I bought this tea months ago because I am (a) a highly suggestible tea purchaser who (b) follows Friday Tea on Bluesky and (c) there was a sale on single-source small farm teas and this one looked interesting. It sat in a pile with other tea purchases on top of my dining room table (such as it is; we don't really have a dining room table so much as a sideboard that fits against our kitchen window, which made the Oh No Too Much Tea pile extremely unwieldy and also made it difficult to eat, and you are allowed to judge me for this because I judge myself) for many months until I finally started trying to clean it off.

 

(I had not tried to clean up the Oh No Too Much Tea pile before this because, and this is important, if I had tried to clean up the Oh No Too Much Tea pile, I would have had to think about things like “where will I put this” and “you know, you have filled every inch of this house with excess tea; have you considered that you should not be a tea hoarder?” and “maybe I should make different choices.” I did not want to make different choices, so I did not want to think about it, and therefore I could not clean up the Oh No Too Much Tea pile. I truly cannot imagine what it is like to not be afflicted with overthinking everything. You people who can just…do things without hours of self-reflection must be so productive. And tidy. But that is neither here nor there.)

 

(That last sentence is a lie. It is certainly here: the tea pile is currently directly to my right. And it is definitely there, for just about any value of “there” which could be tea storage. It is everywhere. I was ignoring this problem so well for so long! But alas. We cannot bring a puppy into a home where it might be crushed by falling tea, so I am going to have to face my bullshit and engage in personal growth. So annoying!)

 

In any event, as I was sorting through the tea pile, I found this lovely cake, and I thought to myself: wow, when I bought this I was so excited about it, and then it just ended up in a massive tea pile and I never tried it, because I thought I would try it and then I would have a partially used tea cake that would sit around awkwardly for years, because either it would be excellent and I would want to save it so I always had it or it would be not excellent and I would not be able to throw it out but would just wonder why I would drink tea that was not excellent. 

 

(If you are following along, you have perhaps begun to understand that the reason there are gigantic stashes of tea everywhere in my house is that on the one hand, the tea storage flow chart always ends with a box labeled “stash the tea wherever you can fit it,” and on the other hand, the tea buying flow chart ends with a box labeled “just buy the tea and figure out where to put it at some later point.” I will not be taking questions on this methodology at this point.)

 

Anyway, as part of my boring personal growth (stomp stomp stomp! I don't wanna!), I resolved to drink the tea. No, not try the tea and then stash the rest of it. I told myself I should drink it. All of it. Purposefully. Just open the cake and put it on a little stand (I have little stands for tea cakes, see, because I figured one day I would open a cake and drink all of it over the course of a month, a thing I had never done before, but that wasn't going to stop me from making a tea-related purchase!) and have some every day until the tea was all gone.

 

So I am on day six of this tea, and it is lovely. It is sweet and has a flavor that I have to describe as “milky.” It tastes so much like milk that if I didn't know better, I would think this was tea with milk, but it is not. It is just a white tea made with older tea leaves, and it is delicious and amazing and the mouth feel is incredible. I've been having it with breakfast everyday, and I've been managing my emotions because this was a limited time tea from Friday Afternoon Tea and there isn't any more, and besides, the point of the tea was to finish the tea, so the tea pile would get more manageable, and not to finish the tea and immediately replace it with three more teas, because you cannot purchase just one tea. That is how you get a tea hydra, not a tea pile. (I may have a tea hydra? Oh no.)

 

I am enjoying this tea, and I am recognizing while I drink it that part of coming to grips with the tea pile is to understand that some things are better not repeated. You can do something that's wonderful and remember it with fondness and joy. You do not have to do it again and again until you've stripped every last ounce of dopamine from it.

 

Rationally, I am sure this is correct. My emotional tea meter is going to need time to get used to this concept.

For the Tomb comes from Friday Afternoon Tea and I feel absolutely terrible linking to this extraordinary tea when you can't buy it, but I'm doing it anyway.

I have been thinking in recent weeks about how billionaires are like border collies.

 

I know, I know. I want to acknowledge right off the bat that this is not true, and it can be problematic to compare humans to animals. There are many differences between billionaires and border collies. Here are a few that I deem salient.

I could go on. But there is one way in which I think the modern billionaire is at least a little bit like a border collie.

 

You see, a border collie is a dog that has high drive. It needs to do something. New border collie owners are told repeatedly that their dog needs a LOT of exercise, but that even this is not enough. A border collie needs a job.

 

If you do not give your border collie a job, it will assign itself one, and it will probably not be a job you want it to do. This leads to misery for all parties. The border collie just wants to do its job, and now it is being yelled at by cruel people who do not care for its personal enrichment just because it happens to have decided that someone has to have the task of gnawing every power cord in the house to shreds. The dog needs enrichment. It needs a task that is pro-social, and until you get everything sorted out, everyone is going to be mad and upset and the household will lack working laptops and refrigerators.

 

Too many of our billionaires have not been given appropriate tasks.

 

Let's take Elon Musk, for instance. He seems to have assigned himself the task of ethnic cleansing the United States. He's posting about “white solidarity” and a lot of other bullshit, and he seems to have taken on this task with every ounce of his corporeal self.

 

He has also posted about how miserable he is and that money cannot buy happiness.

 

Yes, he is personally responsible for millions of deaths and the loss personal freedoms, and I think it's important for other billionaire border collies to see what happens to him (real consequences) so they start making better choices when they assign themselves jobs. But it's very obvious to me that he assigned himself a task that makes almost everyone in the world hate him, and he's miserable about it.

 

To prevent future Elon Musks, I think we need to start engaging in billionaire enrichment programs.

 

Too many people think that, for instance, high taxes on wealthy individuals are pointless because they'll just move away or find loopholes. I actually think that this is fine. I think it is good for billionaires to have to devote efforts to figuring out the loopholes in taxes and regulations, and I think it is very good for us to watch them figure out those loopholes and close those loopholes and have them search for more. We need to start thinking of financial regulation more like one of those doggy food devices that make it so the dog can't bolt its food: it has to really work to dig each kernel out from behind pegs or by nudging a ball.

 

It doesn't matter if the dog eventually gets all the food out. The food is not the point. You have to make it satisfying for a billionaire to cheat on their taxes or evade regulations, or they're just going to find another task they need to cheat on, like the survival of the human race. They're going to be miserable. We're going to be miserable. We don't need to do this.

 

For this reason--for the sake of the billionaire's own happiness, and our own future survival--I believe we need to heavily tax the rich. We need to stop thinking of these programs as punishing rich people, and start seeing them as a form of mental enrichment for people who can otherwise buy anything and everything they want, any time they want. They cannot be trusted to assign themselves jobs that leave us living in a workable society. 

 

We need to assign them a different job.

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