garote | Entries tagged with philosophy

Lately I've been listening to a really neat book called "Why We Sleep" and combining it with pieces of another book called "Sapiens" that so far appears to be about human evolution and the historical events that led us to be who and what we are. Just today I found that the books intersected.

The first book talked about how humans go through a very long adolescent development period relative to every other animal. We're basically helpless for about a decade, relying on parents and community to feed and teach us. Our brains are conditioned to require but also benefit from this process. In a nutshell, we're born with an extremely over-connected brain, and all the way up through puberty, our brain slowly prunes itself down in a process of optimization, during all the massive amounts of REM sleep we get. Half of the sleep time that babies get is spent in REM sleep. Once we're adults, the proportion of REM sleep settles down to about 20%. We still have lots of neuroplasticity, especially relative to other animals, but our major personality traits and mental habits are firmly established.

Neat stuff. The book also points out that our REM sleep is different from that of most other animals too, in terms of its intensity. When we enter REM sleep, our entire body is paralyzed except for a few vital functions, and this allows our brain to take much more of itself "off the hook" all at once. This sort of intensity is only possible because we've evolved to sleep on stable surfaces - e.g. the ground - instead of doing what all our other ape cousins do, which is sleep in trees to avoid predators and parasites. The version of REM sleep that their brains get is not as intense because they have to maintain their body awareness.

Today I was listening to the other book, and it pointed out that the human brain uses an absurd amount of energy relative to other organs in the body, relative to other animals: Our brains use up 25% of all the energy consumed by our body when we're at rest. Good grief! We are truly taking a unique approach to survival, favoring this thing so strongly.

The book also mentioned that to achieve our dominance as tool makers and projectile throwers, we had to have much more articulated hands, which made it awkward to walk on all fours like our ape forebears. Walking upright probably evolved first, so we could range farther more efficiently, and then that let our hands develop. It's very often the case like this in evolution: Some body part or behavior that was fixed in place because it was mandatory for survival suddenly becomes optional, so variations on it start appearing again in the population, and potentially grant an advantage. And in the even bigger picture, the long-term winners are lineages that can both vary, and stay consistent, in some subtle ongoing balance.

But to take advantage of those hands we needed big brains, which could only exist in big skulls. Women walking upright performed better with narrower hips, which meant a smaller birth canal. So how could humans get larger brains but still have narrower hips? By having babies with less-developed skulls and brains which then grew and fused during a drawn-out puberty. It takes a lot of subtle calculation to learn to throw rocks, and learn when to do it, and do similar tool-oriented things. Even without sophisticated language or complicated social structures, that would still favor larger brains. But if we go through a longer puberty, that means more time spent being dependent on others, and keeping your community convinced that you're a worthwhile investment is a competition, on a fundamental social level. Yet another reason to make that brain bigger. And if we're sticking together in trustworthy groups, it means we're far safer when we sleep, so our brains can intensify their REM cycles with less consequence. Now we have tool usage, social bonding, and the pressure to improve both, with a means to expand our brains. The stage is set for complex language and thought.

What's especially interesting to me here, is that like all things in evolution, what seems like a series of cause-and-effect stages that can be teased into a line is actually a crowded parallel process, involving overlapping tensions. The tension is between advantages and costs, creating a sort of dialing-in effect for the next generation, narrowing down near-infinite possibilities to arrive at the living result. For example, why can we keep track of about 100 personal relationships, but not more? Why do we take pleasure in gossiping about friends, family, neighbors, and celebrities, even though it doesn't create more food or shelter? Why is adolescence very long for us, but not even longer? Because It's all been dialed in by all these needs and counter-needs pulling at us...

Anyway, it was all very interesting and it made me think again about traveling and the way humans are able to form brief relationships and interact meaningfully with people that they've never met before, based on shared fictions -- ideas about things that are not physical in nature. The anthropologist in me is fascinated by the idea of doing experiments. That also made me think about physical and mental distance, and how that factors into relationships.

I've also been thinking lately about how I've changed as a person in relationships, over the years. Some things have been steady - like the curiosity that I always have, or the desire for dialogue and connection - and some things have changed, like my ability to have careful emotional discussions, my integration of my need for quiet alone time into my relationships, and my threshold for feeling insecure or threatened by certain situations. There have also been changes with a narrowing effect: Like, there are now situations or dynamics that I will just not engage with any more. Roles I will no longer play; tactics I will no longer use because they usually backfire. Like the brain doing REM sleep every night, there is always an ongoing calibration. Adding and also pruning. And I feel fortunate that I still have enough neuroplasticity to change and learn ... At least, according to these books.

It's wheels within wheels: The evolving human, with the evolving personality. The Leopard Cannot Change His Shorts, but the human can learn some pretty amazing new dance moves.

Anyway, back to the books...

The picnic was well and truly underway, with snacks and drinks all around us and the sun twinkling on the blanket. Moving on from politics, we started to talk about dating.

Her friend said, "I'm in a new kind of phase, I think. Maybe it's because I'm older. I don't want to force anything. I mean, I want to meet someone serendipitously. Like, bump into them at some kind of social event and start a great conversation by accident. But there aren't any good options for that. Even without COVID. Where do you go?"

"Well, it's always been difficult for adults," I said. "The solution last century was lots of singles-only clubs and vacations and mixers, and they were always portrayed as these dank things full of people who were either a little too desperate, or somewhere on the creepy scale. But now the internet has blown that all up. It's created a renaissance for older people to find each other and connect -- even to connect in person."

"But it all seems so deliberate. You open this app that's designed specifically for dating, then flip through people and press buttons, and then you both deliberately go to a place and it's basically a first date. I want to just meet someone randomly, and then maybe the idea of dating them can occur later on, or it won't. I'm not saying 'friends first' exactly, I'm just saying, I want the idea of dating someone to feel spontaneous instead of planned."

"Well, I guess you can go for that," I said. "But speaking for myself, I'm way done with relying on serendipity to connect me to people. I find that the more I engineer my luck, the better it gets."

I gestured to my girlfriend, sitting next to me. "We apparently sat in the same coffee shop for as much as a year before we met, and there's a chance we might have met anyway, but the prompt of a date online actually put us together, and that combined with our relaxed and ready states of mind, and we had a really great couple of first dates. Only later did we learn that we often went to the same coffee shop. So, we were compatible and only a few feet away, but things clearly needed a little social push. Without an app to make us stand out in the coffee shop, I would have kept right on poking at my laptop, and she would have kept right on reading hew New York Times, and the most that would have happened is I might have admired her butt as she walked outside."

"Huh. I can see that but it also sort of proves my point. People hang out in coffee shops all day long, but they don't talk to new people there. If they did, things could be more spontaneous."

"Maybe there's a way to get that back. But I'm not going to stop engineering my luck. If there's an app, I'm gonna use it."

We talked for a while longer, then wrapped up the picnic. We saw the friend to her car, then we walked back the way we'd come, chatting about wanting ice water, and about dating experiences in the modern world. She bought some soda water for herself and a bottle of water for me at the cafe near the top of Bancroft.

"That's one good thing about online dating," she said. "If you're in that mode where all you can handle is a one-night-stand you can find one easily. There are lots of men out there who are nice for a couple of dates and that's about it. And they'd make terrible fathers."

"Hah!" I said. "Same with women!"

"My book about hormones calls it 'Cads Versus Dads'. Some men you like because they have good genes for making a baby. Some men you like because they'd actually be good parents."

"There's a similar thing for men too. If I was just describing it in a reactionary way, by standing the stereotypes for cads and dads on their heads, it would be this: Some women are fun for getting pregnant. They seem to invite and enjoy sex, without a lot of fuss, or they've got a really good body for manufacturing a kid and seem to be making it available, for some kind of price you can pay. Then some women are fun to be with long-term, and would make excellent mothers and companions."

"That sounds about right," she said. "It's sad, but there's still a lot of social stigma about the women who just want to enjoy sex. Like, the idea is, either you enjoy being a mom, or you don't and you're some kind of monster."

"Yeah. It's easier being a cad. I mean, everybody has a ready-made cultural box for men who just want to sleep around and have fun, and it comes with some stigma and judgement, but at least it's a box. It's a place you can be. There isn't even a place like that for women. At best you get, like, a bus stop. You've expected to hang out there for a while and then get serious and catch the bus to Motherhood City."

"Yeah. And there's women in the middle too, in these weird ways," she said. "Like, I've known women who really like being pregnant, and really like having a little baby around, but then they make horrible parents once the kids start growing up, so they call in aunts and uncles and grandparents and end up almost abandoning their children to the extended family."

"Ugh," I said.

"Then they suddenly want to be pregnant and have another little baby around, so they find a guy..."

"That's kinda gross. I've been lucky enough to avoid those women, I think. Or maybe I've just been good with my birth control."

"Birth control is great," she said emphatically.

"You know, ideally, I think the best long-term partner is someone who has some dad qualities but also some cad qualities. I mean, I don't think anyone can hit the exact bulls-eye on both those categories. I think if we all dig down into our heads we start finding things we like about cads and dads that are mutually exclusive. Like, our ideal cad rides a sweet-ass motorbike, but our ideal dad drives a volvo with crumple zones all over, so he won't suddenly turn into a quadriplegic on some random morning commute."

"Yeah you can't have both."

"So, I know I fit some of the dad qualities. You'd told me so. And I like that. But I also think it's important to have some cad qualities. Do I have any of those, from your point of view?"

"Oh, I think so," she said. "Definitely some exciting cad qualities. What about me? What's my balance?"

I thought for a bit. "I don't know. I might have to sit down and really work it out, but off the top of my head I'd say you have a balance. Or, maybe 60-40, with 60 in the mom category. You'd make a fine mom, I think."

"But I have cad qualities too, for sure. Like, sometimes I just say, 'argh I need to be alone and meditate, go away!' "

"I wouldn't put that in the cad area, really. I think that's just introvert stuff. I think your cad qualities are more ... exciting? I mean, it's probably obvious from my description before: To guys, cad qualities in a woman are mostly about sex appeal and liking sex."

At this point we were back in the car, and driving down the hill along College Avenue. Students were going about their business on the sidewalks, dressed lightly for the sunny day. They all looked so young. "They're probably all half my age, or younger," I thought.

"Ugh, how are all these young people ever going to work this stuff out?" I said, gesturing out the window.

"Same way we did."

"You mean, make a whole bunch of mistakes and try a bunch of stuff that doesn't really work?"

"Exactly."

"Yeah; I don't know. I still worry about it. I worry about them. All this history, repeating all around us."

"But it's not exactly repeating," she said. "It's got differences."

"Hah! Well hopefully not so many cads!"

On a whim today I watched some South Park, including the show "All About Mormons". The episode came with a commentary track, talking about the Mormon friends the producers had while growing up.

It reminded me of my ex, and how hilarious and quotable she thought the episode was. She's ex-mormon, and her family is ex-mormon, and I think it's a nice validation of the episode that someone who was directly involved in the church would find it so entertaining. The episode also showed a lot of the positive aspects of Mormon domestic life, which I'd forgotten about in the nearly two decades since I'd last seen it. That domestic life and the church are inextricably bonded, and my ex knew the dark side of that domestic life all too well: The savage rejection of anything that isn't sanctioned by the church.

When she told me about her experience, I was amazed to find parallels in my memory from a friendship I'd started in high-school. My friend had struggled almost the same way, especially with the gravitational effect that his large family unit exerted on him -- except unlike my ex's family, his never could break free from the church. In fact a few years after I last saw them, they packed up and left California specifically to return to the supportive arms of the Mormon community. For years my friend fought to establish his own identity and domestic space independent of that, but found himself reeled back in. With the gift of hindsight I can say now that the intensity of his struggle was born partly of deliberate sabotage: When your parents train you to relate only to other church members and subconsciously portray everyone beyond as inscrutable heathens, you don't exactly leave home with a well-developed social toolbox for building - or even joining - a different community. Even if you find one, you are very likely to be forced into a choice between your family and your community: Any friend or romantic interest you bring to meet the family will be eternally judged by the Mormon standard and found wanting. The emotional hassle of leaving the church also fulfills its own prophecy: People outside it won't understand how hard you had to work to leave. (I suspect this is why ex-mormons so often seek the romantic comfort of other ex-mormons. There are even online dating sites built for this market.)

My friend's younger brother ended up committing suicide, because try as he might, he could not reconcile his real identity with what his family told him it should be. I suspected he was in the closet when I knew him - if not for homosexuality then for something - but I never put the pieces together and realized how miserable he truly was. I never got close enough. I could have been a lifeline, but in my defense, I wasn't yet aware of how deeply irredeemable his family's religion made him feel. I had been raised outside that abattoir, and whenever I walked into it for a social visit, the walls were always hosed clean.

Excruciating doubt, married to compulsory joy. A strange kind of clamoring for the bright side to any event. I suppose the difference between my family and theirs was a fundamentally different approach to bad feelings: Accepting them as natural companions to the good. The few times I overheard my friend talking with his own parents about deep depressing matters, I felt angry on his behalf. "If you're feeling sad, you're feeling wrong," was the essence of what they told him. "It's just a great big abyss out there, and by looking into it, you're dragging everyone else down. Stop looking. Put those feelings to sleep and conjure up a smile. It's better for us all."

Religious standards of emotional conduct, and the pharmaceutical industry: A match made in heaven.

Terror grows in the hiding from it. Constantly running to keep their demons from getting too close, a devout family can cover a lot of ground -- raise a lot of children, till a lot of soil, bake a lot of pies. (I was always impressed by the amount of baking that went on in that house.) Trouble is, with all philosophical roads leading back to the church, nothing stops a family from going in a massive loop. But to them that's fine, because like the runners of the Caucus Race from Alice In Wonderland, nothing makes sense anyway. The point is to keep those demons below the horizon, and your reward for keeping your head down and running hard does not need physical evidence: Your paradise is beyond the veil of death. (Which, bizarrely, in the Mormon scripture is described as a repeat of that Caucus Race, just on a larger scale.)

My ex spoke very frankly about the hell that the church put her mother, and then her, through. Her mother had five children, starting early, and dove headfirst into everything the church glorified for women. She worked brutally hard to make ends meet but was extremely unhappy, and over the years that manifested as abuse, growing in severity until after the family split up and they all got plenty of distance from each other. I don't blame all of that outcome on the Mormon church, but I do definitely blame the church for the completely avoidable pressure it dropped squarely on my ex's mother, for her entire youth, to have children as quickly and thoroughly as possible, despite deep misgivings about it. I've heard that particular story over and over.

I think of the cassette tape that she gave to me to copy - "I'm a Mormon" - full of songs that glorify motherhood and family*, pitched straight at prepubescent girls. Hearing it as an adult, it gives me a terrible chill. I can imagine myself listening to it as a small child, feeling an odd combination of yearning and deep confusion, wondering why the vision for my future that it laid out seemed like a blissfully comfortable armchair that I desperately wanted to relax into -- and knowing instinctively that it was just a bit too small, and if I wanted to fit into it, I would have to amputate something -- something I couldn't quite describe yet. And perhaps that choice would plague me as I got older. I would feel like a failure for selfishly choosing to keep my soul intact, when I should have just sawed part of it away and sat down in the damn chair like everyone expected. Maybe true happiness had been there, like the cassette promised. Those other women sure present as happy...

The prophets and the church found a great way to perpetuate their genes, didn't they? Tie reproduction deeply into spirituality. All it takes is a few rounds: Recruit a group of young, gullible women to move far away from their wiser, more skeptical female elders, and convince them that the highest calling in their life is to spit out offspring. Then enlist their help in convincing their offspring to do the same. Like a tumor, life itself is hijacked and made to serve growth for its own sake. Two generations, maybe three, with the young massively outnumbering the old, and the skeptics driven quickly and quietly away, and you've got yourself a self-perpetuating Caucus Race; the women pounding the earth even as they nurse infants; mothers lining up their daughters to be run into the ground; all the rebellion chased or frightened out of them.

Not a pretty vision from the outside. My family had game nights, camping trips, dances, big holidays, art projects, and a sense of peace and order. No religious overlords required. Moving across the world I am increasingly dismayed at how rare that kind of family life is. Abrahamic religion, in all its variations, has been ordering us to run this race for over a thousand years -- and it's a central feature of the Mormon church since the first day and all the way through to right now.

If I think of the cult-like mixing of religion and reproduction as a tumor, then the metaphor suggests an interesting way to combat it when it's grown too large to ignore: Cultural chemotherapy. Insist on a secular educational system. Insist on sending all children to it. Then insist on a secular media that encourages skepticism of religion but is still humanist, that shows other ways to organize your life, that portrays people outside the church as human, and real, and having the real shot at happiness that they do -- and then find ways to deliver that message, that can pass over even the high walls of the church and its family units. All cults rely on restricting and censoring access to outside information to protect their false promises, so litter the landscape with devices and wires and antenna and software that make it hard for people to covertly censor each other. The more democratized the media infrastructure, the more resistant the individuals are to cult influence.

I'm getting way off track from my original thoughts here, but I want to mention at this point that I have deep misgivings about the way social media works on the internet, because it does in fact provide plenty of means for groups and agencies to covertly censor people. In fact, the selective editing built into a "feed" that is the core concept of all large-scale social media, from Facebook on down, is the very essence of this censorship. So the future is not necessarily a bright one: In pursuit of market share, companies like Facebook actively cater to groups that desire covert censorship - and tracking - of their members. (Pursuit of growth over all else -- hmm, wasn't I just talking about that?)

"All About Mormons" brought up a lot of interesting thoughts. South Park's satire often veers into a nihilistic "both sides suck" territory that doesn't age well, but in this case, they held their worst impulses at bay and fashioned a story that just presents a couple of major aspects of being Mormon as-is, in all their weirdness. Watching it now, I reacted about the same as I did two decades ago ... Except I wish I'd known earlier in life how deeply it was affecting my friends, and what I might say to help them feel confident enough to leave the Caucus Race.

* "The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful." -Father Merrin, "The Exorcist", 1973.

If you’re lucky enough to have parents to watch you grow up, and delight in your progress, you stake some of your identity in knowing they’re impressed.
Later in life you start running out of people to impress.
They all pass on into the dark.
And there’s nothing around but young people and they don’t count. They didn’t see it happen; they weren’t there.
And they need you to bear witness to their own progress.
You only realize what a gift it is when it’s your turn to give it.

My father is old and all the outer layers have peeled off again.
Still, he tells me stories I never heard, about his younger self. Tiny events that set his course for seventy years.
A kind word from a certain girl, a basketball game, a few summers picking fruit.
Seeds that he re-planted season after season into an entire valley,
into which I was born.

It’s a joy every day I know he’s still there, alive, pleased with how I turned out, taking an interest.
But I’ve come to understand the gift he is still giving away.
And so I listen to his stories too, and hold the space he lost when his own father went into the dark, and take pride in his younger self, in an old world I know I’ll never fully understand, doing all those things I never knew, being impressed with who he was before I was alive.
A kind word from a girl who is now buried. A basketball game in a school now closed. A summer picking fruit in an orchard, now a car park.
I remember. You did so well. I am so proud of you.

A video floated by me recently that was a string of confrontations with "college students", asking them questions like "Can you find Mexico and Canada on this unlabeled map?" It was edited to make them look like idiots as a group, and prompt viewers to decry the "decline" in public education.

The more accurate picture is less charitable to history, but more optimistic: Education was never that great. The trend is generally upward, but there's much more we can do to accelerate the climb.

There is also another angle: Information, even skills, can become obsolete with time. Looking back, something that seems utterly useless now may have been useful to the learner for reasons that are now obscure.

One of my nephews knows an extraordinary amount about Pokemon. It helped him make friends. When I was a kid I had Doom 2 maps memorized stone cold and could run through them at great speed. That helped me make friends. My Dad memorized baseball stats on trading cards when he was a kid. Helped him make friends. Lord knows what my grandfather memorized out in the dirt in Oklahoma; probably Bible verses. I could make a case that it was better to know that stuff than to know where Mexico is.

But on the other hand, all that stuff is obsolete now. Pokemon, Doom 2, baseball stats, even - increasingly so - the Bible. And the sheer volume of "useless" short-lived things to learn has grown as well. It's amazing to me that we can still crowd in some good long-term learning amongst all the garbage!!

Perhaps what we need to do is turn up the volume on things that have lasting value.

These days about half the world population has smartphones that beam information almost indiscriminately, and the smartphone revolution is still ongoing. Here's a prediction: In ten years, parents will be able to instruct their kid's smartphones - using conversational dialogue - so they're preprogrammed to only display particular educational content and communicate with particular people. Forget these confusing boxes and checklists and rules: A parent will just say "Hey, phone, make sure Jimmy finishes his math lessons every day, before you let him go on Instagram." And the phone will say "Alright."

While the big tech companies slowly ratchet up their A.I. to handle stuff like this, here's another angle for you to consider:

Whether students can find Mexico and Canada on an unlabeled map is not what matters. What matters is how young people treat the Mexicans and Canadians that they're bound to encounter much sooner than later.

Just after the Civil War, when bands of renegades were still roaming around the states plundering their neighbors, my great-grandmother's uncle spent most of an entire year sleeping inside a hollow log in the woods behind his mother's farm, because a posse would come by on the regular and ransack his mother's house, then demand all the men and boys come out - whereupon if they presented themselves, they'd be shot - because they were Germans, and everybody knew all the f*%&#@ Germans objected to slavery on moral grounds, the bastards. He had to forage for food, sometimes stealing it from neighbors, instead of hunting, because even though he'd been let out of the army with his firearm, if he discharged it they'd immediately start searching the woods.

Now maybe those bastards trying to kill him could find Germany on a map. Probably not. Didn't matter much either way.

Better we teach our kids how to sensibly treat others, than worry about unlabeled maps. And that trend, thankfully, has been unmistakably positive.

This level of outcry around me, about children interacting with digital devices, was confusing for a while. Then I remembered how old I am. The modern smartphone has been around for close to 15 years, which is enough time for the people who were pre-teens when they got their first smartphones to grow up into adults and have their own children.

So, almost all the new parents I encounter are people who have no concept of life before everyone in the universe was anchored to a smartphone like a limpet to a rock. Their concern is not "should we even consider the remote possibility of getting our children internet-connected devices", their concern is "how do we get adequate control over these internet-connected devices that we are definitely putting into our kid's hands?" And amazingly, the solution they are running with is to put the device into their kid's hands, and then wring their hands about the inadequate controls for filtering how they use it.

A smartphone can conjure explicitly pornographic or violent videos with very little effort. Barring that, it can conjure up people who broadcast weirdly compelling but dangerously backward political and moral ideas. The device will then crunch its own usage history and steer the user towards more of the same garbage that caught their eye before. And a kid can go off to some far corner of the Galton board, without their parents having any clue what's going on in their head.

Parents have clear reasons to be concerned. The current tools for strictly filtering the operation of these devices are absurdly, hilariously underdeveloped. But while we wave our consumer fists and demand these things, hopefully before our children's brains turn into cesspools, let's also consider another angle:

There are people out in the country, with very different political views from mine and yours I suspect, who spend time teaching their young children how to handle firearms. Do they lament the lack of adequate device-usage-monitoring apps for hunting rifles? No, because that would be missing the point. The point, and the most important relative difference between what they do with guns and what young parents do with smartphones, is that the young parents intend to leave their children alone with the smartphone, using it all the time in various situations, while the parents go about their business. They are not using it as a tool in a family context, they are using it as a pacifier or a substitute parent, to get some of their own time back. Or barring that, they just do not believe - in a stubbornly optimistic way - that their own children could possibly want to use the device for anything they do not implicitly approve of, or at the very least would never figure out how. Out in the midwest there are situations where a child, alone at home, might fetch the rifle and use it to drive away some creature or person intent on violence, and situations like that are acceptable and what the training is partly for. A suburban kid with a smartphone might post a picture of their art project to Instagram and be deluged with excruciating abuse from mean-spirited anonymous trolls - young or old - and take a poisonous hit to their self-esteem. That's not what the smartphone is for; but that's what can happen when you use it -- and as a parent, would you even know it happened?

You wouldn't just hand your kid a rifle. Why would you hand your kid a smartphone?

Some more perspective:

The young minds of homo sapiens have been thriving for 50 thousand years, with 99.8% of that time in a world lit only by fire. Whether or not a 7-year-old can play Sock Puppets, Motion Math, or Little Solver is not actually going to make the difference between a happy, well-adjusted adult and a miserable drug-addled man-child. Same with following the crap that some of their peers stick on Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook. What makes the difference? How much time we spend interacting with and tending to them as parents. And I obviously don't mean "bulldozering" or "tiger-parenting", I mean simply paying attention. It's perfectly acceptable to deny our kids use of these things until well into teenagerhood and feel fine with that choice.

So what about parents who are so busy working that parenting isn't an option? If spending time with their kids is not an option, handing them semi-nerfed tablets probably seems like the only choice. It's either that or hire some kind of nanny or send them to daycare, both of which cost money and just lock them further into the work cycle. At least the tablet is cheap.

I have no idea how much the stereotype of the one-worker household from the 1950's is really accurate. But it seems to be a great thing to strive for, in some form. One breadwinner and one homemaker, of whatever genders, and ideally they can swap the role, pausing one career and resuming the other, so both can be full-time parents. I fear for the economic standard we live with now, and what it's doing - what it's already done - to parenting. Yeah it doesn't make any money or raise any crops, but parenting is a core human experience. No matter how throughly we nerf the smartphone and no matter how good of a substitute parent or teacher or pacifier we turn it into - so we can get back to work - I fear that parenting will continue to erode, until it seems like some archaic dead tradition that we learn about on a tablet, during scheduled downtime at the corporate sponsored trade school dormitory where we grow up.

That's one of the worst-case scenarios I think of, when I consider kids and the smartphone. Those brilliant engineers and content providers will create an AI-driven substitute teacher, then a substitute parent, and then since it's cheaper than paying a real teacher or parent, it will drown out everything else. All it takes is the willingness of humanity to accept work that pays too little, and takes up too much time, for parenting to happen.

And if that's all the market will offer, then ... well, there you go.

To a detail-oriented person, eliminating the last 10% of the contents of a house is harder than the preceding 90%.

Once all the items with obvious destinations are moved, and all the items with an obvious value have been sold, the house remains cluttered with things that are complicated.

For example a scrapbook of old photos: Should you store it somewhere, or should you scan it and then throw it away? You need to get rid of your scanner too, so you have to decide now if you ever want it scanned. Instead of throwing it away should you mail it to someone? Perhaps you could take out a couple of the photos you really like, and then throw away the rest. If you scan them, should you email copies to someone? Upload them somewhere? Or just leave them on a hard drive stuffed in a storage unit? Until you make this decision, the house cannot be empty.

At some point you reach that weird stage of the process where you’re second-guessing your regular habits. You open up the dishwasher full of clean dishes and ask yourself: Should I really be stacking these back in the cabinet? You notice that you’re down to one bar of soap and you ask: Should I bother getting another?

And there is a stage even beyond this, where you realize you have done something for the last time and now a chore is looming before you that you never encountered before. This is the last shower I’ll be taking here; it’s time to take down the shower curtain and trash it. This is the last piece of toast I’ll make with this toaster; time to shake out the crumbs, wipe it off, and set it on the curb. This is the last time I’ll be locking the back door. Find the spare key that’s hidden under the flower pot, and stick it back on the ring.

Take all the hooks off the walls. Unplug the fridge. Roll up the old welcome mat and stuff it in the garbage.

There is never a time when these last few chores don’t feel sad, even if the place was the scene of suffering or discontent and we are happy to be done with it. The good feelings come from our anticipation of a better time somewhere else. For these final moments in the old place, we think about how it might have been different. We never enjoy erasing ourselves, or confronting the fact that there are no more choices to make. We did our best - or maybe not - but either way we are done.

It's that last 10% that feels like forever.

In conversation with myself.

Do you think that a bike tour is the gateway to a more interesting life?

Do you think that the interesting things you can see from the seat of a bike make up for all the time you spent at your job, staring at screens, shut inside yourself? Staying up late because you felt unsatisfied at the end of another day spent working, saving up money so you can have an adventure?

Sure there is adventure, and good conversation. Stories to tell, fresh air, exercise, good food. Always a new thing rolling down from the horizon. There's no denying that a bike tour could bring happiness. But why this particular choice? Any why persevere, through the hard parts -- the inevitable rain and cold and hunger, the long empty patches of road where there is no one to talk to, nothing to chew on but your own curious thoughts -- and the times when you're deeply uncomfortable, when you wish for the chance to simply stop and put down roots somewhere, with an urgency that belies it as a human need like food and company... What compels you to spend your limited time on Earth doing this thing?

Is it ego? Are you trying to prove something to yourself?

Imagine you've already met your goal; made your journey, and you're back home in your daily routine again. What have you proved except that you can exploit the available technology in a somewhat unconventional means, to go on what most everyone around you will see as a weird extended vacation? One that most people would not choose for themselves, and would not be able to relate to? Because really, people do not like riding their bikes as much as you do. They will not get it. You seem like a nut-job more than an adventurer, placing yourself in danger on the road, especially when everyone around you is "getting there" faster in a car.

People smile and say "that sounds cool," and sincerely wish you luck. But make no mistake: They don't relate. What you're doing isn't cool.

Likewise, you can't be in it for the rebellion, for the "coolness points" of doing something different that sets you apart from others. There's no happiness in competing for novelty -- only a caustic version of pride. No matter how interesting your bike tour actually becomes, there are people all over the Earth who have spent their time doing far more interesting things, far more often, and being so dang humble about it that you don't even know they exist unless you blunder into them and talk awhile. You will probably meet a bunch of them as you go.

No, if happiness does emerge from this journey, it comes from meeting your own personal expectations.

What do you expect?

What sets those expectations? You weren't born with them, you learned them. Where did they come from? Consider your personal history.

You grew up playing adventure games, traveling far away in your imagination -- and surrounded by the redwood forest, deep and quiet, blurring the line between your imagination and real places. You grew up riding a bicycle, and have come back to it in adulthood, integrating it with your daily life, working against the car-focused environment and economy surrounding you. Visions of far away lands have been brought to you by the internet, and a flood of practical information as well. This age of scientific wonders, and the accumulated toil of countless generations before it, has knit the world together with roads and airlines and shipping routes, and the gear to explore them is affordable. It's all there, visible online.

You see a goal within reach, but not too close, like a mountaineer scheming to reach a summit "because it's there." Just how far could you ride? Just how far could your mind range? You calibrate your expectations and your happiness based on what's available. You make it up as you go along, and perhaps you're even conscious of how arbitrary that is.

It feels like these threads have been converging over years, over decades even. How much of your life, in retrospect, has been about this idea?

But then again, how much of this is just selective remembering -- a story you're making up about your distant past to justify your actions? A lot of it, probably. Why make up the story? Maybe it's not your past but your present life that holds the answers.

Lately you've been spending way too much time immobilized behind a desk. That desk is the centerpiece of a routine you follow almost every day. It goes: Get up, ride to work, stare at screens, talk about programming and science with nice people, eat some food - hopefully something nourishing - spend a little time with loved ones, read a book or watch a film, run a few basic errands, and then go to bed for a night of unquiet dreams. Then start the routine again.

It's not a bad routine. In fact, it's a routine that most people on Earth would happily assemble and roll with for their entire lives. There are undeniably good things about it; things you cannot pack up and take with you on two wheels.

But it's still a routine. And there's no doubt you would break this routine if you started a long bicycle trip. If you picked yourself up out of your home, moved thousands of miles outside your comfort zone, dropped down in an unfamiliar land with some hardware and a map, and had to contend with the elements and interact with the locals to move yourself across the globe, your routine would be totally demolished. It's impossible to stay in one place while riding a bike, so a desk is out of the question. (Same with computer screens. Only the tiniest of screens fits on a bike and if you stare at it for more than a few seconds you fly into a ditch.)

You would be forced to witness the world, rather than think about it abstractly like you have for too many years. And perhaps that's exactly what you want. Maybe it isn't happiness you're seeking, or the execution of a grand plan; maybe it's an intervention. Life in one place has gotten too easy, and you used to have expectations for how it would all arrange itself, but life outmaneuvered and outlasted your expectations, and now you've drifted into this weird place nobody warned you about, and been seized by this weird idea as a means of escape.

What do you want?

Is this a "midlife crisis?" What's your crisis; being bored? If you did exactly what you're doing now but you were 20 years old, even motivated by the same sense of boredom, would you doubt yourself? Would others?

"Go out there and explore!" they would say. "You're young, you don't need to think about anything permanent at your age."

What about now? Instead they would say, "You're old. You're supposed to be settled into something and know what you want out of life." And "settled in" means, among other things, staying in one place.

You've been settled before. More than once.

You've managed to work your way into plenty of situations that seemed ideal at the time - jobs, relationships, living spaces - and moved on from them eventually. Your only regret each time was not doing it before things got as bad or as boring as they did. Not everything requires escape of course; some things just require difficult adjustments, and then they continue in another way. But to pursue this particular crazy idea - a long-range bike trip - you are taking apart things in your life that are good as well as bad. That's obsession. And probably stupidity as well.

People all over the world struggle mightily just to claim a fraction of the resources and connections you have acquired and kept during your life, let alone things that you have accidentally or deliberately wasted. If the extreme good fortune of your position is not apparent to you now, it will be apparent soon, because this journey will put you in close contact with many of those less fortunate. How will you feel then, about what you left behind? How stupid will you look to the people you meet, when you try to explain yourself?

But on the other hand...

What if you don't have a choice?

Life is full of contradictions and it should not be surprising that something that seems like a really bad idea also seems like a really great one.

You're well into your forties. By all accounts your life is more than half done. Way more, if you think of it in terms of the aging of your mind and memory. What kind of joke would the back half of your existence be if you spent years on the cusp of a journey that you could quite easily have taken, only to turn around and creep back into your house, close the door, and keep taking the paycheck and eating the fat meals?

Even if it's a difficult journey to finish, it's trivially easy to start. Just get on the bike and keep going. People have bicycled all around the world hundreds of years before you were born, and (you hope) thousands and thousands more will during your lifetime and long after. If they can do it, so can you. Do you really need a reason? Ego, identity, change, intervention, escape... Why are you so worried about it?

It doesn't matter. Possible answers to the question of "why" erupt like weeds - fresh ones every day - and you pull them up, inspect them, and throw them in a pile. The only thing you are certain of is the obsession itself. Unprompted, irreducible, and stubbornly refusing to fade. You've spent so long thinking about it, outlining scenarios and testing hardware and saving money, that at this point if you didn't do it, you might not have much of an identity to fall back on. You'd be some vague person with a job and a house and some good relationships who thought about something really hard for years to the point where it began to seriously interfere with and alter their life ... and then dropped it.

Are you afraid of what you'll learn? Are you afraid in general? For how much longer are you willing to put up with the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously preparing to go and planning to stay? The world is absolutely flooded with opportunities to miss. There is no shortage of them, only a shortage of time. Past a certain level of preparedness, the days you spend preparing turn into their own thing. Are you more comfortable with preparing than you are with actually doing? Are you comfortable in purgatory, and questioning your motives so you'll stay?

Get on with it. Whatever happens - good or bad, or even just boring - it will be your choice. You'd better be okay with it.

It seems strange to consider, but I am probably approaching a point in my career - maybe less than a year from now - when I can step away from the endless treadmill of computer use that I have been on for almost all of my life.

I wonder: what will change about me?
Will I become more outgoing?
Will my interest in people be renewed?
Will I become happier, or less happy?
Will I be more creative?

I have used computers for so many different kinds of artistic pursuits that sometimes I actually catch myself wondering what other creative people can possibly be up to if they are not parked in front of a computer. Sure, many writers prefer physical pen and paper, but those that don’t are usually sitting in front of a keyboard just like me. Some painters may prefer the physical brush and easel, but the rest have moved to touchscreen tablets for flexibility and to save on materials. Musicians almost never compose on paper these days. Same with architects and engineers, until they need to print something for a construction site. DJs and live performers have traded their massive mixing rigs for laptops with little pads and boxes dangling off them. Seems like if everyone is migrating towards computers for artistic expression, then me being anchored to my own just places me ahead of the curve and changing my behavior would make me a Luddite -- a cranky old man sitting on his front porch and dreaming of a simpler time that's vanished into the past while he wasn't looking.

But what can I say except the truth: I am sick and tired of keyboards and mice and touchscreens. Even switches and knobs and blinky lights. The fact that those things are very versatile and that I am very good at using them has changed from a proud asset into a bland annoyance.

I really do like music mixing, and writing little essays and letters, and organizing weird piles of information, and tweaking photos until they look the way I intended them to look when I pressed the shutter. I have the soul of a filing clerk in me, and the computer makes him very happy. But while he is humming blissfully away inside my head, my hands and feet and ass are complaining, louder and louder. “Burnout” doesn’t really describe it anymore. It’s an ongoing badly-controlled fire, and I count myself very lucky that I have inched my way this close to a financial situation that could allow me to take a long needed break from screens and keyboards and tablets and mice.

So now I get to think about it -- not just as a dreamy “what if” scenario but as a real possibility. What would it be like, if I didn’t have to spend every weekday anchored to a screen, thinking in code?

Perhaps I can look at the vacations I’ve taken recently to get an idea. Last June I spent a week at Toorcamp avoiding screens almost completely, and in July I went on a technology-light camping trip, then a trip hunting fossils in the desert with a camera, where I used the laptop only to dump videos for a few minutes each night. How did those go?

Well if I was looking for a common thread in these trips, it would be that there was a delay of a few days and then my mind started to wander in a bunch of interesting directions that it usually doesn’t reach. At Toorcamp I really got to dig into my relationship with geek culture and see how a lot of it is just youth culture in a disguise that I can no longer comfortably wear. On the camping trip I had a lot of interesting thoughts about structured versus unstructured time and my relationship to my work, and the way my parents and sisters influenced me. In the desert I thought about maps and navigation, and deep time, and got to practice my cinematography.

When I’m spending most of each day repeatedly dunking my brain in database and website code, these thoughts cannot crystallize.

Another strong thread in common is that I found myself enjoying the company of other people way more often than usual. I think this is because I didn’t need so much private time to reset my brain. I know I’ve never been fully introverted - like most people I am a mix - but perhaps a lot of my current introversion is actually a side effect of my work. It seems contradictory, but the evidence is telling me that an extended vacation might make me more of a people person and give me more room to think at the same time.

Kind of a weird idea. But I can see the sense in it.

In the meantime, I build code and tend to my finances, and continue tinkering with the house, and doing all of the self-maintenance things that I need to do so that I can keep the money coming in. It’s not like I’m in a bad position. Middle-class life is a pretty good life. But I do wonder, about that other half-seen version of myself, and if he will ever have a chance to emerge.

When you've been writing code for something like thirty years straight, you start to wonder about stuff like this. If you're lucky enough to go on a vacation of a month or more (I've been able to do this exactly twice in this last 30 years) you notice that after the fourth or fifth week your brain starts to change shape really alarmingly, and it feels ...

How interesting; the word I want to use is "easy." Any other mode of thinking feels incredibly easy, compared to writing code. You look all around you at other people and realize with a twinge of jealousy that their brains get to take on all kinds of fun shapes, all day long, and just about all of them are way easier and more pleasant than what you've been doing. You are reminded why so few people do your kind of work even though the pay is very high: It is very hard to do well for sustained amounts of time.

And then woe is you, because when that month is over and you're back in the temple staring at the gigantic mandala and painstakingly etching out pieces of it, your brain writhes like a fish. It wants to do anything - anything at all, please, I'm begging you, JUST ANYTHING - but write more code.

But you plant both hands on top of the fish and add your knee on top, and eventually it stops writhing, and you write more code.

"Ambition comes when early force is spent
And when we find no longer all things possible.
Ambition comes behind and unobservable."
- T.S. Eliot

When you're in middle-age, and if you manage to find a few ways to settle the horrible angst of injustice and bad habits absorbed earlier in life, your attention turns to long-range goals that are complicated and have vague terms of success. Writing that big novel, starting that company, raising children, building a community, et cetera.

Goals like these require stability. So you make an effort to stop tinkering with the fundamentals of your life, like where you live, what you do for a living, who you spend time with. You go with things that are "good enough", or things that are occasionally awful but in a predictable way. You gamely tend to these while you work on your big goals, and if you're lucky, your divided effort is enough and it all moves along.

If you're unlucky, the challenges come too fast, and things break down. You become miserable, even as you're working day by day. This is not what you agreed to when you started this journey. Perhaps it's time to make big changes, including ones that threaten your long-range goals. But the idea of abandoning your goals is terrifying. What else do you have?

You accuse yourself of having a "mid-life crisis," using the term as a weapon to frighten yourself back into line.

You're an adult; you don't get to be in crisis. You pursued happiness for years already and found some, but it didn't accomplish anything big. Big things are your priority now, right? Betraying those just so you can feel better is what selfish children do. The only way out that's allowed is dying in the attempt; that's how you stay dedicated. Not happiness -- the threat of death.

But why? Why turn against yourself? Why believe the stereotype of the mid-life crisis, especially if it shames you?

What advice does the stereotype offer? Stay where you are, with who you are, doing what you are, and resist the urge to change, because change is born of a desire to reclaim your youth, and that's pathetic? Among other things, this equates youthfulness with the ability or need to change, and youthfulness with the desire to leave an unsatisfying situation. That gives way too much credit to the young.

I have spent plenty of time enduring dissatisfying situations while making better plans. That was not time well spent. Throwing more time after it was the easier option. Change was the harder one.

It wasn't wisdom or maturity that held me in those situations. It was fear and doubt. It was the repulsive thought that things were as good as they would ever get, and change would only deprive me of what happiness I currently had.

That would be wisdom only if it was proven by history. If seeking change resulted in a poorer quality of life %51 of the time, that would be enough to make it wisdom. Instead, the odds have never even been close to that. In fact, change has served me well every single time. There is a real phenomenon called "failing upward", and if I pay attention, it's what eventually happens.

Perhaps it helps that I'm the kind of person who keeps planning until the last possible moment before choosing something. But that means lingering in bad situations, and that's a habit I don't like. Either way, I have to keep telling myself that change is not failure.

There is only day by day, now, until there are no more days. What can I reach for? What new way can I connect with the people I know? What stable pattern can I scribble all over?

Get up, dammit; listen to yourself. You know what isn't working. Point it out. No defending, no accusing. Ask for help; ask for time off; ask for suggestions. Drop a few things on the floor. Life is not a support system for your ambitious projects, and acting that way is what got you into this mess. It only works the other way around. Remember why you took them on? How can those lofty goals you've mortgaged your happiness for - the novel, the company, the parenting, the community - be changed so you start seeing a return again?

Everything is on the table.

In that weird train-of-thought ramble in my previous entry, I said that there was a tension in modern culture between protecting women, and women having agency. I also made a bold claim: From one situation to the next, the socially acceptable - the "correct" - side to take seems to be weirdly arbitrary. I thought maybe I could illustrate that claim by telling a story from my past.

About 20 years ago I was working in a small software company, as a programmer. This was back in the days when software was burned onto CD-ROMs or disks and placed in a package, usually with a printed manual. (App stores and large digital downloads were not part of the landscape yet because the internet was still too slow.) We had an employee at the company whose job was to assemble and ship those packages. It was not a very difficult job, so getting it in a college town was more a matter of luck than anything else.

The woman who had that job was about 20 years old, three or four years younger than me. I could tell she found me attractive by the way she lingered by my desk asking non-work-related questions and generally being just a little too friendly and physically close than I was used to. Like most engineers I was bad at reading signals so she had to be very clear before I got a clue and realized that I could ask her out on a date -- which I did.

The date went well. She had blond hair in a pixie haircut, and wore a rough wool sweater in a pale shade of purple that made her intense gray eyes look like jewels. We walked around Santa Cruz, finally settling down in a park, and talked about previous relationships and personal growth. Her movements were calm and measured but I kept seeing little signals that inside she was seething. Something else was going on in her life. Eventually it came out in the conversation: She was just out of a very unpleasant relationship. Right now, her primary goal was to have fun, without getting too intense about it. I said I was fine with that, and by the end of the date we were at second base. We agreed to go on another date soon. That was Sunday, and Monday morning I was back at work.

The office was laid out in a crescent shape with the front door at one end and the stock room at the other. My new friend had a desk with a computer just outside the stockroom, relatively isolated from the other employees, but next to the printers and a big stack of file servers. Part of my job was to maintain those.

Around noon I needed to insert a CD in one of the servers. I walked back to them, and the woman and I began chatting like we always had in the past. But this time, after a couple minutes, we both looked up the hall to make sure no one was coming, and then pulled each other into an embrace.

For the first time, I was dropped into that awkward labyrinth of having a coworker for a romantic partner. (It was also the last time.) We snuggled up briefly and then broke the embrace before we could go any further since we were both too nervous about being discovered. In whispers, we both agreed it was not the best idea to get physically close during work hours. I walked back to my desk and attempted to put her out of my mind.

We respected our agreement for exactly 24 hours, at which point I contrived an excuse to go back to the servers and be near her, and she stood up, looked around, then opened the door to the stockroom and pulled me inside.

I was a software developer with a strong set of skills, working for a relatively low wage, so I wasn't nervous about being discovered. I figured that as long as I got my work done and didn’t interfere too much with hers everything was fine. But I didn’t think about the tenuous nature of her stockroom job. If the boss discovered her wasting time canoodling in the back room she could easily be fired and replaced with someone who didn’t draw the romantic attention of the developers. Even if I had been the one to make the first move, I would not have been the one punished. If I'd stopped to think about it I would have realized it was deeply unfair, and I was being terribly unprofessional. But, we were young and horny people and neither of us had a particular respect for our careers, such as they were.

Over the next three or four weeks we met for some quick hanky-panky in the stockroom on a regular basis. I don't know how many of my coworkers realized it, but eventually I just assumed they all did. The most awkward point was when her boss told her in private one day, “By the way, I don’t care exactly what you get up to back there as long as you get all the orders out,” which was fair-minded but also very embarrassing. So we both agreed to put an end to our hijinks.

Two weeks after that she told me in private that she was going to leave the job.

On the one hand I should have realized that her position would be at risk from any romantic involvement, and rejected her advances and never asked her on a date, for her own sake. On the other hand she seemed to know exactly what she wanted, and if she wanted to risk her job for it, why should I argue? We were both adults; our gender shouldn’t matter. Neither of us was a manager and our duties didn't intersect, and there was no regulation at the office that prohibited dating other employees. But her reputation - her ability to get along with her coworkers in general - was damaged.

The fact that we willingly stopped our canoodling in due time should have demonstrated that she was taking the job seriously, and her coworkers should have left her private life alone. But the three other employees that she directly worked with - three women, all slightly older than her - felt obligated to respond, each in a different way. She told me later that one of them made crude remarks to her and was clearly outraged. Another one got uncomfortably maternal and started asking all kinds of personal questions about our relationship, perhaps to see if I was exploiting her. And the third stopped talking to her, except through terse emails, as if to distance herself from a disaster. Her workdays became stressful and rather than swim against this tide she was moving on.

Did she need protection, or did she need to learn a lesson, or was she an adult taking a calculated risk? We drifted apart rapidly after she left the job, and broke up a few weeks later. It took me another 10 years at least before I started believing that I should have turned down the relationship for her sake, and then gently explained why. And not for any ironclad rule like “never date where you work,” either: It was specifically because we were both too young to navigate it well and that was going to cost her the job. Ideally, I would have known that, and simply dated someone else. But I didn't know that. Did that make me guilty of failing to protect her?

Even 20 years later, I am still sad that it cost her anything. I was good at my job, and so was she. By that metric, every consequence of our brief romantic involvement was bullshit. But I also know, practically speaking, you can't separate the sex from the employee, so you better separate the sex from the workplace. It was guaranteed to bother other people no matter how well it went for us personally.

The no-duh lesson here is "don't date where you work." And if you want to play it safe, check all the other political correctness boxes too: Don't ask your food server out, don't ask your doctor or dentist out, don't ask your attorney or professor or coach out, don't try and date the person who walks your dog, delivers your mail, paints your house... You get the idea. In fact, you should probably stick to dating people who live in another time zone.

So now that you know the story, try swapping all the genders. Would the stock worker I dated still have been forced to leave? Whose "reputation" would have been damaged, mine or his?

Part of me wants to argue that, no matter what the dynamic or the age difference, when a man and a woman get involved at work the woman is always risking much more than the man - even if she's the CEO and he's the janitor - and so we should be finding fault with the man involved for putting her at risk. Another part of me wants to back up a step, and fight against the gender biases that make it more risky for the woman in the first place. But that fight involves declaring a level of agency: CEO or not, her sex life is none of your damn business, so unless you think you're being passed over for promotion because the other guy (or girl) is good in bed, and can make the case in court, then shut up and get back to work. In other words, we shouldn't be concerned with protecting her, we should be concerned with disabusing you of your biases. (And that applies whether the "you" in this hypothetical is a man or a woman, because there's plenty of bias to go around.)

Then, I can back up yet another step. I can say, agency or not, women on average are more susceptible to social pressure than men, so we need to be unbiased and we need to protect them at the same time. That means the correct moves are: Teach men not to be so pushy, and teach women to be more assertive and independent. Except, codifying this into a consistent standard of action is messy, because as I said before, one of the things we can all take as gospel is that there is more variation within the sexes than between them. Some women have no trouble being pushy; some men struggle terribly with being assertive.

So ultimately, stepping all the way back, I arrive again at respecting personal choice. My co-worker and I chose a risky relationship, we learned a few lessons; next time we'll choose differently. We revealed the bias around us: She was scrutinized much more intensely than I was, based on her gender. Her choices were less respected, so she was subject to more pressure. That was wrong. That needs to change.

This strikes me as the sanest path to walk in a world of high dynamic range, even though it also feels like an endless one. I want to move towards a world where, for example, there are as many female fire fighters as male, and a daycare run by men will get just as many customers as a daycare run by women. Do I think we'll actually get there? To be honest, I don't, unless technology eventually completely overhauls sexual reproduction. Until then, we fight the good fight, so everyone who wants to work, can work.

I have heard it said that a woman's brain is roasted in parental hormones for a while after birth, cementing a deep instinctive bond with her offspring. That sounds plausible to me. It also sounds like it would have a profound effect on the behavior of anyone who becomes a mother, to the point where the course they chart in life would be clearly altered, and one could even see large-scale trends emerge to back this.

Yet after all these years I have not seen a simple piece of reference material that would answer a crucial question for me: How many women in the world, who are only partially in the workforce or not in the workforce at all, if you sat down and asked them honestly and confidentially, would tell you that finding a way to spend most of their time running their household and raising their family was a priority for them, chosen freely, even over other options? That is, how many of them actually sought their situation, and are willing to say so, confidently?

There seems to be a strain of feminism in this modern world that is built around a core assumption that has not actually been verified: The assumption that all women - as a collective representing approximately half of all living humans for all time - have been consistently coerced with psychological and physical violence to stay out of the workforce and become unwillingly subservient to their children and the men around them.

This assumption seems ridiculous to me. Let's back away from it. A more reasonable follow-on assumption is that most women, like a flock of sheep, tend to steer towards the middle of the flock, where conventional womanhood resides, but there are outliers - women who prefer to run at the edge of the herd or even leave it behind entirely - who are policed back into the flock on threat of violence and/or disenfranchisement whenever they try to stray towards things that aren't properly sheep-like (read: womanly). This frames feminism as supportive of choice, and supportive of accepting that there is variety in skills and temperament and preference that is wider than the collective difference between the male and female flocks can describe.

I can dig that definition. It makes more sense to me. But it doesn't say anything about why the flocks are shaped the way they are. It makes it acceptable to stray outside them - even celebrates the outliers - but does not explain their overall shape.

With that question still on the table, let me back up another step to view an even bigger picture. Now the view is of the entire landscape, with two flocks of people loosely gathered around these landmarks of masculine and feminine interest, and power, and experience. Perhaps from this altitude we can see subgroups and eddies and realize that even a basic gender binary is an oversimplification, and more diverse concepts are required. Much has been written and much has been illuminated about this landscape, but the detail that I want to focus on right now is specific:

A political writer waving the banner of feminism can publish a book arguing that men are collectively oppressing women through their aggressive overconfidence and assertiveness in conversations, e.g. "mansplaining", and therefore men need to un-learn this tactic because they are using it unfairly against women.

And another political writer can publish a book arguing that the constant portrayal of women as victims of male action, who need protection and defending from this treatment, possibly from other more sympathetic men, actually robs women of their agency and their ability to be respected and to wield power effectively.

Which side should I root for? The side that wants to call out men as "mansplainers", or the side that wants to portray women as capable of fielding just as much shit as men - including their blinkered bravado - and therefore just as qualified to run meetings and drop bombs? If I root for both sides, I am rooting for two arguments that cancel each other out, and I am effectively rooting for nothing.

Let me state this dilemma in more general terms:

Is there an inverse relationship between the level of protection we all insist that women need, and the amount of power and independence we expect them to competently wield? If so, do women need to be protected more, or do they need to be respected more?

I've concluded, regretfully, that the choice is a matter of fashion. It ebbs and flows, and is disturbingly arbitrary, based on the context or the target. Often it seems more a matter of signaling virtue to other observers for the sake of social or sexual competition, than a matter of grand philosophy or real empowerment. To give a blunt example: How many male college freshmen loudly declare themselves feminists because they know that's what women want to hear, then spend years psychologically manipulating women to gain and keep sexual access to them? Years later, how many of them become parents, and are deeply suspicious of all the men that express interest in their college-age daughters, no matter how politically correct they appear in conversation? On a case-by-case basis, one person will argue that you need more protection, and another will argue that you need more agency. I find it hilarious that those arguments often break down along lines of which man wants to merge his genes with yours, and which man's genes you already carry.

Maybe this effort is supposed to be zero-sum, and the result may actually be to prevent the conflict from ever ending, i.e. to prevent one sex from winning, because then we'd live in a sick dystopia and both sexes would lose. But I keep thinking about those vague flocks of sheep, and how they don't quite merge into one.

Here are some things I think we can all take as gospel:

The sexes are more alike than different.
There is more variation within the sexes than between them.
Men's interest in passing on their genes makes life more complicated and dangerous for us all. (But all the men who showed less interest have consistently been bred out of the population; duh.)
Anyone who says women are full of "sugar and spice and everything nice" is lying to get in your pants.
Anyone who loudly declares the previous statement may also be trying to get in your pants.

There is a minimum distance between the two major flocks of sheep - the general trends expressed by all our life choices, split across sex lines - enforced by hormones and hardware. Some political fashions move to push that distance wider. Some press against that distance, insisting that the natural state of society is for women and men to be collectively identical. I think the wisest move is to embrace the fashions that preserve and respect individual choice. If a woman wants nothing more than to be barefoot in her own sunny kitchen, that's great. If a man wants nothing more than to do the same, that's great too. Same with running a company, being a cop, serving in public office, and so on. That seems clear enough, but the real problem is in managing our own internal expectations so we treat all these outcomes fairly.

And if that's not a matter of grand philosophy, but instead a matter of virtue signaling, competition, and context, then no wonder it's so complicated and hard to do right, right? Accepting that others are free to choose is relatively easy. Accounting for our own subconscious bias, moving against the tide of fashion, victimhood, or self-interest -- that's hard.

The crap feeling
Is your bedrock.

Rising around you,
Promising escape,
Each new project
Demands material.

So you dig down.

Those Fraggles are a real mixed blessing.

Every now and then I see a news article float by from a "respectable" source, about how the working class of America has a collective distrust, even hatred, for intellectuals. The narrative usually implies that the American educational system is going down the toilet because of this attitude. Just behind that is the implication that if these hapless blue-collar people would just get off their lazy bitter asses and get an edumacation they would join the middle class and - shall we say - Make America Great Again.

But I believe that colleges, as the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of higher education, should be under pressure to make their product actually useful to the people they sell it to. As I see it, that utility can take two forms:

If a college is courting people who want to elevate their career, their product should be valuable professional skills, at a fair price.

If a college is courting people with money, their product is a classical education that helps people fit in with, and form connections to, other people with money. That's where the real value is for those people, although it flies under a different banner, a more palatable one that reads "Make you a more well-rounded and better human being."

Of course we can take the pragmatic angle and say that colleges are around to do both of these things, but the point here is this: Sometimes people with money go to college, get a classical education, and then land a job afterwards through their connections, without actually learning the professional skills very well along the way.

Or even worse, they go there without money, go into debt, work hard to learn the professional skills the college claims are important, and the college turns out to be wrong.

I've been working in my industry for a quarter of a century now. Started it right out of high school. I have seen a lot of people here who fall into these categories. People who blunder from job to job leaving things worse than they found them, bluffing their way through interviews. People who are fabulously arrogant, believing that the way they did things in their final college project is the One True Way, starting needless arguments over which tools to use (Django or Ember?), which language to write in (C# or Python?), which methodology to apply (SCRUM or Agile?) and judging others for their ignorance of the One True Way. And most often by far: People who are simply unable to do the work, full stop. Eventually you can get a sense for these people and even predict a time frame, for example, "as a recent college graduate, this person will be completely useless to the company until at least six months have passed." And possibly forever, if they don't knuckle down.

This happens. In my industry, it happens quite a lot. What is the proper response to this but skepticism of higher education?

From my point of view, people should be suspicious of a recent college graduate, until they've proven themselves. Especially when that graduate believes that being "a more well-rounded and better human being" is more important than being able to do the job. Or when they declare that they know the work better than the people who have actually been doing it for years. What is the proper response to arrogance? It sure ain't deference. "You have a degree? Oh sorry, I'll stop asking questions now." Yeah, no.

My father was the first of his family line to go to college. I dropped out after five years because my vocation - learned outside of college - was already more lucrative than almost any other the college claimed to train and be the gatekeeper for. My father was very frustrated with my apparent lack of a desire to do well in school (the undiagnosed ADD didn't help) and it soured our relationship for all of my teenage years, but eventually he had to recognize that I'd made good on my own terms, and we eventually both agreed that college was not necessarily a path to the middle class, let alone the only path.

I can tell you what did forge my path: My parents worked hard to give me time and space, and I poured almost all that into the computer. Call it an indirect version of apprenticeship. I'm incredibly grateful for that time and space.

Now I work in a small company alongside 15+ highly educated biochemists. Wonderful, smart, very hard-working people. They had to put in grueling hours to learn their trade just as I did, but they had to pay out the nose to a college for the opportunity to do so. Ask them, and they will tell you how annoying it is that a computer programmer who never took on a dime of college debt can pull down the same wage, and have higher job security. (They can't blame the college for that, at least. Supply and demand.)

I'm digressing a bit, but I'm bringing this up to say that I fully understand the frustration that people out in the world feel when someone tells them that they are ignorant, or lazy, or lower class, because they do not have a college degree, or because they are skeptical that a college degree would appreciably improve their lives relative to the many other things they could (and do) pursue outside ivy walls. ... But the only reason I don’t take personal offense along with them is that I ended up making a crapload of money. And that is really one of the best kinds of revenge.

Success isn’t all about money, but if colleges are gonna take so much of it from people who have so little, then there should be pressure on them to deliver employable skills in return. The "more well-rounded and better human being" part can come along as a bonus. (It did for me.) That pressure should apply whether the money is collected in private tuition fees, or collected invisibly as a tax on everyone.

So the next time you meet someone who distrusts higher education, remember that colleges are not perfect and their place in society is not sacrosanct. The pressure needs to be on. A big ol' pile of book-learnin' doesn't exempt you from questioning. But it does help you form answers, and you can put that to great use while you win over the skeptics.

(By the way, California’s state college system is both affordable and high-quality, and a great mix of vocational and general education. Don’t forget to factor that into the argument when someone tells you that the US educational system is spiraling down the toilet.)

I believe it was that venerable old film Crocodile Dundee II where a woman visiting a group of Aborigines attempts to take a picture of them and is told “you can’t,” by one of them.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says with a mixture of politeness and condescension, “You’re afraid that the camera will steal your soul, right?”

“No,” says the man. “You left the lenscap on.”

The woman makes an embarrassed face, everyone laughs, and then they take the picture.

Now, basic politeness declares that the woman should ask to take a picture before doing so. At which point the man could have just said “No,” and there would be no misunderstanding about soul-stealing either way because he would not need to give a reason for declining. That’s obvious.

But if we skip over that and assume she didn’t ask, a question about political correctness comes up: Would the woman be an asshole for assuming that the man believes his soul is at risk? Or would the woman be an asshole for assuming he was entirely comfortable around cameras? Or is there no good assumption here, and instead she should ask what he means by “you can’t”?

Or is the correct reaction - and I believe this is the one that modern political correctness favors - that she should just shut the fuck up and not ask him why he doesn’t want his picture taken, and just not take the picture, because he said “you can’t,” and asking for a reason why is considered a microaggression?

While you're pondering the right move here, I'd like to throw in some related questions to ponder as well.

There is political correctness, and there is call-out culture. Attempting to scrub the media and our language of damaging stereotypes is political correctness. "Naming and shaming" individuals or groups that employ these stereotypes is call-out culture. The two are almost always mixed these days, but it's possible to separate them.

How much of call-out culture exists entirely online?

If we could get rid of call-out culture but keep political correctness, should we keep it?

If so, should we keep the political correctness of the 90's, or the political correctness of today? Or are they identical?

I can see myself in some future place, as I am here. Listening to sad or twisted music, late at night in a dark room. Feeling my heart hurt in my chest.

I imagine someone walking in, seeing me in this low state, and quietly putting a hand on my shoulder. Perhaps I touch it in response, make some noise, or maybe I don't respond at all. Then they leave the room again, because we're both used to this, and they know there's nothing more to do.

This just happens. It's been a long time of ups and downs. On the up days, I can be lively and adventurous, crack jokes about my problems, and navigate with a steady hand and a sense of determination. I can let stress glance off me, and immediately seek the positive. But then some time passes and I drop below the line of average, into this quiet, painful place.

I've spent a lot of time digging around in my head looking for solutions -- ways to elevate myself by changing some part of my life. The people I'm with, the work I do, my daily routine. Just lately I put myself on a good positive run by getting regular exercise and consistently sleeping enough. I can't tell if my body has actually changed but I've been looking at it differently, feeling less displeased with it, like I can still move the way I want to. This is coming out of a long period of time where I've only felt overweight and slow. Perhaps it's just my mood shaping my self-perception and I've made no visible progress at all, since my self-perception has gone from positive to negative just as rapidly: Yesterday I was feeling pleased with myself; now I’m not.

Now I'm in this isolated, exhausted place again. The sum of my productivity today has been pushing music around in the computer, taking a nap, taking a bath, feeding the cat, obsessing over my finances, and watching a bunch of silly videos on my phone. That's it. That's another day of my life ticked away, and gone. I should have run outside and made some kind of contribution. The farthest I've gone from my bed is the back yard - 20 feet away - to absorb some weak autumn sunlight and slowly pet the cat.

Sure, people have down days. We can't be on point and saving the world every waking minute. Given how complicated things are, that would be impossible even if we had endless energy and enthusiasm: There are many things that people do every day that feel world-saving important but actually just cancel each other out, or amount to nothing more than rearranging sand on a beach. But the point is not always to make some lasting change - it is sometimes just to have an experience, or to make something happen for a brief interval, etching it into consciousness, or history. Going out and doing things can just be about passing time the way you choose, among limited options. You can't make all of humanity happy for eternity, but you can create some happiness while you're around, and that matters.

I understand that. I also understand that it's not just about me. My life is relatively comfortable and I am lucky to have the space to engage with depression in a way that prevents it from derailing my life. But it's still here. Regardless of how justified it is, it always comes back. In fact, it's a long irregular cycle, and I've grown so used to it that I've moved beyond accepting it and instead sought ways to explain it, or even justify its presence, like a hostage situation that's grown twisted. Am I paying some kind of debt to my more creative self? Are my good days a loan and my bad days the interest payments? Do the crops need to fail for a while so the soil can be productive later?

I don't like the idea that my depression is compensating for something. I want to feel happy where I am, without feeling like a lost soul for part of the time. I want to feel like I fit right into my environment, without having to wrestle down the urge to ditch everything and run into the hills. I want to ride the wave - or what I perceive as the wave, in my happy and active self - without having to hit the trough. And I definitely don't want the purgatory in the middle, where everything is just "meh".

But I may not have a choice in this emotional pattern. It's probably genetic, since some variation of it affects my entire family. I hear there are medications that smooth it out, like pressing myself under a flat pane of glass. I feel revolted by the idea of smoothing it out. Does that even make sense? Is it possible to be possessive about something I hate from time to time? Does it make sense to feel that suffering at regular intervals is part of my identity, and I would be losing something valuable if I exorcised it? It's not like this level of depression stops me from feeding myself and making a living. I just feel like shit for a while. I know how lucky I am to not be sailing in seas so rough that they drown me. Unable to work, unable to string two thoughts together, unable to eat or wash myself, and unable to care either way... I've known those people. I've rented houses with those people! I'm very grateful that even when I'm at my worst, my mind is still moving, even if it's just moving in a circle. Even if it's just clawing at walls.

But here's something that makes my depression much more confusing:

Sometimes I feel worst when things are too comfortable. Sometimes I am least productive, and least helpful to others, when my basic needs are too thoroughly met. It's the paradox of wealth. When people are too independent, they turn inward, and start to attend to self-serving goals that have diminishing returns. Sometimes we act selfishly just because there's no external prompt to act otherwise. ... And maybe my depressed times are only made worse by how thoroughly I can embrace them.

If I was forced to work seven days a week instead of five, and had to cycle ten miles to the office instead of two, where would I even find the time to sit in the bathtub and feel horrible? Maybe the exercise endorphins would never get the chance to wear out and pitch me into this trough. That's how it felt during times when I was constantly exercising, like on my bike tours. During those times it's not a crash, but a gradual slide down to equilibrium. Exercise does have a pretty profound effect on me. So why am I here moping with the cat? Because I can.

Face it, you selfish asshole. You relish this broken version of yourself. You find pleasure in wandering this eerie, grayed-out quiet internal landscape, just as much as you enjoy cracking jokes and hammering nails in the sunlight. You're possessive of it.

Is it right to feel that way? Well, thinking of myself only, I can't say. Looking back, the idea that these depressive moods are an indulgence is not even new to me. It's just that sometimes I fight them, and sometimes I don't. But while I may not be able to decide whether they are a benefit or a hazard for myself, they are clearly a hazard for other people, and even if it's not my problem, it's definitely a problem for others. I should take that seriously.

My friends and family are ill-served by this laconic, shrinking violet version of me. For their sake, I should drive him back by doing the things he instinctively turns away from, like contacting loved ones, getting exercise, doing chores that require interacting with new people, or doing some small creative service for someone who isn't expecting it. It's telling that I can so easily rattle off a list of things that help. (Problems do have solutions, you know.) That those solutions never look effective when I'm in the middle of the depressive trough is because frankly, they aren't effective then. They are nothing but absurd then. But the point is not to do the impossible task of grabbing my own bootstraps and lifting myself out of this trough. The point is to steer clear of the next one when I'm back up on the wave and can see it coming.

I don't need to be here. This is not a place I need to return to, it's just a familiar place at the bottom of an easy downhill path. With a little forethought and some scouting I can end up somewhere else.

Let's try that out for a while, yes? Let's renew the commitment to preventative maintenance, so we're less of a pain in the ass to other people, yes? And again, preventative maintenance doesn't mean sitting in a dark room listening to the same Tim Story album over and over. It means reaching out. It means moving around. It means I need to put myself in new situations so I engage with something other than my inner demons. It means remembering that I have a choice.

Here we go!

Just after Christmas I visited my father. I only had a handful of days before work started again, so the schedule was tight. I drove for nine straight hours into the Oregon mountains, through forbidding white walls of fog and lashings of rain, and spent the next two days with him and his wife in their cozy home, sharing stories and looking through photo albums, and tag-teaming crossword puzzles. He’s not as mobile as he used to be, but he sure can murder a crossword.

During the visit I realized that I had reached a strange milestone. Just a few weeks ago I celebrated my 42nd birthday, and now I was exactly half my father’s age. I pointed it out to him while I scanned the crossword clues.

“Congratulations,” he said dryly. “Feel any different?”
“Well, … starting to feel a bit old,” I said.
“Hah! Just you wait,” he said, and snatched the crossword back for another go.

( Of course it was true.... )

A car wash handed out loyalty cards, of two types. The first type of loyalty card had 8 holes to punch, and then the customer got a free car wash. The second type had 10 holes to punch, with the first 2 already punched out.

In each case, it took 8 car washes to get a free one. But the people who got the second type of card tended to fill it out and get the car wash more often.

Just the thought that they were already partway to the goal made them put more effort into actually getting there. It was a 100% psychological thing.

When we have a long-range goal, like getting in better shape, we often visualize the outcome and then ask what it will take to get there, and that immediately makes us think about the entire sum of the effort, which makes us feel overwhelmed or afraid.

But it helps if, instead, we think of ourselves as already partway along that path. Like, we’ve already put some of the progress behind us.

So with getting in shape, it would be, "well I already do X for exercise, and that’s good. Next time I'm doing it I'll just go a few more minutes."

So then we start thinking about how the effort is really a process, made up of small things, that we can build on top of other small things we already have. Like, "do X a little more", or "do Y instead of X every now and then". Not a gigantic life-change, not a commitment to a new way of being, but a decision to acknowledge where we are, in a journey that's already underway, and take a few steps in that direction a little more often.

Taking a few steps is not stressful or scary. It does not constitute a promise to take a thousand more. Did the last thousand steps we've already taken carry such a demand? No, they did not. These few steps do not either.

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Some fun facts about evolution and sleep
Picnics and dating serendipity
Never a beginning; There can never be a stop
Witness
Teaching what's important
Kids, parents, smartphones, and the future
The last 10 percent
Are you trying to prove something?
Letting the fish explore
Crisis and ambition
Long train of thought about gender bias: Story mode
A train of thought about gender politics
CRAP POETRY - 1
A thought about college and anti-intellectualism
PC or not PC ?
Wandering in the gray world
Being 42 and getting sick.
A few steps

Page generated May. 21st, 2025 02:43 am

Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Entries tagged with philosophy

Some fun facts about evolution and sleep

Picnics and dating serendipity

Never a beginning; There can never be a stop

Witness

Teaching what's important

Kids, parents, smartphones, and the future

The last 10 percent

Are you trying to prove something?

What do you expect?

What do you want?

What if you don't have a choice?

Letting the fish explore

Crisis and ambition

Long train of thought about gender bias: Story mode

A train of thought about gender politics

CRAP POETRY - 1

A thought about college and anti-intellectualism

PC or not PC ?

Wandering in the gray world

Being 42 and getting sick.

A few steps

Profile

April 2025

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