Collection of Moments

Steve responded to the first line of my 'Walk As One' post with the comment that he is counting on science to solve the ageing problem. The line was 'The only thing that is immortal is this moment'. Like Steve, I am quite excited about our progress in understanding the human body and the science of keeping us healthy, not just alive, for much longer. I have heard talk that if we can make it through the next couple of decades, we will live healthily to the age of 150. I think that is awesome.

'This moment' is different though. The point of the post was about the Unogwaja Challenge and John McInroy's decision to go on foot from Cape Town to the start of the Comrades. The point of that line was that clinging to immortality is amusing in a way, depending on how you define it. You can choose to define yourself. If you go through a process of figuring out who you are, it is normally a process of elimination. You realise you are 'Not this, Not that'. Not your hand, not your nose, not your toes. Not your race, not your province, not your country. Not your gender, not your sexuality, not your religion.

When we die, we may burn our ashes or bury our bodies. Those bodies are not us. Every 7 years or so, they are almost completely new. If you change your diet, and you are what you eat, 7 years can make you a whole different person. In 'Reason To Stay Alive', Matt Haig tells the tale of his depression. In it, he has conversations with his younger depressed self. These two individuals, while linked, are different people. So is Matt Haig either of them? Or neither of them? Or both of them?

None of us knows the answers to these questions. I also prefer questions that have practical answers or useful further questions. I like the idea of looking for a story that lets me bounce back at anything that life throws at me. We spend so much time trying to figure out who we are. I am trying to flip that on its head. I am trying to spend more time figuring out who I am not. By trying new things, you can slowly break down the things you can't do and get to the juice. The stuff that makes life awesome. Frankly, I think we are more interesting than me. We can do a lot of things. By relaxing a little about trying to figure out our mortal personal identity, we can get cracking on the things that matter more.

We are already immortal. And all we are is a collection of moments.

But yes, having bodies that lasted longer would rock.

Food Literacy

I have found learning new languages incredibly difficult. I agree with Megan that part of why I have found it so incredibly difficult is because it has always been a choice. At various stages I have taken stabs at Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, German, Italian and French. Languages are the most explicit case of where we don't have access to whole swathes of people and culture because of literacy obstacles. I think the same obstacles actually exist elsewhere. I recently wrote a guest post on a friends blog about 'Trying to Unsquiggle'. The world is full of information and flavours, but most of it is just squiggles. Whilst some see through the squiggles, most of us just ignore them and move on because we don't understand. Normally we don't have to. We haven't made a conscious choice about which bits of life will give us the most meaning and fulfilment because it requires an initial effort to unsquiggle. Unsquiggling is intimidating, and as Meg's post suggests, sometimes choice can be a bad thing leaving us less happy.

So I do think a balance has to be found between always looking for alternative choices and being content with what you have. One of the issues I have been chewing is not alternatives but whether I am conscious of the choices I have made, or the choices that have been made for me. This involves a degree of literacy. More specifically the one I have been thinking of recently is diet. Following on from 'Born to Run' in my Unogwaja Challenge process, I have been reading 'Eat & Run' by Scott Jurek. If you, like me, have been looking for a replacement hero to fill the Lance Armstrong void, Jurek may just be that man. He is ridiculously awesome. His book is a combo of a biography of his ultramarathon (>50 miles, often >100 miles) and a cook book. The book is also peppered with other books to read. Like Josh Waitzkin used his Chess Knowledge to conquer Martial Arts, Jurek left no stone unturned as he has refined his knowledge of the human body and its limits. Sometimes dipping into alternative choices isn't about switching. It is about unsquiggling enough truths to help you refine the path you are on. 

Jurek is arguably one of the most hardcore athletes to have ever lived. He is also a vegan. Part of the book also details his transition to a plant based diet. It wasn't immediate. He did it slowly and pinpoints various milestone meals where the emotional obstacles fell away not because he gave something up, but because he found something more epic. I eat meat for various reasons. One of them is that biltong tastes so awesome. Another is because of the cultural side of food and the memories triggered by certain meals. I also value highly not being fussy and fitting in to what company and hosts have prepared as easily as possible. I also enjoy variety. One of my favourite things to do is to say to a waitor - 'bring me the thing you think is the best. Don't ask me any questions, I am not fussy.' I have been philosophically convinced that Factory Farming is not something I feel comfortable with. I recently watched 'Food Inc' and that bought me a few meat free days. I am a 'conspiracy-skeptic'. I don't believe we can blame the machine for the choices we make with our dollars, time and votes. Ignorance isn't an excuse. Capitalism is a ruthless mirror. The captains may have studied our emotional responses and wants and fed the vices we 'don't' like, but we can't blame anyone but ourselves for the ugly picture that presents itself when we don't make conscious choices. Food Inc is an ugly mirror. But emotional kicks fade. Other emotional kicks come to. Comfort. Company. Selective Ignorance. Energy.

Changing diet is like learning a new language. There are so many foods that aren't even in my vocabulary. I don't know what they taste like. I don't know how to prepare them. I don't even know where to buy them. At the risk of sounding stupid, I don't even know how to choose them. When I shop, everything I buy is standardised. I don't have to choose. Like becoming literate so you can understand a language, literate so you can tell between wines, literate so you know good from bad music... part of changing my diet will require literacy. I suspect there is a world of untapped flavour that will make the choice less difficult. As Megan mentioned, a language can be easier to learn when you move to a place where it is spoken. You have no choice. I didn't struggle on my month long yoga courses. Going on courses, workshops or submerging yourself in a way of life is one thing. Real life is another. Ariella has made a successful transition as she described in her guest post. I am still on the fence.

With necessary apologies to the Rider-Elephant metaphor, and recognising the irony when describing trying to increase the plants in my diet, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. So my first step is to try learn who to make Scott Jurek's Vegetarian Chili. If it is as awesome as he suggests, then perhaps I can switch it for my Spaghetti Bolognaise and make one small step for Trevkind. 

Dining Hall Happiness

Some of my best memories of happy times come from my university dining hall. The documentary 'Happy' looks at why the Danish consistently rank as one of the happiest countries in the world and argues that one of the reasons is Cohousing. The community is planned, owned and managed by the residents with private homes but shared facilities such as cooking, dining, child care and gardening.

The thing that immediately appealed to me was the idea of the shared cooking. Going to a restaurant with friends is awesome, but it is not quite the same. Few could afford to do that every night, and just getting a group of friends together nowadays can be a nightmare given how time and proximity poor we are. In the example they gave, there were 20 families living together. They each cooked twice a month freeing up the food preparation time the rest of the month but meaning they still ate home cooked meals rather than TV dinners.

Below are some pictures I took while in my university dining hall. As you can see, we loved the food and it made us very happy. Many of the wonderful people in these photos are scattered all over the world so it would be impossible to recreate the daily interaction we were used to. Social media has helped a little. Twitter allows you to wonder with your tray until you find an interesting conversation to drop in on. Facebook seems to be having more active debates with people starting to share a little more than photos and jokes. But actual face time is harder.

I have tried to think why if communal dining halls are such a cause of happiness, there aren't more commercially provided ones? I haven't looked into the economics of them but from my experience at university, I know the pressures on the food providers, as soon as you bulk up, to reduce costs. Quality was always an issue, hence the ecstatic photos below. It is also not a business I would immediately think of as attractive. You want something that has a competitive advantage. You want barriers to entry so others can't recreate what you are doing easily. Ideally you don't want to be invested in a commodity. I can't think how dining halls will be provided commercially unless they can be added to something else which offers the opportunity for a profit. There are some things you can't wait for the market to provide.

Perhaps just organising more shared meals but in a less formal way than a dinner party is an approach. I have heard of the concept of an 'extra plate' where you offer to cook for your neighbour once a week and vice versa. The Danes have shown a way - I wonder if it will catch on.

                                                         

Granny Perspective

Grannies are cool. One of the coolest things about Grannies is perspective. A favourite happiness story I have heard is of a young angsty teenager talking to his Gran about his problems. She listened, and then at the end said to him, 'When your Grandfather was your age, he was fighting the Germans.' Perspective.

I went to the US for the first time earlier this year and visiting Washington DC was rather grounding. It a city full of monuments and reminders of sacrifices made. Wondering the Newseum (a museum dedicated to news - or more accurately to free speech and the history of world) is like paging through your photo album - but in this case the bigger your. In the search for happiness, the approaches that appeal to me the most are very practical. Exercise. Relax. Eat Well. Breathe Well. Have a Positive approach. Do something Meaningful. Invest in Relationships. I am regularly struck however by how lucky those of us are that get to focus on these things.

I do believe more and more of us are getting to, and I don't subscribe to the 'Good Old Days' theory. If you choose a bunch of measures of what is important to you, and look over a long enough period, life tends to get better. 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' takes a look at the history of violence and makes me very grateful to be living today.

We live parallel lives though. While many of us get to live a world that is less racist, less sexist, less violent, more engaging and becoming happier - war rumbles on. Last night I watched 'Dirty Wars' - a documentary about the Joint Special Operations Command - effectively a modern day assassin group. I am always wary of conspiratorial stories. I am also aware that we can't possibly vote on all decisions that need to be made and that many are really tough with no clear answers. While adding a dose of Granny perspective to my own problems, the documentary did make me feel proud, if that is the word, that we have this constant self reflection and debate. I don't know what to think about many of these issues that I haven't applied my mind to sufficiently. Israel-Palestine is a another conflict that I feel completely lost in the woods about. I like that there are lots of really smart people who live in a world where we can debate our way inch by inch closer to solutions (see the Affleck-Maher debate below) to very difficult questions. War is messy. I am not sure you could have a documentary Civil War meaning 'Courteous and Polite'.

Bullets aren't as effective as Ideas, but we haven't learned how to retire them yet.

Peddling Away

Incentives matter. How you are rewarded or reimbursed affects how you act. It is a very difficult problem. For goods and materials the more free the market the better the price discovery. If the price is too high for you, it is because you prefer other goods and so the right thing to do is not to buy because someone else objectively wants the stuff more than you. If everyone knows what is available and how much people can buy - the price is right. When it comes to people, we haven't quite nailed it for various reasons. We don't like the idea of being treated the same as goods so we don't like the idea of creating an open market for our skills. We want to buy into a cause. We look for meaning. We are human.

This creates a problem because price discovery isn't very good when there isn't a market. Fair is very subjective. Price discovery works partly because there are just two variables - supply and demand. How much is there? How many people want it? It has nothing to do with how many hours of effort were put in, how smart the people were, what personal sacrifice they put into producing the goods. These are philosophical questions that have no answer.

Bill Cunningham rejects all this. He says, 'If you don't take money, they can't tell you what to do. That is the key to the whole thing.' Bill has cut his life down to the bare bones of expenses and lives in a storage room of his photographs and spends his days taking pictures of street fashion. He has looked at what is important to him and built a life around it.

'He who seeks beauty will find it' - Bill Cunningham - American Photographer

He is an independent photographer. Independence itself does change the incentives. There are issues around giving academics tenure. This allows freedom to say what they want but doesn't provide any guards against the academic not actually adding value any more but still sticking around. Bill is different since he doesn't take anything. There is no one who is hard done by in the exchange other than himself.

One of my concerns with the 'income equality' debate is how to deal with cases like Bill. He is very happy not being reimbursed. There are some things you can't price and for Bill that is freedom. Ministers/Pastors/Swamis/Monks/Priests that aren't corrupt and lives simple lives and give to the community also receive the benefits of independence (within the confines of their beliefs). It would be silly to try and work out an income that Mothers and Fathers who stay at home to look after their kids 'deserve'. There is no price discovery for that. There is no market.

Once there is a market, there is less debate about what the price is because you know it. It might not feel right to you but you have the option to change. The thing is once there is a price it also changes the nature of the interaction. If you are paying for something, it is no longer a moral transaction. A great example is the introduction of fines for picking up children from school late. Freakonomics gave evidence that this sort of approach has the opposite effect that you would expect. It puts a price on the additional day care and parents feel less guilty because they have 'paid' for the service.

The question becomes how to get the best of both worlds. How to not have people interacting with each other in a way where the power dynamics spoil things? How can the customer and provider end up treating each other well? How can we maintain the benefits of price discovery helping to allocate resources while also trying to hold on to the benefits of something being priceless? Tim Ferris talks of creating 'Muses'. If you are able to build something that can provide the financial support to allow you the freedom to engage with others in an independent way. This doesn't mean you don't charge them. It just means you aren't desperate. You can walk away, and perhaps that is the key to why we treat people in personal interactions better than when money is involved. They can walk away.

Or in Bill's case... pedal.

Source: Gudphoto.com

Against The World

The story of Bobby Fischer launched the American love of chess, but it is not a happy one. Lance Armstrong are Hansie Cronje are my two greatest fallen heroes. Fischer's story is a little different.

Bobby Fischer: Winner of the 1972 World Chess Championship

Mental illness is already tough to handle. When someone has Cancer, AIDS, Pneumonia or any other clearly identifiable disease, we know how to handle it. When someone has a mental disease, it is much harder. All our affection for people is wrapped up in the relationship we have with them, and that is essentially with their mind or emotional capacity. The relationship may be based on a sport or interaction you have with them - and that may end. Then you have the memory. You keep that. The challenge with mental issues is your perception of 'who they are changes'. Who they are and your most recent memory of them are very hard to separate. Deciding to separate them to maintain a memory is in a way acknowledging a death of sorts. Nicholas Fearn talks in his book 'Philosophy' on how someone can arguably be 'dead while alive' with certain mental illnesses (e.g. advance Alzheimer's).

I don't know much about Bobby Fischer beyond the documentary 'Bobby Fischer Against The World' which I just watched. What I found disturbing here was that his descent wasn't even necessarily an identifiable mental disease. In his case he was famous, so people knew about his slow alienation and although he ended up being 'adopted' by Iceland (with affection for his 1972 victory there), even that ended badly.

We spend a lot of time thinking about what we eat, what we do, and how much we exercise in our search for happiness. This documentary is a great example of the importance of mental health - for ourselves, those we care about and for our heroes.