Good afternoon.
I liked an
opinion piece on bloomberg.com by Megan McArdle: "After 45 Birthdays, Here Are '12 Rules
for Life.'" Although I have over 20
years on her, most of her rules apply equally well to those of our age. (Some of them I just don't agree with, but
they're trivial as well.) It provokes a
chuckle when she describes 45: "The
building years of your life are over, and what you are now is pretty much what
you are going to be. Soon it will be
what you were." I chuckle—but I
also think she's right.
Although
she doesn't explicitly name it, it's clear she's writing in response to the popular
(among Millennials, so one reads) book 12
Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Canadian psychologist Jordan
Peterson. I have not read it and don't
intend to, but the reviews of it make it sound like it's a combination of
muscular Christianity, right-wing mantras against social change, and a lot of
pseudo-intellectualism. McArdle's rules
make much more sense to me than Peterson's.
To my
mind, these are the important rules of the 12 she set out (for those of us a
few years beyond age 45). Her language
is in italics.
-- Be kind. Mean is easy; kind is hard. Somewhere in eighth grade, many of us acquired
the idea that the nasty putdown, the superior smile, the clever one liner, are
the signs of intelligence and great personal strength. But . . . making yourself feel bigger by
making someone else feel small takes so little skill that 12-year-olds can do
it. Yeah, I stay away from people
who approach life this way.
-- This one is hard
for me but I think she's right. Politics is not the most important thing in
the world. It's just the one people talk about the most. That's because
everyone shares the government; only you are married to your spouse. . . . Your spouse and others around you matter more
to your happiness than the government does. You will notice, as you go about
your day, that many, many important things are riding on your spouse,
things that will have immediate costs and benefits to you. Very few of the things that irritate you or
bring you joy have anything to do with the government. My underline; it's true for daily life,
but for anyone who worries about the society at large, and the world we are
bequeathing to our children, it's difficult not to be depressed right now. And for many who rely on government for their
lives, this advice has limited boundaries.
-- This is probably
even more true when one is retired. Give yourself permission to be bad. You know what you're really good at? Things you've done many times before. Mastery is boredom. Unfortunately, we like feeling like masters;
we hate feeling like idiots. So we keep
ourselves bored in order to protect ourselves from feeling stupid. This is a bad trade.
-- I really agree
with this one. We do not do it
enough. Don't just pay people compliments; give them living eulogies. Tell them exactly how great they are, in how
many ways. Embarrass them. Here's a funny thing I have learned by being
just a little bit internet famous: it
doesn't matter how many times you hear them, the words "You are amazing,
and here's why" never get old. They
do not go out of style.
-- Also probably
even more true as one gets past age 60. That thing you kinda want to do someday? Do it now. I mean, literally, pause reading this column,
pick up the phone, and book that skydiving session. RIGHT NOW. I'll wait. Pixels are patient. Don't wait until you have the time to really
relax and enjoy it. That will be approximately three decades from now, and it's
highly possible you won't be able to enjoy it. For most things, if we're post-60 we don't
have three decades!
-- I still find people
who think this way. I shun them. It's no fun to be around people who are
cynical about everything. Somewhere around that same eighth-grade mark
where we all experimented with being mean, we get the idea that believing in
things makes you a sucker -- that good art is the stuff that reveals how shoddy
and grasping people are, that good politics is cynical, that "realism"
means accepting how rotten everything is to the core. The cynics aren't exactly wrong; there is a
lot of shoddy, grasping, rottenness in the world. But cynicism is radically
incomplete. . . . In fact, human beings
are often splendid, the world is often glorious, and nature, red in tooth and
claw, also invented kindness, charity and love.
-- Oh, yes. Also known as "pick your battles." Don't
try to resolve fundamental conflicts with your spouse or roommates. The only
people who win marital arguments about bedrock values are divorce lawyers. . .
. You wouldn't say "I have a free hour; I bet I could solve the
Israel/Palestinian conflict and still have time for a spot of tennis!" So why do you try to use the same hour to
convince your spouse that potato salad should have pickles in it? . . . You should never, ever argue with your spouse
about anything that could be solved with a proper application of money or
ingenuity. As for the rest: unless it is an existential threat to your
future (out-of-control spending, wants/doesn't want kids, abuse, substance
problem, infidelity), leave it alone. On
your deathbed, your spouse will be there, holding your hand. The dream house
you're dying to buy will not be.
-- This one is both
clever and worth following. Be grateful. No matter how awful your life seems at the
moment, you have something to be grateful for. Focus on it with the laser-like, single-minded
devotion of a dog eyeing a porterhouse. You
have been granted 2 billion seconds on this planet, give or take. You are a billionaire! Many billionaires, however, squander most of
their fortune on bitter recriminations about how unfair everything is. Many of them are right, and it really is
unfair. You won't get a refund from the
universe for the time you spent brooding about the unfairness. You lose them just as surely as a second spent
experiencing joy, only they don't even give you something nice to remember them
by. It is, of course, easier to be
grateful when you're part of the middle/upper middle class and have many of the
comforts of life. There are many who haven't
much to be grateful about.
* * *
A friend wrote back in response to the research
about pain and swearing. "I will
argue that psychic pain is as real as physical pain such as dropping something
heavy on your toe. Thus, I take great
pleasure in knowing that screaming obscenities at the TV every time Trump is on
is good for me. Yay. 😃"
Another friend wrote
in response to the paragraphs on Epicurus and pointed me to a couple of
readings. I learned more.
Epicurus
famously said, "death is nothing to us." When we exist, death is not; and when death
exists, we are not. All sensation and
consciousness end with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure
nor pain. The fear of death arises from
the belief that in death, there is awareness.
From this came an epitaph used in ancient Rome and sometimes yet
today.
Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo
Which translates to
I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care
* * *
There are some weird people
in higher education, I will be the first to admit. From
Inside Higher Ed.
A student in
an online sociology course at Southern New Hampshire University had to appeal
repeatedly when her professor gave her a failing grade on a key assignment. The problem, BuzzFeed reported, was that the
assignment was to compare a social norm in the United States with another
country. The student selected Australia
as the comparison country, and the instructor rejected the assignment, saying
that Australia was a continent, not a country. It took multiple appeals before the instructor
relented.
A spokeswoman
for Southern New Hampshire University confirmed the facts of the article to Inside Higher Ed. "Yes, it's true. We take this concern seriously and our
academic team is working to resolve the matter," the spokeswoman said.
That instructor should
be required to take a geography class. I
hope the course in question wasn't one.
Sometimes the
institutions try to make amends for individual weirdness. Later that same day, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Southern New Hampshire
University apologized to the student, canned the instructor, and gave the
student her money back.
Ashley Arnold,
who is completing a sociology degree online, filed a report with the university
when she received a failing grade on a project outline that was supposed to
compare a social norm in the United States with that of another country. . . . Her grading rubric was filled with multiple
zeros because, according to the professor, "Australia is a continent; not
a country." She [the instructor]
told Arnold that the "error made it nearly impossible" for her to
have accurately completed the assignment. . . .
Arnold thought the grade was a joke at first, she told BuzzFeed. When she realized it was real, she wrote an
email to the professor, attempting to persuade her that Australia was in fact a
country.
Arnold provided a link to the government of Australia. "Thank you for this web address,"
the professor replied. "After I do some independent research on the
continent/country issue I will review your paper." The instructor gave her a B- and "warned
Arnold to 'make sure the date, the facts, and the information you provide in
your report is about Australia the country and not Australia the continent.'"
In its
apology, the university addressed its "friends in Australia," saying,
"we know that you are a country & a continent, best of luck in the
Olympic games!"
The process for hiring
online instructors in Sociology at Southern New Hampshire clearly needs a
review. (And that's part of the problem
with having adjunct, non-tenured faculty members teaching courses.)
* * *
This isn't really new news, but "biphasic sleep"
is what we all seem to need. Matthew
Walker, a Brit who took a faculty appointment first at Harvard and now at California-Berkeley,
an extremely distinguished scholar, says we should all take naps. Well, he doesn't use those exact words, that
I know of, but that's the gist of his years of research. Sleep at night and then nap in the early
afternoon. "Humans are not sleeping
the way nature intended. The number of
sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs have all been comprehensively
distorted by modernity."
People in
cultures that haven't integrated industrialization, that don't have
electricity, break their sleep into two parts.
There also remain "siesta cultures" in some places in the
world. Matthews maintains that the biphasic
sleep pattern
is
deeply biological. All humans,
irrespective of culture or geographical location, have a genetically hardwired
dip in alertness that occurs in the midafternoon hours. Observe any post-lunch meeting around a
boardroom table and this fact will become evidently clear. Like puppets whose control strings were let
loose, then rapidly pulled taut, heads will start dipping then quickly snap
back upright.
We all experience "this blanket of drowsiness that
seems to take hold of you, midafternoon."
This "post-prandial alertness dip . . . reflects an innate drive to be asleep and
napping in the afternoon, and not working. It appears to be a normal part of the daily
rhythm of life."
Maybe
Kathy and I are weird, or statistically abnormal, or just abnormal, but the
description of American (and perhaps other industrialized countries') sleep
patterns has never described us, either before we met or since:
Midnight
is no longer 'mid night.' For many of
us, midnight is usually the time when we consider checking our email one last
time. . . . Compounding the problem, we
do not then sleep any longer into the morning hours to accommodate these later
sleep-onset times. We cannot. Our circadian biology, and the insatiable
early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we
vitally need. At one time we went to bed
in the hours after dusk and woke up with the chickens. Now many of us are still waking up with the
chickens, but dusk is simply the time we are finishing up at the office, with
much of the waking night to go.
I wonder
how many people that paragraph describes.
I have no idea. I know for sure
that it doesn't describe me—at any time in my life. (Of course, before the 1990s, no one was "checking
our email one last time." So is
this frenzied lifestyle a reflection of modern electronic communication? I have checked email before going to bed, since
the widespread use of email—but at about 9:00, not midnight.) While I frequently worked a lot more than 40
hours per week, I did it during longer work days and on weekends—not at 11:00
at night.
I could while working—and in retirement as well—go for a
day, or maybe two, with only 5-6 hours of sleep. After that, I just cannot stay awake and
function; I have to sleep. Depending on my
age and what I eat/ate for lunch, I do/did experience the post-prandial
alertness dip in the early afternoon.
(That is, the older I've gotten, the more I experience it, although even
so I don't usually nap.)
Walker maintains there are consequences for public health
as a result of the elimination of biphasic sleep and notes a study that Harvard's
School of Public Health did about changes in Greece. It used to be that Greek establishments were
open from 9 to 1, closed from 1-5, and open again from 5-9. That practice has largely disappeared. The Harvard study included over 23,000 Greek
adults, ages 20 to 83, and looked at cardiovascular outcomes over six years
after the afternoon naps were eliminated.
As
with countless Greek tragedies, the end result was heartbreaking, but here in
the most serious, literal way. None
of the individuals had a history of coronary heart disease or stroke at the
start of the study indicating the absence of cardiovascular ill health. However, those that abandoned regular siestas
went on to suffer a 37 percent increased risk of death from heart disease
across the six-year period, relative to those who maintained regular daytime
naps. The effect was especially strong
in workingmen, where the ensuing mortality risk of not napping increased by
well over 60 percent.
One can
imagine periods in lives when shortness of sleep is inescapable, such as the
months following the birth of a child.
But to the extent that staying up late and arising early is a choice, we
never chose it. To be sure, in my salad days
I sometimes stayed up until the wee hours talking with friends, or with Pat,
but I didn't accomplish much the next day at work when I did that. Once kids came along, no such indulgence was
possible.
* * *
Interesting map.
The blue
gaps in the map, the seas and bays, are the areas that voted blue.
http://digg.com/2018/religious-faith-map-united-states
Gary
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