Foreplaymaxxing

Should everyone be foreplaymaxxing?

I don't mean coitus, you little freaks. Gaze upon the domains of your life — "everything the light touches" (Mufasa voice) — and suddenly you will see foreplay everywhere. By “foreplay”, I mean three things generally happening at once:

Think about when it comes to entering any new environment, like starting at a new workplace. Will Guidara was responsible for creating the #1 restaurant in the world at one point in time. In his book Unreasonable Hospitality, he talks about the notion of “easing into the pool as opposed to cannonballing”. Meaning, if you find yourself in a new environment, like a workplace, don’t just stir up chaos. Instead, listen. Shoot your best shot, but be wary of “giving the speech before you've earned it.” Don’t rush in. Instead, get in sync with your team and enjoy the learning process.

Travel works very similarly. Of course it can be a blast just fully sending it to another country (people still say this... right?), but it's also fun to play around with how you arrive. Many people view the big city as their main target, so they spend the first few days of their trip landing there and experiencing the metropolis, thinking this will maximize their experience. In his 50 Years of Travel Tips, Kevin Kelly recommends doing the reverse: the Laser-Back method. The idea is that you skip the city at the start, head as far out as you can into the hinterlands, then work your way back. After several days immersed in the "Otherness," you return to the city and welcome the hustle and bustle — the luxuries you didn't realize you missed so dearly.

With this approach, the “main event” you’re looking forward to is the big city, but you're deliberately delaying it. The days in the countryside build the appetite, so that when you finally arrive, you’re ravenous for what the city has to offer. The anticipation is the best part. The country is your partner — let it introduce itself to you and avoid making demands of it. Instead, navigate its corners with intention and curiosity.

The same goes for immersing yourself in any field of knowledge, whether it be a language, instrument, or physical sport. Really anything that requires expanding your mental capacity to climb increasing levels of difficulty,

If you decide to try something out for the first time, like kickboxing, a good teacher will refuse to have you jump to throwing kicks. No no no. Instead, they'll start with your stance and positioning, like properly planting your front foot at a 45 degree angle. The kick is the main event, the stance is the build, and you and your teacher set the pace together in coordination.

Whether it's slinging around weights, stretching your body, or picking up a basketball for the 145,231st time, you're better off gradually progressing before going in guns blazing. In these individual efforts, your partner is your own body, which should be coaxed and massaged into the end goal. You're also much less likely to hurt and embarrass yourself.

In each of these cases so far, we’ve talked about you being the conductor. However, you’re often engaged in foreplay as a receiver, often without even realizing it (sorry that sounds creepy). Anything designed to be experienced usually has a good dose of foreplay built into its opening.

Architecture is a prime example. A cathedral's exterior — the towers you spot from across the square, the carved doorway, its scale — is not really the main stage. Its exterior was designed to invite you in to explore the rest. Media and culture often work the same way. The first seconds of a video are the hook, the cold open of a show, the opening track of an album, the opening act of a concert — all of these things are designed to be the door opening to the whole experience. Like any good story, a proper experience is one that makes an anticipatory promise in the beginning with a fulfilling pay off in the end. A sort of climax, if you will hehe.

They say the beginning and the end of an experience are what people remember most, so don’t treat the opening of an experience as a throwaway before the real thing starts. We can debate all day where the foreplay of a building or a video really begins and ends, but the point is the same. It's worth noticing the beginnings of things and leaning into them.

Foreplay is not necessary in every situation of your life (I feel like that’s obvious), but it's awfully surprising how beneficial it is across your life and how much can happen when it goes missing.

Aperitifs, appetizers, tapas, palate cleansers: gastronomy has an entire architecture built around progressing into the entrée at the right pace. The drink opens up your appetite, the small plate gives the table something to talk about, and by the time the main course lands, you're primed for your main meal in every sense. Biologically, it doesn’t make much of a difference, but from an experiential pov, it’s delightful. Scarfing down a rotisserie chicken or Qdoba bowl at your kitchen counter just isn’t the same.

Hard conversations sing a similar tune. Without starting with the reminders of "hey, we're both human" — the casual chatter, the shared fond memory — hard conversations can feel... harder. Many couples therapists emphasize pausing before responding to your partner, especially when you're met with anger or frustration. "Make your breath your first word."

Small talk gets a lot of flack, but it serves its purposes in the right places. You’re scoping out the landing zone for your connection. Sure, it can feel trifling, but it’s a sort of necessary evil. Often, the medicine can feel like poison in the beginning.

As Derek Thompson writes, “Americans—and young Americans, in particular—are dating less, coupling less, marrying less, and having fewer children.” And this may partly be due to the fact of a general lack of foreplay cultural infrastructure. We used to have a sort of cultural “lazy river” apparatus that would carry us along to our next stages in life. But that’s really gone away. Phones and the internet are flattening culture and appealing to anti-social qualities. The Great Homogenization — where everyone’s behavior converges to be the same as they always see what others are doing, and optimize for avoiding friction, embarrassment, the “ick” because of constant online surveillance. As we lose interest in going outside, this also drives the decline in “third places,” in which institutions used to occupy a much larger presence in our lives (both good and bad civil society) — social clubs, church, civic organizations. Now, with those places vanishing as everyone opts to just stay inside instead, we increasingly rely on just you to figure it out. At the same time, the old language of following rules of etiquette and behavior has also disappeared; instead, thousands of random micro-influencers vie for your attention to tell you how they think you should act. And let’s be real, it’s not like mom and dad will help you out much (no offense). Basically, young people lack a whole infrastructure of foreplay (shared cultural subtexts; institutions that would knock the first domino), which leaves them in an awkward limbo of “just figure it out yourself”.

In a weirder way, it feels like our politics are even lacking some sort of foreplay. Buy me a dinner, tell me I’m pretty or SOMETHING before you go full FAFO on the economy. Our president unloads a clip of tariffs; ICE agents randomly burst on the scene, expelling immigrants; our current administration goes around saber rattling, undermining our decades-old international alliances with volatile behavior. We can debate the merits of each of these policies on their own, but I feel like we can all agree that some sense of decorum or finesse would at least make it all go down a bit easier. Yeah, don’t pee on my back and tell me it’s rain, but at least make sure it’s not freezing.

Across all of these facets of our lives, foreplay's strongest quality may be simply slowing things down, together.

Sahil Bloom explains that you should "become difficult to rush. The world will pressure you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed relationships. Rushed conversations. Rushed timelines. There's power in rejecting that trend. Pause. Slow down. Create space to think clearly."

More than that, it’s only by slowing down that you’re able to immerse yourself in a deeper experience: a flow state while you play your sport; an uninterrupted flood of emotion while you take in The Creation of Adam; an ability to observe the city’s oscillations after returning from the quiet countryside.

“Instead of asking how far ahead am I, try asking how deeply am I here? Because when you stop treating life as a race, something incredible happens. Time slows down. Colors feel richer. Conversations go deeper. The smallest moments start to matter. And then you realize there was never anywhere to get to. There was only this." — Alan Watts

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.}