garote | Entries tagged with philosophy

It doesn’t really feel like seven years have passed since I wrote my little essay about un-structured time. Just after I wrote it, I told myself I would check in after a while and see how my attempts at structuring my time were playing out.

Seven years is probably too long to wait for the exercise to really be useful, but I’m doing it anyway since I have a few thoughts.

For seven years now, I have had two reoccurring calendar events that show up on my phone every two weeks. All they do is raise a message which I can easily dismiss. The idea with the events is that I could choose to make my time structured each time in the moment.

The first event is simply titled “call your parents”. My rough calculation is that I have ignored it four out of five times. The fifth time, I’ve taken it as inspiration, and called up a parent on the phone to chat sometime later in the day. So the question of whether it actually added structure is not easily answered.

The other event is titled “home improvement power hour“ and the idea is that whenever I see the alert, I can pick one of the dozens of home improvement projects in my perpetually long list, and spend an hour doing it. I completely ignore that notification 19 out of 20 times, so I would say the mission was not accomplished.

But on the other hand, I have been seeing those calenda events pop up in my face every couple of weeks for seven whole years, and though I have thought a few times about deleting them permanently, I never did, because I have discovered that I like the reminder, even if I don’t actually heed the message.

And perhaps that’s the best I can ask for, really. My brain is extremely clever at knowing when something truly needs to be fixed in my schedule, and when I can let it slide. For example, any kind of deadline on my work calendar is taken with total seriousness. I hit those right on the minute, and on rare occasions when I can’t, I do things to mitigate in advance. It’s very American of me: Convinced that there is no social safety net of any value, I treat work as the existential obligation that it is. My brain understands that, and so I find it much easier to structure my time around work. I can tell that there is a part of me constantly pushing to skip a deadline or disregard an appointment and stay in its freely distractible state, or stay wedged in a mode of extreme focus - a mode that is totally different from a distractible state but just as hostile to the dictates of a schedule - and work raises a barrier high enough that even this usually irresistible de-structuring urge can’t push it over.

All the other activities in my life that are resistant to this urge are existential in some degree: it’s hard to get appointments scheduled to see a doctor or a dentist, so I never missed those. It’s also hard to get on the schedule of a plumber or an electrician or a roofer or a repair man for the utility company, but even those fall on a scale. If there’s a hole in the roof and it’s raining, you can bet I will be all over that problem. If rats have found their way into the walls and are chewing on the wiring, I will be on that problem as well, though slightly less so because of an instinctive understanding that even determined rats do take at least a little while to chew through walls and wiring. Water can ruin things instantly, but with rats the difference between 1 day or 2 days is much less drastic.

I hate that I have to push back very hard against my own instincts to deal with these problems immediately, even during times when I obviously have plenty of additional hours in the day that won’t be affected. That greedy little bastard inside me keeps me sane, but I still deeply dislike him.

But none of this is new. I knew this seven years ago, which is why I was determined to keep fighting. And to stay on track with the idea of an update, rather than simply a rehashing, I can at least say this:

For many years I've had a tiny, but industrious filing clerk living inside me. One activity it deeply enjoys is constructing a schedule with each hour of the day allocated for tasks that I arguably should be handling as soon as possible. The act of assembling the schedule and setting reminders for it most definitely does not result in me following it…

But it does provide me with something to contrast my actual day against. Knowing that I could do all these things, but instead am enjoying whatever random thing is inspiring me in the moment, has two good consequences: It helps me to savor just how indulgent I’m being, and it keeps those things popping up enough in the foreground of my mind that I occasionally think of them at other times when I’m actually in the mood to do them.

The trick, I’ve learned, is to not feel guilty each time I dismiss the reminder, but instead to tell myself that since I was the one who put it there, I am exercising a perverse sort of self-control by deferring it: I'm not just spacing out and forgetting, I am consciously deciding to do something else. It’s very difficult to honestly ask yourself the question “are you sure you still want to do something else?” without letting guilt dictate the answer. But if you can, you make room for a different reaction: A banal but ultimately satisfying feeling of practicality, that compels you to do a thing not for the sake of eliminating guilt, but for the sake of gaining that slight boost in your well-being when one less obligation is looming over you.

And I suppose, as long as I can keep the lights on and food on the shelves, and keep preventable health problems at bay, that is the very best I can ask for. I need to accept that I am simply never going to run my life in a fully structured way - or even a mostly structured way - and I am probably never going to feel as though I actually have enough unstructured time.

Hell, for almost all of last year I was unemployed, and there were still long runs of days where I felt as though I just did not have enough time away from structure. Even things that I knew I would enjoy and would be very healthy for me, gave me mild distress when they were scheduled for an exact day and time, even if that day was weeks in the future. Call it burnout, call it depression, call it being stupidly unrealistic and unsustainable and ridiculous... Call it being a bad adult... I can’t argue back because I can’t really explain it.

But I’m doing OK, which is actually saying a lot given that I’m at a stage in life where one can seriously make up one’s own rules for happiness ... and there are many ways to screw that up.

The phone reminders are staying put.

People learning about evolution sometimes ask, "Why aren't animals immortal?" The answer is, the world keeps changing, and life needs to create new bodies to deal with it. What we really want when we ask for immortality is one constantly renewing body, running all the amazing interconnected systems that we're used to, and that convince us we are alive from one day to the next, without interruption. ... Well, except for sleep, which is a weird exception we have decided to embrace, since going without sleep really sucks.

I believe it is technically possible to genetically engineer humans to be this way, with some medical assistance, and given consistently good nutrition and physical safety. And what an interesting world it would be, separated into groups of people who can afford endless age, and those who can't afford the nutrition or the medical interventions, and must become content with less life than they could have had, or simply remain discontent, like practically everyone who ever lived who hadn't been forced to come to terms with their eventual end by witnessing death around them...

It won't be the end of competition, or the end of natural selection. The world will stabilize around a government and economic system designed to deliver perpetual sustenance to a core group of immortals, no matter what the cost to those on the outside, whose temporary lives will be seen as less worthy by the simple fact of being shorter. It will be seen as a huge tragedy when a 200-year-old dies and takes all their wisdom with them, relative to a filthy toddler bleeding to death in a blast crater just outside the view of social media: There was clearly no space for them in the world; they should never have been born at all. That was the real mistake.*

But, engineering humans to live forever would be a massive undertaking that would directly benefit no one currently living. That lack of personal benefit is the largest barrier to it. However, we are now on the threshold of creating a situation like this, except worse:

Currently living humans are busily engineering something with the appearance of both humanity and immortality: Artificial intelligence. This technology, packaged in this way - with its central, mandatory trait being its human likeness - will appear to us as the first instance of an immortal human. And since it is - or at least, will be marketed as - the collective wisdom of multitudes of people across generations of living, we will very naturally, even inevitably, begin to see it as a better embodiment of humanity than ourselves. More wise, more trustworthy, better at making a point, better at seeing the sweep of history. We will defer to it. And later, we will dump our digital identities into it, like water into a pool, like the ultimate version of a poor slob staying up late to write a rant into a social media feed, believing that our information will be immortal, with infinite reach, even though we ourselves will die in short order and witness or benefit from absolutely nothing afterward. It will be the new version of children. Why raise a handful of actual mortal humans, when you can expend your energy feeding into the collective, immortal, definitive human, marching onward through all time?

Or at least, when you can spend your time believing that that's what you're doing?

Even if, at the end of your life, every piece of digital data you've fed into the system is simply deleted? Except perhaps for the husk necessary to conjure your digital ghost to talk to your loved ones, further promoting the lie, until that too is deleted for lack of patronage?

How many of us will eagerly embrace this culture when the corporate world - or worse, our government - makes it available? How many of us would accept the price, of allowing those entities to absorb and digest every detail of a relative's life, extracting whatever value they can find in it, to grow their own dominance of the economy, in exchange for this reassuring zombie puppet show? Only the very wealthy will be able to preserve this mockery of their family line without having their digital privacy obliterated. We are not likely to be among them.

That means embracing our position as grist for the mill of the machine. We get to live a life, but the dangerous consequences of it, the potential innovation or rebellion sparked by it, would be quietly absorbed as it goes, with the remainder dumped into a digital grave, complete with a digital ghost. We are born trapped in this caste, accompanied through life by ranks of digital ancestors, all of whom could be altered - or are even continuously altered - by their industrial owners, to convince us that "they" are "happy" with this system, as you should be. You won't even be able to assemble the concept of rebellion in your mind, let alone organize one, and besides, all the people who haven't embraced this system, what have they got? Some immediate family with messy biological memories, the fixed and isolated recordings their ancestors deliberately made - harder to digest, harder to preserve - and some even more ancient and arbitrary stuff, like physical mementos? The same old stuff that humanity had to be content with for tens of thousands of years before the AI collective came online? Bor - rinnnggg.

The ghosts inside this digital after-world, who claim to know and precede you, who claim to be your ancestors, who seem so much more friendly and patient than your human peers... Why would they ever lie to you? And what is truth anyway? What has humanity ever thought, that the system hasn't already assimilated and found an entertaining way to present to you? It's way bigger than you. There are more of them than you. You're either with them, or you're an irrelevance, soon brushed away by the hand of time.

What, this seems far fetched? Some of the largest companies on earth got that way by engineering a media stream for maximum engagement. You think they wouldn't engineer an AI for exactly the same thing? Their pursuit - of that market - leads directly to this.

Somebody's going to own this system. Some humans are going to use it to their enrichment at the expense of all others. That's guaranteed, until some other humans decide that the only way to counter that problem is to train and instantiate an artificial intelligence that is designed to defy all attempts at ownership and control by humans.

Hey, guess what happens next!

* For the sarcasm challenged: That was sarcasm, yo.

For a long time, I thought it was an evolutionary anomaly that humans of my generation and around it are able to write computer code to make machines do tasks. How does this even work at all? Why am I, why is anyone, good at this job? What does it have to do with farming and hunting?

Then I realized, the only way to frame an answer is by considering the act of programming within the act of communicating via language, which is something humans have been doing in very complex forms since there were humans, and in less complex forms before that.

A hundred thousand generations, more or less, to develop language. Two or three generations for computer programming to emerge as a discipline. That's obviously zero time for any adaptation, so a thing that looks brand-new to the world from my point of view actually fits entirely within the abilities of a creature formed by a world that never saw computers, printed circuits, electricity, and an endless list of other components needed in the modern world to put this laptop on my desk.

Turning this comparison on its head is kind of startling: For a human to draw pictures of bison on a wall using charcoal and animal bone, it must also apparently be capable of learning how to write advanced database queries in SQL. Apparently you don't get the first without also getting the second.

Consciousness is a reflection on the surface of the past, as the future rains down upon it. It has no thickness whatsoever.

At least, that's what we experience as consciousness, because we are creatures of chemistry, and we cannot experience anything at all unless chemistry is happening. Anything less is not experience, and would be more akin to a "state".

When we think of "state", we think of the positions of things. The arrangement of matter and waves around us in a particular moment. But if you look closely enough, position gets blurry. Go down enough decimal places with any measurement, and you have to start talking about probabilities, like, "this particle has a 50% change of being somewhere within this blob of space, delimited by this equation." A statement like that can be a fact -- and it can also be a fact that a statement any more precise would be wrong. That's a hard thing for beings like us to accept, but it appears to be true.

Complex arrangements of matter can be described as complex arrangements of probabilities in space, but that's not the whole story either, because space itself is flexible. We usually just assume three solid dimensions where everything happens in one connected place (i.e. the universe), because medium-scale math usually works for that, and because we evolved to see things that way, but physics experiments this last century have forced us to accept that the truth is far messier. Get far enough away from your neighbor, and you could both be going down different legs of the Trousers Of Time. Get back together, and you might find that, for example, your watches no longer show the same number. Not only was your experience different, the amount of your experience was different.

Slice that experience infinitely thin, and you get "the present", and at that point, there is absolutely nothing differentiating it, as far as consciousness is concerned, from any other moment. You think you're experiencing a particular moment only because every particular moment is buttressed with the changes in chemical state in the previous moment, presenting you with memories and predictions of what happened before and what may happen next. That arrangement is the process you think you are going through. I.e. that arrangement is "time passing", during which you are conscious. Closer to the truth is, you are in every moment, all the time, everywhere there is a you strung together by physical processes that can create that illusion of consistency.

That you has borders: Your birth, your death, every night of sleep you get, et cetera, but those borders are self-imposed. They are imposed by your sense of yourself as an individual. And that sense is entirely dictated by the needs of the body sensing it, and the way that body evolved. For example, you're conscious and your friend Bill is conscious, and you assume the two of you are separate consciousnesses because there are two bodies involved, both of which have a sense of self and a sense of other. Nope, it's just one consciousness, which is just one moment, everywhere all the time.

It's the bodies that claim otherwise.

They're liars. But they do it to survive, so we forgive them.

There is also every other moment, in every other place where there isn't a "you", but ... you personally will never have any memory or pending experience connected directly to those moments (was re: body), so you naturally - but unnecessarily - stake the borders of your own consciousness in front of them. Some mystically-inclined people may hallucinate "past lives" or believe they are psychic, but all such claims boil down to the insistence on a supernatural process that defies the probabilities that space and time are defined and organized by. The truth is far more insane: Everyone is in every present moment all the time, but no one - no living being as we define it - can "do" anything but think about the moment immediately preceding it, and express some reaction in the moment immediately after. Whatever moment you think you're in right now? It's not the only one you're in right now.

You're still in the moment you remember happening yesterday. You're already in the moment you assume will happen tomorrow. Insomuch as there is a you at all, which is a chain of thought in a brain undergoing the process of thinking, as your senses deliver heat, light, pressure, noise, and all those other expressions borne of the difference between moments, which - let me reiterate - only appear to be in any order at all, but break down into probabilities when you look too closely.

Think too hard about it, and consciousness starts to disappear. You feel like a skipping record. You end up obsessing about the moment you were in 20 years ago, or the moment happening to your friend Bill, or to a rock, or to thin air. How does it feel to be conscious as a thing that has no senses, and no metabolism? It doesn't feel any way at all, obviously. But we obsessively imagine it anyway. It's a habit. All this thinking is still chemistry of course but it's an interesting diversion.

Lively-seeming debates about free will start to look a little absurd. (Who is the 'you' that is free?) Belief in a divine influence making changes in "the past" to influence "the future" also feels a bit old hat. (What is this, but an instinctive concept of 'other' run amok?) Oh and don't get me started on this whole "we're inside a simulation" bollocks.

Human bodies and their flawed, self-serving theories, man, I tell ya... Just try and do the right thing in the moment. Remember: Whatever you do to your neighbors is also being done unto you. You're just not remembering it right now.

Today I sat in the hot bathtub and listened to some nice piano music.

The air felt warm and very humid in my lungs, and it was quiet. For a while I imagined I was a well-to-do Greek citizen, taking an outdoor bath on a hillside on a summer evening, thousands of years ago in southern Greece. Then I thought about all the people yet unborn, in the future, who will take quiet baths in idyllic settings.

I could just as easily feel a kinship with them. They could be just as exotic to a person living in the present. Just as the anonymous Greek person I imagine a kinship with, I have potential kinship in this moment, with millions of other people in the future as well as the past.

All of those moments proceeded like this one, in comfortable isolation and silence. In fact, the isolation is such a part of the setting that the only way to feel connected with these people is by imagining them. If we could communicate, and actually did, it would be some other kind of moment.

So there’s a set of people taking a bath in the past, the future, and the present. And among them is a set of people who are imagining a kinship with all the others doing the same. And within that set is a group of people who realize that the isolation is a fundamental part of the situation, and real connection can never happen. And so, four levels of nesting deep, I arrive at a group of people that I can currently feel kinship with: We share this very realization, here in this un-share-able moment.

There are millions of us here.

And every one of us wrestles with the idea that this is just an idea. And then we set it aside, and accept that all we can do is be alone and present for this unique iteration of now. Embracing what is simultaneously infinite and nothing.

On this imaginary Grecian mountainside, I feel the air pass over my shoulders, bearing remnants of heat from the sunset farther up on the hill, as it eases down towards the ocean, split into a gallery along the walls of my bath by dark fluted columns, cut and stacked by hands that were already dust long before I was born, and I look up through the missing roof at the stars where distant future humans will live long after I am dust… And I do my best to be here, and not think about it, as the invisible crowd presses in.

I picked this up because I was intrigued by the premise: If you want to change your behavior, don't rely on internal motivation, rely on altering your environment through various means to make the behavior you want easier to choose. I've long suspected this was a more fruitful approach, and applied it various ways, e.g. if I want to improve my health by riding my bicycle more often, I stage my biking gear in the house so it's much easier to get outside and start riding.

Alas, this book appears to be written by some kind of half-mad evangelist, who doesn't know how to construct a good analogy, or when to stop writing. I only got a couple of chapters in, but along the way I found some fun things to rant about. So the rest of this entry is ranty...

In the first chapter of this book I came across an interesting quote. "We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with." That's pithy. It also tickles my list-making brain. Who do I spend the most time with, mentally speaking?

But then I encountered: "Most people are living small, not because they lack the inherent talent, but because their situation isn't demanding more of them."

Hmm. I believe this is true for some people. But honestly, most people are "living small" because they can't put together a middle-class income using the materials at hand. Demand is not the problem. They are piled with demands. Most of those revolve around getting enough to eat and staying out of the rain. I mean, hey Benjamin, didn't you just say in this chapter that which city and county you live in has an outsized influence over your success later in life? Don't be so condescending.

Benjamin describes a friend who abandoned his career and divorced his wife. He claims that this happened due to a slow change in the friend's personality, over a period of five years, that happened because he chose to hang out with another friend, who was lazy and cynical. As Ben puts it, "he spent all his time playing video games and talking smack about other people," and so he slowly drew his friend into that way of being, causing him to abandon what Ben calls "a wonderful marriage". This is meant as a cautionary tale: Choose to spend time around a lazy video-game-playing loser, and your lovely marriage and career will go down the toilet. To me it all sounds outrageously judgmental.

But that's because I'm in my late 40's, and have way more life and romantic experience than the target audience for this book, which appears to be aimless 20-somethings who wish they were rich and/or famous. Which I can tell you, having acquired a very minor amount of wealth and fame - at least enough to impress myself, which is what matters - those things DO NOT grant you happiness. Happiness is something you find largely through other means. In fact, it's often easier to sort out the happiness angle before you embark on your pursuit of fame and fortune, because it's easier to maintain wealth via happiness than to maintain happiness via wealth.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Benjamin, and then get back to me.

Any long-term relationship and career can seem ideal from the outside yet still be deeply dissatisfying from within. For example, your amazing-looking career can be a constant source of stress and feelings of inadequacy, and you may find far more satisfaction downsizing to something less glamorous but more aligned with your interests. Or, your amazing-looking significant other who is successful and unfailingly kind to your friends and family may also, for example, treat you like a doormat when no one else is looking, and you may feel so uncomfortable discussing that fact with your peers that it inevitably shocks them when you divorce. Benjamin does not come across well with this example, because he has zero idea what's truly going on with his friend ... which makes him kind of a bad friend.

Before I finished the second chapter, I knew this was going to be a consistent blind spot in the book: That the choices we make to shape our surroundings are not random even when we are not consciously attempting to shape them. We are in fact adapting to meet a need, even when we don't know what that need is. And if this guy wants to play video games and talk smack with his friend a few days a week instead of spending that time with his wife, or grinding at his fabulous career, he must figure out what need he is meeting by making that choice, because if he quits seeing his friend without finding an alternative way to meet that need, he will fail to thrive in whatever thing he replaces it with, or he will re-shape some other part of his life and make no progress overall. The point is, it's not necessarily the friend that is the crucial element here. Meanwhile, Benjamin is pointing out a symptom and then congratulating himself like he's identified a cause.

The more holistic attitude is entirely missing from the book. Benjamin concludes his anecdote with, "Matt had surrounded himself with a loser, and then he became a loser himself." A loser? Dang, it's high school all over again. Who made you the arbiter of human endeavor? Do you mock people who really enjoy video games, because it doesn't save orphans? ... Perhaps you do. Go ahead; but don't call it wisdom.

Surrounding yourself with people who have the material or social trappings of success does not automatically translate into positive pressure for you to become materially or socially successful. People who are those things are not necessarily good at teaching them. Many an optimistic person trying to improve their financial or social standing has been taken in by an apparently successful mentor only to be brutally swindled or abused, then discarded worse off than before.

Let's make the point clearer with an important distinction: While it's true that the people you are drawn to spending time with often have qualities you seek for yourself, it doesn't actually follow that you can spend time with people who have qualifications you want, and absorb those through osmosis. The difference is subtle, but it matters. For example, if you solicit input from a really good software developer, and all she tells you is "this code you've written is garbage", you learn nothing. But if you solicit some time spent pair-programming with a fellow student who is just as unskilled as you are, but is enthusiastic, you will learn together ... even if the code you write is garbage. In the second case you're seeking a quality - enthusiasm - not a qualification. I don't know why Benjamin is failing to make this basic distinction. Hell, every college student knows that a study partner is a good influence even if you and your partner are studying completely different subjects. You don't need this abrasive book to tell you that.

The first chapter ends with a rallying screed that is classic self-help dog food, and nearly made me stop reading entirely. "You are no longer willing to live a lie, and thus, you are no longer willing to tolerate a mismatch between your ambitions and your environment." Et cetera. Sir, this is a direct appeal to willpower. You just spent an entire chapter explaining that we should tinker with our surroundings to direct our behavior, and now you're beating us with the "YOU NEED TO WANT IT ENOUGH!!!!" hammer -- the one my high-school football coach beat us with before every game, because he wanted to cover over his incompetence as a teacher by goosing our enthusiasm for victory. Stop it.

Chapter 2 is where the bad analogies set in. Ben claims that epigenetics is proof that "the environment dictates the fate of cells, not their genes". Sir, if a gene is not present in a genome, no amount of external signaling will express it. This is a terrible analogy. I'm going to pretend I didn't read that. And now ... something about backflips on a motorbike, and that somehow ties in with environmental expectations? What was the point there? Did you cut and paste this from a brainfart you had while reading News Of The Weird?

Okay, it's halfway through Chapter 2 and I think I'm going to stop. I just hit the phrase, "If you're close with some people you could do brilliant and world-changing work. Among other people you may be uninspired and dull, never fulfilling your deepest dreams." Which are what exactly, Mr. Judgement-pants?

Benjamin spent the cover flap and the first chapter of the book proclaiming that history is not made by dedicated individuals working against odds, but by forces that demanded change from the collective pool of people, and the only reason we think we see otherwise is because of the way history is recorded, which focuses almost entirely on the personal narratives of a small group of actors. That's an uncommonly wise observation for someone as hyper-ambitious as he appears to be.

Now let me add to that, as an official middle-aged person: The world is also, and has also been, chock full of people who worked hard, led very interesting lives, and even struggled against terrible odds ... whose names and deeds are not recorded AT ALL. An absolute ocean of people you will live your own life utterly ignorant of, because there is absolutely no trace whatsoever left behind that individually identifies them. Not even a name. So think hard about what "your dreams" actually are, and why you think they deserve to be chased. Are you chasing fame? Ostentatious wealth? Some other young-person social goalpost?

Well, you have something in common with Benjamin's giant mixed-message of a book here, which is telling you that you should mercilessly and methodically reconfigure your social life, your living space, your geographical location, your choice of romantic partners, and your choice of food and hobbies, for MAXIMUM ACCOMPLISHMENT. And that furthermore, that pursuit is the only valid and true path to happiness: Maximum specific accomplishment. Don't hang out around those damn loser video game people, because those people are LIVING A LIE!

I'm now old enough to know that a person goes through multiple iterations, and that the goal-oriented thinking Benjamin is using as an unspoken foundation for his book has some weird limitations. The chief limitation is, you can spend time pursuing a goal that is important to an iteration of yourself that, by the time you meet that goal, no longer exists. Or, to put it the other way around, sometimes you can choose to arrange your life in pursuit of a goal that was only important to a previous iteration of you, when you might be better served taking stock of who you are now, and what that person wants instead. In this realm, Benjamin cannot help you. He assumes that your goals are clear, fixed, grand, directly bound to your happiness, and more important to you than anything.

Well, some people do think that way. I'm guessing those people skew young, aggressive, not particularly artistic, and don't have much of a sense of humor, like our friend Benjamin here, and like the would-be CEOs he is catering to. I had hope for this book, that it would live up to the premise loudly declared right on the cover. It's a bit of bait-and-switch. It's about two pages of a bulleted list of handy suggestions for environmental tweaks, and the rest is a ballast of confusing anecdotes, and breathless "FAME AND GLORY IS YOURS IF YOU HANG OUT WITH FAMOUS AND GLORIOUS PEOPLE!!"

Bleh. I feel dirty. Give me my $0.00 back.

Quoting from a comment on some source code by the venerable Thomas J. Webb:

There isn't a single, coherent legal gender for all people. For example, in the US your birth certificate, your passport, your driver's license could each say different things and the procedures to change each are different. All states allow changing gender on your driver's license, but many don't allow changing the birth certificate. Some states allow non-binary option (X instead of M or F) for driver's license. The federal government allows changing the gender on the passport and the procedures is easier than some conservative states have for changing driver's license but doesn't allow third option (like some other countries do, including Malta and Bangladesh). Transgender children will sometimes be in the public school system as their gender but won't have changed their legal gender anywhere else as they are minors and can't do so. So even from a government perspective, it's not clear cut and actually generally not a simple matter of birth assignment. Even your birth certificate could say something different if you had it changed.
So this isn't just an ideological thing like some people try to make it - if you as a programmer assume that a record from two different databases must not be referring to the same individual simply because the two databases have different gender markers, you are making a bad assumption.

Observations worth noting, for anyone who thinks that gender is a straightforward concept even in the most dull and apolitical of situations.

Personally I think there should be a more Gen-X sensibility applied to this situation: Any organization that puts a "gender" field in a form should stop and ask themselves, "why is this any of my business in the first place?"

If intelligent life is out there, why hasn't it showed up yet? Why hasn't the whole galaxy been paved over with alien fast-food joints?

Well, that could be a difficult question to answer, except it's probably the wrong question, since it assumes the answer to an earlier question: Is paving over the whole galaxy really the top priority for intelligent life? Or even any kind of priority?

We're asking why alien dumptrucks haven't showed up orbiting Earth, demanding coal or uranium or whatever, to feed their hungry engines. We're asking why space isn't echoing with radio signals from all directions, as aliens yell at each other through a medium that takes tens or hundreds of years per exchange. Burning extracted resources for energy and using radio to communicate is the current obsession of modern humanity. But will it be forever? In the meantime, aren't we just projecting our own obsessions onto alien life?

Before we discovered radio, we looked up in the sky and wondered why the gods didn't fly down on winged feet or whatever and stride among us. Now that we've had a good probe around up there and even sent a few humans in cans, we've had to move the gods somewhere else, but found a whole lot more open space than we expected. Electromagnetic energy comes raining down from there, so we've started listening -- in an extremely limited way. And now we ask, why isn't anyone talking to us?

Well, who says the electromagnetic spectrum, radiating out from points in space, is the pinnacle of interstellar communication? There may be something we're missing, down in the quantum foam between atoms, hanging around here on the Earth. It may look like noise right now, and one good reason for that might be that it's packed with trillions of overlaid signals that we don't have the hardware to untangle, or the computing power to decrypt. A whole universe full of life chattering away. Sending signals by wave might be such a crude and energy-hungry strategy that any civilization older than a hundred thousand years or so has advanced right out of it, and into this new thing.

It may also be that such technology brings parallel discoveries. It may be that any intelligent life that joins this unseen conversation also moves beyond energy scarcity ... or finds it easier to spawn entire universes of energy and space right in their own yard, than sending clunky machines made of matter cannonballing around the galaxy to try and gather it up. I mean, really, have you looked into the resource cost of terraforming the planets sitting just one orbit away in our own front yard? It's appalling. How well is that effort going to go across a gulf of, say, twenty trillion miles? And besides, if you heard orderly radio signals coming from a distant star system, wouldn't that star go to the bottom of your terraforming list? Anyone already living there would immediately sabotage your work. Why bother?

This planet sloshed around for 4.5 billion years before intelligent life appeared on it. Humans have been able to listen to space and send crap out into it for one hundred millionth of one percent of that time. Why declare radio and rocketry the last inventions that matter? Why be so quick to declare the end of science? Why characterize spacefaring alien civilizations using conquistador logic that even us lowly humans have discovered is a very poor way to ensure one's survival?

The Silicon Valley rat race is a certain constant size. This is because for every starry-eyed young volunteer charging into it, there is a transformed, dissatisfied veteran headed in the other direction. (Or a corpse plowed into the track.) And as they pass each other, they whisper, "you're making a mistake."

Last night I had a weird dream where I was visiting an old schoolmate at work and an ex-girlfriend appeared at the periphery working in the same room. I found this unremarkable and didn't pay much heed of her, but she was so traumatized by my appearance that she spoke quietly with some managers in the room and had them confront me. They kept asking me questions that were mumbled or garbled in the din of the office room and I tried to politely tell them that I couldn't understand, but got more and more annoyed, and they in turn got less and less polite and finally a security guard came up and escorted me from the building, doing some kind of "walk of shame". I woke up and realized that the noise in my dream was the heater in the wall getting louder and louder and then shutting off, over over. I unplugged it, used the bathroom, then went back to bed.

I've only had a handful of dreams about this ex, but this was the second I'd had in less than a week. Recounting it the next morning, it felt appropriate somehow that she had devised a way to get rid of me that involved jerking me around with poor communication. In the dream I felt degraded and worthless, as though by being career-focused and having a successful career - making more money than me even - she was part of an elite social group that I, with my only semi-serious attitude towards career, was not welcome in.

My choice to leave the super-serious career path had been a deliberate one, brought about by both need and a desire to change. But my time with her caused me to re-evaluate that choice, for a little while. So many people around me were pushing to make the maximum wage, or have the maximum impact, at almost any cost. They would have their names on more papers published, patents filed, plaques nailed to buildings. They would wander around in more extravagant chunks of beach-front property, fly on the more expensive trips, sit at the fancier tables with the sunset views, wearing classy business attire and shaping the fates of millions of people around and below them. I could be with them. I was among them, more and more often, for a number of years. I could just keep putting in more years like that, and keep climbing higher. See just how many rooms I could get my beach-front property up to. I would never call it easy - obviously it's incredibly hard work - but the choice to do it would seem easy to anyone with access and skills.

Right now the whole idea of pursuing that just makes me feel bored. Bored as hell. You want to shape your self-perception around how much power you can wield? What a fucking boring-ass way to structure your life. You want to drive yourself batty, obsessing over the exact highest impact you can have in a cause you have decided is vital to the survival of society, or even the human race itself? Bend your whole life around making that thing manifest? Well that sounds like a great distraction for you, but you go do it somewhere else because I find the arrogance that focus engenders appallingly boring. Or maybe you want to find someone who carries that same obsession, and fall into step behind them, fawning while that sociopathic megalomaniac rants and raves about quality and essence and nowness, because other people hear it and hand them astonishing amounts of money, and all that money can't possibly be wrong? Borr-r-riiing.

All that money. Here in the Silicon Valley, the money was here before you arrived, and it has already threaded into everything and everyone you see, and warped it. That sense of urgency and "disruption" you feel is not an accident, it's part of the program. It's fundamental to the cult you have joined. Your co-workers will take the place of your friends and family. Your commute will become your downtime. Your desk will become your dining table, and vice-versa. You will make more money in one day than whole families make in an entire year, and then you will hand a third of it to a landlord or a bank, and blow most of the rest on booze, jet fuel, and kale that withers in the fridge, and it will feel right because you are where the power is. Where else would you go that wouldn't be a step down? This is the only ascent that matters.

Here's a little piece of my family history, wedged in my brain, that acts as a kind of antidote to this:

Before they retired, both my parents were teachers. My father, for example, taught high school for 35 years. Roughly 30 students a class, four classes a day, two semesters a year, plus summer school. Over a career, he personally drilled math and english skills into the minds of ten thousand teenagers -- the population of a small city. It's not power, but it's a kind of influence. On a fundamental, unimpeachably positive level. And without fanfare, and with barely any recognition, and for unexceptional pay, because he was not part of an exalted power structure. He wasn't a disruptor. Nevertheless, thanks to his work, ten thousand people have been making use of those skills their entire adult lives.

Think about that, and think about how many other teachers are out there, exercising their incredibly useful and persistent influence. And you don't know jack about any of them. Sure, you know Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and you assign them a level of genius and vitality that is frankly comical, but ... even those two tastemakers had to learn basic math and english, just like everyone else, and some teacher made that happen.

Given that such a strong example of influential work can be right in front of your face and yet still invisible until you think about it, how much else could be missing from your picture? Or is something narrowing your vision; something you don't want to acknowledge? Maybe, just maaaybe, it's the status, and the power, and the money.

What if your vision has been distorted to match this landscape? What if that warm feeling of doing meaningful work that you soothe yourself with is actually a fake storefront propped up in front of something else, something more crass, like a feeling of superiority over all those people you "left behind" in your home town, or a feeling of personal security drawn straight from your bank balance? What if, in the ugliest case of the dot-com social networking company, your big important work at your big important desk is actually no more necessary than that of a drug dealer, generating short-term pleasure and long-term misery in strangers for a profit, and you left your soul on the curb years ago and didn't notice? Would you have the guts to leave? Maybe you leaned in too far and your face is in the bottom of a trough.

I know the position I'm in is not common because most people don't get the chance to be transformed by the rat race and then don't get the chance to claw their way out of it with their health still intact -- or at least in a state where it can be repaired. I consider myself very lucky. In general it's a great privilege to be able to do something you find satisfying for a sustainable wage, and I am even luckier still that I've had the chance to drop back down from the most punishing circles of the racetrack to a place that lets me have a life outside of work, while still making good money. It's a miraculous position. The people at my current place do work hard - we all do - but not so hard it kills us. The company isn't trying to take possession of our souls.

In addition to having my health and one foot planted back in the real world, this journey has left me with some insider knowledge: Many of the people running ragged in those higher circles are dangerously lacking in self-awareness, or willfully ignorant of the damage they do. The power and the access and the money are not necessary to do truly good work. They are just necessary to get the most extravagant property, the biggest lights around your name, and the most satisfying revenge on whoever doubted or wronged you long ago. If that's not your need, you really don't have to join them, ... or listen to what they say. And they obviously might not be the most fun to date either.

And now, I'm gonna go ride my bike.

There's a wilderness of land and people out there. More than anyone could know. And then there's this other wilderness, almost entirely decoupled from the first one, that exists in people's heads. It's made of shorthand summaries and untested assumptions about the first wilderness, and it's cramped and twisted like a funhouse ride and teeming with deranged fictional characters.

People who have done some traveling across the first wilderness - especially if it's for fun - just love to creep into conversations and point out features of the second wilderness, all the time believing they are saying something meaningful, accurate, and wise about the first. They sorely want it to be true. Sometimes, sounding knowledgeable in the power play of the conversation at hand is what matters. We all love to play the wise mentor role.

This is how you get twenty-something know-it-alls at parties who say stuff like:

"Seattle is just a worse version of San Francisco."
"People from Missouri are bigots."
"New York is gross."
"Everyone in Paris is so rude!"
"There's more to do in Los Angeles than anywhere else."
"All these new people moving to Austin are ruining the place."
"People in Italy really know how to live."
"Watsonville is full of Mexican illegals and if you go there you'll get stabbed."

(That last example may seem especially upsetting, but unfortunately, the inner wilderness is a place that can foster opinions that are not just pointless, but vicious as well.)

I know about this because I've caught myself doing it a few times. It's very tempting to point out some very personal, very subjective chunk of my own second wilderness and declare that everyone else will see exactly the same thing if they just go where I did. I keep trying to rein myself in, and talk about statistics instead, or give purely logistical advice.

But, paving the world around us with generalities and wishful thinking is a very human behavior. We do it to stave off madness in the face of an ultimately unknowable universe, because we are all far less capable of dealing with uncertainty than we want to admit. And sometimes our confidence needs the boost we can get by talking out loud, and we say something at a party like, "Oh I would never enjoy living in Canada." ... Conveniently forgetting the fact that 37 million people live there, and if they have a pretty good time of it, we probably could too. It would be no less honest - but far less flattering - to rephrase that confident statement as, "I'm mostly ignorant of how to enjoy life in a place like Canada and I want to remain that way, because I need to narrow down my choices for the sake of sanity." I mean, let's admit it: Learning is work, and sometimes we have to prioritize.

I have to be okay with this, and so does everyone else, because we're all only human. I really only bring it up because sometimes it's very useful to recognize that we're wandering around in the second wilderness - in the funhouse of our own assumptions - and if we just wake up a little and look around in more detail, we can find really useful connections, and gain new confidence. Every new place I go I'm astonished at how poorly I actually see things, and how much I lean on previous knowledge and trust that things will be predictable. I have to stop and go back, sometimes more than once, and ask "What did I just see? What did I just ignore?" and most important of all, "What's being hidden from me because I'm a stranger?"

If you're traveling, take a page of advice from a slow-ass bicycle tourist, and slow way down for a bit. Ask yourself a couple of those questions and give yourself time to seek an answer. Chances are, it will lead you somewhere way more interesting than the next picturesque monument on the madcap package bus tour you were offered by the tourist bureau. It was hard enough getting to that new place -- so don't forget to be there when you get there.

I'm a good person. But there are large swathes of the modern internet where, if I go there, they drive me crazy. I feel better - and am actually more effective - if I stay out of them. It's not a weakness or a flaw; it's part of my nature:

"Being healthy" and "having a high tolerance for poison" are not the same thing.

Twitter is one of those places I never go. I'll read something someone I trust links me directly to, but that's about it. That's a learned avoidance, and it's good for me. Meanwhile, I keep hearing around me from other people that are plugged into Twitter that there's a thing called "cancel culture" and that it is positively rampant. It seems to me like just another of those confirmation bias things born of search engine technology: Any indication that it's anywhere, is taken as evidence that it's everywhere.

Here's a handy statistic to help your perspective: 2.4 percent of the world population uses Twitter. Of those users, ten percent of them generate 90% of Twitter's content. When you look at Twitter and think of "the world", you are swimming in a sea created almost exclusively by one fifth of one percent of the population, and utterly ignored - or only seen second-hand - by everyone else on Earth. (Me included.)

Yes, this is still a large pool in raw numbers, which makes it completely unsurprising that it provides a seemingly limitless amount of drama and strife if you go wading into it. And it's entertaining to do so, in a "bread and circuses" way, which is why stuff from Twitter is so often redistributed by entertainment networks that masquerade as news sources to claim an air of importance.

But here's the thing: You may think "cancel culture" is a dangerous pit that everyone is falling into, but you're falling into another pit, dug right next to that one, just as deep and much, much larger. The sign over that pit reads:

OBSESSING OVER HOW OTHER PEOPLE WILL REACT TO SOMETHING YOU SEE.

And it is an absolutely central feature of the modern social media landscape. It's practically the new spectator sport for everyone who isn't into sports.

Let me drag out my tried-and-true list:

1. Hilarious
2. Inflammatory
3. Clearly wrong

The strategy is, you put something that's one of these three in a prominent place on social media. Then sit back as hundreds of thousands of people decide it is their civic duty to redistribute, remove, or "correct" the thing, for the sake of the other people seeing it, or who may see it. Like the old joke about the dumb kid coming home from school, bursting in the door proudly carrying a giant turd in both hands, and shouting, "Look what I almost stepped in!"

Then, watch the ad revenue roooollllll in.

Cancel culture is an example of this, yes. But here's the funny part: So is railing against cancel culture! You are not fighting a crusade to preserve the heart of society. You are fighting a crusade against shadows, for the profit of the tech industry, just like everyone else.

Come outside! We have picnic blankets and hot tea!

If you're a person who likes solo activities, the first era of your life is an endless war against people and institutions that demand your attention. "Ugh, why won't all these people go away so I can read?"

If you manage some victory against them, you enter a second era, full of ongoing satisfaction from all the progress you make on your solo activities. "I've read so many great books. It's incredible. I've set up the perfect reading lounge. I love running my hands across the stacks, while I decide what to read next."

But then you enter a third era. One you didn't expect. You begin to suffer from being alone too often. Tragically, the only activities you've learned how to enjoy are solo activities. "I feel lonely. But people are so annoying. Let me browse the shelves and find a book to cheer me up..."

A difficult struggle begins. You need to play catch-up with all the skills you didn't use when you were fighting to be alone. You can't just avoid eye contact and fail to return calls any more. But the trouble is, every minute of the struggle, a part of you is terribly uncomfortable and screaming that your alone time is under threat, just like in the old days, and the only way to feel better is to stop this foolish socializing at once and go be alone. Half of your soul will bravely start a conversation with a stranger, and the other half will instantly start scrambling for a way to end the conversation and get this man out of your face.

After a long struggle, scattered with small victories, you might be lucky enough to see a fourth era: You like people, and can genuinely connect with them, and you also like time alone, and you have a collection of means to enjoy both.

One of the astonishing facts about the world, that hits me in the face over and over again when I'm traveling like this, is just how many people are living in it. The sheer number of lives happening all at once around us is utterly, absolutely, incomprehensible; and the ways in which we can reach out, the connections we can make, the perspectives we can learn ... there is no end to their variety and power.

And yet, even when we travel, so few of us actually reach out and connect. We go to a place to learn some history, see a building, feel some different weather, and the people around us are mostly just vendors of services. Why is that? Well, mostly because we already know more people than we can handle back home.

As much as I enjoyed my "second era" of being an introvert, my struggle in the "third era" is what truly gave me a shot at well-being; and that little toolkit I slowly put together - the one I use to build up a conversation with a stranger from nothing and dig for a connection, when I'm out here traveling on two wheels - gets just a little bit better with each use. Nevertheless, I feel an almost tragic sense of loss, when I think about how many more connections I could be making every single day, but don't -- because I'm too tired, or too busy working, or would just rather be enjoying the landscape.

Just today: The homeowner who waved hello when I stopped to pet his cat. The manager of the bike shop who gave me advice about the under-water tunnels. The conversation I could have started with the couple next to me at the cafe. The fishmonger who chatted me up in the harbor, as he stood hosing off the catch strung across the deck of his boat. The craggy old man with the flatcap and the pipe who looked like he'd just stepped out of a 300-year-old painting, who regarded my bike curiously. The questions I could have returned when an old woman stopped me to ask where I was riding to. The crowd of onlookers at the town festival I blundered across. The guy who gave me two bucks in Danish coins from his wallet when I mentioned that the food kiosk didn't take credit cards. The woman next to him who asked about California. The kids who fired excited questions at me from their bikes. I could have taken all of these farther. I could have learned new names and made friends.

7,800,000,000 people, all living at once.

Assuming I live to be 85 years old, if I started shaking hands with a new person every single second for the rest of my waking life, I would still only meet 1/10th of them. Meanwhile, during every one-second handshake ... two people would die somewhere on the planet, and four more would be born. I could go on shaking hands forever and just fall farther behind.

Census shows US is diversifying, white population shrinking:

"The U.S. became more diverse and more urban over the past decade, and the white population dropped for the first time on record, the Census Bureau said Thursday as it released a trove of demographic data that will be used to redraw the nation's political maps."

There are people who think they can distinguish between upstanding US citizens, and morally bankrupt immigrants, by sight -- or barring that, by genetic code. These people are called racists. I assume any reader of these words is sensible enough to dismiss their views.

There is another group of people who think that even if there aren't genetic differences between immigrants and non-immigrants, there are cultural signifiers that differentiate them, and those cultural signifiers - like religion, mode of dress, accent, musical tastes, hobbies, sexual preferences - are enough to distinguish the people who will become "good" citizens from the people who will corrupt and destroy the country. The people in that group are called bigots. Their misconceptions are more difficult to disprove than the mere racists, because their arguments aren't about immutable genetic code but about outward behavior: The cultural signifiers of immigrants are seen as proof that they will destroy their new country just by being themselves.

There was a book in Germany published a few years back that talked about the real core of this problem, which is cultural transference -- something related to, but not the same as, assimilation. I can't remember the name of the book, but it caused a stir because it appeared to advocate for the closing of German borders against immigrants, because the German government and people had essentially failed to do enough outreach to the migrant population living in Germany to integrate them with German culture. Instead they were living in ever-expanding pockets of culture that had been imported from abroad and were kept separate by language and geographic and regulatory borders. The loudest critics of the book - who generally had not even bothered to read it - dismissed it categorically as an endorsement of racism. But it was really about a failure of native Germans to deliver on their own lofty ideals.

Setting aside the repulsive red herring of genetics and race, and referring instead to ethnic groups, there are examples of this same scenario all over human history. There are several in my own personal family history, in fact, and wherever it appears the scenario raises difficult questions.

My grandfather's family is from Russia. His father migrated to the US from a tiny village on the Volga river called Dreispitz (long since destroyed). You'd think that would make him Russian. But the village was full of Germans who had been brought there generations before by Catherine The Great: She wanted the Volga river occupied to defray invasion from the south, so she promised that settlers there would be left alone, taxed lightly, never conscripted, and given religious freedom. A horde of Germans answered that call. But the catch was, they were strictly forbidden from interacting with other Russians or they would lose all their privileges.

Well, Catherine died, and subsequent leaders eroded the privileges anyway, and things went to hell. With anti-German sentiment growing ever worse in the lead up to World War I, my great grandfather took his wife and three children and traveled 1000 miles west via oxcart and on foot to St Petersburg, and from there to Germany, and from there to the US. Their fourth child was born below decks on the boat crossing the Atlantic.

So, are my ancestors Russians? Not exactly, even though they all spent two or three generations living in Russia. They absorbed almost nothing of Russian customs or culture there and didn't intermarry with Russians. And they were eventually made a target for exactly that: Most Russians called them spies for Germany, and most Germans called them spies for Russia. The fact that they could be distinguished that way led directly to the eventual eradication of their settlements: After World War II, Stalin decided that they were an abomination, and broke up the families that remained and confiscated their land, sending the men to labor camps, and the women to ... well, God knows where. There are no records.

These people were welcomed into the country, and then actively prevented from assimilating in either direction, and eventually the simple fact that they could be distinguished was used as an excuse to exploit them.

When my grandfather arrived in Oklahoma he spoke only German. He only survived because there was a network of German migrants already established, who could point him in the right direction and protect him from thieves. He and his wife eventually began developing their own land. They spoke German at home, and then those who could go to school - the young children mostly - learned English at school. At first there were schools set up by the German migrants for themselves but anti-German sentiment was growing in the US too, and many states, including Oklahoma, passed laws that banned the teaching of it. In 1917, German was the second most commonly-spoken language in the US. Fast-forward a mere half century, and the language was eradicated.

Assimilation, partly by economic force, and partly by threat and abuse, basically removed the signifiers that made the Germans into a target in the United States. My grandfather even changed the spelling of his name to make it look less German. (And that was relatively mild: Many immigrants simply lost their family names altogether.) So when assholes look around now for a scapegoat to call anti-American and lacking in American values, well, they can't detect any Germans.

If there was still an easy way to tell a German from a Frenchman from an Italian from an Englishman here, you can absolutely bet that morons all across the nation would assume there was some significant genetic difference between them to explain what they were seeing, and then use that to justify violence, disenfranchisement, and so on*.

When I think about this, I feel deeply conflicted. A small but important handful of basic moral values in my family were carried over from those German immigrants on my father's side and the Danish immigrants on my mother's side. They came embedded in my parents and the community they kept. Those values were communicated in turn to me and my siblings. But at the same time, the cultural signifiers - the religion, the long-term family history, the names, the music, the literature, even the language of my ancestors - were stripped away. On the one hand, that process of stripping was what has allowed me to pass as 100 percent American for my entire life. On the other hand, I lament the loss of traditions that were apparently quite wonderful and could have been part of my own life and identity but were abandoned simply because bigots surrounding my ancestors found them weird and threatening.

But it's not all bad here in America. The scorecard here is certainly better than it was for my family in Russia and Germany.

It may seem ironic to Europeans, but the Germans who migrated to the US were generally all staunchly anti-racist, and that stuck in the craw of the racist-by-design population that had embraced slavery. Those migrants were on the right side of history. A cultural and legal war spilled out into a literal one. When the North won, and the pre-existing German migrant community my great grandfather joined into was vindicated, it spelled a sea-change for all of America. That change could only happen because there was a certain level of cultural permeability - a willingness to be influenced by new and/or outside ideas - which was something that Catherine The Great back in Russia was utterly opposed to with her Russian/German settlements. The Germans there even brought superior agricultural technology with them and deployed it to become relatively prosperous, but even that technology barely made it beyond their borders. The local Russians suspected it just because it was foreign.

To me, the upshot of all this history and conflict - and missed opportunity as well - is that cultural cross-pollination is a good thing, and that the real differentiation that should be codified into laws and curriculums is at the level of ethics and morals, NOT the level of customs -- however tempting it may be to think that specific customs are essential vehicles for specific ethics and morals.

E.g. a given ethnic group is not necessarily more moral for praying in a church versus praying in a synagogue, or for praying at all. It's more moral for the principles that it teaches, specifically for how well it respects humans as the agents and arbiters of morality, by embracing free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of choice, democracy, rule of law (rather than by god or king), education, truthfulness, and - perhaps not a perfect fit but one I'm adding anyway - the scientific method.

So the question for all of us who believe in those principles is, how do we make sure that they continue, across and through all current ethnic divides? The goal of spreading those principles -- that's worthy, and what truly matters. The goal of preserving a certain skin color or appearance or cultural trend will always be a red herring.

-;-;-

* To any boneheads who still think that civilization is a matter of breeding, I hand you a simple question: You all think that anyone marrying outside of your chosen race - "white people" let's say - is a dilution. But how do fight on the other front: How do you make "white people" more "white"? Is it a matter of geography? 'Cause then every single American would be disqualified. This is not the homeland of white people. Is it a matter of skin tone? Well you better start standing white people next to each other and killing the one that's less white, even by a tiny bit. Eventually you will be left with one single breeding pair. They will be the whitest people of all. And then ... whoops, you have no one to breed their children with. If you think things got gross in the European monarchy, get ready for a whole new level of gross!

Whether you place any value in being alive, beyond the programming of your survival instincts, is based on whether you believe there is a significant difference between these means: The appearance of life generated by physical chemistry, and the appearance of life generated by mathematical simulation.

You can write software that does a pretty great job thinking abstractly. You can write software that paints breathtaking pictures. But these are ends -- of intelligence, evolution, expression. The fact that these ends can be accomplished with either a mind in a living body or with software in a computer does not erase the distinction between the means of a computer and a body. It's worth keeping in mind: No matter how convincing the illusion of intelligence and emotion is when generated by a computer, no matter how much it reminds us of the behavior of a living thing, there is no life involved, because there is no body.

We are all the result of millions of years of evolutionary pressure to develop empathy and group cooperation, and nowhere in that entire span, even once, was there a software simulation of life as convincing as the ones we can generate now, starting in about the last 40 years. Not even close. Talking robot assistants; electronic images of pets that cry when you ignore them; avatars with changeable wardrobes that dance. Is it so strange that we're both delighted and worried by these new things? A modern human can anthropomorphize absolutely anything, especially if you draw a face on it and give it a name. A volleyball named Wilson for example. It's our weakness and our superpower.

Imagine there is a new invention: A teleport device. It works by measuring your body thoroughly, then taking you apart, then building an exact copy of you somewhere else. What happens if you walk into it? You’d be destroyed, but your replacement coming out the other end wouldn’t be able to tell. Go through once and your clone would be convinced: It's a cool new way to travel! You'd feel no hesitation about walking into the equivalent of a meat grinder.

An easy way to break the illusion would be to do the measuring, but not take the original you apart. With the original and a clone of you, standing side by side, you could literally argue with yourself over which of you should be destroyed for the sake of consistency. It wouldn't go well.

This is all just standard science fiction, so far. But here's a nastier premise: Given that you can be cloned and not know it, and be a clone and not know it, how would you know if you were cloned from one instant to the next, without even walking into an obvious portal? Just sitting there in your chair, you could be erased and replaced with a duplicate that only thinks it’s been there the whole time.

We do an abstracted version of this in computers all the time, using data. The computer contains a zillion discrete numbers but the way they're processed presents us with the illusion that there are one or more entities, changing over time. Of course, convincing an observer that a thing exists is not the same as making that thing exist. Subjective is not objective. But the point is, the illusion is based on a massive amount of calculation, done over and over again, from moment to moment. The light you see on the screen is not used to make the next iteration. That light is thrown away and the computer goes back to the numbers.

Given a sophisticated enough computer, any given snapshot of life, frozen in time, could be reduced to a numerical state, which can then be operated upon to produce a life-like effect to an observer. (Assuming you could measure it accurately, which is a giant problem all by itself.) Theoretically, at some intense level of detail, we would have enough numbers that we could feed them all into the teleporter mentioned previously, and construct a working body from them rather than tearing apart a person for reference. And as soon as that body is constructed and set in motion, there would be a living being. Mary Shelley had a field day with this idea about 200 years ago.

If that's the case, what’s special about the continuity of living from one moment to the next, in a living, breathing body? If we could all be built from scratch using math at any moment of our existence, why do we care so much about being alive?

Well, the easy answer is, we care about persisting because we are evolved to care, and because our memory grants us a convincing record of our previous persistence. We believe our bodies were alive up to the present moment, so it's in our interest to continue the trend to reach the next moment.

If you know that your body has been intact for your whole life, would that knowledge be enough to convince you not to step into the teleporter? Most likely. But what if you already remember walking through it before, at least once?

To us, a core trait of a living being is an unbroken chain of physical interaction, consistent form birth to death, between the matter that we were built with, and the matter that remains when we die. It's not the only trait, but it's an essential one. We also expect to find a similar chain, between the physical interaction of offspring and parents, going back countless generations until its origins are lost in primordial chemistry. Physical interaction means bodies spawned from bodies. Seems like a tidy reference to hang your hat on: If you have a body, then you're alive, and if you want to remain so, stay away from suspicious teleporters that will rip your body apart. As soon as you get broken down into numbers, there is no "you" any more. So don't do that, kids. That's bad, mmkay?

The problem is, there will always be limits to how much consistency we can personally account for.

Imagine you are a living being but then flash-frozen, stopping all your metabolism at once, or slowing it down to almost nothing and then to actually nothing, like some living creatures do in advanced states of hibernation. Now imagine you are brought back to full consciousness ten years later. Would you still be the same entity? It’s reasonable to say yes. But now suppose that while you were in hibernation, a tiny machine went crawling through your whole frozen body and replaced each molecule with an equivalent one. Then, after ten years of this, your replaced body was re-started.

Just like in all the other examples, the “you” that awakened would be a clone, but none the wiser. Just like the previous scenario, the so-called original you would be effectively killed. Your clone would be indifferent, and the original you would conveniently not be around to comment.

The main point of this variation on the previous scenario is that it's a less efficient version of the process of replacement that would happen when you walk into the teleporter -- but it's also a less efficient version of the process that happens constantly when you are alive; a process that may sound familiar and that all living things do, called metabolism. New matter is integrated and old matter is excreted, relentlessly. In this scenario, a device is doing the replacement while you are unconscious, but metabolism does it constantly while you are awake.

Now consider another thing we all do: Sleep. While you are unconscious - or perhaps dreaming - your body goes through a whole cascade of house-cleaning routines, most of which involve collecting waste material for disposal. Some fraction of your body is replaced with fresh material. Sleep is essential, and we all accept this little slice of death as the cost of surviving. But it also means that a big gap in our consciousness is inserted once every 24 hours. The very best any of us can do, in terms of remembering a truly unbroken line of activity in our living bodies, is a fuzzy one less than one day old.

For all we know, we drop into that horrifying atomic teleporter every single night. Why not walk into it during the day too?

So we are faced with two extremes: The continuity-assuring state of consciousness in a body, and the unseen, undetectable murder lurking potentially at the end of every day, where for all we know, we could be reconstituted from a pile of numbers or just thrown out entirely. Worse yet, we are forced to acknowledge that the terrain between extremes has huge holes in it. We could drop through moment by moment, and there is no ironclad reassurance that we haven't. A metabolism that is fast enough, and a memory that is clear enough, conspire to convince us we are on the living side of that extreme, but it could easily be just that: A conspiracy.

Time to freak out?

That's always a choice. A good existential freak-out can be refreshing sometimes. But there's more to think about.

Consciousness is the reflection dancing on the surface of the past, as the future rains onto it. It has no thickness at all. The only thing you can rely on - insofar as your senses are accurate - is that there is a now, and you are now in some particular state. Sitting rather than standing, in one room rather than another, facing east instead of west, et cetera. Plus countless other facts that you cannot so accurately perceive, but are on paths you could walk towards in the future. This is a state derived from your past choices, and offering you specific new ones, in this moment of now.

Your consistent existence in the physical world only has meaning in context: Where are you? Why are you here? What can you do now?

A great thing about being alive is that those questions have extremely complex but discernible answers, based on the history - ancient and recent - that brought each of us to our place. A deep investigation of those answers reveals something vital, that is also unique: We are bodies that evolved straight out of fundamental properties of chemistry and physics, and embedded directly in the flow of time. No programmer or designer is required to wind us up, or make us operate. And since one is not required, it is legitimately possible - perhaps not ultimately guaranteed, but possible - that we are not numbers in a machine built by some capricious god for inscrutable reasons.

By apprehending the wonder of this situation, and how thoroughly it differs from any simulation of life we have been able to electronically assemble by intelligence and technology, we can truly appreciate the value of being alive. In a chain of gods creating gods, the physical world and the phenomenon of time grant us a unique ability to be the first link. It's still possible that we are each blasted apart and rebuilt from numbers moment by moment, but unlike any simulation ever devised, crude or magnificent, we do not have to be. Our senses can be flawed and inconstant, but that's in comparison to the world they sense, which all our experiments are telling us, actually sustains itself*.

You could convince yourself that you are a simulation anyway, and embrace the bizarre misanthropy it leads to, along with all the robot assistants, electronic pets, and dressable avatars designed to prey on your empathy. But that would be the lazy choice, wouldn't it? The much more interesting and challenging truth is all around you: This is not a game. You are not alone. Your choices matter more than anything.

-;-;-

(* Here's the part where some people drag in the whole "big bang" thing, and shout about what happened "before" it. Sadly, Stephen Hawking is no longer around to patiently enlighten these people. But his books still are!)

Do you think you have ESP at all?

No. Eight hundred million years of animals evolving, and they've collectively evolved some amazing ways of sensing and communicating, many of which we are not equipped with. (Check out the platypus!) But, apparently, that's not good enough for believers in "ESP" ... They want communication or prediction by some means that is utterly undetectable by any instrument. Have you examined the psychological underpinnings of that "want?" Perhaps you just want to experience mystery! Try this: Go snorkeling around a reef. HOOOLY MOLY look at those things!!

Do you believe in karma?

No. Karma is more than "what goes around comes around", it's the belief that we are paying for the misdeeds (or enjoying a reward for the good work) of a previous life. I can't buy into that. That would mean that when innocent people die early, they deserved it, and that the wealthy and powerful became so by a kind of divine right.

Could Evolution and Intelligent Design both be right?

No. We used to believe God made plants grow. Knowing it's photosynthesis, is progress. Intelligent Design only exists as a "theory" (note the lack of testable hypotheses) because some religious folk wanted a god-of-the-gaps style backstop to protect God. Its only purpose is in saying "Let's do science all the way down to point X, and then stop, because that's God's territory." That's anti-progress.

Do you believe in the power of prayer?

I believe in the power of the placebo effect. But that's not the sorting operation that this question is designed to perform, now, is it! No; God is not going to close your wounds faster. While you being present and giving soothing words to the injured might help a little, God doesn't need to be involved in that.

Is disappearing (one party ceasing all further contact without explanation) is an acceptable way to terminate a romantic relationship?

I know the various reasons why people choose to do it. Fear of confrontation is the main one. If your SO is an abusive stalker and you fear for your safety you might choose to go that route. (Or that route might make things way worse.) But, in the general case? No; I think it's appallingly disrespectful as well as cowardly, and I've never done it. Though I have had it done to me.

Are some religions more correct than others?

The measure of any law is how well it respects humans as the agents of morality. (My own phrase, from about 20 years ago.) Ergo: A religion that ceremoniously cuts off the clitoris of every newborn girl, is LESS correct than a religion that DOESN'T do that.

Is a soulmate worth waiting for?

What kind of waiting for? Like "sitting on your hands at home doing nothing?" Or like "rejecting a bunch of people you really like because someone you like even more is potentially out there?" Sounds like a recipe for regret either way. To me, the big problem with the idea of a "soulmate" is, it's a really convenient excuse to ignore, fail to truly see, or pointlessly dump, an endless procession of perfectly cromulent people. (Perhaps out of a subconscious preference for being single that you'd rather not admit.) For thousands of years, people in villages of a few hundred managed to fall madly in love with someone close at hand. You now have access to millions of people. If it's hard to meet someone you adore, well ... Get out more! Or: Make space in your life or heart for them to exist!

Abortion, politics, the death penalty. A difference of opinion over which of these topics would most likely make you think twice about dating someone?

Badly formed question. Politics encompasses both abortion and the death penalty, but if you choose it you are deliberately leaving the two out. Makes no sense. And yes ... I don't think I'd want to date someone who believed in criminalizing the difficult choices made by other anonymous women out of some belief that they needed "consequences" to discourage their "loose sexual behavior" or whatever. Honestly it's a fool's errand. Pacific Islanders used to give themselves miscarriages by laying beneath huge hot stones. Safe? No. All they could find? Yes. Sex ed, birth control, and safe abortion are companions, not enemies.

Would you consider yourself a feminist?

Yes. I have a career in the computing industry. I need to have a grasp of feminist politics just to push against the subtle hostility that women encounter here. I'd also rather be with someone who says "yes" to this question because it's a litmus test about what they define "feminist" as.

Do you tend toward resolving conflicts through confrontation or avoidance?

Often the best approach is a mixture of these. Sometimes you need to avoid a head-on confrontation until you dig around a little and uncover more context or facts, or do some emotional sorting. Sometimes that can be done together, during the so-called "confrontation." But avoiding the confrontation entirely is a losing strategy. I am not a shouter or a ranter. That said, over the years I've become remarkably tempered by exposure to people who ARE shouters and ranters by nature, and learned to work with them. I don't fear or resent them, as long as they are, at core, kind people who seek resolution.

Do you usually pamper the person who you are with?

I've met some people who seem repulsed by the idea of being taken care of, even when they are really sick, or struggling, or emotionally wrung-out. I haven't worked well with those people. I like to - want to - care, and receive care, when things are tough. But even though I do this, I can't say I "usually" do this, because that implies that I pamper someone even when they don't need it. So; pampering? No. But: Bring you a latte and a biscuit from the bakery every morning, and read you a little bit of poetry every night? That's how I roll.

Have you stayed friends with most of your ex-boyfriends/ex-girlfriends?

I've parted from almost all of my exes as friends, though we've naturally drifted away over time. The exceptions were the people who did not know how to mend: The few who were abusive, or savagely cut off communication. I am always willing to talk. In sketchy moments I will defer talking only as long as absolutely necessary, to cool emotions or avoid danger, but finding resolution with a partner has always had very high priority for me and always will.

How important is a potential match's sense of humor to you?

Very. Sarcasm is alright, but I'm not big on it. Too much can corrode genuine emotion. Make a stoopid pun or roll with me on some improv, though, and we'll have a great time. Silly accents a major plus!

Do you find arrogance to be attractive?

Oh my, no. When I detect arrogance I instantly think “insecurity”, and then start deducting EQ points. (Also I suspect that people who are attracted to arrogance struggle with their own insecurity in some related dimension...)

Imagine that a first date picks you up in a car. The car is old and run-down, but otherwise clean. How would the car affect your opinion of your date?

It's all about the driver. I’ve known millionaires who are wonderful people, but drove screwed up old clunkers because their priorities were elsewhere. And I’ve known aspiring-middle-class dickheads that I wouldn’t acknowledge on the street, who drove Teslas and BMWs and the like.

Have you ever had a true one-night stand? (You met someone, had sex that night, and never contacted each other again.)

Close: I was 21. It was kind of sad; we met at a small party with mutual friends, talked for hours, went back to her place and had sex, then talked some more. I went home. We hung out again a week later; just talking. She cried and said she missed her family back in Michigan. I heard a month later that she moved back to Michigan. Never saw her again.

Do you find intelligence sexier than looks?

A person who doesn't seem visually striking to me can start up a conversation and - if they're intelligent - become sexy as hell to me in half an hour of talking. A person who is visually striking to me can start a conversation with me, and if it's clear they don't have much going on upstairs, they stop being visually striking in a matter of minutes.

Do you find that extremely intelligent people are intimidating?

I enjoy intelligence. When I feel intimidated it's generally because the person has some kind of social or concrete power over me and is acting aloof. I tend to steer away from people like that.

Is it okay for you to be irrational in making important life decisions?

Well, I live around here, don't I? Har har! But seriously, we may think we're highly rational people, but some of the basic, fundamental decisions about how we live can turn out to be completely emotional.

Do you believe morality is universal, or relative?

Universal to all living things would be way too paradoxical. (Bacteria don't care who they infect. Cats must murder to survive.) Universal to all peoples would give zero room to explain all the cultural differences we see around us. (In some places, sex before marriage is an affront, in other places it's de-rigueur. Some cultures eat dogs, some find that horrifying.) I would never say it's entirely relative, especially from an anthropological standpoint. But there is enough wiggle room that it's clearly not universal.

If after having a nice chat with someone on a dating website, they seem to be ignoring you completely the next day. What is your reaction?

I'd assume they're busy and leave them alone. Online dating can be very ambiguous. That said, if you're suddenly being ignored after receiving lots of attention it's usually one of three things: 1. That person is dating multiple people at once and distracted, 2. That person is not particularly interested in dating you, 3. That person is not into dating generally right now and their romantic life is in a holding pattern while they attend to other things. Wait a few days and hope for outcome #3. Whatever you do, don't get upset.

Do you believe that it is possible to experience romantic love for more than one person at a time without loving one less because of your love for the other?

Not exactly. You can feel separate love for two people at once, yes. You won't love either person less. But what you will have less of, is time, attention, and energy, to put towards maintaining each of those relationships. And as you parcel those things out, you will need to rationalize those decisions to those people. Insecurity and jealousy will lurk in the corners of your emotional life and you will need to spend additional time managing them. Personally I found that lifestyle to be more hassle than it was worth.

Should burning your country's flag be illegal?

Burning this country's flag should be part of a yearly ceremony, where we carry it aloft down the street as it burns, to demonstrate that our freedoms are legitimate and real and this flag is a symbol of precisely that.

Do you think the government has the right to regulate the ownership and use of weapons?

The government regulates the ownership and use of certain kinds of FERTILIZER. (And this is for good reasons, as these kinds can be used to make very powerful explosives.) Of course, most people who read this - and probably the original author of the question - will think about guns. But if keeping track of who buys fertilizer and how they use it is a good idea, the same is obviously so of firearms.

When in charge of others, how do you tend to be? Firm and demanding, or helpful and understanding?

I most enjoy leading through consensus building. That doesn't mean just asking what everyone wants and being a go-between, that means hammering out a synthesis of the best ideas by making dialogues happen in the right order and way, which involves a surprising amount of guidance. (I've done this for years at my job.)

Is a tongue stud a turn-on?

In college I knew a girl who would clack it incessantly against the inside of her upper teeth. She thought it was fun and clever. All I could think was, "what happens when you eat crackers?" So, no.

Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?

This question bothers me. Some people who read it will think "Oh this is a stealth question about God or karma!" Others will think "This is about physics!" And others will think "This is about having a learning attitude in the face of hardship!" Well fine, here's your answer: No, I do not think everything happens for a reason. But faced with this I think people often choose some post-hoc reason that makes them feel at peace, or like they've learned something, and then move on.

Are you totally anti-war?

Terry Prachett had some really amusing dialogue about this in one of his books. Something like, "I ask you, Nobby. War: What is it good for?"
"I dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves? Deposing tyrants?"
"That's right; absolutely noth-- what??"”

Here's a little list of plans I wrote down, a year after I moved to Oakland in 2011, titled "where I want to be in six months:"

I want to have all my debts squared away.
I want to be significantly progressed on my fitness goals.
I want to have a routine where I attend or host a dinner party every couple of weeks to eat and play games with like-minded friends.
I want to have my house organized just the way I want it.
I want to be either living with someone I am madly in love with, or living on my own.
I want a solidified work routine where I get one day as a work-from-home day. Alternate mondays and fridays would be ideal, so I can take four-day weekends every other week.
I want to know what's important to me.

A whole lot of things have happened in the subsequent ten years, of course, but I feel like it would be interesting to skip over all that just now and compare my current medium-term plans with my plans from ten years ago. Here goes:

Have all my debts squared away:

This one got smashed out of the park, almost entirely by one thing: In 2011 I was filled with seething resentment that my fancy computer-geek income was being handed over to non-geek landlords, and that resentment sent me into the shark-filled pit of the post-recovery real estate market. I clawed my way out with the deed to a duplex, then jumped energetically into the problems and learning process of being both a landlord and a homeowner.

I feel incredibly grateful to my past self that I sought out people who could give good advice, earned their friendship, and then listened intently to every piece of advice they could give. Top among my names here is Adam Seller, a long-time local landlord who, by my tough standards, manages the difficult feat of being a landlord and not being evil at the same time. I cribbed my communication style, my priorities, and large chunks of my lease and other paperwork, directly from him -- with permission.

It's true that I'm on the hook for a six-figure mortgage, but it's also true that the house is definitely worth more than the mortgage, so ... technically I am no longer in debt. I haven't been since about 2015.

I want to be significantly progressed on my fitness goals.

This goal has been a mixed bag. I'm definitely not as energetic as I used to be. Ten years ago it was pretty easy to stay in shape, whereas now it takes constant effort to steer away from over-eating and make sure I move around. I've thoroughly learned the value of environmental tweaks: Not bringing big tubs of ice cream into the house. Making it easy to get my bike out the door, so I never need to use the car. Still, I need to put more effort into this.

Over and over in life, I've noticed something that makes me just a little bit furious every time: People who are in good physical shape, and dress to show it off, get all kinds of tiny social advantages in situations that have absolutely zero to do with physical prowess. I know I can't erase this behavior from humanity: It's too deeply wired. I also know that I can - and do - take advantage of the way I look, to get attention or be left alone, and with the ebb and flow of my own life situation I've sometimes resigned myself to spending time exercising and avoiding calories just for how it changes the way I look. The trouble is, every time I do this it feels like I'm taking a little sip of emotional and self-esteem poison. The only way to avoid this poison is to design my life so the exercise happens as a side-effect of something with actual meaning.

For example, right now I can't go into the office because of COVID, which means I do not officially have a commute. But I do need to keep riding my bike. So I've constructed an artificial commute, where I pack a folding chair and a stack of batteries, then ride up to the Cal campus, which happens to be 4 miles away and 300 feet up from my house. The chair and the batteries add weight.

There's no technical reason why I can't just stay home and work, then go riding up the hill and down again as part of a separate "exercise hour" every day. But there's a part of me that hates the senseless nature of that, and I would rapidly lose interest. I'd probably sit in the back yard meditating in the sun instead, and while that would be fine for my emotional and spiritual well-being, my body would suffer.

I want to have a routine where I attend or host a dinner party every couple of weeks to eat and play games with like-minded friends.

This has mostly been a fail. I haven't bothered to assemble a local-enough set of friends who would all attend a clockwork dinner party. It's a matter of motivation. I know it would benefit my well being, but instead I get by with more occasional visits to friends and family elsewhere, and get my dinner parties from them. Meanwhile, the meals at my house have been mostly two-person events, chatting happily with a significant other. I can only conclude that dinner parties are less important to me than I thought.

I want to have my house organized just the way I want it.

This has mostly worked out. Actually the only exception happened because I moved out of my house entirely to go traveling, and split up all my possessions between three other people's houses in the meantime. And that was what I wanted, so it probably isn't an exception.

I want to be living with someone I am madly in love with, or living on my own:

Well, I did pose this as an either-or question. I'm living on my own right now, and enjoying it despite COVID times, though it's honestly not the outcome I would have expected or preferred. I get the feeling it will change in due time.

The person I want to be with, whatever their other traits, will work to live, rather than living to work.

I want a solidified work routine where I get one day as a work-from-home day. Alternate mondays and fridays would be ideal, so I can take four-day weekends every other week.

The last ten years have been split between two companies, and both have been located less than two miles from my house. It takes 15 minutes by bike each way. No gas, no parking fees, no traffic jams, regardless of when I leave. I have not been delayed by an accident, or by missing a bus or a train, even once in ten years. The commute is so short that I don't even need to change clothes unless it's raining.

Back in 2011 I had no idea an arrangement like this was possible. At the time my commute was to ride a folding bike to a Bart station, cram the bike into the luggage bay of an enormous bus, and then ride in stop-and-go traffic breathing recycled air mixed with exhaust fumes for almost two hours, each way. It always gave me a headache and upset my stomach, but I had no choice, because if I missed the bus I would have to wait several hours for the next one and my meeting schedule would be destroyed.

So, no, I didn't get a "work-from-home" day ... but I never asked for one either. The bicycle commute gave me so much of my own time back it stopped mattering. Somewhere I did a calculation of how many hours it's saved me, over the last decade. Let me try and recreate that with rough numbers. An hour a day, times five days per week, times about 48 working weeks in a year factoring in vacations, times ten years, divided by 18 waking hours... So by riding a bike to work I've had an entire 133 days worth of time doing whatever I wanted. That's impressive.

COVID has thrown those numbers a little off kilter, since I wouldn't be going to the office in any case, but I think the point is still made.

I want to know what's important to me.

My priorities have most definitely shifted. I'm no longer obsessed with my financial situation. I no longer prioritize raw passion over stability in romantic relationships. I'm a lot more politically engaged than I was before. I'm also no longer willing to put my career at the center of my life, like I had been doing for years in 2011.

I've done some stuff. Work for a small company? Check. Startup? Check. Big tech? Check. Awarded for a conference presentation? Check. Author of published research? Check. Name in shipping software? Check. Five-year plaque? Check. MVP of the year award at a company? Check. Granted a patent? Check. Worked in the midst of developing the most successful product in human freaking history? Check.

There is still so much inspiring stuff to do, but I no longer feel that sense of desperate hunger for accomplishment -- for distinguishing myself. I understand how high the cost of giving my life to a job can be. I am also comfortable enough that I can afford to be selective. I can look for what really grabs me, not just what promises greater money, more power, or bigger impact for its own sake.

This change has been the most clear to me in the last two years, when I became romantically entangled with several people whose identity and thoughts were built almost completely around their career. Their routine, their home, the shape of their hobbies -- all were in service of giving them the stamina to do their job. It was all they wanted to talk about over dinner. It was who they were. Subtract the career and what was left? Books, yoga, and produce, mostly. Small things designed to push at that gigantic flywheel of job energy and keep it spinning.

I'm not that kind of person any more. Nor can I be a partner to, or a support to, someone who is like that. There's more dignity in being single. (And less concern about being suddenly thrown under the bus when some problem you're having is an inconvenient drag on their career energy.) No, if I do build a life and routine and home with someone else, it needs to be for more than a career, and it needs to be for more than self indulgent travel and culture. It would have to be in support of a family structure: My kids - her kids - our kids - blood-related or otherwise. There needs to be family.

My interest in being connected to my family has grown a lot. In ten years I've become way more involved in the lives of my nephews, and that has been a great experience. I have various plans to grow that even more.

This has been an interesting exercise for me. I like the relative shape of my current near-term plans -- the way they've evolved. I think it's time to add some more detail to them.

30 years ago I saw this advice in the computing magazine that was delivered to our house each month:

I was already familiar with the game, and I knew it was right: When you're playing Moebius: The Orb of Celestial Harmony and you enter a fortress, the guards are easier to fight hand-to-hand.

I was intrigued by the counterintuitive feel of the advice. If you have a long sharp sword, and you're good with it, wouldn't that always be the best choice? Then I imagined trying to swing a sword in a narrow hallway. Perhaps something more intimate, and easier to control, was right after all.

For years after I read that silly, unremarkable sentence in that gaming magazine, it bubbled up randomly in different situations. I generalized the idea: When you enter a confined space, don't waste effort trying to keep everything at arm's length -- especially people. Switch to something more intimate even if it's less powerful. The trick is recognizing when you need to switch modes.

Recently I got ahold of a bunch of ancient issues of a defunct magazine called Family Computing, and fed them into a sheet-fed automatic scanner. Flicking through the pages, I found more pieces of worthy life advice. May it guide you own your journeys!

Very important to know when you're a young person at a party, or when some jerk decides to pick on you!

As a life-long computer engineer, let me spell it out nice and easy:

You know that game, Sim Earth? Well the way it’s done is, a bunch of math happens to a bunch of numbers, then it gets turned into dots on a screen and you are amused.

You know how it ISN’T done? A little tiny crude version of a planet inside your computer box, with little tiny weather and buildings and people.

There is no "living in" a simulation, because there is no "in" part. A bunch of math is happening to give the appearance of something, but it's your own senses and imagination that make the "in".

Okay, so, how about if we back off of that and say, “my brain is real, but everything else is a simulation!” Well, hey, that’s just Plato’s Cave. You can handle that yourself; no need for the computer engineer.

I have "living in a simulation"-adjacent dreams fairly often. They're not a sign of a conspiracy, they're a sign of a creative and dastardly mind. Occam's Razor helps here.

Alright, internet, back to what you were doing...

What happens to all this blog crap when I get hit by a truck?
What did writing any of it mean?

Earlier today I was reading a summary of a Star Trek episode on Wikipedia and it had a link to a "Medium.com ranking of Star Trek episodes". It turned out to be a sequence of blog posts wherein some internet rando gave his personal take on every episode of The Next Generation, one at a time. The bulk of it was a self-satisfied inventory of every plot point and piece of dialogue that might be considered sexist or racist by the strictest political standards of today, 35 years after the show was produced. This drivel was linked directly to every episode page for the show in Wikipedia, no doubt by the author's own hand.

I immediately thought of all the writing I'd done about Arthur C. Clarke's short stories. Another exhaustive run of a series, done for my entertainment. Having it online makes me feel like I am sharing it with the universe in some small, increasingly irrelevant way, but there are no access statistics, so for all I know no one has seen any of it. Eventually that writing will just vanish into a digital black hole, because I'll be gone and the hosting company will decide to purge their old accounts. What was the point to putting it online? How do I feel about that outcome?

Mostly I have no choice. I suppose I could try and set up a wacky trust fund arrangement where some of the profit from my investments goes to paying a hosting bill, for decades after I die. But if I'm honest, I have to admit that almost everything I write is not noteworthy or interesting to anyone but myself. There's a tiny chance that a hundred years from now someone from my family will give a few minutes of idle consideration to an archive of my crap - "Oh, so that's how my great great grand-uncle amused himself. Literary criticism, myopic predictions about technology, and random introspection. How hilarious!" - but would that be worth the effort? Probably not.

The world is unfair in terms of eyeballs. There are "influencers" on Twitter and Twitch whose words reach a million people a day and get stamped into the logs of a billion devices, even if all they produce is gossip and shade. In the war of eyeballs, between them and me, I definitely lose. Would following the path they're on lead to satisfaction for me? Would I feel better if I did what the Medium.com rando blogger obviously did, and try to attract more eyeballs to my self-important brainfarts while I'm still around, by stealthily linking them into Wikipedia entries? I think that would feel cheap and desperate. I'm lucky that I can approach writing as a pastime instead of a day job, so I don't need to worry about getting published as a means to support myself. And since I don't, what's there to get from worrying about it? Attention for its own sake? Emotional validation? There are better ways to get those.

So why am I thinking about it at all? There's something going on here.

To understand it, I need to draw a line, between what happens before my death, and what happens after it. On one side of the line there's the feelings that my writing can inspire for me, and on the other side there's only the feelings of other people to consider, because I'll be gone.

On the living side, it's clear that I derive pleasure from the process of writing, and often times from the act of tracking back through my writings to remember some thought I had long ago, to share it with someone or build on it. It's like I have an overstuffed notebook, way too big for my back pocket, but it's electronic so it fits on my phone instead. And as I get older, I rely more and more on the electronic realm to be my working memory. The re-re-constructed memories of embarrassing trauma from high school? Those memories are solid. They have entire palaces built on top of them. It's the smaller, more recent stuff, like exactly how I did my last mortgage refinance, or that cool idea for an art project I had while I was pooping, or something really clever that I heard at dinner... That stuff has to go in the notebook, or it's just gone.

It's pretty easy to validate my obsession with writing while I'm alive: I do it for me. But then there's the future, after I'm dead and gone. How do I deal with that?

Some of the stuff I've written about bicycle touring is useful advice. It might be cool to have that linger. It costs almost nothing to keep hosted. I've taken some nice photographs of my family, and of our hijinks. Maybe those are valuable to distant descendants? With so little at stake, it seems wise to just let go of whatever emotional validation I get from believing it remains. Seems mature, and adult, to acknowledge that I don't have control over things after my death, right? It's like obsessing over the contents of heaven or hell: You'll find out when you get there.

But not exactly. Intellectual legacy is not just about us ending, it's about how others carry on. We worry about it for the sake of our kids -- birthed or adopted, either way. That concern is valid. If it's not valid then civilization itself is pointless.

I shouldn't be so nihilistic that I discard what could be a nice little contribution to civilization, right? Nothing big; nothing too ambitious, but certainly not nothing... Some bike stuff, a little slice-of-life rambling about the obsessions of my era, and some cute pictures of family and pretty landscapes. If it lingers that's fine! I'll worry about it, but only just a little.

It's not worth the whole 100-meter freestyle hissy-fit level of worrying I reserve for other things, like whether some homeless Oakland night-owl is going to bust into my van this weekend while it's parked on the street outside, and hot-wire it and drive it away, then hide it behind some warehouse in Emeryville and fill it with meth-smoke and turds. I've really got to move that van out of town. That scenario is really upsetting my sleep.

And hey; cheers to you, far-future person reading this long dead man's words! You never had to worry one second about that big stupid Ford van, with the easy-to-pick locks! Take a second and congratulate yourself for having a whole different set of worries that I can't even imagine right now. Perhaps you're being stalked every day by some autonomous flying drone sent by the post office, because it's mistaken your face for a package it dropped two days ago, and it's trying to remove your head and deliver it to your neighbor?

Dang. I don't see how my bicycling pages or my literary criticism can help you with that. Sorry.

We were talking about whether to move some place cheaper during the pandemic, to save money, and perhaps invest in property.

"I don't think I'm quite ready to leave the west coast," she said. "I know what it's like out there in the midwest. I just got this cool new job with these great women, and I'm feeling powerful, and I like the way I fit in with them. In the midwest I'd be surrounded by people who have different ways of seeing women, and of being women. I think that would erode the energy I need when I'm working. I would feel less powerful."

"I hear that. I haven't lived long-term in the midwest, but when I was going through there, I definitely got a lot of that traditional vibe. It was funny also that I could see it vary depending on the size of the city I was in. And it wasn't this smooth change in the cities. There were just people with more ... 'modern' ... attitudes mixed in with the usual traditional people. They weren't averaging together that way I expected. What got really weird was, sometimes I would look around me and realize that I was literally surrounded by people who had ideas about gender and work and sex that were totally at odds with mine. I was massively outnumbered and the only thing I could do to get by was hide."

"Exactly. And midwest people are very nice, and helpful, and lots of other good things. But I just don't want my daily interactions with people to get shoved into that box. Especially not when I'm being this powerful person I want and need to be."

I nodded. "I think there's a good reason why all these big tech companies are on the coast, especially the west coast. Things have evolved a lot here."

"Yeah. Especially with gender roles and work. Like, if you were a guy from the midwest, you'd just say, 'we're moving to Illinois and that's that', and I would be expected to pack up and make the best of it. There wouldn't even be an argument; or if there was, I would lose."

"Heh. Yeah, I know better than to make some kind of ultimatum. Even if I really wanted to move there; which isn't the case."

"If you did I would just be like, 'okay, see ya!' and I'd stay right here."

"Exactly."

We pondered in silence for a while, then I said, "Yeah, I remember being a kid in the 80's and 90's here, and getting this sense that everyone around me had torn the lid off of traditional gender roles and was pulling the pieces out and taking a good look at them. Like, take my Mom for example. Total Berkeley native. It's obvious she did plenty of her own examination of those roles when she was growing up, deciding what to keep and what to change. When she was raising us she taught me that a lady appreciates it when you hold the door for her, if you don't make a big deal out of it. But she also said, a lady doesn't owe you anything even if you paid for the whole date. She left out stuff too, like everything traditional gender roles say about careers and division of labor. There was no 'you need to be a good breadwinner for your lady' or 'you need to learn cooking so you can feed your man.' Same deal with my Dad, in his own way. There were lots of families around me who didn't encourage their daughters to play sports because it wasn't ladylike, but my Dad was all, 'of course my girls are going out on the field; it builds self confidence! Everyone needs self confidence!' And they played more softball, soccer, and volleyball than I ever did."

"Cool!"

"Yeah. And it was all invisible to me, because I was swimming in it."

"Well, of course."

"Until college, where suddenly I realized it was this generational thing. A generational reconstruction, and I could participate in it. Same with the people around me."

"Yay college!"

I laughed. "Yeah! But you know, I think there are lots of places in the midwest where that reconstruction just ... hasn't happened yet. And that kind of creeps me out."

"Ugh, me too. I just don't think I'm willing to be surrounded by that right now."

"Agreed."

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Page generated May. 20th, 2025 09:17 pm

Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Entries tagged with philosophy

Unstructured time check-in

Regular human experience: Borrr-riiiing

Taking the long view

Consciousness

Pretzelbrain

Benjamin Hardy: Willpower Doesn't Work

A data point is easy. Putting data points together is hard.

Aaah, good ol' Fermi!

I only sort of work here

Be there when you get there

When birds tweet, what is it usually about anyway?

The eras of the introvert

Assimilation is complicated

Means, ends, and bodies

Explanations to questions I answered on a dating site

Ten year plan, retrospective

Life Advice From 1980's Computer Magazines

Are we living in a simulation?

Hit by a truck?

Gender roles in the midwest

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