After work today, the temperature was right and I had an errand to run, so I walked about a half hour from the office to Dufferin Mall. I’ve been thinking a bit lately about music and how to make it, so I cranked one of my favourite mashups and counted bars to try to get a feel for how the pieces were structured. It made for a great study; because the mashup had a variety of sources (though largely within electronica), there were a range of speeds, rhythms, and styles for me to try to get the feel of. The mix wrapped up pretty much perfectly as I arrived at the mall.

As I walked up to the mall, switching gears from headspace to the real-world, I thought a bit about awareness, and it brought my mind to a friend’s book I’m reading about the simple concepts behind buddhism. I got into a very thoughtful, appreciative mood while I walked around the mall, trying to be calm and just to see. I watched people buy, and argue, and examine things – something notable was that I only saw two people smile the entire time I was in the mall. I also saw a little girl get very excited about one of those car-machine-rides that’s always outside of zellers/wal-mart/toys-r-us sort of places, but I didn’t actually see her smile.

On my way back from the mall, I noticed a little elderly asian woman jog-walking down the other side of the street, a man who looked very quietly angry, and a bunch of other things. I tried to keep my attitude of observation with me. Coming to the corner of Dufferin and Bloor, I sat down on a bench near the church entrance, and while I did my best just to see the world, my mind took note and waxed reflective. I began to think about the nature of happiness and how it relates to life goals and situations. The words of Solomon were in my mind — also echoed in the simple buddhist book — that even if a person manages to possess all that they wish for, they will leave it behind when they die. My feet got restless, so I turned on a tune and strolled west along Bloor.

I eventually walked past a sign that read “Samosa – 3/$1” and also advertised Dosas. I like these things, and I was still fairly hungry, but I wasn’t done thinking yet. The store that the sign belonged to sat on a corner of a one-way street that exits onto Bloor, so I walked up the street a short ways and sat down to let the song finish and to try to collect my thoughts. This is roughly where I got to:

I thought of the following possible “descriptions” of how happiness could work, as a mechanism:

• There could be just a single sense of happiness, which is:
• independent of your actions / life’s situations
• fully dependent on your actions / life’s situations
• dependent on your actions / life’s situations to a point (positive, negative, or both)
• variably dependent on your actions / life’s situations
• There could also be two senses of happiness: a momentary, event-based happiness, and a rest-happiness felt in the absense of a direct event which affects your mood.

The variable-dependent and dependent-to-a-point situations are very similar. For the variable dependency, one’s happiness can be noticeably affected by an event or situation, but gradually, as one becomes happier and happier (or less and less happy), the effect of an event or situation is lessened. In the “to a point” situation, a situation or event has the same effect over and over again until a certain level is crossed, at which point the event no longer affects how happy a person is.

The fully dependent version would suggest that you could do the same thing over and over again (provided it won’t make you sick or via some other means start harming you — so eating, sleeping, etc don’t count as counterexamples — think instead of reading a joke) and it should continuously increase your level of happiness by the same amount, after every reading.

The fully independent version suggests that no matter what you do — whether you accomplish something, or lose something, or stay the same, you will remain exactly as happy as you are right now. I’ve noticed anecdotally that events do bring (at least temporary) bursts of happiness to me. So full independence does not seem to be a realistic situation, unless you add a second form of happiness: rest happiness. The happiness you have when there is no force acting upon you is what would be independent of events and situations, and it is posited to be essentially unchanging. It could likely be altered through prescription drugs or mental illness, but that’s outside of my desire to speculate upon 🙂

The fully dependent model from two paragraphs ago also didn’t sound very reasonable — so that leaves us with the variable model, the to-a-point model, and the two-happinesses model, and possibly mixes of these concepts.

Having narrowed down the field of possible mechanisms of happiness, I decided to think about the consequences of each of the remaining candidates, to see if I could rule anything else out or find that any categories were actually collapsible. I felt that they were! Essentially, the dependent and independent versions are what matter; I was unable to rule out either of them as a broad class in earlier thought experiments, so it’s worth considering as a whole what each might mean.

Happiness independent of situation or action means that a person could win the lottery and marry a perfect mate and raise perfect kids and accomplish all of their goals and be renowned and respected and essentially have all of their wishes granted, and yet be no happier on average than a person who lives in a waste matter sewer after breaking multiple limbs falling into it. It means that regardless of your actions, your desires will never be fulfilled.

Happiness dependent upon your situation (to at least some degree) means that your happiness is affected positively when good things happen and negatively by the bad. Winning the lottery should then make you extraordinarily happy in a lasting, fulfilling way, but this does not appear to be the case. After great personal victories, people seem to experience a short bout of happiness, which subsides. There appears to be a cooldown on happiness levels. This means that, to reach and keep a certain level of happiness, one must continuously find fulfilment and enjoyment — they will never reach a point where this need ceases.

Thus, both roads lead to the same place: no matter what a person does, they will never ‘feel complete’, or find true, lasting happiness by accomplishing a goal. That, I think, is one of the things worth seeing about buddhism: fulfilment, real happiness, and painless existence are not the idea. It appears that one must simply accept that they will never feel truly fulfilled in a lasting sense. Two corollaries arise: regardless of how great or crappy your life is, momentary happiness is available, and even if you can’t find permanent fulfilment, it is not beyond possibility that a person could flood their life with positive events to try to maintain a feeling of fulfilment. It would just be tiring and wasteful. It’s much the same as food — you can always eat it, but you’ll never be done. And you could probably find a way to eat it continuously, but it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience.

This felt like a worthy result to arrive at, and I found it surprisingly comforting. Seeking fulfilment is not utterly pointless, but it’s also not worth fretting over if I feel that I am not at my happiest at a given moment. Another story from the simple buddhism book came to mind: a man who felt he had many problems sat with buddha and listed each one of them out, then asked for buddha’s help. Buddha responded that he couldn’t help with the problems listed, but might be able to help with a different problem. The man asked which, and Buddha responded “that you think you must solve your problems”.

Having reached a good thought destination, I went in for some food — delicious and cheap, wow! $5 for a styrofoam container full of rice with 2 large splotches of different veggie curries on top, and $1 for 3 samosas! I didn’t go for wild, but I could have paid $3 for 10 samosas! They were incredibly delicious. I ate as I walked home, grabbed some strawberries (going to taste test the expensive ones and the cheap ones), and of course thought some more. I also took an opportunity to smell some flowers, and to enjoy a stunning vista of the moon framed by high park apartment buildings and a construction crane on Bloor.

A productive walk. This is why (and how) I enjoy my free time.

Today, the prince visited the youth centre where I volunteer. I wasn’t there; he visited a few hours before I arrived. I felt like it was a little exciting – it certainly helped to validate the sense I have that we’re being useful as volunteers. That’s a bit of a non-sequitir, but it did.

On the way home, a fellow volunteer found a notice which had been left on the subway. It raged against the visit of a monarch, the concept of a monarch, the unjust nature of our society, and the foolishness of honouring our ‘imperialist heritage’, or even seeing it through rose-coloured glasses. Everything that I read on the page made sense, and it wasn’t really very sensationalistic. It was just stating the absurdity of the situation. Yet I could not move past apathy about it.

I commented on my feelings to my friend, and a nearby stranger contributed their insight: I don’t have to picket, but I do have to vote. It seemed like a rather courageous thing to do at the time, but they were on their way out of the train, so now I wonder if they’d have been so bold having to continue to sit beside me for a few more minutes. I hope so. Anyway, their words got me on the topic of voting, which I have a similar mixed set of emotions about.

See, I’m pretty stupid and uninformed. Incoming list: I don’t know much about economics, about history, about the culture of the french, the eastern-canadians, the northern-canadians, the prairie-canadians, the western-canadians, or even many of the southern canadians (of whom I take membership) — or those who don’t fit in the categories I’ve foolishly devised. I don’t know very much science, very much about theft, or strategy, or budgeting, or military culture or needs, or policy, or our identity, or education, or anything about ‘what’s best for everyone’.

I don’t even know very much of what I don’t know.

Yet, in our society, I seem expected to feel entitled to a loud, strong opinion about all of those things. I am entitled to participate in deciding who will decide about them, and occasionally, I’m entitled to directly participate in deciding about them. Why should I feel that I have the right to choose a person who will run a city, who will choose a person who will run a police force? Or to choose a person that will decide health-care policy?

Usually, there are attempts to inform us, the stupid public, by telling us ‘what they plan to do’ in the form of “campaign promises”. The people running often seem more interested in winning than in doing the best job or the best things for the most people. They are selling the cheapest, best-looking thing they could come up with that roughly aligns with their ideals, and they’re doing their damndest to package it up so we’ll be convinced.

I don’t want that. It’s feels cheap and sleazy, and it’s not about anything that matters. It’s just a giant, stupid game where we feel entitled and empowered but don’t make many decisions that have real impacts on lives. Well, at least I don’t think we should even have that power! I absolutely don’t believe that there is any real way to make more people “care” about voting, or to make us “well informed”. We’re going to continue to be idiots, and we’re going to continue to be apathetic, unless someone stupidly tries to take power via an obvious show of force.

What else

Meritocracy sounds pretty great. Let qualified people run the show. Standardized tests likely aren’t the way to figure out merit, and I won’t claim to know what is, but I strongly think that the people who run countries should be elected for their ability to do their jobs rather than their ideologies. If they are clearly failing us, we as the public should still have the ability to oust them, but there appears to be very little other control we need.

We shouldn’t need to fire everyone every 2-5 years and retrain them on new jobs in new fields. We shouldn’t need to divide along falsely drawn lines of opinion. We shouldn’t be electing people who we pay attention to for less time than the average person pays to coffee. We should be free from restraint and tyranny. We should be free from oppression. We should have the ability to speak our mind and travel where we like, and as I said above, we should have the freedom to reject a government that clearly does not serve our needs.

All other aspects of military, fiscal, health, education, maintenance, and other policies are not things we need to worry about. Perhaps, if we demanded control, we could hold a referendum every X years to vote on some goals. Maybe we’d like to focus on improving health care. Maybe we’d like to focus on improving our collective wealth. Those kinds of decisions may not be beyond you and I, but percentage points and graphs and numbers of billions of dollars provisioned for X are meaningless to us. We could still have people whose job is to oppose the prevailing opinion — dissent and sober second thought are useful to us. But disagreements shouldn’t be motivated by politics.

Also, as a note, I’m not suggesting that a closed meritocracy is the answer — decisions should be transparently part of public record, but they should come as a product of discussion between experts, not politicians. I’d love to see qualified experts run our world as true civil servants, without the asinine circus of politics.

Is that really a ridiculous thought?

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.