Dear mom,

Thanks for walks on the beach and along hiking trails,
Thanks for driving down dead-end roads to see broken bridges,
Thank you for teaching me so much.
Thanks for food, for a home, for money, for love,
Thanks for being a great listener and talker,
Thanks for always making me feel welcome.
Thanks for letting me sleep in.
Thank you for being proud and supportive, and for letting me keep my old crap around.
Thanks for reading my blog posts, and encouraging me to write.
Thank you for letting me go my own way and learn my boundaries, along with your protective, motherly advice.
Thank you for occasionally letting me bring home a big stick to keep around the house.
Thank you for always being respectful of me as a person.
Thanks for big warm hugs. 🙂
Thanks for letting me watch The Simpsons, and Malcolm in the Middle, and King of the Hill.
Thanks for your awesome songs and poems.
Thanks for encouraging me to keep on learning and growing.

Thank you for everything, mom. I owe you so much, and I love you even more.

Not only could you die at any moment, but the entire world could abruptly end. So why aren’t we all terrified all the time?

First, let’s illustrate that the world is in fact perched on doom’s windowsill; here are some possible world-ending (life-ending for a significant population of earth) events:

• the yellowstone supercaldera (or other supervolcanoes)
• an asteroid
• the canary islands tsunami
• a pandemic disease outbreak
• a nuclear war
• a local supernova
• a profound coronal mass ejection
• an alien attack
• the magnetic pole-flip
• an extreme shortage of fuel

The events with the greatest possible period of warning on those are likely the supernova, followed by pandemic disease and an extreme shortage of fuel — likely on the order of days or months before the effects are felt. It’s possible that we could have warning before an asteroid strike, but far from guaranteed. Any of these events could happen with just hours or even minutes of warning.

Here’s where the weird part comes in though: it is pretty much guaranteed that one of these events will occur, or something else equally terrible. The world as we know it will one day face a significant existential challenge, but we seem totally unconcerned! It’s typically a subject of some ridicule.

It’s a certainty from a very long point of view, outside a regular person’s sphere of perception. From that very long point of view, it’s a certainty that one of these sort of events will occur, but your typical person doesn’t have any reason to look at things that way. In our lives, we see tens of thousands of new days where nothing bizarre or particularly out of the ordinary occurs. On the timescale of a life, the statistics flip: instead of a long guarantee that something will happen, we have a pretty-much guarantee that nothing will happen on a given day.

We have a paradox! Each new day is likelier than ever before to be humanity’s last. It’s also far likelier than that to be the exact same as yesterday.

This is why it makes no sense to freak out and stop whatever we’re doing. It’s extremely likely that we’ll live out our entire lives without significant changes — if we all just stopped, we’d cause the change we fear. It doesn’t help that we are so susceptible to sensationalism: there is always a segment of society that wants to believe the end is imminent, and will stretch reason and sensibility to believe it. Those people have made a bad name for anyone wishing to keep in mind that the world is not to be taken for granted.

If there’s any advice to be taken here, I think it would just be to enjoy life. Steve Jobs’ advice to ensure that whatever it is you do each day is something you’d be happy to spend your final day doing seems relevant. I’m doubtful that we have much of a chance to prevent or even to significantly increase the warning time on all of the risks I listed above, but surely we can make progress for some of them. It’s good to know that there are people out there studying existential risks and how best to respond to them.

I’m also of the persuasion that it’s fun to think about these things, and exciting (while very scary) to consider that the world could change in the blink of an eye. Fortunately, it’s not very likely to happen in my lifetime.

Let this be a reminder that common sense may not get us very far.

Two hundred years ago, the common sense approach to getting from point A to a distant point B would be to walk, ride a horse, or take a carriage. A person today would think to take a car. That doesn’t seem like a wild distinction, but think about how someone two hundred years ago would have reacted to the notion of a carriage without horses. You’d probably come off a little crazy just trying to explain it.

Consider that in 50 years, the notion of physically controlling a vehicle from your point of origin to the point of destination will seem bizarre. By then, it’ll just be common sense that you tell the car where you want to go, and you end up there. That’s much simpler than being trained for years just to be a highly fallible controller of a multi-ton steel bubble that gets packed into a tight space with hundreds of other steel bubbles, hurtles along faster than birds typically fly, and relies on hundreds of strangers to maintain constant attention and vigilance for hours at a time. Why does doing that make sense to us? It’s insane!

But it doesn’t seem that way to most of us yet. For now, that’s uncommon sense.

Think about electricity, or airplanes, or hot air balloons. The principles behind hot air balloons had been figured out by the Romans, yet no one made one until the 18th century. People had worked very hard to build flying machines, and somehow putting a big container around a fire never occurred to them as a sensible idea. It’s just common sense: hot air rises. But it wasn’t at the time. Imagine how differently the world might have looked if we’d have had hot air balloons from 50 AD. I think it would make for some pretty wicked steampunk.

On a daily basis, we probably make hundreds of decisions based on our common sense. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any heuristic for detecting when common sense should be replaced by uncommon sense. It’s strongly tied to what the uncommon sense replacement will be, and if someone could easily figure that, well, they’d be a genius super-inventor.

While we can’t easily identify those times, we can probably identify some times when we’re just using common sense. It might be useful to try to be aware of when you’re making a small logical leap about ‘what the best choice is’, and whenever you catch yourself doing it, examine: what are the assumptions that underly that? For example, with cars in 1812, someone might think ‘well I’d take a carriage’. If they were to stop and determine what assumptions underly that, they could easily say things like “assuming I can’t fly or magically just be there” — but with some thought, they might arrive at “assuming I need horses to make the carriage move”.

So next time you’re out enjoying your day: think about the assumptions that underly simple decisions. Like putting on your shoes, locking your house, wearing a helmet on your bike, stopping at a red light, heading in the correct direction for work, or not forgetting to bring your key-card. Just taking a mental tour of my journey to work, those things came up. I wouldn’t have to put shoes on if they were always on. Or if the ground were cleaner. Or if a barrier somehow magically existed between my feet and the ground. I wouldn’t have to lock my house if my doors only ever opened for me anyway. I wouldn’t have to wear a helmet if it became impossible to crash bikes the way we can today. Maybe those are stupid analyses: maybe not. The point is just to recognize things that would make the situation different.

If you consider the assumptions you make about the default decisions in your life, you might strike on a vein of uncommon sense. Good luck.

Today, I spent two hours on a train listening to a conversation. Two tradesmen decided to travel home by train instead of heading with their crew on the highway. Throughout the conversation, the younger of the two men repeatedly expressed his frustration over the fact that they had lost time by spending money on the train (their crew was already home shortly after we left), while the older man told him again and again to relax, and to enjoy himself for once.

They had a few beers along the way, and their conversation was at times heated, deeply personal, nostalgic, and humorous. They were each a little rough around the edges, in slightly different ways. The younger man had lost his driver’s license for one reason or another, the older had been heavily involved in gang activity when he was younger. They discussed women, drugs, getting and staying clean, their plans for the weekend, the past, really the gamut of life. They rejoiced in their friendship, they talked about how they hated each other (and each threatened violence to the other, at times jovially, at times seriously).

The younger one was intent on saving money and hurrying, even if it meant taking extreme personal risks. The older kept telling him not to bother — a particular sticking point was around their transportation when they arrived. The older man wanted to just split a cab, while the younger man insisted they only take a cab as far as his house, and then he’d drive the older man home. But he wanted the older man to cover the cab. The older man insisted that neither of them should drive; they’d been drinking. The younger man repeatedly brushed him off.

It was really interesting. Near the end of it, during a reprise of their earlier argument over timing and the cost of the train and why they took the train in the first place, I suddenly started listening as if they were characters in a play. Things slipped into an uncanny valley very quickly, and I felt like someone outside of the world, or that these men might just be actors who screw with travellers, performing a brilliant two-man show. Suddenly, their lines didn’t seem to be delivered as convincingly. It sounded like they were just saying what they thought they were supposed to say.

It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever noticed.

As we got into town, the elder man, frustrated with how sour the younger had been throughout the trip, stood up and headed for the exit early. The younger one sat silently for a bit, and then followed. I had a few minutes to mull the experience over. I considered the subjects they’d talked about, their differing perceptions of time, and their attitudes toward life, each other, and the people they knew. I haven’t had an opportunity to observe people so different from me in such a candid fashion before, and it was really stunning.

My final thoughts, as I put my laptop away and got off the train, were that I, like a fish in water, pay very little attention on a daily basis to the geekiness of the people in my universe. I had actually forgotten that most people aren’t like the ones I interact with every day, and it’s weird to recall that generally, I am the weird one.

I did not ever think I would grow up to describe myself as a hockey player. I remember being alright at “getting the ball away” when playing floor hockey as a youngster. Some of the kids who knew things about hockey were angry that I never passed it to anyone, and they had every right to be. I was just flinging the ball as far away as I could.

I can also remember getting my two upper front teeth knocked in while playing floor hockey during Grade 11 or 12. One of them is porcelain now, and the root on the other fortunately survived. Thankfully there’s no gaps! From that day on until a few months ago, I pretty well stayed out of sports’ way.

Fast forward to today: I’m feeling a bit down on myself at work because I haven’t found the level of productivity I aspire to. Two particular kinds of decisions come up occasionally, and my annoying default response is to freeze up and find a distraction. If it’s a particularly tough little knot to figure out, I can burn a lot of time thinking, getting frustrated, finding something else to do, returning and reloading the mental context, then getting frustrated and removing myself again in a sort of loop.

This has got me thinking — just a bit — about the dreaded topic of “whether I should even be doing this kind of work at all”. In many other situations, I feel I can act quickly and land on my feet, but these ones just catch me. The first is the “should I write it one way or another” moment, and the second is far worse: “I wrote it the one way, but now I see the problems with it are bigger than I guessed… should I continue down this road despite the looming clouds, or undo my progress and try the other path? Maybe there is a third option that hasn’t occurred to me yet?” That one kills me. Especially when the “looming clouds” are something that appears time consuming, might still fail, and I don’t really know how to do it.

So anyway, back to hockey. It’s floor hockey, by the way — I’m not awesome enough to do this on skates yet — tonight I got a goal and a half, while playing defense. The first goal, the full goal, was a lucky shot that soared in under the crossbar. Felt great. I played a pretty solid game (for me) tonight: kept on people, cleared the ball to the right places, stopped lots of incoming attacks, and I didn’t get as out-of-breath as I have in the past.

I’ve only been doing this once a week for two or three months. When I started, I was dying by half-time, and I noticed very clearly how bad I was. It was still fun, but I felt like I was as much harm as good out there. That feeling kept on for a while, but it’s been less and less. I’ve made steady progress. But wait: I didn’t tell you about my other goal yet.

They got one on us, and we were already down by a few. It felt like we kept outsmarting and outplaying them, but something would slip and the ball would fly just perfectly off of legs or a mask into the net. A fluke of flukes! I felt angry — not at the other players, but at how we just couldn’t catch a break. The goalie passed me the ball and I started to bring it up; the other team moved in to block me as I got to half, and my teammates broke over the halfway, but were pretty well covered.

I focused my anger, and decided to be tricky! I deked right like I was going to pass while I ran left, bringing the ball with me. I dodged around a confused-looking forward, ran toward the net, halted the ball and shuffled it away from a nearby defense, then shot! It went straight past the goalie, who just stood there dumbfounded. Everything had lined up perfectly: I felt like a boss. While triumphantly strutting back to the other side, I heard shouts: “doesn’t count! doesn’t count!”

Why the hell doesn’t it count? Were you guys subbing really slowly? That’s your fault.

No, actually, see, there’s this rule in hockey. When the goalie passes it to a person after a goal, that person can bring it forward with them up to half, but must pass it over the line. I didn’t pass the ball: I just ran with it. The rule probably exists because rushing the net like that gives an advantage. The reason everyone just let me past is because they all know the rules, and I looked like an idiot. A complete amateur, which is what I am.

At the end of the game, they decided to count it anyway. We lost by a wide margin regardless, and they were feeling charitable. I made a complete beginner’s mistake tonight, but that doesn’t change that I played a solid game. I poured my heart into something, and it was a dumb idea. But I learned something.

My stuff at work? I’m probably making stupid decisions all the time. As long as I keep my head level and really work hard, I’ll learn. The same goes for every thing in my life: I have mistakes ahead of me, and should consider them as welcome opportunities to learn from. All I can do is try to be better each day.