Long, Deep Silence

Our world is noisy; we are bathed in communication throughout nearly all the minutes of our waking life.  We pay for smartphones that condition us like little pavlovian puppies to pay attention whenever they summon us.  Information provides us with the perspective necessary to make wise and informed actions, but it is also noise.

My wife and I were struck by an interview she found between a journalist named Pico Ayer and a biochemist turned Buddhist monk, one Mathieu Riccard.  Their entire conversation was a long advocacy for practicing stillness every single day.  Early in the discussion, Pico poses the thought experiment to the interviewer: Imagine spending 30 minutes every day being still and silent.  For some of us, even imagining such a thing inspires stress; for people who already feel overwhelmed by the exigencies of their to-do lists, committing half an hour to intentional idleness is almost an offensive proposition.  But it shouldn't be.

Our brains are organs, just like the rest of our body, and their functioning influences every aspect of our daily lives, perhaps more than any other part of our bodies.  They are the confluence of hormonal riptides, evolutionary imperatives, conditioned responses built from decades of life experience, all with an edifice of socially constructed knowledge and understandings built on top.  Our actions and choices grow out of this tangled mess of motivations.  Our only hope of taking hold of our life's direction is to engage meaningfully and willfully with the things that churn in our heads.

Often, the noises we populate our life experience with are purposeful distractions that help us avoid considering difficult or painful thoughts.  Sometimes we're so wrapped in distractions that we can't even acknowledge the scary monsters that make us afraid of silence.  But everyone has something to gain from reclaiming the mental space to be quiet and still, to listen to the stirrings in our mind, let them say their piece, and put them to rest.

It's not something that comes easy to many people.  It should be a practice.  But consider it an investment of time that yields tremendous dividends for your future peace and clarity.

Re-think your Accumulation

Articles and arguments about the value you get when you spend your money on experiences versus objects have proliferated over the last decade, and I wish as a society we could take this truism to heart.  A disclaimer up front: my wife and I are both aspirational travel junkies, and even though we've been more stationary than normal for the last few years, we're already sold on the general concept of marshaling our extra resources towards big vacations, rather than big ticket purchases.

With that being said, I'll present the thrust of the argument: when you buy things, your enjoyment diminishes with time.  When you buy experiences, your enjoyment grows with time.  QED.  Not convinced?  Here's a more thorough elaboration.

Point 1: "Stuff" never lasts forever.  It breaks down.  Inevitably, the longer you own it, the worse it will work, and the less successfully it will be able to fulfill whatever desire you were trying to satisfy when you bought it in the first place.  In many cases, particularly with technology, these products have designed obsolescence - the companies build them such that they break or dramatically decrease in function after a certain amount of time.  The incentive on the manufacturer's end is natural - any company that makes a product that lasts forever will eventually put itself out of business once everyone owns the product.  All businesses want you to repeatedly give them your money, and the only way to do that if you manufacture things is either to have those things break (necessitating replacement) or to create "better" versions of the product that will drive a desire for replacement, even when it isn't necessary.  Which leads me to

Point 2: We always re-calibrate our expectations.  You buy a new product.  It's shiny.  It's fancy.  It makes some task simpler or allows you to do cool things.  You're happy... until after a few weeks the new product is just part of your normal routine and fades into the background of your expectation of the experience of life.  We constantly adjust the bar for happiness for ourselves, so that material advancement doesn't make us happier - it's makes us need more things to feel the same amount of happiness we already had before.  Before Keurig machines, everyone made coffee by grinding beans and putting it through a percolator or french press.  They didn't feel like this was a terrible burden - it's just what you did to get coffee.  After people adopted Keurigs, they were amazed at how much time they saved, until they got used to it and took it for granted.  Then for those people whose machines broke and had to revert to the "old" way of making coffee, the process was excruciatingly inconvenient because their expectations had been shifted.  We aren't objective analysts.  Not even close.  The same task (making coffee with a percolator) that didn't make them unhappy before now makes them miserable.  That's what you're paying your hard earned dollars for.

Point 3: Memories gain in value. When you pay for experiences, even experiences that are terrifying or unpleasant in other ways at the time, you get to keep the memories.  As time passes, even memories of experiences that were initially unpleasant become valuable - as funny or exciting stories, as life experiences that make you a more interesting person, as bases of knowledge that create empathy and understanding with a wider range of human life.

Simply put, buying stuff sometimes satisfies a short term addiction, but will inevitably make your future less pleasant.  Buying experiences can make you happy now, and will be exponentially more valuable in the years that follow.

And now the mandatory travel photo that must accompany a post such as this:

Subjectivity in the Life of a White Man

I've written numerous times before about the role that subjectivity and beliefs about objectivity play in our lives, our attitudes, and the choices we make.  I've been trying to make the case for a while now that the proliferation of communication and perspectives that appear in digital media are creating a broader cultural recognition of subjectivity, and that this is a good thing!  When I hear hateful, prejudicial, closed-minded conversations, I always go back to the idea of subjectivity; I've felt for a long while that most of the hateful, horrible things that happen in our world wouldn't happen if everyone were fully aware of the layers of interpretation that sit in between them and the "objective reality" they think they're looking at.

image from the Oatmeal.

I had an amazing conversation with a friend last weekend that really shook up all my thinking around this question, and I just had to share it.

To understand the full context, you need to know a few things - first, that I'm a white male from a suburban, protestant background, and second that her parents (and I think she as well) are first generation immigrants from Thailand.  She is female, she is non-white, and she is Catholic, different from me in all of the major demographic measures, and different from the politically economically dominant subgroup in our culture of which I am a member.

As I was explaining my ingenius theories about subjectivity to her, I could see the skepticism written all over her face, and the result was a heated discussion that brought me to a point of significant realization.  My ideas about subjectivity have grown out of my own subjective experience as a white male.  I grew up in an environment where it was easy for me to identify with the images and symbols that surrounded me.  That wasn't her experience at all; as long as she could remember, she's been confronted by the fact of difference and by messages that made her question both the ways she looked at the world and the way the world was presented to her by her teachers, the media, and the broader cultural zeitgeist.

Long story short, I'd been walking around assuming that nearly all people were locked into this delusion of objectivity from which they needed to be liberated, without realizing that millions of members of minority populations (or populations that have disproportionately small economic/political influence) have been living out the tensions between their own subjective experiences and the "objective" world for their entire lives.

I don't really know what to do with this, but it does give rise to two interesting thoughts.

1. I wonder if this is particularly true in America, because of its particular cultural and political history
2. This seems like the best argument for diversity in representation in decision-making, in companies, in government, in all aspects of life.  The concentration of political power in the dominant group makes achieving diversity a significant challenge, but we'll all be much better off if we consider institutional solutions to incentivize diverse perspectives.

Choices are for Chumps

It's fascinating how many assumptions we carry around with us, use to judge situations- assumptions that often drive major life choices- that we leave completely uninterrogated.  One of the most ubiquitous, complicated and problematic is the notion that if we have more choices in life, we will be happier/better off.

Let's start with the argument for choices.  It goes something like this: people walk into situations with pre-existing preferences.  If they have more choices, they are more likely to find an option that is more closely matched with their preferences.  They get what they want, they are happy!  End of story.

But is it, really?

First off, we all know that we encounter decisions every day into which we carry no real preferences.  In that case, having more choices can be an inconvenience.  Ever been with a group of friends trying to pick a restaurant, and no one is particularly motivated to go any place in particular?  And yet, no one wants to rush into a decision when there are thousands of tasty options available in any major city.  Sometimes I wind up so hangry that I'd rather just be by myself eating a sandwich, rather than standing around with a group of intelligent people dithering between five equally good choices.

Which brings me to point #2: happiness is not about the satisfaction of objective needs and wants that you've already identified for yourself.  Human beings constantly measure their happiness relative to expectations, not relative to objective measures.   Remember that old adage about the grass always being greener?  Read any of the happiness studies that have been published in the last five years demonstrating that after an initial surge of pleasure, lottery winners end up about as happy as they were before they won the lottery?  Choice factors into this picture of expectations as well.  You walk into a store, looking for a pair of jeans.  On the racks in front of you are literally hundreds of options to choose from.  There are hundreds more in other stores just down the street.  With thousands of jeans to choose from, your brain (perhaps subconsciously) is telling you, you are guaranteed to find the perfect pair of jeans.

But we all know that isn't going to happen.  Even if you have hundreds of options, you don't have the time or energy to explore all of them.  Many of the options are redundant.  Many combinations of characteristics that we fantasize about (amazing fit and quality, low price) are virtually non-existent.  But our emotional brains don't weigh these logical considerations - we only feel in that moment that we live in a land of plenty and we still find ourselves unsatisfied.  We judges ourselves, judge our personal character, when what we are really experiencing is a natural response to choice overload.

One final plug for the value of fewer choices - go to a nice restaurant, some place with three or four stars.  Count up how many menu items they offer.  My bet - less than ten.  And they'll all be delicious.  The next night, go to the Cheescake Factory, and explored the encyclopedic menu of offerings.  You'll have all the choices and options you can handle.  And no matter what you order, it's going to taste like lumpy garbage.

The Crowd Sourcing Conundrum

I've been wrestling with a question for years now, and what better to do with our complex musings than to air them out in the confused, liminal space that is the internet.  The head-scratcher boils down to this - it seems like large numbers of more or less ordinary people collaborating can achieve incredible results, but so many people just seem so... stupid!

One widely published story over the last few years that gets at the heart of what's eating at me is the results achieved by the protein folding game FoldIt.  Programmers designed an online game that allowed regular joes to prototype protein configurations in enzymes.  Within months, the crowd-sourced protein folders had surpassed the best results of experts in the field, scientists with many years of education and specialization.

Remember that adage about monkeys and type-writers?  The FoldIt story suggests that a million monkeys at type-writers might not only be able to produce Shakespeare, but that they might be able to do even better and in less time.

Another illustrative example - Wikipedia.  Considered unusable as a citation in most academic anyone  could edit Wikipedia at any time.  And yet, it sports a lower error frequency than the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has recently concluded print publication, so perhaps that should tell us something.

contexts because of the fact that it can be freely edited by anyone with an open-ended information vetting process.  After all, anyone  could edit Wikipedia at any time.  And yet, it sports a lower error frequency than the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has recently concluded print publication, so perhaps that should tell us something.  We're programmed to defer to authority and expertise, even though collective efforts have often proved more effective.

What is it that makes a big enough group of normal people into a collective manifestation of genius?  Some of us in the bunch of real dumb-dumbs, but somehow that doesn't seem to ruin everything.  It reminds me of an analogy Douglas Hoffsteader uses in his absolutely brilliant Goedel, Escher, and Bach.  He creates a character named Aunt Hillary, that is actually literally an ant hill.  It was the first time I really imagined a multitude of individuals as constituents of a larger organic whole.  What if we are all just cells in the global earth human symbiotic organism?  Each of us a neuron, busily adding to the collective computational and creative energy of the greater whole.  Viewed in this light, as we continue to consume and process information all the live long day, we can at least imagine we're contributing to something bigger than ourselves.

The Fear

Earlier this week on my commute home, I heard a discussion on NPR (that's right, I'm a pathological NPR listener) about the Shanghai Tower, currently the second tallest building in the world.  An engineer was describing the counterweight system used to keep the super tall structure for wobbling too much - essentially a thousand ton hunk of metal that follows instructions from computerized sensors that leans into the direction of the wind to reduce swaying.  Apparently in buildings this tall, without such a system, people are prone to getting motion sickness on the upper floors are prone to motion sickness.

Holy crap.

There is a lot you could say about this engineering masterpiece, but what I couldn't get out of my head this ridiculous contradiction - that despite the fact that I've been skydiving, the idea of being safely tucked away on one of the upper floors of the Shanghai Tower is gut-wrenchingly terrifying for me.  I am quite sure this fear is irrational, that it defies probabilities.  But it's there, all the same.

As I thought more about it, I realized that  the difference between these two scenarios - skydiving versus being in a tall building - turns on a very fundamental bifurcation in human personality. The skydiver is prepared to face an absurdly dangerous situation all alone. She or he jumps out into nothing and saves herself with her own willpower when she decides to pull the ripcord. A person standing in a tall building has invested their faith in large institutions that extend well beyond themselves. They believe that the architects who designed the buildings considered how to keep the building from falling down, that the safety of the structure has been verified, that emergency plans are in place.

So then, the skydiver is afraid to put faith in institutions, and the building dweller is afraid to trust themselves.

What are you afraid of?

Capitalism = Misery

A favorite talking point of politicians and metric used to gauge the success of nation states is the overall rate of economic growth.  Millions of people the world over during époques past and present have had their fates determined by high level policy decisions designed to accomplish that singular goal of fueling the rate of economic activity.  It’s taken for granted that more is better, that pushing that percentage ever higher holds the key to personal and collective success for all members of the political unit.

Why?

Economic growth requires one essential ingredient- a consumer population with the desire to have things that they don’t already have.  Consider that – capitalism doesn’t work if the population is content.  Every corporation large and small invests tremendous assets to convince you that there are things missing from your life, things that will make your happier or smarter, more attractive or more successful.  Companies want  you to feel like you and your life isn’t good enough, and that you should give them money to make it better.  Conservative economists evangelize about the power of economic incentives to motivate human behavior, and its crystal clear that in a world of buyers and sellers, the sellers are driven to help you identify all of the things missing from your life.

There’s a vicious circular logic entrenched in the political discourse of contemporary America that measures whether or not our country is headed in the right direction by to drive up the statistical measure of our frantic pursuit to fill the voids in our lives with material possessions.  Our national project is pathological dissatisfaction.  We’re only happy when we’re as unhappy as possible.

I’m sure Heller and Kafka are laughing about this somewhere.  Or sighing maybe.

We could be doing things differently people!  See this discussion between author Dan Buettner and National Geographic where he has a data-driven analysis of states and communities around the world that let their policy be driven by goals of increasing equality, tolerance, safety, community, and health, rather than economic growth.