Out of Time

This is it.

As promised over a year ago, this will be the final post for this blog. The reasons for this are primarily:

1. I think it has reached a point where I am saying many of the same things over and over, only differently. Not useless, but less than ground breaking.
2. It is time for ME to move on, which has been one of the underlying themes as well.

I figured the last day of the year would be a good time to make the change, but one thing led to another, and I couldn’t get it done. So here we are. It is not easy. I like doing this, but, in addition to the reasons above, I don’t really have time for it anymore.

My plan a year ago was to work through all of the posts I had in a draft state to get them online before signing off. I failed. Just like what happens in life, time caught up and I didn’t get everything done I wanted to do. There are dozens still sitting incomplete. I have decided to let them go. I’m not a big fan of symbolic actions because I think they ultimately don’t work. We know we’re doing it symbolically, which belies our sincerity and speaks as much to a need for drama. Show business can be powerful, but the power is often fleeting. All of that is true in this case as well. So…I’m not suggesting I will not write again. Only that it’s time for this blog to rest in peace.

On the occasion that I go back and read previous posts I am at once astounded and proud of how good and insightful some of them are, and also disappointed at how incomplete or lacking in any innovative thinking others are. To the astute reader, I have revealed a lot here, about myself, and human nature in general.

It was never for anyone but me. I never promoted it or cared how many people looked on. It’s simply my art, and started as a way to get some basic thoughts down. Something about writing things down codifies them, forcing the writer to think rationally in complete sentences and to ground statements and feelings. A worthy exercise, and one I think I got better at over the seven years of posts.

It evolved, as I knew it would, though I found myself surprised at how it evolved. I don’t know how obvious it is, but there was actually a turning point in the nature and presentation of the subject matter. It would be interesting to bring someone in to read through it all to see if that stands out. It’s blatantly obvious to me when I read many of the posts before and after that time. It happened over a number of months, but began here (not coincidentally, that post is the most linked to throughout the rest of the blog, barely beating this one.), and began to get momentum here. Life changes, sometimes in ways that there is no undo button for.

As a sort of farewell gift, I offer up my top 50 favorite posts (not already linked elsewhere in this one), which was an agonizing process that probably wasn’t worth the time it took, especially since the list would likely be different if I did it again next week. I hope that for those who come along later, this might get you started with what’s behind the scenes here. In chronological order…

1. Common Sense
2. If the Voltage Gets High Enough…
3. Boundaries
4. Start by Doing a Good Job
5. Religion and Politics
6. Hierarchy of Money
7. Science Has a PR Problem Too
8. Policies
9. Brass Tacks
10. Battle of the Unknown
11. Compromise
12. Love Will Find a Way
13. Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
14. The Curse of Perseverance
15. Love and Trust
16. I See Dead People
17. Serendipity
18. Dedication
19. The Drain of Friction
20. The Value of Images
21. What Life Really Is
22. Ideal World
23. The Chosen Ones
24. Forgive
25. A Metaphor for Life
26. The Result of Answers
27. Creativity
28. In the Flesh
29. Move Past Go
30. The Pretty Girl Gets Kissed
31. A Beautiful Story
32. Hope is Not a Strategy
33. Morality
34. Caged
35. Free Will is Fake
36. Burning Ships
37. Blind Spot
38. Delusions
39. Why Love Wins
40. Strength
41. One Step
42. Trust, the Hidden Part
43. Probability: Facts, Statistics, and Reality
44. Changes
45. Pride and Face
46. Comfort
47. Atheism: Instrumental versus intrinsic
48. Reasons or Excuses
49. New Information
50. The Opposite of Success
51. Bonus: the whole Happiness series

 

And here are a few random facts.

• The most visitors to the blog in one day was on 1/6/2015, after this post.
• 2015 was the busiest year for visitors, with 2011 close behind.
• 2015 also has the most published posts, at 81.
• Nearly 2,000 unique people visited the blog throughout 2015.
• After the United States, Germany had the most visitors.
• The most viewed page, by far, was the home page.
• The most looked at post was this one, followed by this. It appears traffic to the site was more influenced by my use of a couple of popular terms people search for than the actual content of the blog. Humbling, though not surprising.
• The longest time gap between when an entry was started and when it was actually completed and posted was 56 months.
• There are almost 1,000 comments posted across the 493 blog entries.
• There are over 22,000 comments not posted, as they marked as spam. Unfortunately some of those are/were legitimate comments. I never got to sorting them all out. Sorry about that.
• There were 520 images posted over the course of the blog. The images are very important, and often contained additional information/meaning.

To quote a friend, “It’s time.” I could drone on about all that I’m thinking as the final letters get typed, and the unused material gets trashed, but it’s a frivolous delay of what I have decided.

It’s a lot like life. Time runs out while we still have things on our to do list.

I do have another potential endeavor in the works. If anything gets going on that I may return here to leave a trail of bread crumbs to it.

And with that, I bid you adieu.

All the best,

David Stewart

 

 

 

 

Infinite Game

Short term thinking sometimes causes us to betray ourselves in the long run. It could be from making a bad, if convenient or safe decision. Often it’s from making no decision. How long is the long run? It’s hard to know, and seems to depend a lot on context. Some people tend to measure the world in flashes, and they’re happy to do something they call generous for a few seconds, as long as they get a payback before a few minutes up. More common and more celebrated are people who play a longer game. They build an asset, earn trust, give before getting, and then, after paying their dues, win.

There’s something else available, though, something called an infinite game.

In finite games (short and long) there are players, there are rules and there are winners. The game is based on an outcome and is designed to end. In the infinite game something completely different is going on. The point is to keep playing, not to win. In the infinite game, the journey is all there is. And so, players in an infinite game never stop giving so they can take. Players in this game throw a slower pitch so the batter can hit it, because a no-hitter shutout has no real upside.

A good mom, of course, always plays the infinite game. But it’s possible to build an organization or even a society that does this as well. Build hospitals and schools instead of forts and barricades…

You probably know people who play this game. You may well have been touched by them, inspired by them and taught by them. The wrong question to ask is, “but how do they win?” The right way to understand it is, “is it worth playing?”

Organization’s Effects

If you take a group of people, a subgroup of the larger population, and expose them to focused messages again and again, you will start to change their point of view. If you augment those messages with exposure to other members of the group, the messages will begin to have ever more impact.

We generally tend to align ourselves with those we’re around. We don’t fully understand why. There is a lot of psychology we know, and then other stuff we can’t explain. Yawning, for instance, can be statistically shown to be contagious. It has been studied for years, yet we don’t know why it happens.

Once a group starts to become aligned, and starts acting like a tribe, the messages of the tribe will become self-reinforcing. When someone is born into that tribe, there is a very high probability she will never know the difference. It is simply her common sense about the way the world works.

Programmed.

Are You Really Sure?

What if the speed of light isn’t constant? You don’t have to think too far into that question to surmise that it would break a lot of what we think we know about the universe.

VSL (Varying Speed of Light) is a real theory that has some traction, but is considered out of mainstream physics. It does resolve a few very sticky problems in our current understanding of the universe. For just one example you probably aren’t aware of…the cosmological expansion we often hear about actually appears to be accelerating, which in current (constant speed) thinking would imply that on a large scale gravity is repulsive. The science we accept is not at all iron clad.

There are two ways to look at this:

1. What can we be sure of? The answer, truthfully, is not much. Everything can be questioned.
2. When the prevailing science gives us a solid answer that remains stable for decades, we can be sure enough that it’s true to go ahead and act on it. That’s being practical.

There is always going to be that shred of doubt. It’s usually nothing, but sometimes a universe can be found there.

Okay, it’s mildly interesting to entertain these thoughts, but really, what difference does it make? It doesn’t impact that I have to go to work tomorrow, or take out the trash. Does it? Well…first, you don’t really have to do any of those things. Second…it gets to the religious question, and that changes potentially everything about what we’re supposed to be doing.

The more you learn about these subjects, the more you discover that “we” (as in the human race) know a lot more than “we” (the individuals) are aware of. We really do know and understand a lot about how the universe works. At the same time, you begin to see how many problems and mysteries there are within and around all of these things we think we know, which makes the mysteries all the more profound and troublesome.

As I have written before, it takes a bit of a leap of faith either way.

The more fundamental (to me) question is…what makes us leap one way or the other? Why do some look up at the sky and see God, whereas others look up and see only physics? Really think about that question for a while. What tips the scale one way or the other for an individual?

Impressions are (nearly) Permenant

“But what will I tell my people?”

Once someone makes a decision about something subjective, it’s almost impossible to persuade them that they were wrong. Not just because it’s difficult to really be ‘wrong’ about subjective things, or sometimes to even quantify them, but because you’re no longer asking them to remake the first decision, you’re asking them to admit an error, which is a whole other thing.

Compounding this, we often make it awkward for someone who is trying to come around to be embraced, largely because they are hurt that they were rejected in the first place.

The opportunity is to encourage them to look at new information and make a new decision. Give them the story they need to rationalize the change. “Well, I know I said X, but that was before she/he/they listened to me and changed…”

Step two is to celebrate the newcomer, not to dredge up their past positions and wave them in their face.

The Marketing Drug

Every time I see my dentist he tries to sell me stuff. Various services they provide that will in some way (they claim) improve my life by addressing some shortcoming or concern taking place in my mouth. I never knew my mouth had so many problems!

I’m all for selling people on things that can help them take care, even if they are merely for pleasure or aesthetics (vanity), but like everything else, there can be a tipping point where we sometimes take it too far, or are too manipulative.

It reminds me of how food is marketed. The marketing has become so powerful that some of the people being hurt actually are eager for it to continue. This creates a cultural feedback loop, where some aspire to have these respected marketing jobs, to do more marketing of similar items. It creates a society where the owners and leaders of these companies are celebrated as risk-taking, brave businesspeople, not as the modern robber barons that they’ve become.

The cultural feedback loop can’t be denied. The NAACP, which represents a population that is disproportionately impacted by the health costs these products create is actually allied with marketers in the fight to sell ever more and bigger portions to its constituents.

The crime continues because the money taken by corporations that change our culture is used to fund campaigns that conflate the essential concept of ‘freedom’ with the not-clearly-articulated ‘right’ to respond to marketing and consume stuff in quantities that would have been considered literally insane just three generations ago. And we like it.

[I’ll write the previous paragraph’s point again here to be clear: we’ve decided that consumers ought to have the right be manipulated by marketers. So manipulated that we sacrifice our long-term health in the face of its power.]

We ban accounting that misleads, and we don’t let engineers build bridges that endanger travelers. We monitor effluent for chemicals that can kill us as well. There’s no reason in the world that market-share-fueled marketing ought to be celebrated merely because we enjoy the short-term effects it creates in the moment. Every profession we respect has limits created and enforced by society. These rules make it more likely we don’t race to the bottom as we cut those corners or maximize our profits.

The question is this: are you responsible for the power in your hands? If so, then we need to own the results of our work. If not, someone else needs to step in before it’s too late. No sustainable system can grant power without responsibility.

Just because marketing works doesn’t mean we have an obligation to do it. And if we’re too greedy to stop on our own, then yes, we should be stopped.

And don’t even get me started on the marketing of drugs. The pharmaceutical complex is as out of control as anything humanity has ever witnessed. It’s capitalism, and the battle is to win. At all costs.

 

Religion’s Social Reinforcement

Once culture or set of behaviors becomes intertwined with our lives for a period of time its distinctiveness fades. In the United States, religion is a part of our way of life. While some have argued that Christianity is the national faith, and others that church and synagogue celebrate only the generalized religion of “the American Way of Life,” only recently have many realized that there actually exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America.

We celebrate some religiously based holidays in an official (governmental) capacity. Many of us share some fundamental beliefs and values in terms of how our society is organized and operated. They are based on, parallel to, but independent of the the theological tenets of each specific denomination or religious belief. This dates back to the early notions of the nation as religiously diverse by design (free from religious tyranny), but while not being too overtly biased in any one tradition, it clearly was based primarily on the Protestant ethos and set of values.

So here we are, a religious country that while presumably based on freedom of religion, doesn’t necessarily subscribe to freedom from religion, and certainly doesn’t appear to honor its own tenet of separation of church and state. (All of which varies somewhat according to your geographic location in the country.) This produces a bias worth briefly pointing out.

1. Religious Bias – If your chosen set of beliefs happen to align well with the Protestant framework the country and society was built upon, you have it easy. Things invisibly make sense to you, and you probably don’t even see how biased and gamed it all is. Of course, if you happen to be of some other religion, lots of things stick out and seem to fall somewhere on the continuum from weird to downright unfair or discriminatory.
2. Anti Religious Bias – In recent decades the pendulum has swung more towards an increasingly forceful resistance to all things in our culture that reek of being driven from a religious notion. The divide has widened. It has at times appeared to reach a point of near irrationality. Unfortunately, the baby sometimes gets thrown out with the bathwater here. There is a history of statesmen who happen to fit well within this parallel civil religious state, but who are great and effective leaders first and foremost. They can get tossed aside, which seems to leave even more room for the more dogmatic to get their voices heard and rise into a consciousness of a generation that otherwise would have recognized them as extreme.

Certainly the chasm between the different religious groups, not to mention those who do not believe in anything religious being part of our government, stands in stark relief these days, largely due to our ability to consume the media that paints these pictures. Often people on or near the fence are pushed away in the crossfire.

Perhaps we would be better off it it wasn’t so blatant. Things would be a little less cozy and comfortable for those who’s values align with the prevailing values of the society we have now, but if the overall populace were more validated and respected, the chasm could close. I argue that if we’re smart, in a rising tide lifting all boats way, the WASP’s would proactively give up the bias to help produce an environment of better dialog and growth. This is one where meeting half way may not be enough. Things have been too skewed for too long, and aside from arguably not being right, it’s obviously just not going to work effectively anymore.

Civil religion (“civility” being the operative concept) can be a great way to build a society, but in order to work it must walk a well thought-out line between being too biased towards one group versus being too watered down to be meaningful. That’s a big challenge for some capable leadership. Without it, things will continue to degrade.

Ominous.

 

Fine Lines

A Nazi Christmas dinner in Germany, circa 1940. Looks pretty familiar and comfortable to us, except for the pesky implications of those arm bands. Thus it’s not just a dinner, or a Christmas dinner; it’s a Nazi Christmas dinner.

If you’re standing in line with a stranger, what happens if he’s a few inches taller than you? Probably nothing. There’s nothing to distract, or to cause discomfort. You may make small talk. What if he’s a little shorter than you? Or wearing a sport coat?

What if he’s from another state? Probably nothing to consider…

What if he has really long, gray hair? Or an eye patch?

At some point, most people reach a degree of discomfort. What if he’s over 7 feet tall? Will you mention it? Or if he’s under four feet? What if he’s from a different country? Or a different race or speaking with a significant accent (or, more accurately, an accent that’s different from yours)?

For as long as we’ve been mobile enough to encounter others outside of our tribe, humans have been on alert for the differences that divide us. Then we fixate on those differences, amplifying them, ascribing all sorts of irrelevant behaviors to them. Until, the next thing you know, we start referring to, “those people.” We start boiling them down to generalizations, and even building a narrative for ourselves about them.

It seems as though it’s a lot more productive to look for things in common. Attitudes and expectations. Beliefs in the common good and forward motion. A desire to make something that matters…

Because there’s always more in common than different. We need to start acting as smart as we are.

When You Can’t See…

This is part of a church parking lot near my residence. It is on a route I commonly run as part of my fitness routine. Due to my schedule, I often get up at 0-dark-thirty, braving the cold to run in the morning. There are some lights around, so it’s not completely black. I discovered one morning they had added this feature to the road connecting two lots. I didn’t see it. Imagine running along in the solitude of your thoughts, listening to an old Boston record, then suddenly finding yourself face down on pavement! That fast it jumped up and grabbed my passing foot. (I realized later these had replaced some that were there before, but had been painted with stripes so they stood out in low light.)

My iPhone took the brunt of it. I am nothing if not determined, so I got up, shook it off and ambled on, the inconvenience of darkness suddenly transformed into a protective cloak preventing anyone from seeing my dumb move.

It occurred to me later that when you’re unable to see them, mere speed bumps become stumbling blocks. Getting blindsided is emotionally taxing in the moment, but generally illuminating as we get some distance and reflect. Never one to pass up a good metaphor, I thought about some ways this impacts our lives.

• An automobile accident – Even the person not at fault will play it back to see if there could have been a way to be more observant, to avoid it. Maybe more alert next time.
• A hurtful word or phrase – spoken in haste, without proper regard to for the message the hearer takes away. Slow down and think it through before letting emotions carry you too far.
• An unwanted business or political outcome – Were you wrong, incompetent, or apathetic? What can you do better next time?
• A breach of trust – Was the trust well grounded?
• A personal setback – We you trying to leap beyond your means, or was it other circumstances you should have been able to see?

Getting back up and getting on your feet is the easier part. The real key is in taking the lesson being offered to you. Not just during the time of heightened awareness produced by the emotions, but in an embodying, long-lasting way. Some would call that wisdom.

 

 

 

 

 

Canned

When our desire and need for simplicity and efficiency replaces authentic human interaction we betray ourselves. Of course nobody is fooled. That’s not even the question. The perfunctory gestures of a polite society help connote a mood of civility. But in order to work, we must care enough to make them authentically.

Of course, it is far better for both parties to engage genuinely. Without that it all races to the zero of noise in the background that, given how busy we all are, isn’t only not needed, but actually becomes a nuisance. And transitions to a burden: “do I have to acknowledge these people?” Maybe you could write a subroutine for it. Let the computers talk to each other!

It’s no wonder we feel more alone than ever, even though we have far more input than ever.