When no news is good news

I’ve been abstaining from the news lately. Not that I’ve ever been a news junkie, but for the past week or so I haven’t read or watched any at all. I’d found myself tired of it—the repetitiveness, the irrelevance—and then I read an essay by Rolf Dobelli that convinced me to try giving it up altogether (at least for a while, as an experiment). The guy makes a cogent argument against the Standard American News Diet—one of the key points being that nearly everything you read in the news has no discernible effect on your life. After all, if the effect was discernible, you wouldn’t need the news to tell you about it. 

My news-abstinence became significant early yesterday morning, though. There was a fire at the marina, clearly visible from my apartment, about a mile away across the water. It was only 6:30, and still twilight. I watched the flames and the rising black smoke while I brushed my teeth and buttoned my shirt. It looked like the fire was pretty big.

As I drove in to work I thought about the fire and its relation to my news-abstinence. Obviously, this was a newsworthy event. In only a few minutes I would be at my computer, where I could look up some local “BREAKING NEWS” site and surely get a preliminary, on-the-scene report. And I kind of wanted to. I was curious.

But of course my curiosity had no basis. I don’t sail or own a sailboat, nor do any of my friends/family, nor do I even think very highly of sailing as a pastime (very cliquish, it seems). I knew (as Dobelli’s essay predicts) there was almost certainly nothing in that fire that would affect me. My curiosity was morbid, voyeuristic, and transitory.

So I decided to maintain my celibacy and not look it up online. I decided instead to conduct an observational study. I was the first person in my little work area to arrive that morning, so I figured my two workmates, when they got in half an hour later, wouldn’t know about the fire (not everyone’s home has a kick-ass bay view like mine, heh heh). I wanted to see how they’d react when I brought it up. I know neither one of them sails, and that they’d have as little reason as I did to imagine they’d be affected by the fire.

Only a few minutes after they’d each sat down, I said (nonchalantly), “Hey, did you guys see or hear about the fire at the marina.” One said she’d noticed smoke on her commute, the other wasn’t aware at all. Obviously, since I had only seen it from a distance and hadn’t read about it, I had nothing to offer by way of explanation. “Yeah, I could see it from my apartment, and it looked kind of big,” I think I said.

They immediately wheeled around to their respective computers—in unison, and as if in a deliberate effort to confirm my expectations—and looked it up online. I couldn’t help cracking a wry smile behind their backs. They each found it on a different site, too. The fire—still burning—had made not only local but also regional news. My, the speed of the internet in spreading tidings of disaster.

They shared aloud some of details, and sure enough there was nothing meaningful to any of us. A boathouse had gone up. No one knew why. If anyone was hurt or dead, they didn’t know who. It was still rather hot at the moment. 

So the whole checking-it-out-online, gathering-of-information thing had been a waste of time and attention. Not a huge waste, obviously, but a waste just the same. Imagine how that interaction might have gone if we didn’t have the internet (or other rapid-delivery news channels). The fire is the type of thing I probably would bring up anyway, even if I wasn’t conducting an observational study, just in case my workmates had friends or family they might need to be concerned about. Here’s how I see the web-free version:

Me: “Did you see/hear about the fire?”

Workmates: “No.”

Me: “Looked kinda big.”

Workmates: “Oh. I hope no one’s hurt.” (Maybe get on phones to call loved ones.)

I’m not trying to deride my workmates for turning around to their computers the way they did. Turning to a computer (or pulling out a smartphone) is the instinctual 21st-century response to hearing about anything. Can’t blame anyone for it. But the nature of that response should by itself indicate to us that what we’re responding to isn’t terribly relevant to our lives.

How would you respond if someone told you something that seemed like it might be a cause for your personal concern? If a coworker came in and said there had just been an explosion at the tire factory, and you knew your son/husband/brother was supposed to have just started his shift at the tire factory, would you turn to your computer and try to find a news story about it? Far more likely is that you’d be getting on the phone and/or running out to your car.

My guess is that many people around town turned to their computers over word of this marina fire. And my guess is that it was for them as irrelevant as it was for my workmates and me. It’s funny, since you would expect that if any news were to be relevant, it would be the local news. The truth, though, is that most of the things that genuinely affect us are either mundanities that don’t make the news, or they are emergencies so personally critical that our knowledge of them bypasses news streams altogether. 

I’ve only been avoiding the news for a matter of days, so I can’t confirm if a news-free life is truly better. There may in the future be something seriously important that I—in my book-reading, semi-unplugged world—totally miss out on. Maybe I’ll miss the opportunity to work for some hot new company because I didn’t read about it in a Time magazine profile. Or maybe I’ll lose all my money when I don’t read the CNN Money article about fears of my bank’s becoming insolvent. Or maybe my mother will be shot in the face by a terrorist and I won’t hear about it until she’s already buried.

I’ll be sure to let you know.   

Reading the signs

Now that I’ve spent a decent potion of my life working in a place where I hear about marketing campaigns, branding, web copy, etc. and where I know some of the people directly responsible for those things, I’ve started giving a lot more thought to the specific words that businesses use to attract customers. 

Along those lines, I noticed something yesterday that made me chuckle. I was riding my bike through an area of fairly cheap-looking suburban apartment complexes—the kind that cater to college students and people who started families way too young. One of these places had a sign that looked like this:

NEWPORT

an apartment community

If you had asked me beforehand, I would have said “apartment community” is an oxymoron. Apartment complexes are collections of transient strangers. Usually the feeling between apartment neighbors is one of mutual apathy—and sometimes antipathy.

And sure enough, this Newport place didn’t exhibit outward signs of being any more a community than the apartment complexes surrounding it. When I think of community, I think of people planting a garden together, or lots of kids roughhousing good-naturedly, or—I don’t know—music and dancing or something. Newport had drawn shades and a few cars parked in front.

So I thought the sign was maybe misleading. If this place is a community, I’d hate to see what a non-community looks like.

I had to wonder if any customers are actually influenced by the use of the word “community” here. Are there people who see it and find themselves (consciously or unconsciously) more inclined to consider living there? Do the existing residents drive by that sign and feel reassured in their choice to call Newport home? It seems hard to believe. 

So that leads to the corollary question: who do the proprietors of the complex imagine they’re reaching with this sign? The sign obviously cost some time and money, so I’m sure they gave a bit of thought to how they were going to brand the place. They probably drafted several other slogans, and the choice of “community” was most likely not careless.

They would do better to keep the sign purely factual (e.g., “Newport Apartments”) and spend their time instead just perfecting the design. That more than manipulative word-spinning, I think, is the way to make a sale. 

We all know from our experiences online how important design is in forming customer relationships. We’re unlikely to buy from poorly designed websites. They look like they might be scams. Bad design affects other decisions, too. Would you apply for a job at a company with a really cheap-looking website? I’d be hesitant.

Good design builds customer trust. I trusted Dropbox when I signed up for it six months ago not only because my friends told me about it, but also because the site just looks professional. And although Dropbox does have a slogan (“Simplify your life”), they don’t put it front-and-center on their homepage. The design is the more important part.

So the point is that this Newport place really should have just gone for broke on fonts, spacing, color schemes, and the like. It’s obvious from their use of “community” that they’re trying to set themselves apart from the other apartment complexes. Design would have been the better way to do that, especially since slogans and marketing copy, when so patently false, can backfire. I’m less likely to want to live there, because I find their sign insulting to my intelligence.

If the sign had just looked really, really nice, I might have given them a second thought.

Myths of social plenitude

Sometimes I hear people say they want to move to a bigger city because there would be more people to meet. A town of 80,000 or even 200,000 just isn’t a large enough pool to draw friends from. They want to go somewhere big where they can choose from a wide array of people.

It sounds like a no-brainer. If you have x% chance of meeting your soulmate or your BFF in a town of 100,000, then surely that percentage increases considerably by moving to a city of one million. And even further by moving to a city of 10 million. 

It’s true, of course, that the probability of your soulmate’s existing in a group of 10 million people is 100 times greater than that of their existing in a group of 100,000 people. But that says nothing about your chances of meeting that person.

The populations of modern cities are beyond our practical comprehension. Human beings evolved in bands and tribes, and that’s the group size we’re instinctively accustomed to. More than a couple hundred is tough for us to engage with on a personal level.

Take my relatively small city of 80,000. There is no way I will ever know 80,000 people, even if I dedicated my life to it. Suppose I started tomorrow going door-to-door meeting everyone in my town, writing down their names, taking notes on their lives, making every possible mental exertion to know who these people are. By the time I got to the end (how many years would I have to spend?) I would have forgotten the people I started with, and a substantial portion of the population would have turned over with residents’ comings and goings.

So no matter where you go, the percentage of the total population you meet (and actually remember) is going to remain quite small. That’s just a constraint of our psychology. The people you meet are also probably going to be a fairly narrow demographic slice. Your friends and lovers will probably be focused around some particular location, vocation, or leisure interest. They will be your neighbors, your colleagues, or your fellow yoga class attendees. A big city will mean seeing more faces on the street, but I can’t remember the last time I made a friend doing that.

I learned something about this when I first left home for college. I was excited about the social opportunities that would inevitably come with going to a school of 12,000 people, as opposed to my high school of 2,000. Imagine being able to hand-pick your friends out of such a large group!

I spent my freshman year in a dorm complex of about 600 people living in 12 separate four-story stacks. At the end of that year, I had four real friends. Two of them lived in the same stack as me, one floor down, and the other two lived just a couple stacks over. What an incredible coincidence that out of the entire university population, the four people best-suited to be my friends all happened to live within 90 seconds’ walking distance of me.

I realized that the pool from which I was drawing friends was actually just as small as it had been in high school. The people who lived on the other side of campus, or who didn’t know someone I knew, or with whom I didn’t have any classes—they might as well have not existed. 

It’s a bit different in adult life, since we have more choice about where we live and how we spend our days, but it’s still true that the major commonality of all our relationships is proximity. We make friends with the people who happen to be there. And the people who are “there,” in any real sense, are not going to come from too wide of an area. Uptowners generally don’t meet many downtowners.

There are definitely some towns so small that your social life would benefit from going someplace bigger. The people I’ve known who complain about their small towns don’t live in towns that small, though.

You can test whether your town is truly small by the Grocery Store Test, which works like this: if you moved to the entirely opposite side of your town, would you still shop at the same grocery store?

I use grocery stores in this test because they are a place where everyone goes, and to which few people have a sentimental attachment. If you moved to the opposite side of town, you might still go to the same bar or shop at the same bookstore, because those are “your places.” Most of us don’t care what exact grocery store we go to, though. In my town, the south side co-op is the same as the north side co-op.

So if you move from one side of town to the other and still shop at the same exact store, that means your town is so small it only has one grocery store (or at least only one store good enough to patronize). More to the point, your town is so small that moving to a different part of it doesn’t mean seeing different people.

There are a handful of semi-familiar faces at my grocery store—people who I recognize because they also are regular shoppers at the store. But if I moved out to the north side of town, it’s entirely possible I would never see these semi-familiar faces again. I wouldn’t be shopping there anymore, and the people shopping at my new store may well be people I’ve never seen before. 

A broader way to apply the Grocery Store Test is to consider whether there are many things in your town that can be called “the only one in town.” Even in my smallish city, if you were to ask about yoga classes, golf courses, dance studios, or yacht clubs, the answers would be: more than one, more than one, more than one, more than one. 

And once you have more than one group devoted to a certain interest, you begin approaching the limit of how many people an individual can even consider as potential friends. If you were super devoted to meeting other yoga-ers, you might alternate each week between the west side class and the east side class. But if you tried to alternate among three or four classes, or if those two classes happened to have 50 people each instead of 25, would you really have an easier time meeting people?

One thing that does affect your chances of meeting people in a new city is the type of person who lives there. A certain type of person will find it easier to make friends in San Francisco than in Nashville, and vice versa. Finding a place with a relatively high percentage of people with values similar to your own could make you a lot happier. But the overall size of that place is pretty meaningless as a determiner for how happy you’ll be with the people you actually meet there. 

You get to choose between a city of 100,000 like-minded people and a city of 1,000,000 like-minded people. As far as relationships go, is one really different from the other? 

Machines that think they know everything

My company just got some shiny new microwaves for a couple of our break areas. They’re gigantic and stainless steel and programmable and very 21st-century. They have I suppose as many bells and whistles as a microwave can conceivably have. How’s this for fancy: when the timer runs out and the beep goes off, the little LCD screen says, “Enjoy your meal.” 

Enjoy my meal? My meal, you say? How does this microwave presume to know that I just microwaved a meal? How does it know I didn’t just heat up a snack? Or a beverage? Or how about a plate of bite-size hors d’oeuvres to share with my coworkers—what kind of meal is that, I ask you?

Maybe I microwaved one of those rice-in-a-pouch hot packs that I’m going to use to ease my lumbar pain. I’m not going to be enjoying that meal very much, am I?

Maybe I microwaved a CD to see those weird crack lines develop. Maybe I microwaved a tin can to see if mini lightning bolts would strike. Maybe I’m a disturbed sadist and I microwaved a small live animal. Maybe I microwaved a smaller microwave (these new ones are honestly that big) just to see what would happen.

None of these things are meals.

Maybe I did indeed microwave a plate full of food—roast beef, mashed potatoes, and steamed broccoli—but I did it only to have the pleasure of throwing that hot food out the window. In what sense, then, is that a meal? Maybe I microwaved a frozen Lean Cuisine thing. That shit doesn’t even count as food. Maybe I turned the microwave on with nothing at all inside it, just because I like the sound it makes.

No matter what, it still tells me to enjoy my meal.

Pff. 

Smart-ass microwave.

Pretensions of world domination

I’m going to write once again about something I saw on a minivan around town. I’m not consciously trying to make a theme out of this. It just sort of happened.

What I saw was a bumper sticker saying “Get involved. The world is run by people who show up.” For a moment it seemed to me like a decent sentiment. It’s similar to Woody Allen saying “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” You’ve gotta participate if you’re gonna make it.

There’s a difference between the two, though, if you look closer. The Allen quote is humble and general—it seems to come from his own experience and observations. All he’s talking about is success. The word “success” means many different things to people, and it can be applied to pretty much any activity. No doubt Woody Allen has achieved his fair bit of success, seen other people achieve it, and seen plenty of others fail to achieve it.

Now read the bumper sticker slogan again. “The world is run . . .” it says. When I read this the other day, I had to do a double take to gather the context of this bold statement. The sticker was on the back of a tan minivan parked next to the YMCA in insignificant little Bellingham, WA. 

I had not realized that the people running the world were driving ten-year-old minivans and taking their kids to swim at the Y on Saturday mornings in rainy hamlets of the Pacific Northwest.

Nor do I think the people actually running the world feel much need to advertise their running of the world with clever slogans. They know they’re running the world, and other people know they’re running the world. They probably don’t care much if the guy stopped behind them at the light is or isn’t motivated to greatness by what he reads or doesn’t read on their bumper.

I wondered about the guy who owns that van. (We’ll just assume it’s a guy. It really makes no difference.) It’s certainly possible he’s achieved some kind of Northwest-style success. Maybe he’s the director of an organic farmers cooperative. Maybe he owns his own artisan coffee roasting business. Maybe he works from home as a marketer for sustainable energy initiatives. 

Any one of these is possible, and he may well have achieved his success by “getting involved” and “showing up.” But his ride and its location sure didn’t make me think he’s one of the people running the world. I didn’t get the impression he was even on his way up to running the world or that he’s even acquainted with any people who run the world. So where does he get the idea that he knows what traits world-runners possess, or that he can tell us how to emulate them?

I think it’s a natural human tendency to take the truths we find in our own little corners of life and extrapolate them into world-governing axioms. We’re all guilty of it to some degree. We want to believe that when we succeed it’s because we are following some universal principle of greatness. One guy gets ahead by knocking on doors, and suddenly the world is run by those who show up. Another guy climbs the ladder by keeping his mouth shut, and the world is run by the quiet ones. Yet another guy makes his bread by connecting the right groups of investors and entrepreneurs, and the world is run by the communicators. There’s no end to the grandiose claims we like to make about our knowledge of the world and how it works.

Just don’t put it on a damn sticker.

Liberator and master

I was a bit miffed at losing an hour of my life a couple nights ago when we switched over to Daylight Saving Time. Sure, I was given a free hour a few months ago when we went off it, but I wasn’t thinking much about this balance first thing Sunday morning. I was just thinking that I had woken up to a surprisingly dim 8:30 am and that I didn’t feel as well-rested as I should have for sleeping in until then. 

DST always amuses me insofar as we talk about it like we’re altering reality itself. “Oh, we’re losing an hour tonight,” we say. “Oh, we get an extra hour tonight.” Of course we all know that time itself is a natural phenomenon that doesn’t change one bit. It’s only our convention of measuring it that changes. And yet all of us, like I did one paragraph ago, talk like time is genuinely being added to or subtracted from our lives.

It points up our obvious dependence on timekeeping. DST was first implemented because it was felt that the early sunrises of summer were being wasted. So, shift one hour from the morning to the evening, and now more daylight time can be used. To someone living in a society without timekeeping, this would sound preposterous. The idea of the sunrise coming “earlier” would make no sense to him. Rather, it’s just that the night gets shorter. The sun makes its own time. 

But to us, the sunrise does come earlier. We organize our entire lives around clocks, and we’re not going to change our standard bedtimes and waketimes because of anything the sun is doing. The workday starts at 8:00 whether it’s been light at that point for hours or for minutes. If DST wasn’t used, you could still independently maximize your summer daylight hours by getting up with the sun at 5:00, but the entire clock-based infrastructure of modern life would be well behind you. You would be pretty limited in how you could use that extra daylight. It’s easier if everyone just agrees to pretend for a while that the sunrise is happening closer to the beginning of our workday.

So from that perspective, DST makes sense. It’s the same as if we all decided to get up one hour earlier. Nothing so crazy about that. And yet most of us still regard the biannual clock-shift as a nuisance. If you use any timepiece that isn’t connected to the infowebs you have to remember to change it, the shift fucks up your sleep, you feel like some part of your life is out of your control.

I think we all innately know we should be living our lives in rhythm with the sun. Waking by alarm in the dark is painful. Our bodies sense that the time on the clock is arbitrary. Living by the sun is no longer an option, though, unless you want to be an unemployed eccentric. You might be friendless, too. Ever try making plans with someone to meet for lunch “when the sun is at its zenith?” It doesn’t work so well.

It’s for basically this reason that Daniel Boorstin (in The Discoverers) says the clock is one of the most important innovations of human history. Before human societies had accurate timekeeping conventions, it was impossible to make good appointments. You might tell someone to visit you when the shadows were such-and-such length, but with such imprecise measures you might be waiting for your guest for a long time. Only when people had precise, mutually agreed-upon metrics could they make efficient use of the day.

Once this was the case, business flourished. A medicine man (or whatever) could pack in twice as many patients since he wouldn’t have to wait for anyone’s interpretation of the angle of the sun to match his own. That’s a contrived example, but you get the point. Imagine trying to get anything done (with other people, that is, and people not living in close quarters with you) without resorting to specified hours and minutes. You could still accomplish useful things, but much time would end up wasted.

It’s likely that clocks (that is, of the non-sundial variety) crept into human societies at a fairly slow rate. But imagine if they exploded onto the scene the way things like smartphones do today. In five years, they go from being nowhere to being everywhere. 

If this was how it happened, I’d guess the people to first use clocks would see them as the most liberating thing ever. They would suddenly be able to do so much more. It would be like a veil had been lifted from their eyes. Maybe they even felt this way despite the slow introduction of the clock. I’m sure the tinkerers developing early timepieces saw the many possibilities their work would open up, much like technology developers today.

But cut now to the present. I don’t think many of us feel liberated by our clock-centered culture or excited by our ability to schedule the day. If anything, people complain of being over-scheduled. Living by the clock means dealing with unnatural, government-mandated time shifts twice a year. It means feeling stressed and guilty for being late. It rarely feels like fun.

Clocks do allow us to organize ourselves to do great things, and we wouldn’t have many of modern society’s achievements without them, but I think most of us on a personal level would feel more liberated by a return to clock-free, sun-based living. 

It goes to show how often the things that at first seem to free us end up enslaving us. Take email, for example. It went from being a free and instant way of sending a letter (wow!) to being a nightmarish chore that some people spend their entire damn workday wading through. 

Humans are by nature competitive, so we try to wring everything that we can out of new technology. Some of these technologies (like clocks and the internet) entail major shifts in how people live. So as users compete to wring more use out of a technology, life becomes warped around the technology to the point that we feel it’s using us rather than the other way around. What was once beneficial is now just burdensome. But maybe that’s nothing to lose sleep over. 

Highly suggestible drinkers

In the Co-op parking lot today I saw a minivan with a couple of big door magnets advertising Kangen water. “Change your water. Change your life,” they said. I encountered this stuff for the first time last summer, when I stopped in for a little while at a hippie cooperative house down the street.

Kangen water comes from special purification machines that you hook up to your tap. The machine evidently does something to “ionize” the water and make the pH more basic. The water we usually drink, the hippies told me, is too acidic. The dude who had actually purchased the machine and brought it to share with his co-op buddies also said something about the machine making the water molecules smaller (and thus easier to swallow?). 

Sellers of Kangen machines make all sorts of attention-grabbing health claims about their special water. Joint health, immune support, detoxification, anti-cancer, anti-aging, flatulence control—the usual litany. All the hippies assured me it was legitimate. The general consensus was something like, “Yeah, I definitely feel a difference when I drink it.”

A quick google of “Kangen water,” though, will reveal these health claims to be—at best—questionable. The websites are filled with pseudoscientific gobbledy-gook and meaningless graphics. Kangen sellers basically claim that water—that most essential ingredient for life as we know it—is incorrectly structured for our bodies. They don’t just claim that common tap water has junk in it that should be filtered out. Water in general, they say, can be improved upon. How it happened that life got so far on inferior product isn’t mentioned.

The door magnet I saw today also provided this web address: www.drinkkangen.com. Looks like honest business to me. And here’s the real kicker: Kangen machines cost on average three to four thousand dollars.

Yeah. Th-th-th-thousand.

That anyone with wits enough to save that kind of money could be taken in by such obvious snake oil is a genuine marvel. Or maybe it just underscores the ease of getting a credit card in this country. These charlatans must be making sales, though, because some of the sites clearly took a fair amount of time and energy (but not much intellect) to create.

And like I said, I saw living proof of the Kangen sellers’ success just a few blocks down the street. The funny part of it is that the guys drinking it all claimed the water really had an effect. I don’t doubt they believed it. I’ll bet the owner of the minivan I saw today genuinely believes it, too. And they might truly feel something.

But whatever they feel when they drink this miracle water isn’t coming from the water, it’s coming from their minds. It’s just the power of suggestion. They read this falsely esoteric marketing copy telling them the water will give them health and energy, and then when they drink it they work themselves up into feeling healthier and more energetic. They feel it because they want to feel it. 

The magnet I saw today also said, “Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired?” Who wouldn’t want to have that problem solved, and who wouldn’t want to believe it could be done with just a little machine that sits on the countertop? It’s almost like modern-day idolatry. People pray to the Kangen machine, and somehow it does seem to actually make things better.

Our thoughts and emotions are so closely linked to how we feel physically that it’s basically impossible to identify the physiological effect of any one food, drink, vitamin, etc. People will swear that drinking kombucha eliminated their sinus issues, or that flaxseed oil in the evening makes it easier to get up in the morning, or that goji berries make it easier to breathe, but it’s unlikely they would claim these things had they been given these foods with no foreknowledge of their supposed benefits. 

I did in fact read just this afternoon a comment from a guy on a health blog swearing that regular kombucha keeps his sinuses clear (after years of problems). Do you think that if he had no idea what kombucha was and you slipped him a regular dose of it mixed in with orange juice that he would feel any difference? Like, “Oh my god, how is it that my sinuses are staying so fucking clear?” I doubt it.

I know from my own experience that the good feeling I get from making healthy choices is difficult to parse into intellectual and physical components. A healthy dinner of, say, a salmon salad does indeed feel good in my body, but there’s also a good feeling from knowing that I made a better choice than if I had eaten a burger and fries, like all those other American schlubs. I feel smart, and a bit proud, and those feelings contribute to the energy I have when I go for an after-dinner bike ride or whatever.

So when I say to someone, “I feel good because I had fish and vegetables for dinner,” I can’t claim that I feel good just because of the magic omega-3s or beta-carotene. I think those things are good to have in your diet (and there’s certainly more genuine science supporting them than there is for Kangen water), but I know that much of what I feel comes from reading health and fitness blogs that tell me I should feel good for eating those things. 

So even on the level of salmon and vegetables versus burger and fries it’s hard to pull out the placebo effect. When you get down to the hyper-specific level of trying to determine the effects of different types of salmon or different growing methods for a certain vegetable (which many people do) it becomes even harder. Are minute changes in a vegetable’s chemistry truly noticeable?

There seems to be good science backing up the health benefits of grass-fed beef, for example. But do I feel a difference eating grass-fed beef regularly versus the conventional stuff? I’m not sure. The health benefits (if true) are only observable over decades. So if I feel a difference on a day-by-day basis, it’s probably more mental than physical.

And yet you could still probably get some people to pay top dollar for grass-fed beef even without presenting credible science supporting it. You could just give it a snappy slogan like “Change your steak. Change your life,” and people would buy it. Tell them a grass-fed steak will make them feel better instantly, and you’d have people saying, “Yeah, I definitely feel a difference.” 

I’ve never seen a seller or proponent of grass-fed beef make any New-Agey, quick-fix health claims like this. They tend to be very moderate in their approach. I’m just trying to point out that the power of suggestion is very powerful indeed. It can even convince people that ionized water is the cure for the common cold. 

It’s sad to see marketers so shamelessly exploiting people’s suggestibility. But I guess it’s also kind of funny to watch the hippies take the bait.

The mathematics of teamwork

I am sick of sitting through meetings and being forced to work on things in groups. In the past couple of days I’ve come up with an airtight mathematical formula to determine the probability of a meeting being an effective use of time:

P = 100 * (1/2)^(n-1)

where P is the probability (as a per cent) of a meeting (or team project) being effective, and n is the number of people involved in said meeting or team project. 

So a meeting of two people has a 50% chance of being effective. That sounds about right, doesn’t it? You sit down with one other person, and it could go either way, really. It depends on the nature of the project, it depends on the two people and their chemistry (or lack thereof), it depends on the time of day and the weather. But generally when I sit down to talk with just one other person, I say to myself, “Well, maybe this will be a waste of my time and maybe it won’t. 50-50.”

As soon as you start adding beyond one other person, though, your chances of effectiveness plummet exponentially. Each additional person cuts the probability in half. A meeting of 5 or 6 people still has a slim chance of being worthwhile, but once you get a meeting of 8 or more (which I had just yesterday), you’re looking at probabilities of effectiveness below 1%.

What does this irrefutable mathematical fact say about our cherished principles of the democratic workplace? Well, it says what we all knew all along, which is that those cherished principles are a damned lie. Most problems are best solved in solitude. Groups of people suck at actually getting things done. 

A group composed of people who have all been working hard in solitude might (might) come together at the end of everyone’s individual efforts to make something great. But a group of people trying to decide shit around a conference table will rarely do anything.

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Postscript: An implication of my formula is that a meeting of one (a solo project) has a 100% chance of being an effective use of time. Obviously that isn’t true, since solo projects frequently fail. But then, that might be taking the mathematics too literally.

Post-postscript: Another implication is that a meeting of zero (guess that means everyone stays in bed that day) has a 200% chance of being an effective use of time. I don’t know what conclusion to draw from that.

The sit-and-stare

This afternoon I had a nice sit-and-stare. That’s where I sit on my couch and stare out my window. No music. Just staring. A snack or a drink might be involved, but not always. I try to just look out the window and let that be enough for me. It helps that I have an expansive view these days. Still, I would try to get in a good sit-and-stare once in a while even when I lived in a place that looked onto a boring neighborhood street.

I think the sit-and-stare is something people don’t do enough of—not adults, anyway, and not in this culture. We feel pretty uncomfortable when we’re not distracting ourselves with work, entertainment, or socializing. We grow older and forget the art of daydreaming. An extended period of unproductive observation of the world makes us feel either bored or guilty.

I know we feel this way because it’s exactly how I felt this afternoon. I hadn’t done a proper sit-and-stare for a while, and if I go too long without doing one I forget that it’s actually a good thing. I didn’t really plan my sit-and-stare this afternoon so much as I just let it happen. I was at a loss for what to do next. I had taken care of the chores and preparations for the coming work week, I had gone for an hour-long bike ride, I had read a bit of my book, I had checked my email, I didn’t care to try getting together with anyone, I was fed, watered, tea-ed, bathed, and otherwise satisfied in my immediate physiological needs.

So I sat down feeling anxious about finding something more to occupy myself with. The standard 21st-century solution to this problem is to spend some time mindlessly clicking through garbage on the internet. I can’t claim I never employ this solution, but I’m happy with myself whenever I manage to avoid it. To do so I have to do like recovering addicts  when they remind themselves that, no, that hit of dope ain’t gonna make me feel good, it’s gonna make me feel bad. I just have to remind myself that there isn’t a fucking thing on that internet that I truly want to look at right now.

I managed to avoid the distraction this time and sit in my nothingness. For the first few minutes I felt restless, but then I started actually paying attention to what was outside my window. I was reassured in my indolence by the sight of two gulls on the chimney of a house across the street. They were doing exactly what I was doing—sitting and staring. They were hunkered down against the wind and cold, but they looked unbothered to be doing anything other than exactly what they were doing at that very moment.

I could only assume they had taken care of the major gull business of the day. Any necessary food-finding, nest-building, and crow-fighting were out of the way, so they were free to just be. They didn’t engage in any bird small talk, and they didn’t seem to notice the lack of entertainment. 

Animals are better than humans at the sit-and-stare. They don’t trouble themselves with “keeping busy” when it isn’t necessary. It’s an admirable quality. I understand that some human cultures do a better job of following the animal example. I’ve read accounts of Westerners living with indigenous tribespeople and being frustrated by the way the tribespeople would “pay visits”: they’d sit silently in their host’s house (maybe smoking, maybe sipping tea) for 45 minutes, then say, “Well, we must go,” and walk out the door. Somewhere in Western civilization a screw came loose that prevents us from being so comfortable in our elemental nature like that.

I don’t know what I really get out of the sit-and-stare. I suppose one thing, almost involuntarily, is ideas—but not useful ideas like the kind you can get money off of, only useless ideas like the kind that generate blog posts. There’s something good in the sit-and-stare, though. Life feels more confusing when I don’t put forth the effort to do nothing. 

A bit of nothing reconnects me (in a not at all cool or sexy way) with a certain animal part of myself. And if something can get me closer to being like an animal—doin my business and not givin a fuck—I’ll take it.