Birds and Mosquitoes

I was pushing my three year-old, Yael, in a little red plastic car the other day, the one with the blue handle for the adult to push with, doing lap after lap in her Bubbie’s back yard. Each revolution took us past Bubbie’s birdbath, your standard white pedestal-sinky set-up. Every single time we passed the hammock and came upon the birdbath I had the very same thought, which was that although it was a lovely birdbath that was sure to attract even lovelier birds, it was, with its stagnant little pool, a perfect habitat for thousands of mosquito eggs. It is said that when the English colonists first arrived in Maryland the Chesapeake Bay was so plentiful they could they dip their hands in and pull out a fish; but while the Bay is now on life support, during Baltimore summers you can stick your hand in the air and pull out a mosquito. And while Baltimore’s mosquitoes aren’t known to carry malaria, one does have to worry about the mosquito bite equivalent of death by a thousand paper cuts.

By the ninth or tenth circuit it occurred to me that the birdbath cum mosquito nursery should have its own card in the Tarot, seeing as it encapsulates the inevitability that every human effort to improve the world be fraught with unintended consequences. Look, a cardinal! Ugh, mosquitoes. Writ large, this inevitability goes as follows: Look at the standard of living in advanced industrialized nations! Ugh, climate change.

There is a small but vocal movement, some of whom call themselves future primitivists, which asserts that everything went off the rails when we abandoned hunter-gathering and took up agriculture, i.e. when we established civilization as we know it. I would note that hunter-gatherers were no less proficient at having children than their corn-fed descendants, which, as every parent knows, rendered the hunter-gatherers vulnerable to the greatest source of unintended consequences the world has known: no one ever knows what the hell their children are going to get up to.

The first law of thermodynamics holds that, in a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just changed from one form to another. The universe is an infinitely large version of just such a closed system, meaning that the total energy in the universe is constant. I’d like to suggest that the amount of good in the universe remains at a similar eternal equilibrium. The idea of such an equilibrium isn’t new, of course, and is at least as old as China’s yin and yang, the symbol for which suggests that there can only ever be as much light in the universe as there is dark. And the mechanism that keeps light and dark, good and evil in balance in our universe may very well be unintended consequences.

This balance is maintained when intentionally bad acts have unintended good consequences. To wit, Desmond Tutu’s remarkable assertion in a speech I heard him give that “Europeans brought apartheid with them to South Africa, but they also brought the Bible. We got a good deal!” But since most people, most of the time, are trying to make the world a better place, even if only for themselves or those they care about, most of the unintended consequences that keep light and dark in balance are, in fact, dark. This goes a long way towards explaining why winning the lottery is almost sure to ruin your life, and why there are so many miserable successful people, e.g. biographers for John Wooden and Bill Walsh, respectively the greatest basketball and football coaches ever, have reported that each was exceptionally insecure amidst and because of their fabulous and consistent success.

What about the unintended good consequences of good acts, when people “pay it forward,” when love spreads, not to mention the unintended bad consequences of bad acts? Perhaps unintended consequences flow out of every single act, whether malevolent or benevolent, like waves from a stone dropped in a pond. The peak of every wave is the crest of the unintended good consequences, and the trough of every wave is the nadir of the unintended bad consequences. Peak and trough mirror one another in length, and the balance between light and dark is maintained. Some quantum physicists hypothesize a universal wave function, i.e. “the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction) If the universe is, in fact, an infinite ethereal wave, then maybe the idea of waves of unintended consequences keeping the universe aligned isn’t so very far fetched.

If doing the right thing leads to as much bad as good, whither social justice? I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech:

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Like Churchill, those engaged in the fight for social justice shall never surrender. But, unlike Churchill, we shan’t go on to the end, because there is no end. Victory in one battle only assures the next. Nevertheless, we can, and must, make this better. Even if the law of unintended consequences makes the fight for social justice into a high stakes game of Whac-A-Mole.

I would close by suggesting that if you have trouble accepting the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, consider the fact that it is a world that can’t be improved upon. And if the yin-yang symbol were a glass, would it be half full or half empty?

Find Your Passion!

A piece in the current edition of Johns Hopkins Magazine highlights JHU alum and motivational speaker Jay Shepherd’s “’Five P’s’ of occupational happiness,” the first of which, of course, is passion. If we are to believe Shepherd and basically everyone else who has ever opined about the proverbial color of one’s parachute, passion is to workplace satisfaction as winning is to sports, i.e. it is something of a cure-all. The first and most important step in landing one’s dream job is, per the “passion for your work” belief system, dreaming about said job. Like many of our contemporary reigning ideologies, the “passion for your work” narrative is total poppycock, and ignores the fact that most people dream about not having a job at all not from a lack of insight into their own passions, but in order to devote themselves full time to these very passions. We all know what color our parachutes are. It’s just that for most of us, The Wall Street Journal fanatics notwithstanding, that color isn’t green.

In his wonderful collection of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb succinctly captures why we dream about giving up work for our passions instead of translating our passions into paid labor, why, if we restrict ourselves to the primary colors, we avoid dreaming in a combination of yellow and blue. But before turning to Taleb, I should note that if one first learns, as I did, that yellow and blue make green from the Glad sandwich bag advertising slogan, is it any wonder that the boundaries around permissible happiness are erected at the outer limits of one’s dream job? As a child when I dreamed of happiness it was most often as a multimillionaire athlete- instead of enjoying sports for sports sake I fantasized it into a profession. As a college student my friends and I gave serious consideration to opening a tavern together- it wasn’t enough to sit around drinking and enjoying one another’s company. And as an adult I imagine waking up to find my name on the New York Times bestseller list- writing for pleasure could only ever be masochistic because the only possible pleasure would be the pain of not getting published. So, pace what I said above in paragraph 1 and the start of paragraph 2 about what we’re really dreaming of, perhaps the truth is that while we’d all like to imagine that if we won the lottery we’d quit our jobs and devote ourselves full time to whatever our own version is of e.g. photographing the indigenous wildlife, we’re all much more likely to end up becoming someone’s boss. Which makes Taleb’s take on what it means to be alive all the more damning: “You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.”

If Taleb is correct, as I believe he is, then “the dignity of work” is one of the greatest lies ever told, and there can only ever be “the dignity of leisure.” As members of the unhappiest profession (per official Forbes magazine rankings), lawyers know this. See Shepherd’s description of how a bunch of lawyers reacted to one of his motivational speeches on the “Five P’s”, as quoted in Johns Hopkins Magazine: “Nobody threw any tomatoes.” In the magazine Shepherd’s line is described as a joke, and perhaps it is; I have yet to figure out a way to tell my wife something serious without first joking about it (in what I’m sure she would describe as a painfully unfunny fashion.) Shepherd’s speech to the lawyers about the importance of passion reminds me of the time I was at a Jewish gathering in celebration of the holiday Tu B’Shevat, the “new year” celebration for trees. Several folks had been asked to prepare short readings for the celebration, and one individual, who happened to be Israeli, began a nice story about a tree that was used to make a cradle for a baby, which sounded nice, but was then used to make a boat for a miracle worker who could calm the seas with a word, at which point everyone started to get a little antsy. When the story continued and the tree was being used to make a crucifix the entire room erupted in a single voice: “That’s a story about Jesus!!” No one threw tomatoes at the reader, who, by way of explanation, had only read the first paragraph of the story before deciding it was a perfect tale to tell at Tu B’Shevat, but, needless to say, we didn’t get to hear how the story ended. Just so, I’m surprised Shepherd made it through all “Five P’s” without the lawyers exclaiming in unison, “Hey, this story’s about happiness!”, and heading for the door.

But it’s not just the lawyers who are unhappy. A recent Gallup poll found that amongst the global workforce, only 13% of workers like their jobs. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2013/10/10/only-13-percent-of-people-worldwide-actually-like-going-to-work/ ) 63% are described as “not engaged,” while the remaining 24% are “actively disengaged,” which is a polite way of describing the difference between those who dislike their jobs and those who hate them. When I read the dust jacket for Taleb’s book I found the description of his central project, unmasking “modern civilizations’s hubristic side effects- modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not slavery” (emphasis added) a touch hyperbolic. In America, after all, we are not even 150 years removed from the war that ended slavery qua slavery. But as I read more about the Gallup poll it occurred to me that it just might be my status as an American that was blinding me to the truth of Taleb’s assertion that “There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.” The poll found that the United States, along with Canada, had the highest proportion of workers who reported liking their jobs, at 29%. That figure, 29%, is uncomfortably close to the 30.4% of Americans who hold a Bachelor’s degree. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bachelors-degrees-at-record-level.html?_r=0 ) And because I live and work among the happy 30%, I have no real notion of what it’s like to be a wage slave, my teenage summer gigs at McDonald’s and my quarter-life crisis nadir during a two-week stint stocking the shelves at a liquor store notwithstanding. No real notion that Taleb is waving the truth in front of a nose that I don’t even realize I’ve stuck up in the air.

The 13% of global workers who like their jobs is a figure just close enough to another number to give me pause. As defined by Wikipedia, Stockholm Syndrome is “a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome ) And just how many hostages experience this “phenomenon?” Again per Wikipedia: “The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 8% of victims show evidence of Stockholm Syndrome.” And almost exactly half-way between 13% and 8% we find 10.9%, which is the exact percentage of Americans with advanced degrees, who, I humbly submit, are the pool from which the very happy, the 8%, are drawn. Subtracting the lawyers, who are incapable of happiness, should easily get us down from 10.9 to 8%.

To be crystal clear, I am suggesting that the happiest of the happy, those who don’t just like their jobs, but those who actually love them, are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome, one in which they (or we, given my advanced degree and overall job satisfaction, which easily meets the 13%’s “engaged” criteria ) have so aligned themselves with their captors that they take “What’s good for IBM is what’s good for America” as an article of faith. In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace captures exactly how this happens in a passage describing “the soldier personality, the type that believes in order and power and respects authority and aligns themselves with power and authority and the side of order and the way the whole thing has got to work if the system’s going to run smoothly.” If you’re a soldier, you will, assuredly, “want to line yourself up with the real power. Have the wind at your back. Tell them listen: Spit with the wind, it goes a whole lot further.” And if you’re a soldier with an advanced degree, you’re already this close to being one of the 8%. To put a twist on a phrase from Slavoj Zizek: Enjoy your syndrome! Or, to translate it into motivational self help-speak: Find your passion!

You Can Only Win if You Don’t Play

On my morning commute I pass a billboard that displays the current jackpot for both the Mega Millions and Power Ball lottery games, and this morning Mega Millions was up to 257 million dollars. I am unable to report on the Power Ball, as the figure doesn’t register in my mind until it tops 200 million dollars, at which point I, like almost everyone else, begin to think about stopping in at the nearest convenience store to purchase a ticket. Life’s busy treadmill usually wins out, and I don’t get really serious about buying a ticket until the lottery zooms past 300 million. This despite the ample anecdotal evidence that hitting the jackpot will more than likely ruin your life.

I am reminded of Shirley Jackson’s classic short story, “The Lottery,” in which the citizenry of a small town are all entered in an annual lottery, with the catch that the “winner” is stoned to death. But in Jackson’s story the lottery is compulsory, whereas we’re all signing up voluntarily for a chance to be, if not precisely stoned to death, then buried alive under our sacks of dough. It is tempting to believe that winning the lottery simply sets in motion an equal and opposite reaction: oh, how nice, you won tens of millions of dollars- so sorry about your dead son (a real life turn of events that happened to my former co-worker’s friend, and exactly the kind of anecdotal evidence about the lottery we are all privy to). Such a belief is grounded in devout bitterness, bitterness that is fed by the inevitable envy towards those who do win the lottery, and perversely, also fed when you learn of the winner’s equally inevitable demise, even if that demise is simply having a reputation as the world’s biggest rich asshole. Even though you rejoice that the winner’s life remains a piece of shit like your own, your bitterness only grows as you realize that should lady luck smile on you, the Lord nevertheless follows up the giveth with the taketh away, twisting life’s greatest mystery into the following: “Why do bad things happen to lucky people?”

Avoiding the temptation of this equal-and-opposite-reaction worldview requires that we re-inspect our notion of luck. Mega Millions is more like than unlike Jackson’s “Lottery” because the people who are lucky enough to be truly happy would never in a million years play Mega Millions. This means that every last one of the pool of potential Mega Millions winners is, to one degree or another, basically unhappy, at least in the moment they purchase their ticket. One of only two real changes that occurs for the Mega Millions winner is that he or she goes from being unhappy to being unhappy with money, the other change being that he or she never again has to worry about paying the bills or putting food on the table, which, while not insignificant, is, per the wisdom found in “Man does not live by bread alone,” not by itself enough to overcome a basic dissatisfaction with life. One who doubts that everyone who plays the lottery is to some degree basically unhappy must answer the question of why on earth a happy person would play the lottery. Doing so would be no different than deeply loving one’s spouse and then turning around and cheating on him or her. And infidelity, like playing the lottery, is born of dissatisfaction.

This second perspective, while discomforting to me as someone who occasionally plays the lottery (because really, what the bleep do I have to complain about re: my own circumstances, which are the only circumstances in question given that I’m certainly not playing the lottery while fantasizing about all the philanthropy I’m going to get up to. I should add, for the sake of clarity, that despite buying lottery tickets, I have never and would never cheat on my spouse, who is the main reason I am happy enough to buy lottery tickets so rarely, and, if I just opened my eyes a little wider, would keep me out of the checkout counter at Royal Farms for the rest of my life), has the advantage of nullifying the question of “Why do bad things happen to lucky people?” The truly fortunate are those lucky enough to realize how good they have it. But even these folk still face, at a minimum, old age, sickness, and death, which leaves us yet wondering “Why do bad things happen to good people?” If I can find just find an answer to that, I’ll make millions.