major deformities through a doctor
    • I’m mostly talking about acne, but also more extreme problems like harelip, messed up teeth etc
• For Trivial Interestingness
  • Do psychedelic drugs
    • Done properly, psychs fundamentally alter your relationship to color, sound, and all the other elements of physical experience.
  • Develop a refined taste
    • Look up the “Top 100” albums, movies, shows, video games, whatever; try to understand what makes the good things good; engage in solve
  • Do interesting things
    • Collect stories to tell people. Skydive, go hitchhiking, etc
  • Get good at something
    • Learn to play an instrument, or cook, etc
  • Travel

You might agree or disagree with any one of these suggestions; but it’s hard to deny that if someone did all of these things, they’d come out of the other end substantially more attractive. Because trivial goods are additive, rather than multiplicative, every step you take along any of these avenues is contributing to your trivial attractiveness. The fact that these factors are shallow, and not reflective of anything complex, means that they’re easy to gauge, easy to understand, and not likely to end in wasted effort.

While it’s certainly true that some people are born with natural advantages in this domain— wealthy families, appealing face structure, interesting childhood stories— there’s no reason to allow their advantages to draw you into resentment. Trivial attractiveness is absolute, not relative; the existence of other attractive people has no bearing on how people treat you, except at the margins where they are forced to choose a limited number of people for some role in their lives. Monogamous romance is the primary domain of life in which trivial goods take on a relative character— and luckily, monogamous romance is self-balancing, because human beings are born male and female in even quantities.

If you bear any resentment regarding an inability to form interpersonal relationships— or to form the kinds of interpersonal relationships you desire— trivial goods are a powerful tool for moving that resentment inward, where it can be addressed. In the short run, the factors which go into acquiring friendships, colleagues, and romantic partners are fundamentally under your control; in the long run, you are constrained only by your own pathology, and the pathologies of the people around you. In the former case, the solution is self-evident. In the latter, the solution is the Framework Process.

A final note: As I’ve stated previously, the Framework BlogBook is not in the business of furnishing proof for its claims, as I believe that “proving” anything about something as complex as a human being is impossible. Instead, my intention is that you internalize the principles of the Framework without accepting or rejecting them, and find gradually whether they match up to your own experience. Trivial goods are some of the simplest and most immediate factors in effect in interpersonal relationships, and are therefore some of the easiest to witness in action. The next time you are making a decision about reaching out to a new person, take a moment to evaluate the factors that went into your decision after-the-fact. I bet you’ll find that trivial goods are far more relevant to your decision making than you thought.

With that, our discussion of interpersonal relationships has come to an end. The next chapter lays out the last of our tools for DIY solve: idiot spackle, the most recent (and least fully formed) addition to the Framework.