Paper words, digital words

A little while ago, I had an argument with a coworker about the Kindle and other e-readers, and whether they are a boon or a curse for the reading community and for society. I generally try to avoid arguments with people at work for the good reason that, according to an adage I read somewhere, “Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” That was certainly the case here. Somehow I got sucked into it.

I came out firmly in favor of the Kindle. My much older coworker (who I’ll call “Babs” for convenience) came out firmly against. I’ll say right now, though, that I don’t own a Kindle, and I have a fond affection for the printed volume. But I recognize my affection is purely sentimental and illogical. I like the weight of books in my hands, I like looking at them on my shelf, I like the way they smell. Also, a lot of the books I read are long, oldish, not-widely-read history books that may have no Kindle version available or only a low-quality one.

My love for antiquated paper and ink notwithstanding, I think the Kindle is a fantastic innovation. Someday I may come around to buying one. Babs could only shake her head. Her first argument against them wasn’t really an argument at all, just a repeated statement that something about reading on an electronic tablet “isn’t the same” as reading on paper. Since there was little logic here to rebut, the only thing I could say is that the important part is literacy—not the medium by which we exercise it.

Her other point was more interesting to argue against. “Think about all the people who make books,” she said. “All the people working the printing presses and running bookstores. I just think about all those people who are going to lose their jobs.” It’s a nice sentiment, in a way—and expected from someone who is part of a generation for which “commodity” means a physical object—but it’s a totally backward way of looking at economics.

Babs is right that plenty of people in print publishing are going to lose their jobs. It’s already been happening for years. This is undoubtedly frustrating and even tragic for the individuals and families involved, but it’s only a fraction of the story. Think of all the people involved in building the software to make the Kindle work. Think of all the people involved in building the slick hardware with the screen that—damn it—really does look like a printed page. Think of the workers assembling the parts and shipping them. Think of the people making Kindle versions of old books, maintaining the purchasing and download systems, handling customer service. These are jobs that didn’t even exist a few years ago.

And it doesn’t end there. E-readers are opening up fantastic opportunities for amateur writers to self-publish at minimal cost. One of the barriers to launching a writing career—selling yourself to a monolithic, institutional publishing house—is coming down. This is also probably opening up opportunities for small-time freelance editors to begin finding more clients. These, too, are groups of workers benefiting from innovation.

But it doesn’t end there, either. E-readers benefit consumers. I enjoy the time I spend poking around libraries and bookstores looking for print volumes. But I understand there are plenty who don’t. The Kindle ends up saving its users a significant amount of time. A cynic would say these people are probably going to waste that saved time anyway—and he may be right—but he couldn’t say the opportunity isn’t there. Maybe a Kindle reader will find that he finally has the time to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. Or to be less grandiose, maybe he’ll just find he has more time to do his reading and also play with his kids. That’s a good thing, right?

Ah, but there are still those poor typesetters and ink-rollers standing in the unemployment line. What about them? Well, they failed to abandon a sinking ship. Rather than sticking to their established jobs with the blinders on, they should have learned about programming for the Kindle. I don’t mean to belittle them, because I can’t say I won’t someday be caught behind the curve of some great new innovation that makes my job obsolete. But if I do, I won’t expect anyone’s pity or philanthropy.

It’s true that innovation frequently puts certain groups out of work. But it also puts so many more groups to work. It may destroy a few jobs here and there, but it never destroys wealth. It always creates it. And that’s the main thing.

Observe your fuck-ups

I made a wonderful boring accidental discovery at work today. When using a web browser in Windows, Alt+D selects all text in the address bar. I did a little jig to celebrate. 

Like I said, it’s totally boring. It’s relatively trivial, too, and I’m sure it’s not news to some people. But the way I discovered it illustrates a lesson worth keeping in mind. 

I was trying to press Alt+S to navigate to a particular tab in a database I spend a lot of my time working in. My finger slipped and I pressed Alt+D. It took me only a split second to see I wasn’t getting to the tab I wanted, so I more-or-less unconsciously corrected the mistake in my second attempt. After I had got where I wanted, though, I realized that during that split second when I was correcting, the address bar had turned blue. After poking around for a few seconds, I figured out it happened from pressing Alt+D. And I was happy, because I like to use quick keys as much as possible, and I had previously wondered whether there was a quick key for selecting all in the address bar. Hooray!

Obviously, this new trick is going to save me only a negligible amount of time in my web browsing. But this is far from the first time something like this has happened. I’m routinely showing my colleagues faster, more efficient ways to manipulate the systems we use—systems they’ve been using for a decade and I’ve been using for 18 months. They ask me how I find all these clever shortcuts. The answer is that I pay attention to my mistakes.

Everyone always says to learn from your mistakes. This advice is fairly easy to follow when our mistakes come from conscious choices and take place in a measurable amount of time. If you make a bad investment and lose thousands of dollars, that’s a mistake you can study. But a lot of our mistakes happen unconsciously and fast—slipping and pressing the wrong buttons, for example. We don’t study these mistakes because we usually don’t know what we did wrong, and we do know how to immediately remedy the mistake.

You mean to press a key combination that will print your document, but you accidentally press two keys that close the program. Fuck! You go and reopen your document and try again. But wait a second. What keys did you hit that closed the program? It was frustrating in the moment, but maybe it’s something you could use later.

This is how I’ve discovered most of the slick navigation that has eluded my more experienced colleagues. In my haste, I routinely mess up and do things I don’t mean to.  Nine times out of ten, the mistaken click or button combination does nothing at all, or at least nothing I didn’t already know about. But once in a while it will do something unexpected, and I will retrace my steps to see what I did and how I might employ it in the future.

My colleagues don’t do this. Their routine mistakes are just another of the many frustrations facing them each day. They would benefit from thinking forward to circumstances in which the “mistake” might be useful. On an individual level, none of the shortcuts I’ve found amount to a significant increase in productivity. But they add up to eventually make a difference.

More than anything, I think it’s just the right attitude to have. We all have so many routines in our lives. There must be times during those routines when we make mistakes that could actually improve other parts of our lives, but which we take no time to examine. Who knows what we might be missing? 

Uniqueness in historical violence

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about the World Wars. When I say “lately,” I mean for the past year. I’ve read almost nothing else. Until you’ve spent some serious time studying them, you have no idea of their scale. They were bloody and destructive almost beyond imagining. The cursory surveys you get in high school and college tell you nothing.

One of the questions that continually comes to my mind is whether the carnage took place on such an appalling scale because of a particular rabidity of the belligerents or simply because of improvements in technology. Put another way, did millions (as opposed to hundreds of thousands in previous major wars) die because of mindsets unique to that period in time, or did millions die only because the artillery was better and airplanes could rain death from the sky?

It’s a difficult question to puzzle out. There’s no doubt the fighting was fierce. Over 700,000 became casualties at Verdun as France and Imperial Germany threw everything they had into the maelstrom. Over 1.2 million became casualties at Stalingrad 26 years later as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany did the same.

The proximate cause of all the death and dismemberment was the devastatingly effective weaponry produced by 20th-century industry. At Verdun, the soldiers defended themselves with machine guns, and hurled two-thousand-pound high-explosive shells at enemy positions. At Stalingrad, they had tanks, dive-bombers, self-propelled artillery, and truck-mounted rocket launchers. For the first time in history, soldiers had the means to level entire cities in short order.

But of course the weapons didn’t discharge themselves. They were fired by living, breathing men at the behest of the military leaders and politicians who gave the wars their shape. Were these leaders unique in how they saw the world and how they saw their mission in war? Were the circumstances unique? If 20th-century weapons had been available 100 years earlier during the Napoloenic Wars, would those have become as bloody? Could a conflict as bloody happen again?

In many ways, the causes of the wars and the attitudes of those fighting them now seem impossibly remote. The First War was basically a clash of empires. Germany had stolen Alsace from France, they were posing a threat to Britain’s naval supremacy, and they were joining Austria-Hungary in challenging the backward empire of Russia. Imperialism still lives in 2011, but the notions of national pride, honor, and glory that carried the great empires to war have basically died. At least, no one now articulates these notions as credulously they did.

The Second War followed as a consequence of the First’s ravages. The human and material losses, as well as the shame of defeat, gave birth to the peculiar ideologies of Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. Observing these movements at the distance of 70 years—seeing their pageantry, their fanatical devotion, their constantly propagandizing stage management—they seem like historical anomalies. They were meteoric in both their rise and their fall. How could there ever be another man quite like Hitler, and how could he flourish in any circumstances other than those of a Germany ruined by war and humiliated by Versailles?

This would be the comforting conclusion to come to. It would be comforting to believe the unprecedented violence of these conflicts resulted from the storms of a special and never-to-be-repeated historical moment. But at heart, the architects of both wars were driven primarily by two things: desire and hate. These qualities certainly still exist. Circumstances can change at the drop of a hat, and there’s no telling who might be in power tomorrow.

The great war leaders of the 20th century fought with the means available to achieve their ends. Those means happened to be hellishly destructive. There’s little to suggest that great war-makers of the past fought with anything less than the full means available during their time, either. Nor is there much to suggest that current leaders would restrain themselves from using their every available means. The time since the World Wars has of course not been enough for the baser qualities that drove those conflicts to have been bred out of us. And if the destruction of those wars came from a logical progression from bows and arrows to rifles to aerial bombardment, it spells an uncertain future.

The aesthetically minimal man

I live in an apartment with nothing on the walls. It’s been that way since I moved in a year and a half ago. I have six beloved houseplants that add a bit of color, but otherwise the place is naked. I like it this way. If someone were to give me, say, a framed Mark Rothko print, I would hang it and probably enjoy it (he had pretty subdued tastes as well). But I don’t want one enough to go buy it myself. Nor would I care to buy anything else for decoration.

I used to be the opposite. In my high school and early college days, I liked to live in hyper-decorated rooms with Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling and posters covering nearly every inch of wall space. I felt a room like that was more exciting. I also felt it was a great way to broadcast my interests to anyone who might visit. My taste in movies and music, on garish display, would show my guests how fascinating I was. That was my hope, anyway.

Sometime since then I went and got boring. I may have felt all those old posters were a bit immature for a guy older than 21. I may have felt they just didn’t represent my tastes anymore. And I may have just decided that, after all the moving around in college, it was too much hassle to bother tacking anything onto the wall. I can’t exactly remember now, so I’m guessing it was a combination of all three.

The upshot is that I now live in a place that my 18-year-old self would probably be appalled to see. It would look so suspiciously adult to him. But what the idiot high school kid wouldn’t see is how superior the visually subdued environment is as a place to actually live. Those posters only amounted to so much mental clutter. I don’t need to see Robert De Niro’s face on a Goodfellas poster every time I sit on the couch. I don’t need to be reminded that I like Pink Floyd every time I walk in the door. I already know it.

We only have so much time and energy to think and feel. Routinely subjecting ourselves to visual (or auditory) stimulation that doesn’t stimulate our intellect or emotions seems like a losing proposition. The time it took my brain to process my Nirvana poster each day was minuscule, of course, but it was still something, and it all adds up. 

The busy-ness of my old rooms would now exhaust me. I would feel distracted and restless. A handful of beautiful paintings wouldn’t be so bad to have. But so many people these days are in the habit of filling their homes to the rafters with visual bric-a-brac that I can’t help thinking there’s a lot of good thinking time being crowded out. 

It’s the opportunities for thinking that make an aesthetically minimal living space trump the alternative. My mind works better in bare walls. I also feel it might be a better environment for conversation. When I have someone over now, we’re just two people sitting among some greenery having a chat. De Niro’s mean mug isn’t there to distract us. It’s a quiet pleasure most people wouldn’t recognize right away, but it’s well worth trying.

Remember not to forget to unfuck yourself

 I got a little gem from the staff of my apartment building today. The Winter Newsletter scotch-taped to my door this afternoon reminded me where to park and where not to park, how to dispose of my Christmas tree, and why I shouldn’t let grease and food particles run down the drain. They also had me “note that we charge $30 for after hour lockouts.” Added to that was this helpful advice: “Please leave a spare key with a trusted friend or neighbor if you are likely to lock yourself out.”

I had to wonder what kind of paradoxically responsible airhead would be both likely to lock himself out and aware that he was likely to do so. It seems that the people most likely to lock themselves out are the most likely precisely because they don’t consider themselves to be so. 

Here’s how we might rephrase the apartment staff’s statement: “If you are predictably and reliably stupid, please consider taking steps to mitigate the ill effects of your stupidity.” That’s basically what they’re getting at. But we could go further:

“Hey, stupid. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Remember all the times in the past when you ruined everything and imposed on the people around you? Like the time you locked your keys in the car with the engine still running? Or the time you tried to microwave your soup while it was still in the can—do you remember that, doofus? Or the time you poured motor oil in the wiper fluid reservoir and antifreeze in the oil reservoir? That was a doozy. I don’t point these things out to shame you. I only point them out to show that you have established a historical pattern of thinking with your asshole and blowing it big-time. You fuck up frequently. You fuck up severely.

“So here’s the short version of it, fucknuts: the probability of your locking yourself out of this apartment late on a Sunday night is approximately 73%. That ain’t so so good, brainiac. For all I know, you’ve already done it once before. And if you do it, you’ll make the maintenance man unhappy, and he will make you pay him $30, which will make you unhappy.

“That’s not to say there isn’t a solution. If you leave a key with a neighbor, you can lock yourself out to your heart’s content without consequence. No one is asking you to stop being stupid or to stop making stupid mistakes. We love you the way you are. But if you just make a few simple arrangements beforehand, you can make your stupid mistakes less of an inconvenience. Thank you.”

High-resolution holidays

Now is about the time you start hearing people talk about the resolutions they’re going to make once January 1 rolls around. There’s an endless variety. You might hear a coworker say she’s going to get back into going for long fitness walks. A friend of a friend says he’s going to start reading more of those books he’s been meaning to get to.   Pardon me while I laugh. 

No matter how they’re phrased, all New Year’s resolutions are essentially the same thing, which is self-delusion. It boils down to this: if you were genuinely serious about whatever it is you’re resolving to do, you wouldn’t wait for an arbitrary date on the calendar to begin doing it. There’s nothing remotely special about January 1. It’s just another day. It doesn’t even correspond to any celestial event. If you resolved to start eating right on the summer solstice, I would still think you were full of shit, but at least I would have more respect for the thought you put into picking a significant date.

The bigger point, though, is that change doesn’t happen by deferring it to the future. The future is interesting, but it’s only an idea. For anything you want to do, there must be some way to get started today. There’s no time like the present, because the present is the only time we actually live in.

I wouldn’t be so cynical as to say that all resolutions are bogus. People can and do improve themselves. But the postdated resolutions people begin trotting out each December bear none of the qualities of effective resolutions. People start eating healthy and exercising when they see an embarrassing photo of themselves and suddenly realize how far they’ve let themselves go. People stop drinking when they have a falling out with an old friend and suddenly realize how much they’ve lost through alcohol. The commonality among resolutions like this is the inescapable feeling that one has to begin now. A resolution will never stick if there isn’t a sense of urgency to it. 

But the holiday season provides a convenient excuse for our weaknesses. It’s filled with bad food and distracting activities that we can point to as the source of our failings. Once the season is over, and all the bad things are gone, we’ll get down to that serious business of living. Only it doesn’t work like that. You’re going to eat better once the cookies and candies are gone? Well, there are always cookies and candies available. You’re going to start that website or read those books or paint those pictures or whatever once there’s less friends and family stuff going on? Well, there’s always friends and family stuff going on. 

To really change any part of your life, you have to realize that your life is happening at every moment. Time is continuous. It doesn’t start and stop at our defined intervals. Any moment is as ripe as any other to begin doing anything. The holiday season does present particular difficulties (especially for the perennial resolution of eating better), but if your January resolution is going to stick, doesn’t that necessarily mean defying those difficulties next December? Why not rip the band-aid off now and be stronger than it all this year? If you don’t get started now, you probably won’t ever.

Religions without gods

I stopped believing in God when I was about 13 years old. Like dear old Bert Russell, I just didn’t feel God had provided enough evidence. I had been raised (sort of) to be a believing Christian. For a time I actually did believe, but only in the naive way kids can be said to really believe in anything. They were totally unexamined beliefs, held because I had been told to hold them. Once I began looking at the world through eyes of reason, God disappeared.

I wouldn’t say that I became completely unreligious, though. I spent my teens living in a sort of dissipated manner, but that was mostly because I had so little responsibility for my own life. Food and shelter were taken care of, and the pocket change my folks gave me for cleaning the house and mowing the lawn was enough to buy pot on the weekends. Why bother living my life by any code?

When I got out on my own, the empty pleasures of high school (which had never been that much fun anyway) weren’t enough to sustain me. I spent a few years feeling lost, and when I was 21 I became a strict vegetarian. I’m not sure anymore why I made that choice, but I certainly believed in it at the time. I think what attracted me to it more than anything was the asceticism of it. It demanded a level of self-control that, it seemed, would inevitably sharpen one’s sense of identity and purpose. And anyone who’s ever known or been a vegetarian knows how it becomes a religion. 

After about 18 months of it, though, I began to question whether it was really such a healthy diet. I began eating meat again, but my eating habits overall may have become more religious rather than less. I cut out all processed foods, all grains and starches, and all but the tiniest amount of sugar. I also began working out in more intense and focused ways than I had before. It was the religion of yoga and bean soup shifted laterally to the religion of kettlebells and steak salad. I did and still do make the occasional exception, but so far it appears this religion is going to stick.

If there’s one defining characteristic of true religions, it’s that of practice. I say “true religions,” because much of what passes for religion in America is really just a Sunday-morning lecture series that’s forgotten as quickly as were the lessons of Political Science 101. Real religions require their adherents to do things. Orthodox Jews have kashrut and separate sets of plates (and sometimes even separate dishwashers) for meat and dairy. Balinese Hindus have their morning offering. Muslims everywhere have their numerous abstentions and their five daily prayers. It’s these rituals—practiced day in, day out—that give a religion its character.

I think most people hunger for some sort of religious practice. It reminds us who we are. But when we don't find it—maybe for lack of searching, maybe for the vagaries of fate—we'll generally settle for habit. Junk food, television, wasting money on stuff we don’t need—these things become religions by default. A good percentage of people find rituals that genuinely fire their character and inspire self-improvement. But many don’t. Those who do typically have a hard time articulating why, exactly, their rituals matter to them. It just sort of works, they might say. 

A religious practice of fitness and healthy eating (like I’ve stumbled upon) is hardly groundbreaking, and it definitely doesn’t provide all the answers in life. But then, no one ever said that it would. What it does is give me just a little something that makes me different from a lot of other people, and it makes feel generally positive about my life. This seems like a good goal for religions, and if it were the goal of Christianity, I might have been more inclined to just stick with that one to begin with.