Bits For Rent

It’s hard to believe it has been over 11 months since I last sat down and gave myself the time to place my thoughts into sentences. In fact, it is almost a year to the day since my second-to-last entry here. What fascinates me about this is that I cannot even count the number of times each week I will think of a subject and say to myself, “Hmm, this would be a great blog post.” Suffice it to say that it would be quite high. And yet, after 11 months, I have naught to show for it but these few short sentences expressing my regret at all the things I lacked the time to do.

Time is a fascinating thing. And thinking about it has caused me to want to make some pretty spectacular sweeping generalizations about people. The rest of this post will be rife with those, so literalists and fact-checkers may want to take their ball and go home before I start causing smoke to come out of your ears. Everyone else, enjoy the ride.

The Illusion of Control

As humans, it is in our very nature to attempt to control as many of the variables in the world as possible. For those that we cannot control, we build up such great amounts of data that we are able to predict, within one or two standard deviations, what the likely occurrence will be. In the world of technology, Moore’s Law tells us that the number of transistors that we can place in a computer chip will double every two years. This statement has held true for over 40 years. With weather, we lose accuracy the further out we predict, but 24 and 48 hour forecasts hold an incredibly high level of accuracy. (Thanks to the spread of 3G networks and WiFi, we are able to keep up with adjustments to a forecast on the fly, thereby lessening the likelihood of incorrect forecasts from negatively impacting our personal plans.)

My favorite example is the odds-makers in Vegas, though. The amount of times I have heard, or even said myself, how incredibly accurate the line is… well, let’s just say the amount of nickels could afford someone a free lunch, and possibly dinner. The beauty of Vegas’s system is similar to that of the New York Stock Exchange– the actual measure of the point spread (or stock value) is directly correlated with our own assumptions as a whole. There’s a fascinating book about this by James Suroweicki called The Wisdom of Crowds which I won’t go into at length, but the crux of the book is this: people, so long as they have some knowledge about the subject, will as a group deliver an estimate of that subject’s worth, outcome — whatever it is that is being measured — with almost startling accuracy.  When pressed into guesswork or speculation, be it for Fantasy Football or the outcome of an election, we do a damn good job of predicting the future.

Yet despite all of our cunning and data analysis, cross-referencing and fact-checking, gut feelings and soothsayings, we make for especially rotten self-analysts. We routinely stack our plates with more than we can handle, build up incredible backlogs of things that we “must” get done but that are not of a high enough priority to actually get done, and never fail to lament our perpetual lack of time (case in point: this post). A lot of things can be blamed for this, such as becoming bogged down in minutiae, spending too much time on things that are of no practical benefit, sleeping too much, or sacrificing personal time for the sake of socializing with others. None of which is really important, though. It’s nice to be able to assign the blame elsewhere and list reasons X,Y, and Z as to why we never finished that book or made it to the gym yesterday, but again that’s really just us being human and needing to categorize, number, and file away all of life’s particulars.  The point I suppose I set out to make is that we actually have very little control of our own lives, despite our firm belief otherwise. Holding your breath will not slow down time any more than a Shake Weight will get you into shape. Which is, I believe, largely why we do our best to ignore it.

To be more clear, what I think we ignore is more the long-term span of time, not the immediate and ongoing elements of time. Think about it like this: when people reach certain milestones in their life, such as a birthday or anniversary, we typically celebrate those moments retrospectively. New Year’s Day is probably the biggest exception, due to resolutions and the optimism and hope that a new year brings, but even birthdays tend to be focuses around what has been, not what will be. We do not care for analyzing our personal future because we are hardwired to not think about it, just as we are hardwired to not think about our own inevitable deaths. The reason for this is the same reason we have weather forecasts and Vegas over/under lines: we hate uncertainty. With a passion.

Two examples to help me illustrate this point:

Imagine if you were to knock down every wall in an IKEA and take away all of the signs that indicated what section you were in and where you could find certain items. It would take what is already, in my humble opinion, an excruciating experience and turn it into torture. Nothing would make sense without the guide lines there to show us the way, and no doubt the store would have a very difficult time attracting customers. (In fairness, there are people that enjoy sifting through clutter to find hidden gems, much like a child will rifle through a bag of LEGOs in order to find the one block he needs to build something. In these cases the end goal is always clear beforehand, though. I will concede I’m generalizing a bit here.)

My second example is a bit more partial to my job, but think about MySpace versus Facebook. Even without the exclusivity of “college students only” that propelled the latter site to such heights, Facebook was always better positioned to succeed. And the reason for that really comes down to two factors: uniformity and user authenticity. By only allowing users to modify the content they shared, and not the design of the site, Facebook maintains a consistent appearance and style throughout all of its pages. Likewise, the insistence on users listing their real names and using photos of themselves as their profile picture encourages a sense of legitimacy and authenticity to the experience… which, on the Internet, is quite honestly a fucking miracle. The internet is the world of Anonymous, and yet Facebook has over 500 million people (mostly) representing themselves authentically. People are drawn to it because it can be trusted to deliver on these two points.

With time, though, we can’t trust anything that has not already happened. “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” That may be the single most accurate statement ever written, other than perhaps, “The French are rude.” But I digress. The point I suppose I’m driving at is that we live in a society where we are constantly aware of what is immediately in front of or behind us, but we too often fail to see the forest for the trees. Americans, in particular, are guilty of a life where everything must be full-throttle, on the quick, and we’ll sleep when we’re dead. Even I am guilty of this, and I love sleeping in. The unfortunate thing is that this is ultimately a part of our human nature, or so I would posit. You can crush an ant hill and sit and watch as the colony frantically rebuilds its home and laugh at how pointless it seems, but then you’ll go on Facebook and see one of your friends post something like, “Lost phone, need #s.” The catalog of the past matters more than the future, because it is the record of our lives and all that we will leave behind when we’re gone. It’s why photos are the first thing people rush to save in a fire. “Don’t worry,” you can console someone, “all that stuff can be replaced.” But he or she will still feel miserable, because our accumulation of “stuff” — experiences, clothes, phone numbers, friends, CDs — is what defines us. In the end, afterlife or no afterlife, or record of existing on this planet comes from those people, places, and things we touched. On a base level, we realize that; but in the here and now, it’s often too easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle without considering what each action will mean in a day, a week, a year, or even a decade. (Obviously some choices matter less than others so we don’t need to be microscopically analyzing every choice, but bear with me — I already warned you I’d be generalizing.)

But why then do we always wish we could have done more? Why do we work so hard and make so many sacrifices only to look back at the end of each day and reflect on all the things we did not have time to get done? Maybe it’s because, deep down, we hear the seconds ticking away and know that there can only be so many more to come. Maybe it’s because we want to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and our shortcomings are indicative of how we could improve. Maybe it’s both of those, and more. But control is an illusion. Time is the scarcest resource known to man, and we will always feel as if we are at a lack for it because it is the one thing we can never get back (well, that and your taxes). So we make our decisions deliberately, prioritizing what to get done and what to shelve every minute of every day, knowing full well that every cause will have an effect and that each task completed leaves behind two that we’ll never get to. It’s like a never ending case of buyer’s remorse, us wishing we had been able to have done the other thing or possibly done them all. Perhaps that’s part of human nature, too. For all of our efforts to reduce uncertainty and live life in control of the information available to us, we’ll always feel the need to make that information more complete. Each opportunity that passes us by grates on us because it’s one more data point that must be left blank, like those MP3 files you have without the album art.

“Great,” you may be thinking, “so what was the point of this post again?” Good question. To me, it I appears I wrote over 1700 words of meandering, navel-gazing prose that leaps from point to point without drawing any definitive conclusions, other than life is rather short on definitives but most certainly has a conclusion. Time marches on, with or without us, and it can often feel like a race we’re struggling to stay in. All I know is that in the time it took me to write this, I could have done a load of laundry, taken out the trash, dusted my apartment, and probably read a few news clips to catch up on current events.

But, hey, that’s what tomorrow’s for, right?

America is marching into the future not willingly, but kicking and screaming. I can hardly blame her.

For those of you reading this out of boredom or simply because you’re wondering what I’m talking about now that the headline and intro have grabbed your attention, perhaps you’ve missed the news of late. Here’s a brief recap:

The auto industry is floundering. I mean, it doesn’t have just one foot in the grave; it’s got on its Sunday best, the coffin is ready to be lowered, and they say the service is going to start at any minute. If you’re working for Ford or GM, you thank God you got to go to work today. If you work for Chrysler, well let’s face it, you don’t work for Chrysler any more because it is about to perform its great vanishing act. I’m being a little lighthearted about a very grave situation for many, many Americans, but let’s face it, folks: GM and Ford got called to the principal’s office and I don’t think they’re coming back with just a few weeks of detention.

Which moves us into the second phase of the recap: what’s been going on over at Capitol Hill? A lot, but you’d hardly be at fault for not noticing, given that the world is still broken. Most recently, there’s been a big huff about CO2. See, that was a pun. But seriously, carbon dioxide is bad, m’kay — at least, so say the EPA and our new leader, President Obama. A daring new ruling has just hit the Oval Office after two years of study. Back then, in 2007, Bush was dealing with a ruling by the Supreme Court over whether or not CO2 was a harmful substance, and if it was should the EPA be tasked with regulating it. Well, word has now just conveniently got back that, hey, CO2 is pretty fucking terrible for the planet, and we should probably stop making so much of it.

Now, that sounds like a good idea, right? Well I certainly thought so back in October when Obama was calling for a Cap’n'Trade policy on greenhouse gases. Back then, the general idea was that greenhouse gases were really bad, and in order to reduce our dependence on foreign oil as well as rescue the earth for suffocation, we would limit the amount of pollutants we release as country, and charge ourselves if we went over the set limit. Noble idea, no?

Apparently “no” was what Congress thought. Six months, a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, and a new Democratic president later, the Senate votes almost unanimously that no ruling on emissions control should be passed if it raises the prices of electricity and fuel. Whoa. Didn’t we just, you know, vote for the guy that said, quite publicly, we will limit emissions and tax ourselves for using too much? And now Congress is all like, “Whoa buddy. In case you didn’t notice there’s a recession going on. We can’t really afford all these wacky ideas of yours.” Obama’s response? “Yes, you can.”

Remember that bill I mentioned regarding the EPA? Well Obama certainly did, and now he’s wielding it in the form of a gun, trained on the Senate. Here’s the ultimatum: either the Senate sticks to its guns and says no to cap’n'trade, or Obama will likely enact EPA control over CO2 emissions, assuming it is within his power to do so. That, folks, would be very, very bad. Whenever the government is in charge, it usually is pretty bad, but when it comes to air? Do you think we can just warden off our air and separate it from China’s or Europe’s? There isn’t even a plausible way to differentiate air polluted by the US and air polluted by Mexico (well, the smell of tacos might tip us off…)! If the EPA forces sanctions on limiting emissions, not only would the failing Auto industry be the first to die, but the energy grid would be next in line (even though it should be first in line, since it creates the majority of our pollutants, at about 34%). That’s bad. Real bad.

But what about Obama’s cap’n'trade plan, though? Honestly, I really don’t know. Lesser of two evils? Certainly. The right way to go? Maybe. The right move for our country right now? I’m not so sure.

Our country, no, the entire world, is going to have to stand accountable for the gluttonous consumption of the past at some point in the near future. We will all be judge, jury, and executioner for one another, and the consequences will no doubt take a heavy toll on us all. The high and mighty will surely be the first to be cut down and sacrificed, sinners and merchants of death all of them (ya right), but it will be you and me, dear reader, who will have to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “Wasn’t there something I could have done to help stop this?”

There was, and still is. Make no mistake, and do not doubt your decisions so far. Barrack Obama was the correct choice for president. Regardless of whether or not his policies are the safest or most sound, we now have a president that is willing to give us all a swift kick in the ass and get us back on our feet… though I admit the logistics of that make it sound like he’s just a bully. Still! we must press on. The banks and the foreclosures were only the beginning of a long and drawn out reckoning. But with every institution that falls, a lesson is learned and a new opportunity springs forth. Personal computers stopped selling? Smartphones and netbooks (very small laptops) have sprung up to take their place. The housing market is stagnant? Could you pick a better time to be looking for an apartment or condo, you fresh out of college, broke-ass student? Chrysler is going bankrupt? Did you that they were ranked as one of the worst car manufacturers in the world by Consumer Reports? Did you know that Chapter 11, should they fall into it, would allow the company to restructure and actually have a chance at being less terrible than it was before? Black cloud, silver lining, so on and so forth.

It’s not all coming up roses, but then again it never did to begin with. We’re humans; we stand up, walk forward, trip, fall down, and pick ourselves back up. If there never were any mistakes to learn from, there would be no interest in trying anything new. (Why try to fly if we weren’t born with wings? Even then, it’s not like the Wright Bros. got it in one take and stopped there.)

Right now, the government is too scared of the new to accept any lesson it may be taught. I say go ahead and make the leap. No matter the outcome, we’re bound to be better by it.

(P.S. The title of this post refers to the climax of Atlas Shrugged, when John Galt explains that if he were to meet the Titan Atlas and consult him about his enormous burden, there would be no greater sign of defiance, or personal strength, than to shrug the weight of the world off as if it were nothing. So to all of you reading this worried about your personal futures in these dire times–shrug.)