bring me the head of nicholas carr

Want to Want

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Epicurus thinks that if we’re honest with ourselves, though, it’s more that we want to want greater understanding, freedom from our phones, time to cultivate and maintain close friendships, etc. Or, to be more precise, we wish our desire for these things were more powerful than our desire for less important things. Epicurus might say, “Now, of course you want to walk out the door to enjoy the beautiful fall afternoon with your friends, and it’s in fact quite easy to walk out the door, but people often do not leave because they want to stay alone indoors on their phone more.”

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

Freddie deBoer:

Both authors reference research that demonstrates that, while exercise has a number of health benefits, weight loss isn’t among them; Dimbleby has a chapter titled “You can’t outrun a bad diet”, which underlines the fact that exercise increases food cravings, which prompt eating that undoes calorie loss. This has grown to become a bit of conventional wisdom over time, but the age-old advice to eat less and exercise more is hard to shake.

But what can you do? Van Tulleken suggests… just about nothing. He’s insistent that genetics, the presence of unhealthy food options, and marketing essentially hold fat people hostage. Ultra-processed foods, he argues, “hijack our brains”. Even his brief final chapter on trying to live without UPFs is positively fatalistic, mostly counselling people not to hold out hope. As is the fashion, he laboriously argues that poverty effectively prevents the impoverished from making any decisions at all.

In 2015, when Jurgen Klopp took over as manager of Liverpool FC, one of the major changes he made was to bring along a backroom staff, including a nutritionist and a conditioning coach. Such specialists weren’t entirely unknown in the sport, but, shockingly to me, they weren’t ubiquitous either. Multimillion-dollar athletes at the top level at their profession would still eat the equivalent of fast-food takeout after games, which itself was still an improvement over the not-too-distant past, when players often partied like rock stars. Anyway, Klopp, who had a background in sports science himself, brought a stereotypical German efficiency with him and his staff and set about raising the standards. The club would release promotional videos for the fans, behind-the-scenes stuff, showing the staff at work and having them describe their methods and goals. It was then that I realized I had a serious interest in nutrition and sports science. I couldn’t get enough of it. The Lady of the House suggested one day that there was a gym in town where I could indulge my interest, and the rest is history.

A couple years ago, I convinced my stepson to start doing a nutrition program, even if he didn’t want to train yet. He’s lost seventy pounds since then, without doing any exercise at all. It’s not even a diet, per se. You just learn how to combine the optimal amounts of protein, carbs and fat at each meal to achieve whatever your goal is. True, certain foods don’t fit within the meal plan. He hasn’t eaten pizza, ice cream, etc. in two years. But it’s not like you’re forced to eat nothing but salads. I have more possible variety in my own meal plan than I could ever make use of, plus, because I also train, I get a cheat meal once a week. Point is, it doesn’t really take superhuman levels of willpower and self-control. Best of all, it only costs twenty-five dollars per visit. I go in every two weeks to get my body fat and proportions measured. My stepson only has to go about once a month. Twenty-five, maybe fifty dollars a month, to have expert advice on how to structure your diet and adjust it if needed. Trust me, fellows, this is not esoteric knowledge or unattainable luxury.

I’ve often mused out loud that if I ever had the chance to meet anyone from Liverpool FC, I wouldn’t choose any of the players. I’d want to meet Klopp, of course, but also Mona Nemmer, the nutritionist, and Andreas Kornmayer, head of conditioning and fitness. Oh, for a chance to sit and pick their brains! Dreams aside, though, I still often marvel at the fact that here, in a small, unremarkable town in the middle of Virginia, for an insignificant amount of money, I can still get the benefits of a comparable level of expertise. I don’t blame individuals for not realizing how easy and affordable it can actually be to be fit and healthy. I do feel nothing but hatred for people who profit by promoting the fatalistic message that technology, marketing, genetics, whatever, have robbed you of your agency. We’ve always been constrained by “structural” forces, whether man-made or natural, but within those limits, there’s still enough freedom left to use. As Epicurus knew back in antiquity, though, the relevant thing is whether you actually want what you claim to want. Honesty and self-awareness are, as ever, rare commodities. We’d rather lie to ourselves and pay others to lie to us even more. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives.

So I Blame This Town, This Job, These Friends, The Truth Is It’s Myself

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Chris Stirewalt:

But then I remember that my problem isn’t distraction, my problem is procrastination, as every editor I have ever had would readily attest. I have to fight the urge to be a digital Prufrock who measures out my life with hands of cards. But the app and the phone aren’t the problem. I am the problem.

I was very good at wasting time before iPhones, even before there was an internet. I wasted enough time playing actual cards with human beings in college that I probably could have added another major. I built model ships, tried to beat my own record for bouncing a tennis ball on a racquet, memorized National League batting statistics, went to see the same movie in the theater as many as 10 times, and always, always, always there was my best friend, television.

I don’t pretend that there aren’t serious disruptions attendant to Americans carrying their narcotizing devices in their pockets with them instead of having to go home and supplicate themselves before the glowing screen. Nor do I mean to suggest that there aren’t consequences from entertainment that can be tailored to every individual’s preferences. Media that concentrates interests and turns us inward necessarily turns us away from each other. Network television, for all its vacuousness, was a shared national experience and sometimes exposed us to ways of life other than our own, even if in caricature.

But I do mean to remind us that we had already been conquered by electronic media before we started carrying little computers in our pockets. But the devices did not create the desire for entertainment as anesthesia. We have always wanted all we could get, and we were already getting more than we needed before Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in October 2007.

The Lady of the House got an audiobook copy of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows from the library over the summer. One morning over breakfast, she said to me, “It’s amazing how accurately you had this book pegged even though you never read it!” Well, I’m not being falsely modest when I say that it didn’t take any great insight to see the popularity of that book as just another example of a perennial truth about human nature: most people are desperate to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own lives, and other people are happy to sell them ersatz absolution. I’m not religious, but reading about Buddhism since adolescence has steeped me in the understanding that we always want to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else — anything other than what we’re doing right now. You either continue chasing your tail like that, or you reflect on this and start practicing different habits. Those are your options.

Yet He Hath Ever But Slenderly Known Himself

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Likewise, I suspect a lot of people are now discovering that despite the convenient excuse offered to them by authors like Nicholas Carr, they never really were interested in reading more books, either.

And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

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Tom Chivers:

Guyenet’s argument is that we’re looking at it the wrong way. First, it’s not that some foods are more fattening because of how they affect our bodies — they’re more fattening because of how they affect our brains. And second, it’s not a particular food group; it’s not fat or carbs or sugar. It’s that we have become extraordinarily good at developing foods which are hard to resist, are full of calories, and which don’t fill us up. Essentially, through the simple workings of market capitalism, the food industry has been steadily optimising for the most obesogenic, “hyper-palatable” foods it is possible to make.

…Luckily, says Guyenet, there is a way around it. But it’s a bit bleak. The problem is not fat, or carbs, or sugar. It’s not ultra-processed foods or crisps or sweets. It’s the fact that all this tasty stuff is being combined in increasingly tasty ways; the problem is that tasty food is really hard to stop eating. “What do we do,” asked Scott Alexander in his excellent review of Guyenet’s book, “when the enemy is deliciousness itself?”

The sub-heading tells us that “Capitalism is cooking up food designed to short-circuit our brains.” Speaking of willpower, I will demonstrate restraint by avoiding the easy joke about how non-capitalist societies have indeed done very well at limiting excess (or even minimal) caloric intake among their citizens. Instead, I’ll just note that it appears Guyenet will be to obesity what Nicholas Carr was to the decline of reading in a digital age: a purveyor of convenient excuses. No, no, you see, I would eat better and exercise, just like I would have read more books, if only “the system” hadn’t rewired my brain, corroded my agency, and made me a slave inside my own body. The good that I would, I do not…

There’s a Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow, in which the Buddha, responding to someone pestering him with irrelevant metaphysical questions, says:

“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.”

Speculating about the nature of the soul and the afterlife versus simply doing your best to live an honorable life, or endlessly analyzing the origin of obesity rather than practicing moderation in diet and exercise — the Buddha was describing the countless ways we rationalize, procrastinate and stall rather than simply do what we know we need to do to make our lives a little bit easier or more pleasant. We demand that the world itself be changed before we exercise our own agency, an absurdity that should reduce us to helpless laughter at our own foolishness. “But…but…how can I be expected to avoid temptation? Why can’t some benevolent, omnipotent overlord simply remove all temptation from my grasp instead?” We may invoke the jargon of neuroscience and economic radicalism these days to pretend that we’re explaining things more thoroughly, but the dilemma is the same as it ever was: we never work as hard as when we’re trying to avoid necessary, boring work. As Neil Postman wrote, “Like moral theology, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.”

What You Oughtn’t to Do, But You Do Anyway

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Abby Manzella:

As I watch the words build without the distracting shot of adrenaline from the phone’s vibration and the laptop’s beep, I think of Pavlov, and how well we’ve been trained like dogs to retreat to our treats. I long for the blue light that sometimes flashes on my phone. Our phones have trained us to receive a dopamine burst even through a signal light. Many of our senses are covered: sound, sight, and touch. If programmers could only figure out how to deliver taste and smell, our food-centered selves would do nothing but tweet.

As I complain, though, I watch the words accumulating and do not open another desktop window.

Brad Warner:

Normally, when you desire something, that desire is hooked to a thought that says, “If I satisfy this desire, my life will improve,” or “I must satisfy this desire or else I will not be happy.” So you chase after whatever you desire in the hope that you can catch that thing and thereby either improve your life or avoid misery.

…But when I say I want a milkshake, I mean it. I honestly do want a milkshake. But I also know that drinking a milkshake won’t really fix anything. It might make me happy for a few minutes. But then it’ll be over and I’ll just have a bunch of useless calories inside me, making me fat. I’ll probably also feel kind of bloated and gross because that’s how I usually feel after drinking a milkshake. I want the milkshake. But, even though I want it — and I mean like I really, really want it — I don’t have that corresponding sense that getting what I want is the best thing that could happen.

Too often, we try to repress or deny desires, which only encourages them. It’s better to look at them directly and recognize, with whatever wisdom we’ve acquired through experience, that whether we satisfy those desires or not, very little will change. This tends to lessen their compulsive hold on us. Still, I don’t know about you, but when I’m truly interested or absorbed in something, I can easily ignore all those little temptations. If I’m easily distracted, it’s probably a sign that I’m conflicted about paying attention to whatever I’m engaged with. I know I’m of a minority opinion here, but whenever I hear the trendy complaint about how Silicon Valley has hijacked our attention spans, I think, well, it seems to me the reality of how you choose to spend your time is being laid bare before you, and the difference between how you act and how you think you should act offends your pride, so you retreat behind the bad-faith claim that your agency has been compromised by forces beyond your control. Sartre may have been an execrable little toad of a man who was wrong about damn near everything, but at least he managed to be right about one important thing. We constantly lie like this to ourselves to protect our self-image, when it would be far more dignified to accept responsibility for our actions (or the lack thereof).

And All You’re Gonna Do, But You Don’t

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The only thing the internet did was reveal that you’re not as dedicated a reader as you once thought you were. It presented you with temptation, and you gave in. This may be painful and embarrassing to admit, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Maybe you were a voracious reader when books were the most convenient means of entertainment you had, but now it turns out you’d rather watch videos and scroll through social media posts. You’re not willing to swim upstream against the currents of popular culture and peer pressure. Like many people, you want to have read books, you want to think of yourself as the kind of person who reads books, but you don’t actually want to devote time to reading them.

This isn’t necessarily a problem. You can of course still be an intelligent, interesting person even if you don’t read for pleasure. But you lack the confidence to withstand the negative judgment of some imagined literary snob who might think less of you. You lack the appetite for the possibly-uncomfortable introspection which might reveal cracks in your self-image. It’s easier to make aspirational gestures toward accepted standards of taste and intelligence than to forge your own. So you fall back on some absurd dualism in which the “real” you is being held hostage by your brain chemistry, or the manipulations of Silicon Valley, while your stupefied doppelgänger continues texting, instagramming and snapchatting. Honestly, I’m not sure how this excuse is more face-saving than the alternative. There’s always dignity in owning one’s agency, however humble the ends to which it’s directed. But there’s nothing dignified about pretending to be at the mercy of forces beyond your control.

Give a Book a Face and It Will Gaze Back Into You

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L. M. Sacasas:

But by whatever combination of factors, Facebook has, for now, achieved an unprecedented level of influence in societies across the globe, as Vaidhyanathan documents so well. Could it have been otherwise? Certainly. But that is irrelevant. If we live our lives through Facebook, our lives will be shaped by Facebook. If Facebook mediates our public discourse, then that discourse will be shaped by the formal properties of the platform. The critical point to register is that we will be worked over by the medium, as McLuhan has put it. We will conform to its image. And this will happen regardless of how judiciously and responsibly we post.

As some doggerelist once said of Nietzsche, He might say, were he here today, of media old and new: Give a book a face and it will gaze back into you. The moral of the story here, in a review of a new book, amounts to “count the costs and pay the price,” though without the concision. If you feel that social media is detrimental to your personal happiness and to civic health, then delete your account and walk away. Learn from the example of the Amish, Sacasas says. Earlier, though, he sounds a deterministic note in suggesting that Facebook’s engineers have learned too well from casinos and junk food how to make their product “addictive,” which, as far as I can tell, is just a more concise way of saying “Lord, grant me analog contentment, but not yet.” He criticizes Vaidhyanathan for urging us to strengthen our social institutions and firm up our moral norms in response to the deleterious effects of social media, preferring to emphasize the need for creating new, robust practices in a post-SocMed age rather than seeking to recover older ones, which strikes me as a distinction with only a 4,000-word academic difference. But then what makes the Amish immune to the supposed “addictiveness” of modern technology? How are we supposed to take inspiration from them if the superstructure and the demiurge and our own traitorous nucleus accumbens are all conspiring against us to eliminate whatever free will the philosophers and neuroscientists still allow us to cling to?

I don’t mean to be harsh. I just feel like I’ve read this article a hundred times already, though thank God for small favors, this one didn’t cite Nicholas Carr. Invoking Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes in a discussion of why we say one thing about Facebook and do another is just the rustling of academic plumage, when the salient point is, as always, that human beings frequently desire mutually exclusive things. Our reasoning processes, such as they are, are frequently too weak and easily exhausted to resolve those contradictions. We often experience agency and responsibility as a burden and seek to give it away cheaply, only to complain of all these cumbersome restraints preventing us from being our best selves. Like the guy who’s brave and anxious for the fight so long as some strong men are holding him back, we talk a good game about all the refined pursuits we so wish we had time for, but when the opportunity repeatedly presents itself, we find ourselves keeping up with the Kardashians while living shallowly and sucking the marrow out of a KFC bucket meal. That vacillation, that incoherence, that popular dance known as the bad-faith shuffle — that’s not an anomaly in need of explanation. That’s the human condition.

Or Did You Long for the Next Distraction?

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Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.

— Nietzsche

Eric Andrew-Gee:

The lesson we’re slowly beginning to learn, though, is that they’re not a harmless vice. Used the way we currently use them, smartphones keep us from being our best selves. The world is starting to make up its mind about whether it’s worth it and whether the sugary hits of digital pleasure justify being worse, both alone and together.

As I’ve said a time or two dozen, we keep ourselves from being our “best selves;” smartphones are just the latest convenient excuse we strew across our own path. If it somehow becomes widely accepted that phones are no longer considered an acceptable excuse for our shortcomings, we’ll invent another one. That’s the human condition. Sartre may have been a garbage human being, but his concept of bad faith almost makes everything else about him worth it.

The article makes full use of the latest terminology from neuroscience, of course. This is how we like to deny our agency these days, by pretending that we’re at the mercy of our neural pathways and dopamine spurts. But those neurochemical factors were always involved in our omnipresent battles with temptation, even when we didn’t have the technology to observe them. Nothing has changed since Paul was lamenting how “the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do.” The fact that we talk about neurotransmitters instead of willpower or virtue now doesn’t change the fact that the solution is still the same as it’s always been: reflect on your behavior, acknowledge any flaws that need correcting, and start practicing new habits. If you can’t do that, it’s probably because you don’t actually care enough to do so. Admitting that, though — that’s the problem. I remember an old punchline about having never seen someone work so hard to avoid work — similarly, I’m always amused/amazed at how much effort people will put into rationalizing and excusing their bad habits rather than practice good ones.

Look, I’ve had a smartphone for six years. I mostly use it for work, and otherwise it sits on my dresser, untouched, for hours. I don’t surf the web on it. The only game I have on it is a chess app, and I rarely play it. I don’t text people just to chat. Am I superhuman to be able to resist this supposedly-immense gravitational pull of dopamine rushes and novelty bias? I can assure you I’m not. You know what I do instead? I make time to have in-depth conversations with the Lady of the House, and I set aside a couple hours almost every day to read books. There is no possibility of being distracted by a stupid toy phone, no matter how insidious the intentions of engineers at Google, because I’m consciously aware that these are the things I’d rather do than anything else on Earth. If you find yourself repeatedly preferring to thumb your phone rather than talk to your spouse, maybe that says something uncomfortable about the quality of your relationship. If you’d rather browse aimlessly through the app store than read a book, maybe you’re not actually interested in reading, even though some aspirational part of you thinks you should be. Those are the sorts of unsettling questions most of us would rather avoid, even at the expense of our dignity as we make pathetic excuses for why we never do the things we claim to want to do. By pretending to be enfeebled, we somehow, counterintuitively, salvage our pride.

Discipline is a verb, not a noun. It’s not a “thing” you “get” in order to perform actions. It is the consistent performing of actions. You only know you have it in hindsight, when you look back at a pattern of consistent accomplishments. Until then, there’s a hundred tiny trials every day. You can either practice skills and habits to better cope with them, or you can allow them to defeat you and whine about it.

“But you don’t understand!” people like Andrew-Gee will sputter. “Parents are too often on the phone to greet their children upon arriving home! Mothers are too distracted by texting to pay attention to their breastfeeding infants! These are some of the most fundamental, important aspects of our lives! It’s too terrible to accept the implications for our character if being distracted is a choice we’re all making, rather than something being imposed on us!”

Yes, I know. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

I Wanna Make Up My Mind but I Don’t Know Myself

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Stephen Heiner, like countless other people, read Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows and came away with a renewed determination to reclaim his neuro-territory from the pernicious imperialism of personal technology. His guerrilla tactics are likewise predictable: write things by hand, avoid multitasking, etc. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about doing things the long, slow way, but again, as with nearly everything else that has been written in praise of Carr’s message, the problem is that it substitutes a technical solution for what is more a question of value. In other words, this, to me, is a job for Sartre’s conception of bad faith.

Carr starts from a conception that others have called the “contemplative literate subject” and assumes it as the default. He seems to think that what demands explanation is the fact that fewer people today (however one would quantify such things) seem inclined to live a life of literary introspection. I, on the other hand, start from the premise that we are always divided against ourselves, wanting to have mutually exclusive things, lacking the discipline and motivation to resolve the conflict. I suggest to you that most people don’t know what they want out of life, and that this is, and has always been, the norm. I suggest that their oft-stated desire to live more profoundly is aspirational — that is, they realize that it looks good to profess such a goal, even if they’re not particularly motivated to achieve it. And I suggest that the reason so many people have happily taken to Carr’s message is because they recognize how useful it is in allowing them a bad-faith excuse, a way to avoid the sort of uncomfortable soul-searching that might call upon them to change their lives. They are content to forfeit their agency and act like the helpless prisoners of dimly-understood forces beyond their control.

I don’t mean “change” in the sense of substituting a pen and paper for a netbook or smartphone — that’s the sort of trivial self-improvement scheme or productivity hack you can find in any self-help book. I’m saying, what happens if you start thinking about why you spend so much time allowing your energy to be dissipated by idly thumbing your phone instead of reading a good book, or why it is that you spend so much of your day in a high-tech work environment that leaves you feeling exhausted and empty? What if it turns out that you don’t really want to read books because you’re not actually a profound person? What if a life of watching sitcoms and sports honestly sounds good enough to you, but you’re afraid that admitting it would be devastating to your social status and self-image? What if you start to suspect that you’re spending all your time working at a job you hate because it pays the sort of money you need to live the lifestyle you’ve somehow happened into, and besides, all of your expensive education went into preparing you for it, and sunk-cost fallacy notwithstanding, you can’t even begin to consider changing course now, and besides, your family depends on you playing your role, and oh, God, how did you ever end up with a spouse and three kids to begin with, and where oh where could you even consider admitting that some days, you feel ambivalent enough to contemplate just driving off into the sunset and never thinking about any of them again?

Most people, I suspect, are practiced enough at burying such speculation before it asserts itself, and have been since they were adolescents. Thus, when a public intellectual comes along to tell them how their dissatisfaction is due to the fact that technology has rewired their brains, they have a ready-made headstone to put on top of it.

The Good That I Would, I Do Not

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Alan Jacobs:

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr interviewed, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it — who can’t get back, as Lucy Pevensie for a time can’t get back to Narnia: what was an opening to another world is now the flat planked back of a wardrobe. They’re the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it…I don’t know whether an adult who has never practiced deep attention — who has never seriously read for information or for understanding, or even for delight — can learn how. But I’m confident that anyone who has ever had this facility can recover it: they just have to want that recovery enough to make sacrifices for it, something they will only do if they can vividly recall what that experience was like.

What do I want? What do I need? Why do I want it? What’s in it for me? Thus did the Beastie Boys provide us with a rhythmic, rhyming conceptual framework for investigating those goals which remain unmet despite our professed intentions.

Jacobs talks earlier in the book about the different reasons why people read. Some people are after an experience of raptness, of being immersed in a book to the point of forgetting to eat dinner or go to bed on time. But some are not so much interested in reading books as in having read them — books are merely instrumental, a means by which to have improved one’s character, raised one’s I.Q., or boosted one’s status. (Both tendencies can coexist in the same individual at different times, of course; I speak from experience.)

We understand this in other contexts. Some people genuinely enjoy exercise, and being fit is just a nice bonus for something they would do anyway. Some people would like to have exercised, and would like for other people to see them as fit, but aren’t so keen on actually doing it. They like the idea of being healthy and slender, but they also like the experience of relaxing and indulging. The irresistible force of their vanity meets the immovable object of their laziness.

Being conflicted like that is, I would suggest, much more of a “natural” human state than being highly motivated and disciplined. We vacillate between different impulses all the time. We desire mutually exclusive things and avoid making a hard choice between them. We fear that what we really want isn’t what we should want. Our tastes and appetites change over time. And we inevitably frame our choices in the most flattering way possible. No, really, I would have exercised if not for… Honestly, I love reading books, but these gadgets, see, they’re rewired my brain…

We feel the trembling uncertainty along these fault lines in our character and hurriedly dash back to the safety of such comforting narratives. But it is precisely those cracks in the tectonic plates of our personality which invite us to explore a little deeper. What if you’re not truly the person you thought you were, or the person you’d like to be? Would that be such a bad thing? What are you willing to sacrifice to get there, then?

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