FALSE PATH

March 13th, 2020

Some depressing subjects are healthy to explore.  This is counter-intuitive with respect to the current cultural prescription to always strive for happiness.  Aside from the fact this mandate is unrealistic, to catch happiness, clap it in mutual irons, and shackle it to yourself for all eternity, it also misses the point.   Happiness is a crippled word.  It serves merely to misguide us.  What we really seek, is to feel alive.

Not only does this light up our memory with those instances when we’ve managed to touch this elusiveness, it’s clear it has less to do with a single high-riding state -like happiness- and more to do with a depth across a spectrum of feeling.

Feeling alive has a lot to do with the way we deal with fear.  Do we ever feel alive when we give in to our fears?  What about when we rise up against our fears?  We wouldn’t necessarily call this happiness, but sure makes damn good living, even if you get knocked down, fail and wonder if it was worth it in the first place.  We feel alive when we summon the courage to get back up and try again.  This has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with making life worth living.

Side-stepping happiness as a deceptive red herring, we now face fear unexpectedly.  How do we deal with this paralyzing puzzle.

This is why it can be so healthy to explore some depressing subjects.  For instance, what’s worse than failing to face your fear of incompetence, deficiency and defeat? 

Well for one we eventually run out of chances to stand back up and try again.

We must contemplate death in order to override our fear of failure with a greater one:

the fear of leaving life having never lived.

NEGATIVE EXTRAPOLATION

March 12th, 2020

Narrow misses are lucky for two reasons.  For one you didn’t get hit, but the second reason is you are given the opportunity to extrapolate negatively and imagine what the situation would have been like had it been much worse.  This might sound more depressing than lucky, but the second step to imagining a worse incarnation is the ability to figure out how to prepare for it.  Questions arise:

Will it happen again?

Is it possible to guarantee it never happens again?

If it does happen, what systems would I want in place?

This ranges across all sorts of things, from a scrapped knee after a bicycle accident while not wearing a helmet, to a destabilizing virus that doesn’t have a really high mortality rate?

Cyclists never fall just once during their careers on two wheels and we all get sick every year.

The first situation is pretty easy, and it’s often advice that we get from parents: wear a helmet, don’t ride when the roads are slick, pay attention to those gravel patches.

But the second, that of viruses that can run through populations opens up a potentially strange and productive land of thinking:

Does my business have the ability to hibernate for months on end without dying?

Why are my family and friends so far away from one another?

Perhaps I have another reason to keep healthy?

Do alternative energy sources seem even more advantageous now?

Such questions range the gamut of our whole life, and the imaginative space here is so ripe that our answers can start to take the shape of exciting movies.  We all admire the plotting and prepared super hero or supervillain, but such practicality often receives a smirk in real life.  This is perhaps because most people don’t want to feel obligated by the crowd to think about one more thing, and pencil in more stuff on the to-do list.

While these social forces are powerful in the moment, they mean nothing when events turn troubling.

We also have another force to battle, that is: irrational optimism.

As Robert Sapolsky writes in his book BEHAVE, “while people might accurately assess the risk of a behavior, they tend toward distortive optimism when assessing risk to themselves--- ‘Nah, that couldn’t happen to me.”

In some circumstances, this human tendency is great.  It helps create grit and fuels us to press onward past failure.

But it works against us when we face true disaster.  It’s for this reason that it can be so important to extrapolate negatively.  It’s not in order to be simply morose, it’s to level reality against our tendency to see it incorrectly.  Truly terrifying things can happen.  Are you good? Or would you rather have a plan when that monster comes knocking?

ALARM

March 11th, 2020

What is the function of an alarm?

The most common type of alarm is probably a smoke detector.  Sprinkler systems might come in second.  The detectors sound their alarm when a certain level of particulate in the air is detected.  Sprinkler systems activate when a certain level of heat is reached.

These make sense on their own, but think of it in terms of money.

When we use our debit cards or credit cards, do we get an alarm when we hit a certain level? 

Most people know that anxious circumstance when they run a card hoping that it’ll go through.  The only alarm we get with these cards is when they are dead.  Either there is no more money in the checking account, or the credit card is maxed out, and both decline.  To be sure, these systems don’t really have alarms so that we are left to be more likely to spend money. 

Imagine if they did have an alarm.  Say your debit card gave you a notice when you were down to $1,000 in the bank, and then another when you hit $500, and another at $100.

This sort of staggered alarm system would also give you an idea about the rate of spending.  Rate is something that smoke detectors and sprinklers can’t do.

These detectors can’t tell you how fast your house is filling up with smoke or why it’s filling with smoke, they only sing at a certain point.  And because of this simplicity, such detectors can’t differentiate between some food you burnt while cooking, and a pile of dirty laundry that an angry lover has soaked with gasoline and lit on fire.

No one questions the use of alarms, and we readily invest in them despite this alarmist quality they have.

This is what alarmist means: exaggerating a danger and so causing needless worry or panic.  That word has been bouncing around a lot lately and as a result the ricocheting has put some dents in the meaning.  Are the alarmists of today just the silly hypochondriacs of society?  Or does smoke always mean fire?  Even when it’s just someone cooking a delicious meal?  Even a delicious meal, or the desire for one can cause a house to burn down.  But there’s a difference between the alarmists we roll our eyes at and the smoke alarm that complains about our cooking.  The thing is, we have to do something about the smoke alarm, and if we don’t know exactly why it’s going off, then we turn on to high alert for what danger might actually exist.  Do we pay the alarmists of society the same attention?  Do we check up on the details of the possible danger they detect?  Or do we just roll our eyes?

Look at the asymmetry here.  We don’t begrudge our smoke detectors of false alarms, because they also work when there really is cause to worry.  The detector might be crying wolf, but we diligently listen every time because we know the wolf exists and the detector is always looking for it. 

Even more importantly false alarms give us a chance to see how we’d react during a real crisis.  Schools, ships, and organizations of all sorts have drills designed to deal with these emergencies, and these drills are intentionally carried out with a simulacrum of alarm. 

Would you call a school’s fire drill alarmist?  No, not really.  They are preparing for the real thing.

The way the word alarmist is being used, is akin to calling fire drills a waste of time.  At the very least, acquiescing to an alarmists call to attention is an opportunity to explore our response in order to see what will happen when a real crisis hits.  Notice how the word ‘alarmist’ here completely undermines the meaning of the word ‘alarm’.  If we don’t perk up when the boy cries wolf, what happens when the wolf actually comes?  What if the wolf is on the hunt for something more than just the boy’s flock of sheep?  What if the wolf is looking for the entire town?

Panic distracts you from seeing the best course of action.  This is its real danger.  It obfuscates and clutters the mind with too much emotion.

On the other hand, remaining calm does not mean you take no action.  Being inactive in the face of danger makes you likewise vulnerable.

If anything, panic is a sign of someone who isn’t prepared.  And remaining dedicated to business as usual is perhaps a sign of someone who doesn’t even realize how unprepared they are.

As Upton Sinclair once observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Very few businesses are designed with real catastrophe in mind, which means they are often vastly unprepared, assuming that things will continue business-as-usual.

In a world where we only have one life to live, is there such a thing as needless panic and worry?  Or are such things indications of real problems that we haven’t yet solved?

HALF A MILLION WORDS

March 10th, 2020

Today we take a short break from our regularly scheduled programming to pause for a moment in order to celebrate a wee little achievement.

Today, Tinkered Thinking hits half a million words.

This officially marks the halfway point for the initial experiment, which was to write and produce at least 1,000 podcast episodes and write 1 Million words.  Naturally, it’s taken a bit longer than anticipated to hit half a million, so it looks like Tinkered Thinking is destined to go at least 1400 episodes, pending any unforeseen disaster of course. 

To be clear, the Tinkered Thinking website doesn’t actually have half a million words.  There are projects that are underway behind the scenes that will be released in coming months and later this year, but all told and combined, this little side-hobby project has hit the milestone.  Not like anyone would ever count anyway.

It’s reasonable to think that the number of people who have a 1,000+ page word document stuffed with half a million words is pretty small.

So what does it feel like to have this in my possession?

Honestly, it feels much like if I were to ask you how it feels to have taken a breath half a million times in a row. 

Once something becomes a non-negotiable part of your day, it ceases to require effort.  And this extends to the point where you notice it negatively if it’s missing.  Several times I have prepared episodes for weeks in advance in order to take a little vacation from the project, only to find that I was writing gargantuan text messages to friends and in response to people on Twitter. 

Not writing, has become a bit like holding your breath.  The system starts to get a little squirrely without the practice.

Considering how little effort the project actually takes, it’s hard to imagine life without it going, but then again, it seems even more ridiculous to think about this project going on for something absurd like decades. 

But we will see.  This project has already garnered far more of an audience than I ever imagined and it was not even undertaken with this goal.

If, however, enough people find value in Tinkered Thinking and the number of supporters, readers and listeners continue to grow, there’s many directions this thing could go.

And if you’re curious about where Tinkered Thinking might go, please share it with family and friends.  While monthly and one-time donations are always a truly tremendous help, growing an audience for something like this is far more powerful in the long run. 

Many goodies for subscribers are in the works. 

So stay tuned.

AUTOSEND

March 9th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to David Perell, who is often referred to as “The Writing Guy” and he is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to motivating an instructing people to write.  You can connect with him on Twitter @david_perell

Here’s a simple exercise that has tremendous effect: write a letter to yourself.  Write that letter with the intention that you’ll read it at some point in the future.  Say maybe a year from now.  You might have an idea of where you want to be in a year, and if you don’t, this gives you a quick and easy opportunity to think about it.

You begin to realize that what you do now is going to create the life that you’ll be living next year.  And so in some sense, you have some explaining to do:

What sort of life are you going to leave for the person you’ll be in a year?

Are you working hard to make life better for that person?

Or will that person be confused why you didn’t keep up with your efforts.

Writing a letter gives you an opportunity to explain yourself, not just to the person you’ll eventually be, but also to who you are now.

If you’re about to give up on something.  Maybe something you’ve put a lot of time and energy into, then it’s a chance to either clarify why it’s a good idea to stop, or it can be an opportunity to rev yourself back up with the core reasons why you should keep at it.

We often only reflect quickly, on the moment, or maybe what happened yesterday, or that frustrating encounter last week.  But a year is an excellent length of time to look back on.  You can get a lot done in a year.  You can set things up for a solid crack of the bat.  Or get it all done, and wonder about aiming higher.

Not only can this become a productive dialogue over time, but the best thing about writing a letter to yourself is that it’s sent as fast as it comes into existence.  It’s an exercise for the present moment as much as it becomes a point of reflection in the future.