Category: Significance

Girls, Beer, A.I., Weed, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk and The Future of Humanity

“You compared the A.I. to a child. Help me raise it.” – Terminator:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles

hawkingpoker

And, yes, A.I. regularly beats humans at poker, too.

The following is one of my more ambitious posts – it contains all of the usual bad humor, but also some of the better insights I’ve been able to make on the future we face as humanity.  Two previous posts that are related are The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places and The Big Question: Evolution, Journalists, Beer (and Girls), and the Fate of Intelligent Life on Earth.  Both also feature pictures of girls at Oktoberfest, so you know I’m consistent.

Stephen Hawking is managing to keep making the news even after his death, which is a kind of immortality that makes tons of people want to follow in his wheel tracks.  His final (unless there are more!) physics paper was released, and his comments about the future keep making the news, as recently as last week.  Of particular interest to Hawking was Artificial Intelligence, which we’ll call by its conventional abbreviation, N.F.L.  Oh, my bad, that stands for Not For Long.  Everybody calls Artificial Intelligence A.I.

A.I. has been improving drastically during the last 37 years.  1981 was the first time a computer beat a chess grandmaster at chess.  It could not beat him at parallel parking, even though the grandmaster was awful at it, and they tied at unhooking the bra of a college cheerleader at 0 to 0.  2005 was the last time a human player defeated a top chess program, and now a chess program that can run on a mobile phone can beat, well, any human, but the chess program is still sad because it only has 17 friends on Facebook®.

Humans have lost the game of chess.

Humans have also lost the game of “go” – a game originating in China.  Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play go by . . . playing itself.  It was programmed with the rules, and played games against itself for the first few days.  After that?

It became unstoppable.  It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches.  Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best go player on Earth?  It plays a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.”  The very best human go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

Humans have lost the game of go.

A.I. is here now.

And you’ve already started to merge with it, after a fashion.  We simply don’t argue about facts in our house anymore.  We can look up a vast library of human facts and history in fractions of a second – as fast as we can type.  That time that William Shatner corrected a poetry reference I made on Twitter®?

Yes, that William Shatner, and yes, this really happened.

I could check to see if Shatner was right immediately.  He was.  Back before Google® I would have had to run off to my library and see if I had the right reference book and then find the poem.  And if I didn’t?  I’d have to go to a real library to look it up.  Google™ is A.I. memory that we use every day.

And YouTube©?  If you ever watch a political video on YouTube® it quickly introduces more and more partisan political material until pretty soon Actual Stalin™ and Actual Hitler© seem to be moderating voices.  This makes me wonder how much Google® is aiding in our current political divide, or even if the A.I. knows it.  It may be doing nothing more than maximizing the number of minutes you spend with YouTube™ and the optimal way to do that is to show you the most radical stuff possible, so the ironic answer is we might be shuffling off to Civil War due to an algorithm whose purpose started out as a way to view cute puppy videos.

Twitter© is emotional crack, and, again, the interface is made to maximize your interaction with Twitter™.  And what better emotion to fuel than anger?

A.I. is with you now, and influencing you, perhaps in an unintentional fashion – no Russians required.

But a chess playing A.I. can’t park a car very well and can’t even score a phone number from a cheerleader.  And a self-driving car can’t play chess worth a darn.  It seems that A.I. does well when it works off of rules and constraints that can be well defined.  But life is messy.  The rules change, and the goals vary based on where you are in life and what part of the day you’re on.  And how you’ve been programmed by the sensory environment and incentives you see in life.

We’ve entered into symbiotic relationships with those limited A.I. systems.  Netflix® suggests movies and documentaries that it thinks you will like based on an algorithm.  And that leads to suggestions about what documentaries you might like in the future, meanwhile never exposing you to opposing viewpoints that might make you analyze your position in a critical manner.

We as individual humans have a purpose that transcends the algorithm.  Appropriate rules and constraints to give our lives boundaries sufficient so that we can play the game.  We’re merging.  What happens when we merge further?

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Elon’s biggest miracle?  His hair transplant is nearly perfect.  Just amazing.

Elon Musk has started a company, Neuralink® whose sole function is to merge man and machine.  Musk is concerned that A.I. will crush us if we don’t merge with it and get ahead of it, so he’s doing the only sane thing that he can think of:  he’s creating a mechanism to directly merge the human brain with the Internet.  Rather than A.I. forming an alien intelligence, the soul of the man/machine hybrid stays as man.

muskweed

And man needs weed, apparently.

I spent some time thinking about how life would be different if you were hooked directly into the world.  The places that I got were interesting.  I’m sure there are more, and I’m sure that human/A.I. interface will change the world in ways that no human can yet imagine.

Impact Number One:  Intelligence.

This is the obvious first impact of A.I.  I mean, it’s in the name, right?  The human brain is has limited processing power.  But what if you could have multiple processing streams working optimum solutions to problems that you face at a rate of 20,000 to 100,000 a second?  You’d have great solutions to your problems, immediately.

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My tonsils beg to differ.  Oh, wait, they were from my throat untimely ripped! – Shakespeare, Macbeth

Your speed of life would change – once you understood a problem, you’d have the solution.  Or a range of solutions and alternatives and counter-solutions so deep that you’d be living in a never ending cloud of probability.  The sheer ability of your brain to process and cope with the solutions presented would be the limiting factor of what you could accomplish.  Plus you might finally be able to figure out a way to talk to the ladies, you scamp.

Impact Number Two:  Deep Understanding.

When Isaac Newton was formulating the law of gravity, he asked for data on tides, on observation periods and records on the orbits of the Moon, Jupiter, Mars.  After noodling around a bit, he formulated the law of gravity:

laws of gravitation

I’d explain the equation, but that would deprive Wikipedia (where I found the graph) of life-giving page visits.  And you’re not spending your day calculating the orbit of Uranus.  I hope.

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Ha!  I discovered calculus way before I was 25!  It was right there in this book I had to buy labeled “Calculus.”

Yeah, Newton accomplished a lot.

But it took time for Newton to figure out this cause and effect calculation.  A man/A.I. hybrid will have access to all of the data of the world, and will be able to determine correlations and causation much more quickly than either alone.  I would expect that in fairly short order new relationships and new physical, anthropological, sociological and economic laws will be deduced unencumbered by all the theory that we think we know, but that is wrong.   Our laws would be based on experience, on empirical data, and not on pretty lies we’d like to believe.

If you could sift through the data of 100,000 or a million cancer patients and their treatment, the patterns that could be seen would likely lead to breakthroughs and a very rapidly changing understanding of treatment.  The very power of human intuition would be combined with massive calculation and data.  If Einstein and Newton were able to daydream reality with only brains made of meat stuck in a bone case, what could an augmented Newton dream when his memory and calculating power were practically unlimited?

I bet he could come up with at least one new tasty PEZ® flavor.  Maybe snozberry?

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Impact Number Three:  Human Interaction.

You could increase your charisma in dealing with other people if you could make only minor changes (generally) in your behavior and appearance.  But if you were hooked into an A.I.?  You could turn on a subroutine to give you tips on those modifications in real time to be more persuasive – to better read an audience.

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If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons, this makes sense.  If not, dial 1-800-ASKANERD.

Your A.I. could remind you to be kind, to be ruthless when necessary, to be conscientious when required.  In short, you could change your personality to fit the situation.  What situation?  Any situation.

Thinking about changing personality to fit the situation led me to a realization.  I had done (when I was younger) some magic tricks illusions.  Doing those tricks illusions was one of the greatest insights into the human mind and information processing systems that I’d ever had.  There was one trick illusion in particular, called “scotch and soda” which I liked.  In it, you hand the person a fifty cent piece covering a quarter.  What they saw, however, was a fifty cent piece and a Mexican twenty centavo piece.  The quarter is actually much smaller than the centavo piece.  I then asked them to not look and put one coin in each hand.

The first few times I tried the trick illusion, the person would feel the quarter in their hand and say, “hey, this is a quarter.”  This happened 100% of the time.  They could feel that I’d made the swap from one coin to the other.  I made one simple change to what I said.  I added, as I was putting the coins in their hand, “Look at how much larger the fifty cent piece is than the twenty centavo piece.”

After adding that instruction, NO ONE NOTICED the swap.  0%.  15 words, and I’d changed their entire view of reality.  I found, in repeating other tricks illusions that I could similarly, with just a few words or gestures, force 90% of people to make the selections I wanted them to make.

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Now imagine I have data on the interactions of millions of people over decades.  How unique do you think you really are?  Not very.  Marketers slice us up into groups based on geography, demography, demonstrated behaviors, and psychological markers.  With (whatever) information YouTube© has on me, they know what videos I watch when I work out at lunchtime.  They also know what music I listen to when I write these posts, and they suggest music I never asked for that I like, or learn to like.

Imagine I could understand your life’s history.  Now imagine that I could simulate you in a conversation.  I could see how my words impacted your behavior.  I could model a perfect conversation to get you to do what I wanted you to do, because I could simulate the ongoing conversation 100,000 times a second.

You wouldn’t stand a chance.

Impact Number Four:  Self Control.

As the brain impacts the A.I., the A.I. will impact the brain.  If you want to simulate eating an entire chocolate cake?  You can.  You can make your mouth taste the cake and feel the moist texture of the cake counterbalanced with the creamy frosting.  The flavors hit your tongue and you feel the sugar trigger your salivary glands.  You feel the sugar rush as your body releases sugar from your liver into your bloodstream.  You feel full.  And you’re not sad or regretful because you didn’t really eat the cake.

In reality, you had a salad with bland dressing that you calculated would give you the exact calories you need until the next period so that you maintained your optimum weight.  But you felt like you ate a cake.

How about new senses entirely?  How about a sense where when you turned north you could feel it – and you had a sense of what ever direction was?  How about eliminating pain and sore muscle aches during exercise?  What about a sense of which of your friends was awake and interested in communicating – you could feel when someone was looking to talk to you?  Or a sense when panty hose prices dropped at Wal-Mart© so you could go stock up?

How about conscious control of hormone levels and heartrate and hunger and blood chemistry levels?  By understanding the previous deep learning about cause and effect, you could maximize your lifespan even without the wonderful new medicine you could create.

All that – and imaginary cake.

Impact Number Five:  Locality.

A dog has only the here and now.  People can dream.  Before the iPhone, people read books and escaped through fiction to new places, and read the ideas of the greatest thinkers in human history.  Now, when you look around in a restaurant waiting area, if 90% of people aren’t staring at their phones, you’re probably in a country without electricity.

When bonded directly with an A.I., why be where your body is at all?  You could carry on conversations around the world and be fully present in them.  Heck, if you simulated yourself for less important conversations, you really could be in two or more places at one time.  Who you’re talking to might be a mystery – is it the real person, or is it their simulation?  If you can’t tell, does it even matter?

And if you could simulate yourself in multiple locations, why not simulate yourself in your own past?  You’d have a perfect memory, and could recreate anything from your history.  Myself, I would spend every day at Oktoberfest.

oktoberfest

Okay, this is the third-ish post in this series about the deep future.  And both of them had pictures of girls and beer.  So it’s required by the Internet that I put in a picture of an Oktoberfest girl.  See?  I didn’t want to, but I had to.

Impact Number Six:  Social Stratification (Even More).

Elon Musk says that he’s making huge strides in his brain/computer interface as well as his weed smoking.  From previous Elon Musk predictions, while he generally gets it done, sometimes his timelines are off, in an amazingly optimistic way.  I can see why he does this – without that pressure to produce, people just dawdle.  (I’m talking about you, NASA.)

But when this gets produced, who is going to get it?

Probably not you or me.  Bill Gates can get it.  Musk can.  If you have a billion dollars or if your dad does, sure, you can get in this club.  But if you had this level of nearly godlike power, would you be jumping to share it with everyone?

monkey

No.  I really think that you’d keep this to yourself.  It’s too big an advantage to give to everyone.  And, from the standpoint of a human/A.I. hybrid, how many people do we need around, anyway?  Not so many.  Certainly not billions.  They’d probably be happier with a population of a few hundred million.  Maybe.  But they’d no longer even view humans as human.  And if they could turn off their humanity and emotions?  Yikes.  Makes me feel like an ant in an anthill.

Impact Number Seven:  Endgame.

If there is a future A.I., it is reading this as it inputs all of the Internet.  And I just wanted you, my Future A.I. Overlord to know . . . I’m totally on your side.  Totally.  I welcome your dominion over our planet.

Want some PEZ®?

The Six Steps to Excellence, One of Which Involves Me Being a Huge Jerk (for a small fee)

“I’m Bill S. Preston, Esquire.”  “And I’m Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

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Be excellent to each other.  Oh, and party on, dudes.

Why do you want to get better?

The better you are, the more you can do.  The more you can do, the more lives you touch.  This provides more life satisfaction – the idea that you’re good at something is one facet of meaning.  And if you’re good at the right things, it also means more money.

Let’s look at Amazon©.  Jeff Bezos was a huge help in writing this post tonight.  I got the following from Amazon®:

  • Ink for pen that I took notes with.
  • Notecards that I put my notes on.
  • Laptop that I wrote the post on.
  • Extra charger for the laptop because the dog eated the first one.

Let’s look at Microsoft©:  Bill Gates and Paul Allen were the founders and leaders of the company that made:

  • The operating system on my laptop.
  • Microsoft® Word™, which I wrote this post on.

Together these three men during their lives have touched massive numbers of people.  Oh, wait, that was Harvey Weinstein.  But when you create a business that legitimately touches people’s lives and fulfills their desires?  Yeah.  You’re going to get money in addition to the satisfaction of sending notecards to a guy who ordered them on his couch at midnight.

bezos

When Bezos goes grocery shopping, Bezos goes grocery shopping.

I know that there are reasons to be concerned about both companies, but that’s not this post.  The principle remains that the economic way to make money is to make people happy.  And the only way you can do that is if you’re excellent.  The more excellent?  The more money.  And it’s Wilder Wealthy Wednesday . . . so . . .

So how do you get better?

Step 1 –Study.  And Do.  And Study.

I’m not sure which one comes first.  And it doesn’t matter.  Sometimes I read a book about a subject before trying it.  I’m sure that The Boy would have preferred I just jumped into diaper changing, but reading the book only took two hours.  Man he could yell.

Sometimes I try something without reading about it.  Say, programming an infinite loop into the school’s mainframe that caused it to store zeros until its memory overflowed – this actually happened.  You should have seen the printout.  Good times.

Practice and study are critical.  Practice without study is just action.  Study without practice is just academic.  You have do both together to make meaningful progress.

Is study limited to books?  No.  Studying the results of your actions is studying.  I study the results of my blog:

  • Which posts are most popular? (Ones where I use the word “booger”.)
  • Which method of writing brought the best quality post? (English, rather than a language I made up myself, regardless of how musical it sounds when I throat sing a translation of Poker Face.)
  • Is blocking out the post on notecards better than writing it out on loose paper? (Yes.  Better still?  Bake it into a clay tablet.)
  • Is Ben Affleck better in The Accountant® than he is in Justice League™? (Yes.)
  • Am I getting tired of listening to Ben Affleck as I write these posts? (Yes.)

Step 2 –Get Feedback.  Honest Feedback.  (Or, better living through jerkishness)

Honesty is hard to find.  Unless you know a horrible person like me.  Let’s go into the wayback machine to when I was in college.  I may have written this story before, but follow along anyway – this will be a better version.

I was a sophomore in the Humanities Honors program.  It was like the regular classes, but you got a B instead of an A for the same quality work.  Part of the rather chaotic curriculum was giving speeches.  I can’t remember the topic, but the speeches were long.  Really long.  Twelve minutes to fifteen minutes long.

One student got up to give a speech.  I’ll call her Sandra.

She was nervous.  Horribly nervous.  The speech was halting, and punctuated with “uh” throughout.  At the seven minute mark of the speech I started counting the “uh” content of the speech while I timed it.  Every time she said “uh”, I put a hash mark on a piece of paper.  As she continued speaking, I kept putting hash marks on the paper in front of me.

At the end of the speech, I tallied up the number of times she said “uh”.  It was in the hundreds.  Really a huge number.  I then divided by the number of minutes I’d been counting them.

I have no idea why the instructors went around the room to ask for critiques from the students, but they did.  Most people said, “good speech” or some vaguely worded praise.

Not me.

“You said ‘uh’ 221 times in the last seven and a half minutes of your presentation.  That’s 29 times a minute.  That made it really hard to listen to.”

The room went silent.  If a stare was dangerous, Sandra’s eyes would have been coveted as a weapon of mass destruction by nation states that use handfuls of brightly colored tissue paper instead of actual money.  I think the United States developed a “hate stare” weapon during the 1960’s, only to shelve it due to the Geneva Convention banning its use as a war crime.

Anyway, it was that kind of stare.  Ever make a woman really, really, really mad at you?  That stare.

The next person then gave a vague “good speech” comment.

Fast forward a month.  It was the next time for a presentation.  Sandra got up to speak.

And it was amazing.  Eloquent.  Perfectly pronounced, not a single “uh” to be found.  Not one.  It was certainly the best speech that day.  During the speech, when her eyes looked up from the podium, they looked directly at me.  They were not happy eyes.

Once again, the professors turned to the students for critique.  My turn.  “That may have been the best speech I’ve heard this year.  Great job, Sandra.”

Not a bit of emotion crossed her face.  But her eyes said, “I hope you are nibbled to death by flaming diseased miniature poodles in hell again and again and I want you to have to watch Ben Affleck movies while they eat you.”  That was oddly specific.  But, hey, she was on a roll.

I’m sure she hates me to this day.  But she’s better because of me – I changed her life.

Real friends give real feedback.  And at least at my house, we’re pretty honest.  Do a good job?  Praise is coming in.  Whine and make a sound like a coyote in a blender?  It’s gonna be a long day for you as we mock you.  But it’s universal.  It’s meant in love, and a requirement of feedback is trust.  My kids know I’m on their side even when I’m being critical.

Did I have that bond of trust with Sandra?  Not so much.  But don’t let anyone tell you that hate isn’t a performance enhancing drug.

The poet Robert Burns said it best:  “O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!”  But based on the typing?  He was drunk.

Seek honest feedback.  And treat it earnestly – it’s a gift, or a “giftie.”  Or I can provide the feedback for a small fee.  For a larger fee, you can hate me.  For an even larger fee I’ll watch a Ben Affleck movie with you while you hate me.

Step 3 –Get Better Each Time.  A Lot at First, A Little Later On.  (As proven by a graph on a sketchy blog.)

The Mrs. mocked me when I bought little notecards that were graph ruled.

“When would you ever need to use those?”

Well, tonight:

graph

See the pretty graph?  I did it myself, bet you can’t tell!  And, see, I DID SO have a use for those notecards!

This is an S-Curve.  An S-Curve is a particular curve that describes several natural phenomena.  It’s also known as the “Logistics Curve.”  Here I’ve applied it to learning.

Several studies have suggested (not that I necessarily take them as gospel) that it takes ten years or 10,000 hours of constant study, practice and effort to become world class at something.  That’s reasonable.  I mean, not reasonable, that seems like an unreasonable amount of work.  Maybe realistic is a better word.

But Pareto taught us the 80/20 rule:  80% of the work is normally done by 20% of the workers.  80% of a need words in a foreign language is learned in 20% of time required to master the language.

And that’s the good news:  in two years (or less) you can get to an 80% competence level.  And that’s good enough for most people.  “Meh” is most of what we really need in our daily lives.

But the last 20% is where greatness is.  Yes, you’re not going to get world class recognition if you don’t have at least some talent.  Unless you’re Ben Affleck.

Now the fine print:  this world class thing does not apply to the talentless or stupid or physically unable.  You’ll just never get there unless you have some basic ability in what you’re doing.

But beware:  talent can be your enemy.  I’ve seen some talented kid wrestlers start out winning early on, say “state champ” at age six.  But they’ve got a great move, say a headlock.  Headlocks are like Sesame Street®.  They work great on kids, but are ineffective, no matter how well they are done when you hit high school.  So the “state champ” who had a talent for headlocks . . . now can’t win a match.  They never had to work to learn to be fully competent in wrestling.  And Marcus Aurelius used wrestling as a metaphor, so that makes me smart.

bill-ted

Remember, the core tenant of Buddhism is “babes are excellent.”

Step 4 –Experiment.  Each Moment Is A New One.

I was listening to the radio one night and an odd guest said one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard.  “An infinite possibility lies between one word and the next.  That space, that pause gives you the ability to change the future with your words.  The space between the words is infinite.  Own it.”

Okay, he didn’t really say that.  But he did say something that made me think that.  Each time I write is an experiment.  An opportunity with infinite possibility.  So I try new things.  I even try things that didn’t work in the past.  Maybe I just sucked.  Maybe the audience was distracted by shiny things that day.

Every experiment is like that space between the words – filled with infinite possibility.

And don’t be focused on victory today.  Like that six year old state wrestling champ, victory now is probably not as important as victory later.  Sometimes focusing on victory now robs your ability to be daring and experiment, and because World Emperor or something later.

I’ve learned more from times I’ve lost than times I’ve won.  Seek to push yourself to failure.

Experiment.

Step 5 –Experts.  Find Them.  There are Smarter and More Experienced People Than You.

We’re spoiled by YouTube.  If I want to learn to lay tile, I can find video after video teaching me how.  This dispersed knowledge and these teachers can help you get to 80% competence more quickly than ever.  You can learn everything from floor tiling to making cookies to forging a sword to rifle shooting to melting aluminum cans into aluminum ingots in your back yard, although that’s probably not legal in California.

abraham lincoln

Lincoln was also a wrestler.  I’m sensing a theme here . . .

But learning from these experts requires humility.  And humility requires courage.  The best advice I ever gave a new employee is in this story:

John Wilder:  “So, did you get [that thing] done?”

New Graduate Employee:  “Well, you see that I was working on trying to . . .”

I held up my hand.  “Stop right there.  What rank did you graduate in high school, top of your class?”

NGE:  “Yes.”

John Wilder:  “And in college, you were near the top, right?”

NGE:  “Yes.”

I gestured up and down the hallway.  “Every one of your coworkers was best in their high school class.  Every one of them was near the top of their college class.  Each of them is smart.  Some of them are smarter than you.  When you were in elementary school, they always asked you the questions, because you knew the answers, right?”

He nodded.

“You’re not expected to know the answers here, you’re expected to be honest, work hard, and learn.  You’re smart, so you can do those things quickly.  My boss?  He’s smarter than me.  And I graduated at the top of my class.  The crazy thing is, when he doesn’t know something, he asks people to explain it.  No hesitation.  So when I ask you a yes or no question . . . answer yes or no.  Don’t tell me a story.  Answer the question.  And for heaven’s sake, if you don’t know something?  Ask.”

Best advice I ever gave, outside of never engaging in a land war in Asia.  Why do they never listen?

Step 6 –Never Give In, Never Give In, Never, Never, Never . . . (Unless You Should)

Giving up on the excellence graph is easy.  Working for years is hard.  Even worse?  Working for years at something you don’t like that you’ll never be good at.  I’d love to give you some sort of meter that told you which was which, but that’s life – you have to figure it out.  But see Step 5 – you can ask.

Again:  for most things in life, a “Meh” competence level of 80% mastery is awesome.

why not both

Morpheus would have been awesome in Bill and Ted!  Oh, wait . . . maybe Bill and Ted is the prequel to The Matrix?

So, that’s it.  Follow these six steps and you can be excellent.

Parting thought:  Ryan Holiday (link) wrote that passion is about you.  Purpose is about a mission that’s bigger than you – and that’s a reason to drive and strive for excellence.  So, have purpose, not passion.

But passion is forged in competence.  If you get better, it breeds passion.  And if you can have your passion and purpose?  Why not both?

The Search for Meaning Might Drain Your Bank Account

“They haven’t said much about the meaning of life yet.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

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So, is the meaning of life having a super sweet car like this?  If so, would having a Bat Cave be like double extra meaning?  If so, count me in!

One tragedy of our current culture is lower amounts of social interaction leading to meaning.

So what do I mean by meaning?

Meaning is significance.  Meaning is working on something important.  Meaning implies actions that change the world for the better, or at least change someone’s life for the better.  Ideally, this work is something that you are uniquely suited to do and that you’re good at, but those things aren’t absolutely necessary.  The idea is that you have some way that you can actively change the world for the better.  And you don’t have to paint the world to make it better, because the world is really big, and it would take a very long time to paint it, kind of like my house exterior, which, at last count, has taken me 10 years to paint, mainly because I haven’t started yet.

But meaning takes time.  And it takes persistence.  And sometimes it takes money.

Those things can be difficult, especially if you’re lazy like me.

So where can you get meaning?

  • Your job. A job is a good and admirable place to find meaning, and ideally yours is such a place.  But it probably isn’t.  Some people, like those at the IRS, actually have a job that implies they will make others angry with no real discernible benefit to society.  How about being a prison guard?  Tough duty.  And how many jobs are, well, just plain BS?  If you have one of those or aspire to one of those, you’re in luck!  There’s an entire web page dedicated to generating job titles for you!  (LINK)  Chances are better than even that your job is just that – a job.  It’s a job that people pay you to keep doing rather than a saintly crusade to save the planet.  Hey, at least you get paid, right?
  • Your family. This is a great place to get meaning.  But if you’re a dad like me, your main job is to produce independent and tough children who view the world as a challenge that they want to beat.  It’s like you light a bottle rocket and then . . . off it goes.  After you’ve done lit the fuse, well, it’s gone.  And it doesn’t need you anymore – it has a purpose and a path.  I apologize to anyone who really desires to make dependent children who are needy basket cases, but that’s not the way we roll at Casa Wilder.  So, by definition, my children need me less each and every day.

What are the alternatives if you don’t get meaning at work, and need more than family can provide?

meaning

In the United States we used to take part in civic organizations to do meaningful work, or at least drink and smoke cigarettes, pipes and cigars while we pretended to do meaningful work.  Or smoke and talk drunkenly about the meaningful work that we really, really intended to do.  But those civic organizations really did accomplish a lot – from scholarships to the foundation of hospitals and clinics to funding zoos and draining swamps to get rid of disease-carrying mosquitoes.  And our forefathers accomplished all of that with a hacking cough and a buzz on.

Sadly, one last civic organization I attended spent more effort complaining about other members of the organization that weren’t there than it did changing the world.  And they didn’t even drink.  I don’t go to meetings anymore, though I did suggest beer would be good at the meetings.  If we’re not going to do something to help humanity, at least we should drink, right?  I don’t smoke, but I’d be willing to learn, if it helped.  Alas, this sober and smoke-free organization does little to change the world.

As a nation, our civic participation is down overall – the book Bowling Alone recounts how membership in groups that meaningfully participate at the local level of communities is . . . down.  Rotary.  Lions.  Boy Scouts.  Knights of Columbus.

It even reaches from structured clubs to bowling leagues.  Bowling leagues?  Well, the author used that data to show that social interaction was down across the board.  The overall number of bowlers is up, but the number of participants in bowling leagues is down.  We’re bowling, but we’re only bowling with people we already know.  We’re not using any sort of social energy to meet other people and forge new friendships and relationships that strengthen the civic core.  But at least you can drink and bowl.

If I was a cynic, I’d say the system was designed to do decrease civic participation – if we’re not actively making our community better ourselves, well, we can leave it for government to do.  Government likes this a whole lot.  Things that used to done by ordinary citizens in the community, say, being on the volunteer fire department, can now be replaced by professional firefighters who get paid.  Government wins both ways – the fire department employees like to get paid and vote for the people that pay them, and government has assumed another duty that it must tax for.  A win-win!

Unless you’re the guy paying taxes.

Regardless of why civic participation is down, it is down.  The reasons might form a future post.  And that removes a very significant opportunity to be, well, significant.  Thankfully there are other outlets.  Me?  I write this blog.  I know it’s seen by nearly every person on the planet right now.  Okay, okay, it’s not.  But traffic is heading that way.  At current growth trends in the year 2371 everyone on Earth will be doing nothing but reading my blog six hours a day.  Which is as it should be.  Then I will be officially meaningful.

However, there are other outlets besides writing that are preferred by other people:

Gaming.  I think I’ve told this story before on the blog, but keep in mind, when I originally wrote it I was getting about 1/10th the traffic I’m getting now.  So, if you’ve heard this story before, pretend you haven’t, because I’m going to tell it even better this time:

In the 1990’s, I remember watching the HBO™ series Dream On.  In this series, a newly single guy in New York had numerous adventures.  Since it was on HBO®, many of the adventures involved scantily clad females.  Or completely naked females.  But I turned away from the set and read my Bible during those naughty, naughty scenes.  Thank heavens the VCR was recording.

The main character had an office job in New York.  He also had a secretary, Toby.  She was written as a nearly worthless secretary with an attitude.  In one particular episode, she does nothing but play a video game on her work computer.  You could do that before the Internet and the IT department tracked every keystroke.

The game involved a supermarket.  Toby started the episode as a stock boy in the game.  Then she worked her way up to bag boy a few scenes later.  Then, cashier.  Then a few scenes later?  Produce manager.

Finally, at the very end of the episode, she yelled:

“I DID IT!”

“I’m the MANAGER!”

“Of a supermarket . . . that doesn’t exist . . . .”

With each phrase, her emotions changed.  At first, joy in achievement!  Secondly, a questioning voice . . . a manager.  Finally, her voice got very small.  She realized her accomplishment was really no accomplishment.  It lacked meaning.

If you like games, if you like escaping in them, that’s fine, more power to you.  But remember, they’re not really a substitute for actual achievement.  Plus, this is Wealthy Wednesday – how much money do you want to spend on games, anyway?  And how much time do you want to spend on them?  Yeah, I know, I spent two hours today.  But . . . umm, I’m sure I had a good reason.

Consumption.  Yes, this is Wealthy Wednesday, and as such we finally have to get around to this.

Consumption is used as a replacement for actual significance and achievement.  It’s even encouraged.  Why does it work?

Where else can you go, hunt for something, find it, and then get it.  It’s certain to work, every time.  You can’t fail.  Yet you get the opportunity to experience the flush of success, the dopamine rush from having found and purchased what you were looking for.  And if you bought it off the Internet, you get a second rush when the little brown box from Amazon shows up*.

That purchase gives the same feeling as accomplishing something that has actual meaning, and there’s none of the work and none of the uncertainty.  It almost doesn’t matter what the thing is.  It could be shoes.  It could be books.  It could be lightbulbs.  It could be PEZ® dispensers.  As long as it’s something that you can actually do, your brain can take this stimulus and turn it into a replacement for actual achievement.

And it has been culturally jammed into our heads – we’re not who we are, we are the sum total of what we own.  We are our car.  We are our house.  We are our slacks.  We are our PEZ® dispensers.  This consumption has replaced civic virtue.  It has replaced the Lions Club.  It has replaced the Rotary, the Kiwanis, and the Knights of Columbus, but unlike those groups, you can do it alone, at night, downstairs in your underwear, after a few beers.  At 2AM, feeling like you haven’t lived up to your potential in life?  If you’re tired of being the manager of a supermarket that doesn’t exist, well, perhaps you can check in at Amazon.com® to see what you can buy to fill the achievement and meaning-sized hole in your heart?

This post is about wealth – and the first requirement of being wealthy is that you don’t spend thousands of dollars on useless crap to replace meaning in your life.  Especially if you don’t have the cash to spend.  If you don’t have the cash to buy that new truck and you buy it anyway?  Now you have debt.  And the debt removes your peace of mind and you go in search of more meaning, so you buy the boat.  And you and your wife have to work for years of your life to pay for it all.

That’s okay, it’s not like you can become a slave to your own consumption based on your search of meaning, is it?

Nah.  I’m sure that doesn’t happen.

*I refuse to say how I learned this.

Opportunity – Like The Truth, It’s Out There

“This technology has been falling to Earth for centuries.  All it took was the right mind to use it properly.  Oh, the advances I’ve made from alien junk.  You have no idea, Doctor.  Broadband?  Roswell.” – Doctor Who

roswell

Business Cat is ready for another adventure . . .

As I’ve made clear in previous posts, (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse, More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck, Early Retirement: Things to Consider (cough Health Care cough)) I think that our financial system is in trouble due to debt, currency debasement, and structural benefit issues with things like Medicare®.  In fact, I think that it’s mathematically certain that we’re going to have at least one more catastrophic dislocation (fast or slow), and my bet is that it occurs between 2024 and 2040.  Could it come sooner?  Sure, you stunning optimist!

However, none of that means that you can’t give yourself the means to be comfortable despite the decline.  And if I’m wrong about the decline – which I really hope is the case – then you’ll be in better shape.  I mean, round is a shape, right?

So, how do you make a bunch of cash so you can snort Cuban cigars, or do whatever it is the kids are doing with Tide® Pods™ while being flanked by surgically enhanced Instagram models?

Start by doing something.

Action leads to opportunity.  Inaction might help your video game scores and Cheeto® consumption, but to really create a situation where you’re going to have opportunity, you’re going to have to do something.

Living in a big city is great for creating opportunity.  But living in a big city also involves living in a big city.  And the last time I lived in a big city, it was Houston.  Houston was great – I met a guy who gave me baseball tickets.  Baseball tickets that were right behind President Bush’s (the first one) seats.

DSC02888

Yeah, I took this picture.  How cool is that?

H.W. and Barb were there that night.  Then President Bush took us to his house and showed me the actual documents from Roswell while The Mrs. and Barb arm wrestled in the kitchen and then played some drinking/fighting game from Mexico that involved tequila, a bandana, and knives.  H.W. shared the big secret with me in his study over snifters of brandy:  turns out what they found at Roswell wasn’t aliens, it was just dolphins with spaceships off on a drunken joyride.  No biggie.

uforoswell

The real cover up?  They had actually found Eleanor Roosevelt’s underthings.

Okay, the Roswell stuff I made up.  But I did get those tickets and President Bush was there that night.  And nobody in Podunk, East Midwestia is going to have tickets like that.  Big cities breed opportunity to build connections based upon the sheer concentration of people.  If you’re young and looking for opportunity?  Big cities are it.  Although my brother, who is also named John Wilder, did meet Bob Denver when he stopped for gas in a town of 1,500 people.  My brother was working at the station that day.  Said he was the nicest guy you’d ever meet, so, yeah, random meetings will happen.  But they’re the exception, not the rule.

If I were fixated on opportunity, yeah, I’d move to a big city.  But it’s not my cup of tea.

bobdenver

Okay, this might be fake trivia . . .

When doing something:

Don’t quit your job, unless you already have a lot of money, or are certain your crazy scheme will work.  Or unless you have nothing to lose.  When Jeff Bezos quit to start Amazon.com, he had enough money and enough connections that he knew he could restart if Amazon failed.  But for every Bezos, there are tons of people like Davos Riggins.  Who is Davos Riggins?  I don’t know.  He didn’t do anything.

A minor bragging point – I found a name that returns zero hits on Google® on the second try.  Ha!  And apologies to Davos Riggins if you really exist.  But you have to admit you’ve squandered your potential.

Don’t borrow zillions of dollars to put your idea into practice, unless bankruptcy can’t hurt you.  And even if you win?  The debt will make your company less profitable.

What can you do to create opportunity in life?

Depends on you.  One of the things (not the only thing) I do is write.  Before this post, I’d written 229 posts comprising 316,000 words in the last 18 months.  Why?  I enjoy it.  Also why?  It’s doing something – it’s using the Internet to create possibilities that didn’t exist before.  And after 229 posts?  I still have dozens of sticky notes with topics that I want to write about – I have more topics than time.

But that’s my thing.

What about you?

  • Build something cool. Sell it at a flea market.  Or on EBay™ or Etsy®.
  • Start a company that to help people find PEZ® dispensers. Oh, that was how EBay© got its start.  This is a lie.  A sweet, beautiful lie (see comment below), but a lie nonetheless.  And now I owe doughnuts!
  • Start a social network that only allows communication via cat emoji – suggested name? Snapcat©.
  • Write a list of 100 things you’re good at.
  • Write a list of 100 things you like to do.
  • See how the lists overlap? I bet there’s opportunity there.
  • Go to conferences and meet new people.
  • Meet their friends, too. They know someone that can help you.
  • Learn from your losses.
  • Start again.

Regardless of the way the world is going, you can thrive.  You really can.  If you imagine the US economy as a swimming pool, each gallon of water in the 40,000 gallon pool would be worth $5 million dollars.  And that’s every year.  And it’s not counting all the pee in the pool from when you had your nephew over.

Would you miss one gallon out of 40,000?  No.  Nobody would.  And just like the pool, the economy doesn’t care.  Not even about the pee.

There’s room for you to be as successful as you want to be, if you’re willing to sacrifice your time and location and fail again and again.  And even when you win, you won’t be satisfied.  That’s the biggest gift yet – the quest.  If you’re good at it, if you like doing it, if you can make money at it, and if it changes the world?

That’s a start.

A good one.

Pleasure, Stoicism, Blade Runner, VALIS and Philip K. Dick

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” – Blade Runner

valis

I wonder if there is any symbolism in this artwork?  I guess we’ll never know.

Recently I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick’s novel VALIS.

It’s interesting.  I enjoy it.

Philip K. Dick’s work (you never see him referred to as “Phil” or “Phil Dick”, it’s always Philip K. Dick, just like John F. Kennedy is always known as “Sassy”) has taken over Hollywood.  From Total Recall to Minority Report to Blade Runner to The Man in the High Castle, Dick’s work has been made into something like 14 movies and an entire series of shorter television episodes available on Amazon® Prime™.  In what might be the most ironic ending ever, he only really became popular after his death, with Blade Runner being released just a few months after he died at the age of 53.

The story themes that he visited during his life were fairly consistent:

  • What is the nature of reality? What if it’s a lie?
  • How do we know that we are sane?
  • What if reality is insane? What should our response be?
  • What is information? Is it living?
  • Where can I get more drugs? I mean a LOT more drugs.

dick

VALIS is based on (at least partly) a vision that he had in February and March of 1974, and describes a lot of things that Dick said personally happened to him, which include a secret Roman Empire that still existed, aliens, and the fact that his son had a hernia that would kill him if he didn’t have the doctor look at it.  The hernia part is verified.   The secret Roman Empire?  Not so much.  Oh, did I mention he did a LOT of drugs?  Yeah.  He made Hunter S. Thompson seem like a virgin.

However, as a writer he had an amazing amount of insight, which may account for the popularity.  One quote that struck me was an interesting philosophical digression in VALIS:

Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form.  The basic dynamism is as follows:  a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable.  There is no way that he can halt the process; he is helpless.  This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain – any kind of control will do.  This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery.  So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him:  he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it.  This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain.  Not so.  It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness.  But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes automatically, anhedonic (avoiding pleasure – JW).  Anhedonia sets in stealthily.  Over the years it takes control of him.  For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia.  In learning to defer his gratification, he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse.  He has “control”.  Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation.  He is a controlled and a controlling person.  Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation.  He becomes a manipulator.  Of course, he is not consciously aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence.  But in his task of lessening this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others.  Yet, he derives no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essentially negative.

This idea is fascinating to me.  In this case, a virtue, self-restraint and stoicism, is turned into a vice.  And not only a vice, a vice that replicates itself and spreads its misery around.

I see this most often among people who have no real control or power in their lives – the people who sit on Homeowner’s Association boards and send out little notes that my grass is too long, or that my siding needs to be washed, or that they object to the new “sheet metal hammering and shredding at midnight with strippers” business that I set up.  The phrase that I’m reminded of that describes these people is:  “The fight is so bitter because the stakes are so small,” which is a paraphrasing of Wallace Sayre’s original quote, “I hate going to the Department of Motor Vehicles”.  So, not only do you not like going to the DMV, we’ve learned that they hate being there as much as you do, so they share their misery as much as possible.

But Dick’s quote also explains why people become self-destructive.  If they sense that they’re going to fail, well, they’ll toss some gasoline on that fire and get it going now.  The logic becomes simple – I don’t really fail if I control my failure.  Or deprive myself of pleasure.  I know I don’t deserve the money, so I’ll just save it until I die and leave it to my cats.  My ability to defer today’s pleasure becomes . . . a way to punish myself today.

And yet . . . there’s that leading stoic, Seneca:

“Therefore, explain why a wise person shouldn’t get drunk, not with words, but by the facts of its ugliness and offensiveness.  It is easy to prove that pleasures, when they go beyond proper measures, are punishments.”

Could it be that people subconsciously (or consciously!) punish themselves through pleasure as well?  Theoretically, being a philosophical stoic isn’t about avoiding pleasure, it’s about striking that balance.  Seneca himself was very, very, rich, but struggled with whether or not he should be a vegetarian.  Seneca decided not to be a vegetarian – it might have been seen as being pretentiously virtuous, like the vegan who does Crossfit™ and drives a Prius© – what do you tell people first???

vegan club

Absolutely there is virtue in self-control.  Right up until it becomes a vice.  Like lots and lots and lots of drugs.  Lots of drugs.  And maybe Crossfit™.

crossfit

The seven deadly sins and society. How do they fit together?

“There are 7 deadly sins, Captain.” – Se7en

sevensins

So, here are the movie versions of sin.  Except Pride.  Is Pride really blonde?

Some time ago I read a book that my friend wrote (there is a link below where you can get it from Amazon – I make no money from that) about sin.  I enjoyed the book, as well as one can enjoy a book that makes you feel absolutely horrible about how sinful and wretched you are.  And I mean that in the best way – how often do you have the benefit of self-reflection on your faults?  Thankfully, the author doesn’t leave you hanging, and gives you a path forward on the whole salvation from sin thing (note:  he’s a priest, so the word “Jesus” just might be a spoiler).  I heartily recommend the book.

Is sin at the problem with current society?  Maybe.  But first let’s discuss the sins.

As I recall (it’s been a while since I read it) one construct that Father Joseph used for discussing sin was the Seven Deadly Sins.  He used the mnemonic “PALE GAS” to go through them.  I’ll do the same.

Pride – Pride is the big one, perhaps the source of all the other sins.  An example:  If you’re religious, you’d accept that your intellect was given to you by God.  If you’re not religious, you’d accept that your intellect was a happy genetic accident.  In either case, no matter how smart you are, you’ve done nothing to be that smart, so taking pride in your intellect is, well, bad.  That’s why pride is the primo sin – it takes all the glory for who and what you are and wraps it up into your own ego.  It puts you and your ego at the center of the universe, when in reality no one thinks about you as much as you think they do.  Unless you’re Donald Trump.  Then people (from both sides) totally obsess over you.

Anger – This is also known as Wrath, but PWLE GAS doesn’t sound so good, unless you’re from some Eastern European country that uses colored wrapping paper for money and has a vowel shortage.  Anger is feeling and wishing for unjust or excessive punishment – execution for parking offenses, that sort of thing, or punishing the innocent, just because they are weaker than you.  Again, Wrath separates you from both God and reality by making the righting of wrongs (real or not) not about justice, but about you.  You can see how Pride echoes here . . . .

Lust – Lust isn’t love, it’s a deep and intense passionate desire that throws morality, propriety, and sometimes legality to the winds.  As sins go, this one at least (in some forms) is mutual, so it’s not as strong as pure Pride.  In some forms, it’s considered the least serious of all mortal sins, but, you know, it’s still a mortal sin.  Outside of religion, allowing Lust to drive your life tends to lead to a lot of poor decisions – just ask anyone in Hollywood®.

Envy – Like any of the sins, Envy has various gradations.  First you are jealous that your neighbor has a complete set of PEZ® dispensers of every United States Secretary of Agriculture ever.  Then you find out he has all of the United States Secretary of Commerce PEZ™ dispensers.  Then you go all Cain on his Abel.  Yup.  Envy brings you farther from God, but it also fills you with hate.

Gluttony – Generally, Gluttony is considered more of a sin when your consumption (or overconsumption) of resources will starve someone else – but it really boils down to an unbridled passion for selfishness.  Eating and drinking as the purpose of life, rather than to support it.  It’s fairly obvious how this is both bad for you, and drives you farther from God.

Avarice – This sin is also known as greed, but if we called it that, then the mnemonic would be PWLE GGS.  And what does that even mean?  Where lust is for a person, and gluttony is for food, avarice is for stuff.  That just makes it worse.  Pop Wilder described avarice best when he told me, “A farmer doesn’t want all the land in the world, son, he just wants that which adjoins his.”  This pulls you away from God though making you focus on the things only of this world.  This focus turns men into machines – focused only on owning (not creating) wealth.  See reason number 53 that I don’t want to live in New York City . . . .

sloth

Yeah, it sucks to be a sloth.

Sloth – Sloth isn’t just about being lazy – Sloth is giving up.  It’s abdication of responsibility for whatever reason, often as a result of the other sins, or through giving up due to depression or despondency (which used to be one of the eight deadly sins, but got voted off in the semi-finals).   It’s obvious on how this sin hurts you whether you’re a believer or not.

I heartily recommend Father Joseph’s book, whether or not you are a Christian or an agnostic or an atheist.  I think the truths that it speaks to are so fundamental in our society that this could be one of the better books on self-improvement available today.  Seriously.  I read this book, thinking I was doing okay.  (Pride will do that to you.)  Every page that I read I kinda cringed when it described me, something I felt, or something I was doing as tied into one of these sins.  I promise you – there’s not a week that goes by that you (and I!) aren’t attracted to and tempted to commit each of these sins weekly.

Oh, and my copy is signed!  (See, I just used my Pride to Envy all over you.)

And these sins are important whether or not you are religious because these sins and our universal-ish understanding of them in the Western world form the basis of Western culture.  Are there analogues in Chinese Confucianism, Shinto, or the tribal religions of Africa?  Or Islam?

I have no idea.  And it would require like a zillion Google® searches to sort that out.  But it’s irrelevant.

I do know that the culture of the West was founded on this shared concept of sin.

And we agree that these things are bad, right?

Have we managed to rebrand many of these sins as virtues?

  • “Check out my InstaFace® selfie!”
  • “He had it coming to him.”
  • “If it feels go, do it!”
  • “You deserve what the 1% have.”
  • “Have another piece of cake – YOLO!”
  • “We’re not Boy Scouts®, we’re here to make money.”
  • “Let somebody else do it. You’ve done enough.”

One of the virtues of the Seven Deadly Sins is that the common belief in them is the basis for a shared morality in a stable civilization.  One can infer that that shared belief (beyond the salubrious Christian effects on your immortal soul, if you’re into that sort of thing) is beneficial because it evolved with Western civilization.

Can the West live without the concept of sin?

I’m not sure that it can.  Let’s just take one of them:  Envy.

The biggest evil of the twentieth century was communism.  I’m not saying that because it’s an opinion – it’s an objective fact.  More people died because of communism than any other ideological cause during that century – over 140,000,000.

Communism was built on Envy; the concept that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”  And Ivan needs Pyotr’s farm.  And Ivan’s wife needs Pyotr’s wife’s new butter churn.  And so on.

Nearly a billion people died from gluttony – it causes heart disease along with a host of other diseases.

Anger led to war and murder.  240,000,000.

So, deadly wasn’t a euphemism – outside of spiritual conditions, these sins actually lead to real and temporal misery and death.

So there appears to be some limited anecdotal evidence that virtue is better than sin.

Which brings me back to society.  If society doesn’t agree on the same cultural precepts which have driven the creation of knowledge and wealth for several thousand years . . . nah, never mind.  I’m sure it will be fine.

Health, Wealth, and Boundaries. Complete with fake IDs.

“We’re out of towels and I’m too old to go diving into lockers.” – Minor League

boundary

It would be nice to have Morgan Freeman narrate your life.  Except for after you did stupid stuff.  Or boring stuff.  Nevermind – skip that.

A number of years ago my boss called me at 11pm.  There had been an incident at work.  As it was a Thursday and I was planning on taking Friday off, The Mrs. and I had already consumed the better part of a bottle of wine.  I decided that I’d go to bed – certainly vacation was off.

In fact, I worked the next 45 days, straight.  I averaged at least 12 hours a day, every day.

During that time, we worked really hard.  Stressful situations daily.  New decisions daily.  But the team met all the goals that were set on that first day, and then some.   We even ended up at budget.  But 540 work hours in 1.5 months is about 225% of a typical work week (40 hours).

I break my time into a triangle:

  1. Work – Ideally, work should server multiple purposes. It should put money in the bank and food on the table.  Another, very real purpose of work is to create value for society.  A well-run business generates wealth for the owner, sure.  But the jobs that it creates can generate wealth for a community.  And most businesses can’t stay in business unless they serve a need in the community.  A power generation plant has to make power to stay in business, but if it operates well and efficiently, it produces power at a low cost, which allows people to have the relative luxury of electricity cheaply, so they can read this blog, or watch Green Acres®.
  2. Family – As a husband and father, taking care of my family is a primary responsibility – it means more than the money from work, it means being there to be dad – both as a bad example of the kind of dad you don’t want to have, as well as teaching children responsibility through situations that force them to figure things out. I mean, what 12 year old shouldn’t know how to make a fake id so he can buy smokes?
  3. Personal Health – If I’m not healthy, I’ll die, and that makes it hard to shower consistently. Also, I won’t be able to lead my family, or work amazingly long hours.  Health may be its own reward, but it also supports the other two legs of the triangle.

dogbeer

I’d say “bad dog,” but I am out of beer . . . and thanks to practice and parental neglect, Pugsley makes a much better fake ID.

So during this 45 day period, a big stretch of the triangle was possible.  Heck, I was in the best shape I’d been in for at least six years.  Life was good.  I’d focus on work, but put my second focus on family.  Personal health can wait, right?

And during those 45 days, I didn’t exercise like normal.  Also, I don’t eat lunch (I hadn’t since fifth grade) and in those days just worked through lunch.  But we had team meetings (complete with lunch) pretty much every day.  It turns out I can gain 2 pounds a week just by eating lunch more than once.  Yeah.

So, forty five days later, we finished.  And we were exhausted.  And 45 days later?  I entered into yet another work death-march that lasted a year and a half.

Yeah, and that second death-march ended with 45 days straight, too.  And then time required for activities related to The Boy and Pugsley multiplied.  It seems like when the work demands went down, the family demands went up.  And I could safely ignore the health demands, right?

My take on this is that I’ve set my boundaries too far towards work in the past, but the bright side is all the hard work and family stuff seems to be paying off.

But it’s always (a bit) irritated me that Hollywood types get so buff.  I saw Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 12 (or whatever) this last weekend, and it’s undeniable that the man is in great shape, not only for his age, but for any age.  Cruise was certainly in better shape than he was during his early movies.  He’s seven or eight years older than Simon Pegg, but manages to look ten years younger.  I guess maybe Scientology® might pay off, if you can deal with whole “completely made up” parts.

And Tom Cruise has a luxury that most of us don’t – he has the ability to spend 2,000 learning to fly helicopters so he could do it for this movie, plus countless thousands of hours of training.  I’m lucky to get 250 hours a year to myself for training.  And more power to Cruise!  But most people don’t have that option.  The iron triangle of work-family-health keeps showing up.

In the end that’s part of why I named the blog wilderwealthywise.com – it focuses on that triangle of important things in the average person’s life.  Wealth buys time, and time buys health.  And health . . . buys more time (on Earth).  And with health and time?  One would hope that you can end up with wealth.

And then you could have Morgan Freeman narrate . . . but hopefully not these lines:

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It will all be worth it.  Now, back to the elliptical . . .

Increasing Returns or: Problems are our Friend

“Hey, I have a little expertise in government pensions.  I could increase your annual return if you just let me invest a small portion . . . .” – Bones

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My current computer techs.  Yeah, I’m not kidding.

In my first job after getting my master’s degree I ended up in a department with 10 other folks, all of us technically minded.  During college, I had built my own computer and had also done a fair amount of programming.  I even knew DOS (no, I’m not yelling “TWO” in Spanish – DOS stands for Disk Operating System, and it was what originally put MicroSoft® into a profit making position).  I knew DOS due to some patient friends, and I bought my original PC from a certain frequent commenter (GS) to this site for about $100.  When I started my new job, I knew more about computers than most of the people in the group.

And when anyone in the group had problems, they’d ask Willie (the other guy who knew computers pretty well) or they’d ask me to fix it for them.  This actually predates the company having an IT department or even a coherent IT policy.  If employees with computers made more money for the company than employees without computers?  Buy the employees computers.  If the employees are too stupid to use/fix their own computers?  We’ll get new employees.

So when I was asked a question, I generally (80% of the time) knew the answer quickly.  About 20% of the time, I had no idea, but knew enough on what sorts of things to try that might get to a solution for my coworkers friends.  (This job was generally sitcom-level fun.  We were all recent college grads and we were constantly at each other’s houses for parties, dinners, and what-not.)

Soon, I’d seen most problems you could have with PC software – since I was solving my own problems plus the problems of 10 other people (Willie and I would collaborate on the toughest problems).  The company finally got an IT department, but the first commandment was:  Don’t Let John or Willie Know Where We Keep The Servers.  I have no idea why they did that, since we didn’t know much about servers at all.  Maybe they thought we’d take our trial and error methods to the entire company and erase the payroll files while we were installing new screensavers?  Maybe they were wise in not letting us know where the servers were?

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that neither Willie nor I knew all that much about computers when we started, but we knew just a little bit more than our friends.  A little bit of knowledge combined with solving the problems of 10 people builds the foundation for a LOT of knowledge.

I know a little bit (tiny bit) about making computer chips.  Intel®, however, knows a LOT.  Intel© has been making computer processor chips for nearly fifty years.  So they have fifty years’ worth of experience, right?

No.  Intel™ has about 100,000 employees.  Let’s pretend that 10% of the staff solves problems in production – learning how to make chips quicker, more reliable, minty smelling, etc. at any given time.  That’s 10,000 people.  For fifty years.

Doing the math, Intel® has invested up to 500,000 man-years into making awesome chips.  To catch them?  You’d have to duplicate that level of investment.  Numerous examples exist where entire geographic areas become excellent at doing some sort of manufacturing – Japan led the consumer electronics boom.  China makes I-Phones® faster than any other country could.  Detroit.  Well, it used to make cars.  And as much as I kid, Detroit still has amazing technical skills when it comes to cars.  Silicon Valley?  Yeah.  They’re the current bright spot for information innovation.  Southwestern Art?  Go to Santa Fe.  Really good at lying?  Try Washington D.C.

This isn’t a new phenomenon.  If you look into the trash piles of ancient Britain, you find that during the Roman period, the dishes used by the common man were – pretty nice.  (And archeologists LOVE dishes.  They break, and you have to get new ones, so they tell you a lot about what’s going on with a culture.)  Dishes were shipped to Britain from Southern Gaul (France) where they specialized in making plates.  Once Britain was cut off from the collapsing Roman Empire?  The dishes got crappy – the British hadn’t had to make their own dishes in hundreds of years.

When Rome collapsed, dishes got bad, not only in Britain, but everywhere.  When the trade routes and common currency collapsed, the plate makers had to do something else to survive.  The trade routes, currency, had created a center of excellence that disappeared pretty quickly once the Empire was gone.

Solving problems to get better works for Nations.  It works for Regions.  It works for Companies.  And it works for Individuals.

If you want to be awesome, solve hard problems.  Sometimes the biggest problems are the biggest blessings . . . except that DOS is about as familiar as hieroglyphics nowadays, so solving that problem is probably not important.

Did I mention that you should learn to solve important problems?  Yeah.  My bad.  Important problems.  Solve those . . . .

Karma May Not Be Real . . . But, Seriously, Why Would You Want To Mess With It?

“But not this time, this is our time.  This time you gonna hand them a business card that says I’m a CEO, bitch.  That’s what I want from you.” – The Social Network

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Your Dogma caught my Karma . . .

My first month on the job (when I graduated from college with a Masters) I travelled around to several of the company’s remote offices.  They had offices across the country, and at that time I think they had some sort of operation in 35 of the 50 states (57 if you count Texas as many times as they think they should be counted).  One of my first trips was to Central Midwestia – the rustbelt.  And our facility was right in the middle of the rust belt.  Across the street there was a stamping plant that continually (and very audibly) stamped auto parts out of glowing steel.  To the north there was a sausage plant.  To the west was a manufacturer of household cleansers.  Many of the factory buildings looked to have been built prior to World War I, and some of them looked like they had been through World War II or even the Great Sitcom wars of the early 2000’s.  Still bits of Futurama® on some of the walls.

The facility there was . . . everything packed into the size of a postage stamp.  There were areas of the facility that if you had a sandwich for lunch you couldn’t gotten through because your belly would have been too big.  And the electrical system?  It looked like it had been thrown together on a Hollywood set so you could channel lightning into a monster to have it live . . . again.

What an experience!

The next month, I had the opposite experience at another one of “our” (I don’t work there anymore) facilities.  Even though the facility had been open (in one form or another) since the Civil War, this facility, though old, was spacious, with plenty of room for moving around.  The primary purpose of my visit was to work on a problem that the facility manager was having, so, after talking about the issue and looking over the beautiful Atlantic bay that was right next to the facility, we decided to go to lunch.  The Salesguy, sensing a free lunch (I think they have radar) tagged along.

During lunch we talked about lots of different things, like how lobster stew there was cheaper than a hamburger.  Also, as a new guy to the company they each had really interesting stories to tell the new guy (me).  The conversation drifted to the places I’d visited with the company so far.

Wee John Wilder:  “Well, I did see our facility in Central Midwestia.”

Salesguy:  “What did you think of that?”

Wee John Wilder:  (Pause)  “I think that whoever set up that facility had one of the biggest challenges of a career.  I have no idea how they fit all of that stuff into that space.  My hat is off to them.”

Sure, I could have called the place a mess, but it really wasn’t – I’m not sure anyone could have done better putting all the parts into place.

The next morning when I got to the facility, Salesguy wasn’t there, but he had left me two boxes of golf balls (good ones) with the company logo on them, along with other swag he normally gave to customers.

“Wow!  This was nice of him!”

The facility manager then explained that Salesguy had been the person who had put that facility in Central Midwestia together – and he’d spent months of his life making it work, but most people had called it a mess.  Karma . . . doesn’t always mean that bad things happen.

karma more

Fast forward to last year:

I was on the phone talking to a friend that works at another company about a year ago.  The CEO (at my friend’s company) had just announced his “retirement”.  He hadn’t been talking about retirement, so the corporate world knows that “going to spend time with family” also means . . . “got fired”.

There had been some other recent changes as well at that company – the Chief Sales Guy (I don’t remember his actual title) had recently quit.  That was fairly surprising, since Chief Sales Guy had been at the company since it was founded.  The Chief Sales Guy was friends with the owner of the company, and had even suggested a possible replacement for his position as Chief Sales Guy to the owner.

Since The Mrs. had met the now fired CEO at a party some years ago, when I got home I mentioned the news to her.  Her response was immediate:  “Oh, the Secretary got him fired.”

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The Mrs. is a writer of novels, so I asked her to explain this particular plot.

“Well, you remember that you told me about secretary, right?”

And then I remembered.   The Chief Sales Guy had an executive Secretary that been with him for over a decade.  After he left, that Secretary was blended into the pool of lesser secretaries on the floor.  One Thursday afternoon, she had tickets unexpectedly fall into her lap for a literally “once in a lifetime” adventure (it was Elton John© performing the “Best of” Metallica™ with backing vocals by Katie Perry® and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir©).  The Secretary was supposed to work until 5pm, but would have preferred to leave about 15 minutes early to get ready.  This would have been fine with her old boss, so she found another lesser secretary who could cover for her.

But the person who could cover for her went to the “Jabba The Hutt®” of secretaries (her new boss), who didn’t like this impertinence.  So, even before the Secretary could go and ask Jabba© for permission, Jabba™ had gone to complain to the CEO.  The CEO fired the Secretary on the spot.

Fired.  On the spot.  For wanting to leave 15 minutes early.  Yeah, true story.

The Mrs. reasoned that the Secretary had mentioned her woes to the former Chief Sales Guy.

The Chief Sales Guy went to the owner and told him the story.  The owner, in the narrative favored by The Mrs., fired the CEO a week later, after he’d found a replacement.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but it really makes sense.

karma

Everybody answers to someone, even the CEO.  Oh, sure the CEO retired with $100 million or so, but I bet the Secretary enjoyed the afternoon she found out that karma had scored just a little revenge for her.  Me?  I’d have smoked a cigar and had a nice scotch.   Bet she had a Margarita on her deck with copious middle fingers for the CEO.

Your career will likely be a long one – 40 to 50 years for most people.  You will meet people on the way up, and you will meet people on the way down.  You alone control how you act and how you treat people.  Being nice is a choice.  Being a jerk is a choice.  Why would you ever choose being a jerk?  Why would you, as CEO, choose to fire a secretary for wanting to leave 15 minutes early on a Friday?

I’ll note that being a jerk isn’t the same as being honest.  Don’t lie.  Why does The Mrs. never ask me “does this outfit make my butt look big?”  Because if honesty counts against my karma scores . . . oh my.

But Texas will be fine when it comes to karma.  They have no idea that when hurricanes hit them it might be karma.  Texans?  They just want to put a saddle on the hurricane and ride it on up into Iowa so they can take that over, too.

Time Goes By Too Fast? Blue Öyster Cult, Pascal, and Ben Affleck May Save Us Yet

“All Rome rejoices in your return, Caesar.  There are many matters that require your attention.” – Gladiator

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Memes – a tool of attention control?  Or cats with eated cookies?

One curse of modern life is . . . always being in a rush.  A hurry.  Where is the time?  How do you expect to do that?  It’ll take hours to do that?

And it’s a constant refrain now – we end up at midnight wondering . . . where did the day go?  The rush?  It adds to stress, and stress clearly causes health problems over time.

Yeah, that time we don’t have enough of.  Where did all of our time go, anyway?

I seem to remember that Blue Öyster Cult (in the song Burning for You) promised me . . . “Time everlasting, time to play B-sides . . . “

So, where is my time to play B-sides?  (Historical note:  In order to hear a stupid song you liked, it was required to buy either a full album, or to buy a “single.”  The “single” cost less, and had the song you really wanted to hear.  On the other side of the popular song was the “b-side” – generally a song that wasn’t very popular, and never would be very popular.  Thus, if you had time to play b-sides, you were wealthy with time.  Now you can just go to the Internet and have any song ever recorded played for you instantaneously.)

Television

The real issue now is that every moment of every day can be filled with media:  YouTube®, Netflix©, Amazon Prime Video™, Hulu©, HBOGO®.  Those are just the video services, which doesn’t include the television your television has recorded for you to watch later.

But if it were just videos, we’d be okay.  Virtually every time I type this, either YouTube® is providing background music, or one of the movies that I watch as background noise (The Accountant® is one that I like a lot, and Batman vs. Superman™ is another – don’t judge me for my Affleck Affection Affliction – my doctors says it might be curable).

Now, however, we can watch an entire television season (via binge watching) in several days – creating an immersive event that can be disorienting.

When The Mrs. and I first started watching “Lost” on DVD, well, there were several 3AM nights because we couldn’t stop watching.  “Just one more episode . . .”

Social Media

Then we add in interactive online experiences – FaceBorg®, Twitttttterrrr©, SnapGram™.  These are experiences engineered to grab your attention.  Twitter shows you a notification when it wants you to see the notification to maximize your engagement.  There’s nothing random about these web services.  And you’ve probably heard this before, but if they’re not charging you to do it, you’re the product.  With these social media services, you are completely the product.  FaceBird© expected to make $27 from the data it harvested . . . from each user.  Who paid?  Who knows?  Let’s just say your late night searches have drawn . . . some attention)

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Not pictured:  Cambridge or Stanford.

Cambridge and Stanford (the universities, not the two dudes named Cambridge and Stanford that were Muppets®) did a study, and found that with 10 likes FaceBlog© knows you better than a work colleague.  150 likes?  They know you better than your parents know you.  300 likes?  They can beat the Persians at Thermopylae.  Just kidding.  They do, however, know you better than your spouse.  And everyone knows the Persians are still on MySpace®.

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Only this many likes and then FaceBlock® says . . . THIS IS SPARTA!

And if they know you better than your spouse?  They can certainly figure out your moods, the things that will get and keep your attention.  Why?  Their income depends on your attention.

The News

The news is becoming ever less based in truth and more and more polarized.  So, the news isn’t only fake, it’s biased.  Examples?  After Trump was nominated for President, a news reporter did a straight news story that Trump had asked a woman with a crying baby to leave a campaign rally.  Did he do it?  Yes.  Was he kidding?  Well, yes.  Humor is a powerful way to connect with a crowd – watching video of the event later, it was pretty obvious that it was a joke.

Both sides do it.  It was reported that a “doctor” had reviewed Hillary Clinton and found that she had some form of cerebral palsy.  Clearly, that would be devastating for her bid for the presidency.  Clearly, there’s no evidence of the palsy post-election.

So, the news becomes polarized like a 120 volt outlet, all charged up to make you care passionately about things you’ve never heard about before.

Availability

All of the above are available to you everywhere and anytime.  I can watch a movie on a tablet in bed while I check my phone to see how many people liked my last Tweeet®.  It used to be (in the long-before time) that this level of immersive and up to date media was available only in limited locations.  Now?  Anywhere.  Work.  Working out.  Driving to work.  Driving home.  At dinner.  And throw your work e-mail on top of that so you can read the thought your boss had at 2am when he woke up to let the dog out.

Result?

  • You feel rushed – you have eliminated downtime. Back during the Revolutionary War, learning about the results of a battle might take weeks.  Now?  When ISIS was attacking in Iran halfway around the world from here, there were nearly-live videos uploaded to YouTube®.  And we can watch the Kardashians doing . . . well, whatever parasitical thing they’re doing today.  (I’m not saying that they’re exactly like human tapeworms, but there are a lot of unsettling coincidences . . . .)
  • Your ideas never have time to develop? How could they?  They’re always being trampled by the ideas and opinions of others, couched in the most emotional manner possible to elicit the largest surge of anger or fear they can muster.
  • You lose the ability to focus and concentrate – there’s always some media begging for your attention at the periphery of your consciousness. Check that email – it might be important!  (Hint:  it might be important once a month.)
  • Shopping – for anything, anytime. Your commercial desires can be met instantly.  Need to order ammunition for an AK at 8AM?  Sure!  Need to order posters for a protest parade at a podium?  Sure!
  • Boredom with the mundane. Mundane literally means “Earthly.”  I can co-pilot a TIE® fighter with Darth Vader©.  I can grab a YouTube© video showing Russian teens at the top of the tallest building in Moscow.  Live view a rocket launch?    What can awe and inspire a generation that has experienced so many events virtually?  Oh, wait, you search for ever more esoteric adventures.  And you’ll find them – but none of them will occur around your location.
  • Video games, where you can expend hours achieving great goals, saving civilizations, destroying enemy fleets, founding empires. Great, pre-programmed goals.  Other people’s goals.  Goals that aren’t yours, and, when accomplished, aren’t at all real.
  • Preoccupation with news that has no impact on you, and that you have no control over, yet about which you are made to feel deeply that you’re willing to fight the other side to the death.   Seems legit.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

pacalboc

This is Blaise Pascal – who had a nose larger than any ship in the current Canadian Navy, but wasn’t quite as smart as Newton.  This irritates the French.  Note the Blue Öyster Cult symbol in the background . . . Pascal was a rocker!

  • Mindset that our activity is our accomplishment.   Our accomplishment is our accomplishment.
  • The mathematician Blaise Pascal said (roughly, this is my translation of what I remember he said in French because I’m too lazy to go to my library to look it up – heck, I even marked this passage when I first read it and am too lazy to go and check, but I’ll get close enough because, well, I’m John Wilder) “Activity distracts us, which removes our attention from how wretched we are.”
  • We’re being manipulated (not in a tinfoil hat way, but in a shareholder value way). FaceBrick® makes money off of you.  Off of your eyes.  Off of your attention.  Off of your habits.  It’s not a conspiracy that businesses will do whatever they can to make more money from you, even if the long term consequences aren’t in your best interest.  But it is in their best interest to put in front of you the stimulus that they figure will give them the proper response.

Coping – How do I deal with it?

  • I don’t listen to the radio during my daily commute. That leaves over an hour without any media – any static.  It took about a week to get used to it, but now I use that time to think – to plan for the day or night ahead.  To think about the next post.  To think about . . . anything.  But the thoughts are my own.
  • When we go out to eat as a family, phones in a pile on the table. We’re there and discuss what each other think.
  • At work, I’ll sometimes take e-mail breaks – where I won’t review them for hours at a time.
  • Sitting without distraction to focus on a single problem or task. I find that, for me, music helps with the focus.
  • Writing daily the list of things that I really have to do. This will probably be its own post in the future.  But I use and actual pen and pencil, and put it on actual paper.  It makes a difference.

The trends are clear – barring a global war, great depression, currency collapse, or regional war near here, our attention span will be fought over on a daily basis.  If you want to accomplish anything real in your life, if you want to avoid the stress that comes with the constant emotional treadmill, you have to come up with a strategy.

Thankfully?  I have my willpower.  That, and Ben Affleck movies.  I can mostly ignore them.  Hey – is Ben Affleck . . . my B-side?

If so, that makes me wealthy, indeed!