Achievement And The Cognitive Time-Horizon

 At EconLog, Bryan Caplan has a great post on "unschooling," and specifically the fact that he thinks "unschooled" children ought to be required by the parent/instructor to do one or two hours of math a day, even though such a requirement violates the principle of "unschooling."

He thinks so because, in his experience, unschooled children are seldom strong in math. Here he is elaborating on the problem:

Won’t kids who would greatly benefit from math choose to learn math given the freedom to do so?  The answer, I fear, is: Rarely.  For two reasons:

First, math is extremely unfun for almost everyone.  Only a handful of nerds sincerely finds the subject engaging.  I’m a big nerd, and I’ve done piles of math, yet I’ve never really liked it.

Second, math is highly cumulative.  Each major stage of math builds on the foundation of the previous stages.  If you reach adulthood and then decide to learn math to pursue a newly-discovered ambition, I wish you good luck, because you’ll need it.

I think I'm less experienced than Caplan is, but for whatever it's worth, my experience has been this: The main difference between kids who become successful later in life and kids who don't is that the successful ones learn how to engage in "pain today" for "gain tomorrow." It's the ability to relate a current very unpleasant task to a handsome reward in a far-distant future. 

The kids I know and knew learned this skill from practicing either sports or music. Once they learned it, though, they were able to apply that skill to things like math, computer languages, foreign languages, and anything else that ended up giving them an advantage later in life. 

So, I like Caplan's keyhole solution here a lot; but I also wonder what the best way to teach this kind of perseverance is. As I said, the only way I really know how to teach this skill to somebody is by introducing them to a sport or musical instrument and helping him or her excel. The process of tirelessly practicing a thankless task like free-throws or etudes, followed by eventual success, imparts upon the child an indelible sense that hard practice over the course of weeks and months produces excellence. Once you've learned that, nothing in life can stop you.

But, what's your opinion? How do you think we can best teach this skill to children?

Stationary Waves And Coronavirus

The concept of temperance has been a feature of this blog for many years. When I talk about temperance, I'm not talking about eschewing alcohol, but the two ideas do have commonalities. Temperance, broadly construed, means having enough restraint to not just do, you know, whatever the hell you want to do, whenever the hell you want to do it. Temperance means keeping your hedonic urges in check long enough to make sensible decisions in accordance with your longer cognitive time-horizon. See this old post on the issue for a brief primer.

There are many articles and blog posts out there discussing the matter of what is the correct policy response to the coronavirus epi/pan-demic. There is plenty of criticism to go around. Who did what, and did they do it how soon? What aspect of testing or messaging did the CDC botch, what can be learned from the mass quarantines in other countries?

In one sense, I think it's natural that people want to look at it from those angles. I can sympathize with that inclination. It's much easier to have a debate about public policy and to get worked up about all the wrong things someone else did than it is to simply acknowledge that pandemics occur approximately once every one hundred years, and that using political machinery to stop the spread of viruses is ultimately a futile endeavor. We'd have better luck stopping an incoming asteroid.

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing that the government can do to protect you from communicable viruses. They will spread, because that's what viruses do. It's the circle of life.

On a personal note, most readers will probably have nothing to worry about with respect to COVID-19, anyway; the death rate for most people appears to be somewhere between 0.1% and 1.0%. Those are very good odds for a virus like this. But for me, it's different. I'm "immuno-compromised." I'm a type 1 diabetic. For me, the death rate might be something more like 9%, and the rate of hospitalization independent of death is much higher for me than it is for the population at large.

This thing can kill me.

On the one hand, we could say that coronavirus is a public health emergency. On the other hand, we should probably say that the public health emergency already exists. I see just how much other human beings spread their germs around on a daily basis. You people are absolutely filthy. I see multiple people per day walk out of public restrooms without washing their hands. I see people playing with their noses, mouths, eyes, and then putting their hands all over public surfaces. I see people cough without covering their mouths, I see people spit out of their car windows, I see people blow their noses by plugging one nostril, leaning to the side, and blasting debris onto the sidewalk. It's disgusting. And these aren't low-brow "others" in some "other" part of town. These are the middle and upper class people in "nice" neighborhoods. These are the normies. And they're filthy, filthy people.

Earlier this morning, I saw a Facebook advertisement for a bidet. The comments under the ad were everything I've come to expect from filthy Americans. They expressed incredulity and skepticism, they laughed, they mocked, they teased... This is happening during a global pandemic. Here we have a centuries-old device that can vastly improve American hygiene and reduce the spread of communicable illness, and even during a global pandemic Americans' response is one of mockery and skepticism.

That mockery and skepticism, combined with Americans' refusal to wash their hands, cover their mouths, and avoid blowing their noses on the sidewalk, is what will ultimately be to blame for the spread of coronavirus and diseases like it. It's easy to point fingers at the CDC for botching "testing," but the demand for "testing" would be decidedly low if Americans knew how to wash their hands, backsides, and faces, and knew how to keep public surfaces clean and disease-free.

Naturally, there's nothing I can do from my perch above my keyboard, writing on an unread blog about how Americans are a travesty of public filth. But maybe things could get a little bit better on the margins if we all thought a little bit more about temperance.

If you find it tempting to blow your nose on the sidewalk, exercise a little temperance. Find your way to the nearest tissue, and use that instead. If you find it somewhat of a hassle to wash your hands every time you use the bathroom, exercise a little temperance. The expedient thing is to skip the hand-washing step, but the right thing to do is to wash your hands. You might not see the point of covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze in the privacy of your own work cubicle, but I urge you to exercise a little temperance on the margins. Cover your mouth, then go wash your hands. And, for god's sake, get a bidet. They are $15 and install in seconds. Jesus.

Practically speaking, it's unlikely that you'll be able to prevent every cough, sneeze, and itch that needs scratching. You won't always be able to find your way to a bathroom in time to wash your hands or do whatever else you need to do. But if you can exercise a little temperance on the margins, then there's a slightly better chance that people like me won't die.

Please, I beg you, exercise a little temperance. Be a little bit more hygienic. This disease does not really need to spread widely in an environment in which people practice good hygiene.

Unhealthy Lifestyles Are Not A Matter Of Education

I recently read a click-baity article about the "top X number" healthiest vegetables. The main surprise about this list, other than the fact that I clicked on a such a time-waster in the first place, was that all of the vegetables listed were pretty much what everyone already buys at the grocery store. This wasn't a list comprised of kohlrabi and cactus pears. It was a list of carrots, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, and so on.

This raises the question of why we need an article that tells us to keep eating what we already eat. The cynical answer is, of course, "Har har, Ryan, the article wasn't meant to inform you about vegetables, but to keep you on the page long enough to increase the probability of generating ad revenue." Touche.

The less cynical answer is that most people - meaning, most Americans who eat food - already know how to eat a healthy diet, but fail to do it anyway. For a long time, we've been told by health educators that education is the key to getting Americans to improve their diets and their lifestyle. Articles like the one I read, paired with mere observation of Americans in their natural habitat, would seem to suggest otherwise. The so-called "fitness industry," too, is big on education. Read my free e-book, subscribe to my newsletter, watch my YouTube channel, see my tips for a healthier diet, etc., etc.

No, I don't think like of knowledge is the real problem here. Really, what we're talking about is a lack of self-control. Eventually, we all reach adulthood, obtain a disposable income, and come face-to-face with a doughnut shop. A few of us can ward-off temptation by eating a nutritious breakfast before we head out the door, but the majority of us - a statistical majority of Americans are obese - are simply left to wonder, "Why not?" Why shouldn't they spend their money on a doughnut? Why should they deprive themselves of something they genuinely enjoy, if they can afford to buy it, it tastes good, it makes them happy, and so on.

Only after confronting the reality of their own reflection  in the mirror, after years of not saying no, does anyone realize that there is a very good answer to the question of "why not." The answer is that years of acquiescence yields obesity, premature aging, and with them, a variety of other health problems.

I know many people, friends of mine, who are my age and who express envy of my position as a fit and healthy guy pushing forty. I'm a normal weight. My bio-markers are normal (well, except for the type 1 diabetes thing, but that's not a lifestyle choice). My energy levels are generally high. I look about ten years younger than I am, and I perform athletically much the same as my friends performed twenty years ago.

I'm not boasting, this is the physiological truth. And the best part is that it feels great being fit and healthy. All those who once boasted of the importance of living life to the fullest in their twenties, complete with all the boozing and drug use that entails, are now a little jealous that they feel so old. They take stock of their joint pains, their muscle aches, their sluggishness, the lack of "spring" in their steps, and they credit old age. But old age didn't get them here; poor diet and lifestyle choices did.

At forty, there is still plenty of time to reverse most of the negatives. With strict and deliberate diet and lifestyle changes, most people can recapture their energy levels and their good biomarkers, and many can also regain their youthful figures. A good diet can improve your complexion and the strength and sheen in your hair. Spending more time being active in the sunshine can give your hair great highlights, make your skin look better (but do use sunscreen), and give your body a much-needed boost of Vitamin D. Some people can even work themselves up to a level of athletic performance that far exceeds my own. All it takes is diet and exercise.

I'm not saying anything anyone doesn't already know, though. Everyone knows that skipping the burger, staying home and grilling some fish, eschewing the doughnuts, getting out for an hour or two of exercise ever single day, and so on, can drastically improve their lives for the better. But still, they don't do it. Just like they know eating broccoli will make them better off and they don't do it.

Ultimately, it all comes down to self-control, to the willingness to forego instant gratification for the sake of a better future. I have called this temperance across an extended cognitive time-horizon. You have to be the kind of person who is willing to get by with less. That's less doughnuts, less treats, less alcohol, less partying, less lying around, less TV. You have to be the kind of person who knows that less today means more tomorrow.

And it's interesting to me that this is a lesson that extends into so many different areas of life. As with health, so with financial gain. To be a millionaire in today's world really just means living well below your means and saving consistently. One doesn't really even have to save aggressively. Being a great musician means putting in 30 minutes of deliberate practice per day. Having a great yard really just means setting aside an hour a week to pull weeds and move a garden hose around. Having a great marriage means taking the time to make interactions with your partner positive rather than negative. Writing a book or two per year means writing a page or two per day. Think about it, that's nothing!

Ultimately, it's rather stunning what most people fail to accomplish in their lives when we consider that all any accomplishment really requires is small but consistent daily effort. So, no, it's not that we don't know how to accomplish any of this. It's that we know, and we still don't do it.

Twists & Turns

I spent the morning wondering what I should blog about. I wanted to write, but the words wouldn't come.

One reason for that is I found out that an old family friend of ours is dying. Not only that, she's dying in a way that there are lessons to learn from. I could have written about that, and about those lessons, but my heart just wasn't in it. I'm sad that it came to this, I'm sad for her and her family, and for my family, as well. I keep thinking about her situation, and about my childhood, and then naturally about my own child.

It's strange to watch someone go from being an ordinary child to being an adult, to being an adult with problems. One can't help but wonder when a person's life went from being about getting good grades and fitting in with childhood peer groups to being about heavy adult struggles and the inability to cope.

When I was a certain age, pretty much the most important thing in the whole world was basketball. Any chance I could get to play basketball, I would. I'd call friends over, and we'd play for hours. We'd play at school. We'd play in athletic leagues. We'd play basketball. What ended all this was junior high team tryouts. Some of us made the team, and some of us didn't. Those who did stopped playing with those who didn't so that they could play with the school team. It's kind of a shame that such a thing would separate us, but I suppose it's only fair. With our basketball-playing group thus dismantled, no further getting together was quite as fun. Eventually the whole thing tapered off. We went our separate ways and got involved in other aspects of our lives.

This sort of thing played out in my own childhood many different times. In the early days, we all ran around together. Later, I got heavily involved in competitive running and spent that time by myself instead. Some of us used to get together and listen to music and jam on our guitars. Then some of us formed a band and the larger group dissolved. Those who weren't in the band stopped playing music and went back to what they were doing before - in this case, Dungeons & Dragons - while the bandmates experimented briefly with being cool. (Don't worry, it was short-lived.)

It's rare to experience a lifelong friendship. I don't have any close friends from when I was a little boy. I keep in touch with some people via social media, but we don't regularly interact. The progressive, lifelong process of becoming more specialized has a tendency to limit our interaction with a broader group. A diverse set of friends can come together, but by adulthood they usually need a common excuse to do it: a book club, a work group, a hobby, etc.

So, it's not that friends ever become less important, it's just that the natural progression of existence is to go from being surrounded by a community of friends to being surrounded mostly by your own family. I'm not at all sure that this is a bad thing.

But every now and then news comes in of an old friend passing away or a former neighbor getting into legal or other trouble, and from our own internal perspective, it's jarring. We weren't there to experience the transition, and so for us it comes out of nowhere. The girl who once had a crush on you passed away in a car accident. The neighbor down the street developed a drug problem. The student-body officer had financial trouble, and then a mental breakdown. The city league teammate you had developed cancer.

Thankfully, it sometimes works the other way, too. The cranky loner with a scowl on his face overcame his depression and raised a happy family. The aloof snob discovered her alternative lifestyle after high school and became open and welcoming of all people. The poor kid started his own business and got rich. The shy wallflower became a social worker and helped hundreds of people have better lives.

Well, that's life. We all play one of these roles. A major part of my blog's purpose has been to comment on the various paths that lead to ruin, and how to avoid them. Maintain a long-range cognitive time-horizon; leverage principles of individuality in the face of strong negative influence; learn effective communication strategies; don't willingly maintain any serious illusions about your life or your world; always learn, always grow, always feed your sense of self-improvement. We can make the world a better place by being better people.

On Setting A Proper Life Path

I believe that it's very important in life to set oneself on a good path. A good path isn't a guarantee of success and happiness, but it does minimize the potential for avoidable catastrophe.

For example, I believe that most children should set themselves on a scholastic path that trends toward college. This is not because I think college is right for everyone, but rather the fact that the toward-college path will generally tend to set a person's life up for either college or not-college. The not-college path only sets a person up for not-college.

Another example is drug use. I believe most people should put themselves on a path toward eschewing recreational drugs. I don't think mild experimentation will ruin a person's life, but the pitfalls of drug use are well-known and well-documented. While some people are able to escape from youthful experimentation relatively unscathed, the overwhelming majority of people will be set up best in life if they steer away from drug use. This will also tend to keep them away from criminal communities and dangerous outsiders that could influence them in other unwanted ways.

These two examples are relatively obvious, but there are lower-level gradients of these same examples that I also think are life-enhancing.

To the toward-college example, I think people - no matter who they are - ought to put themselves on pro-knowledge or pro-curiosity life paths rather than on anti-intellectual paths. One need not be a genius or an academic to appreciate the fact that more knowledge is better, and even a plumber will have a more successful life if he learns comparatively more than his peers, and always demonstrates curiosity and a thirst for knowing more.

And, to the anti-drug-use example, I think people would be better served to avoid "beer culture," "cigar culture," "vaping culture," "barbecue/meat smoking culture" and so on. This is not because I think those things are gateways to additional drug use, but because communities that enthuse about unhealthy activities will tend to make a person's overall health worse. By contrast, it is well-documented that people who hang around physically fit friends with good diets tend to adopt those same healthy habits themselves.

I hasten to add that it is entirely possible to have a good life even if you aren't particularly curious about the world, even if you love to brew your own beer at home, even if you put bacon on everything, even if you enjoy the occasional cigar, etc. You can have a good life under many different circumstances. My point isn't that such things are impossible, my point is that people should generally stick to positive paths if they want to have a generally positive life.

Our lives tend to become whatever it is we surround ourselves with. If we surround ourselves with good, honest people, our social groups will tend to become good and honest. We might even become more good and honest ourselves. Surrounding ourselves with dishonest criminals, casual drug dealers, unhealthy or uncurious people, and so on is of course no guarantee that we ourselves will become worse. But the risk is obviously higher for those who surround themselves with bad things than it is for those who surround themselves with good things.

Now, you might disagree with me about which specific things are good and bad. That's fair. It's not so important to me that we agree on the list of good and bad as it is that you come up with your own list, and set yourself on a path toward more of what you consider good and less of what you consider bad. Whatever things end up on your "good" list, steering yourself toward those things will tend to make you happier and more fulfilled in life.

I occasionally see friends and acquaintances who deliberately set themselves on bad paths. In time, it becomes obvious that they're dissatisfied with their lives, but they never make an effort to change their life paths. This is bewildering to me and, from a friend's perspective, more than a little frustrating. The friends who spent a lot of time at clubs and raves had mental and physical health problems later. The friends who chose highly unfocused and idiosyncratic career paths - stints at the Peace Corps, stints teaching English in faraway lands, long and winding paths to eventual college degrees, and so on - are all now saddled with debt, living in small apartments, and wondering what to do with their lives. The friends who never took care of their health are all predictably overweight, and unhappy about it. Those who delayed marriage and children until later in life have struggled to find good people with whom to build a later life. And, indeed, those who rushed into marriage and children too early have experienced broken marriages and poor relationships with their children.

In hindsight, it is all very predictable. Anyone could have expected that too much of Thing A would put a person at risk of Unsatisfactory Life Outcome B. I'm not gloating over their poor choices, and that isn't the point. The simple fact of the matter is that it's easy to expect a certain kind of outcome if you set your life on a particular path. When I see my younger friends setting themselves up for lonely, unhealthy, or financially difficult lives, I try to subtly and inoffensively nudge them marginally toward a better path. But their problem is not insufficiently good influence. Their problem is that, in the moment, they think they will be the exceptions.

In the moment, everyone thinks that their own personal bad choices are inconsequential and that they have plenty of time to reverse them later on. And, indeed, life is long enough that we can all afford to make a few really bad decisions and recover later on. But, on the one hand, why plan your life such that you'll have something to have to recover from? And, on the other hand, you're going to have to set yourself on a good life path eventually, so why not now?

In the end, I think a lot of this has to do with having a sense of personal "restraint," or what Aristotle called the virtue of "Temperance." When we achieve independent adulthood, it's tempting to set out to do almost literally whatever you want to. It's a natural inclination, a fully understandable feeling. But having a sense of temperance or restraint means that you can think of a few good reasons why you wouldn't want to just go for it, whatever it is. Our decisions ought to be mindful of the risks and consequences. Some of what we might choose to do is worth the risk. And, indeed, if we set ourselves on a broadly good and constructive life path, we'll even be able to afford a divergence now and again. Healthy bodies recover quickly. Treating romantic partners with kindness and respect will result in a string of fulfilling relationships, even if they aren't all successful; eventually, one will be. Pursing knowledge and opportunity where you find it will get you far enough ahead that you can take a risky career move or two in pursuit of something great.

But all of that depends on a person's conscious decision to set out on a good life path to begin with. If you decide from an early age to live life in the fast lane, by the time you're 30 or 40 years old, you won't be able to afford to make too many mistakes. If you instead take the time to build a strong foundation for your life, you'll never have too far to fall, and you'll usually land on your feet.

Adventures In The Long Form

Two rest days in one week!? What am I supposed to do with myself!?

Not being accustomed to de-training, otherwise known as mixing in a recovery week between periods of heavier training load, I find myself getting antsy. It's easy to let my mind wander too far, especially with the availability of all this training data my fitness watches and apps give me these days. It's easy to let fear creep in, too: what if I lose my fitness?

That is absurd, of course. I can't lose all my fitness in a week, and I especially can't lose all my fitness during a week in which I spend most days working out! It is physiologically easier to maintain fitness than to build it; that's one reason why recovery weeks are important for good training. If I spent three weeks ramping up my training load, I'd need some maintenance time -- that is, time spent maintaining my current level of fitness, without pushing too hard -- in order to decrease my overall levels of fatigue and prepare my body for the next three weeks of heavy training.

This morning was a case in point. I woke up at the usual time: early, so that I could get a workout in. Today, however, is a rest day, so I closed my eyes for another fifteen minutes of rest before having to take a shower and get dressed. I closed my eyes momentarily, and when I opened them again, I discovered that I had slept for an extra hour! This was technically no cause for alarm; I still had plenty of time to get ready for work. What's remarkable is that, five days into my recovery week, my body was still so exhausted from the previous three weeks of training that I unintentionally nodded off for a whole hour.

The same thing happened to me a couple of days back, too. On the agenda for the day was a 60-minute Z3 (tempo) run, which I happily completed in the warm March sun with a smiling face, a lifted spirit, and spring in my step. When I got back to my desk at work, I nearly nodded off. That evening, when I got home from work, I took long nap, an hour or more of sleep that I normally wouldn't need.

I've never been one for napping, not one to try to get more than my share of sleep. I like to get up and be active. The fact that my body was basically taking me by the proverbial shoulders, shaking me, and crying, "Nap, you dolt!" indicates just how much fatigue it's currently dealing with. This kind of fatigue is precisely what recovery weeks are aimed to alleviate. By next Tuesday, when I kick off a planned ten consecutive days of running with a two-a-day, I should have recovered enough to go back to killing my workouts with style. Or so I intend.

However, fatigue is not the most interesting feeling I have as I work through this training schedule. Anticipation is. I find myself looking ahead, not just at the workouts coming up this weekend, but at the workouts coming up over the next two weeks.

Saturday, it will be rather enticing 20-minute Z4 aerobic threshold run. Sunday's a bit of a downer; it's a long run day, but I only get to run for a measly 60 minutes. Monday is a prescribed cross-training day; the prescription is for 30 minutes of cross-training, but how much fun is a 30-minute bike ride? Not as much fun as a 60-minute bike ride, that's for sure! Then, the next two weeks will be dominated by exciting "Mixed Runs," consisting of intervallic alternations between not just aerobic threshold pace and recovery pace, but also tempo pace and random pace variations. There are so many different kinds of workouts coming up over the next month that I have to look forward to. I'm positively bubbly over it.

This anticipation, this effervescence, demonstrates something that has been missing from my training for quite some time: real variety. I haven't had this much training variety to look forward to in years. Even my P90X training, which emphasizes "muscle confusion," and thus variety, hasn't offered me the same kind of variety that this half-marathon training schedule has. (To be fair, it is economically infeasible to produce a video-based workout series with this amount of variety. You can't produce 112 workout videos and expect to make money on a venture like that! Besides, most people cannot commit to the full 90 days of a P90X program, much less to sixteen week of serious training for distance-runners.)

But print-based training schedules, or perhaps we should say long form training schedules, have that advantage over home video series and "couch-to-5K" beginner programs. Freed from the confines of a flashy package and every-man marketing principles, unconstrained by the need to sell non-athletes on a quick fix, long form training schedules can get an athlete down to business, offering difficult workouts, comprehensive recovery weeks, and a wider variety of workouts than people normally get from online home workout programs. That's their advantage.

It's not so very different from watching a movie or reading a book. Most people appreciate the flashiness and shorter timeframe of a good movie, but those of us who can commit to a thousand pages of Moby Dick gain access to the advantages of long form storytelling. Physical fitness works much the same way.

Harder

Someone recently told me that treadmill running is a lot easier than running outside. He reasoned that, since the treadmill requires a higher speed, and also possibly a steeper incline, to achieve the same calorie burn, the treadmill must be easier. 

This logic is robust on one level, but not on another. One could argue that cycling is easier than running, since bicycles enable us to use mechanical advantage, and this is strictly true. The problem with that argument is that no one uses a bicycle to cover the same distance at the same speed as they would have done running. With the greater mechanical advantage, cyclists tend to ride faster, right up to the point where they're getting just as good a workout on the bike as they would have gotten running. Cycling is different than running, but for most people, it's not inherently "easier."

The same is true of treadmill running. Treadmill running is biomechanically different from running outside on stable ground, it involves slightly different muscles, and so on. In order to achieve a similar calorie burn, one has to approach the treadmill differently. That doesn't mean running on the treadmill is inherently "easier," only that it's different.

There is another issue at play here, however. If we were to relegate ourselves to only those activities which are more difficult than other activities, we'd never become physically fit at all. That's because training your body involves a diverse set of workouts. Some of your workouts must be dedicated to building muscles, some to learning skills, and some to resting and recuperating. If you were to train at 100% effort, 100% of the time, you'd never get anywhere at all.

A good training regimen involves two or three days of muscle-building. For example, the typical marathon training schedule will have you doing interval training twice a week; P90X and similar programs dedicate three days a week to lifting weights. The rest of the time, we train at lower levels of effort to achieve different, but no less important, goals. Runners will use one day a week for a long run and the remaining days running in active recovery mode. P90Xers will find their remaining days dedicated to plyometrics, yoga, and flexibility. Failing to do these "easier" activities means not getting enough rest, or getting too much rest; it means not gaining the benefits of balance exercises and increase flexibility.

As a final dynamic here, note that most training schedules involve relatively easier workouts in the beginning, building to progressively more difficult workouts toward the end, and then culminating in a de-training week or two in order to reduce fatigue and "peak" for a race or final weigh-in. Few would argue that the beginning of a training regimen should be loaded up with the most difficult exercises; that's just a recipe for injury. Fewer still would argue that great athletes should not attempt to plateau for competition; no one would perform at their peak if their muscles were tired and sore.

So, in the big picture, we must utilize more- and less-difficult workouts at different times to achieve long-range results. The immediacy of the comparative difficulty of a thing is really just a minor concern. Every moment in your long-range training regimen serves a purpose in the broader context. Increasing your cognitive time-horizon to include harder workouts as well as easier ones will make you a better athlete. Increasing your cognitive time-horizon alone will make you a better person.

You Really Can Improve Dramatically

By now, I should be writing a book review for The Path of Daggers, next in line in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, which I have been working my way through for the past two months. I found this book off to a slow start, so I didn't feel quite so inspired to read it. As a result, I'm only halfway through. Despite being several hundred pages shorter than many of the other novels, I'll likely spend an additional week reading it. Oh, well.

The fact that I've read more infrequently over the past few days has given me insight into another matter, however. I'm still reading the book at the same pace while I read it, I just haven't been picking it up as frequently. This has caused me to notice the speed at which I'm reading, which, I must say, is remarkably faster than I realized.

When I first started reading this series, I was reading 100 pages or more per day, but it was taking me a full day of reading to do it. Right now, I can read a hundred pages without hardly noticing. Two hundred pages on a weekday is entirely feasible, and if I had a day I could afford to dedicate to reading, I think I might be able to finish a whole book.

I don't say this to brag, and I am well aware of the fact that many other people read faster than I do. What's interesting to me is the relative increase in my reading speed over the course of these two months. I've more than doubled the pace at which I read; in fact, I may have quintupled it. Whatever my base rate was, that's an increase worth noting!

It's not entirely surprising, of course, to discover that persistent daily dedication to a habit can make significant improvements in a person's ability, but we all spend so much time mentally invested in our daily tasks that we seldom get to experience a stark reminder of just how much self-improvement we have "on tap." For me, this process of improving my reading has been one such reminder.

An added dimension here is that, the reader will recall, I found time to read by giving up a lot of my social media time. That means that I could have spent this time practicing anything, not just reading; and I still can. When I finish all the books on my plate, I can spend this time practicing my guitar playing -- and get tangibly better. Or I could spend it learning how to play the piano better -- and get tangibly better. Or, I could spend it learning a new language -- and make tangible progress. Right now, it's reading, but in the future it could be anything. This feels like a windfall to me because it is "found time" of a sort. I can spend it how I please, and make myself a better person in any way I choose.

The same is true for you, of course. If you can find the time to do it, you can spend a little time on something every day. Within two months, you'll have improved significantly, and perhaps even dramatically. You could quintuple your reading speed, or accomplish something else; something you never thought possible before.

More Than Carpe Diem

A long while back, I read an article about a man who realized that he did not have enough time left in his life to listen to all the album in his record collection. He did have a rather large record collection, but not so large that he did not know what he owned. He wasn't collecting for the sake of collecting. He was buying albums that he was legitimately interested in listening to. It just so happened that he reached middle age and realized that there were many records in his collection that he would never hear a second time.

In part, he meant this as an exposition on focusing on what you love. In part, he meant it as a commentary on the sheer volume of music out there, and how most of it is destined for obscurity. In part, he meant it as an expression of the realization that life is so very short.

Children, with their whole lives ahead of them, can afford to while away some of their time. For them, it's not really "whiling away," anyway, since children learn by playing, after all. For adults whose life path is essentially set, however, time is of the essence. There are only so many performance reviews before you have to give up on ever getting that big promotion. There are only so many years to start saving for your child's education, or for your own retirement. There are only so many summers to be spent climbing Kilimanjaro or visiting the Louvre. You don't have to do it this year; but you only have so many years, and if you don't plan on doing it during one of those years, at least, you'll never do it at all.

It takes time to lose weight and get in shape, time to get yourself "beach-ready," time to get dressed up and go to a fancy party. If you don't start today, how much time will you have? Do you think you'll be "beach-ready" when you're 65 years old, no matter how good of shape you're in? You need to be fit today to get to the beach tomorrow. You need to train today to run a marathon next year. You need to apply now if you want to get a passport for this summer.

The book I'm reading now is seven-hundred pages long. I can read fairly quickly, but it still takes time to read seven-hundred pages. If you want to read the great literature, you need to get started. If you're as old as I am, it is already likely that there is some great literature you'll never have the chance to read, no matter how fast you read. And if you want to write a book one day, suffice it to say that it takes longer to write seven-hundred pages than it does to read them; longer still to have them edited; and longer yet again to have them published -- if your first attempt is even good enough to be published!

To strum a few chords on the guitar or to plink away on the piano doesn't take all that much time. It does take months, though. And to play with any degree of pleasantness, you'll have to study for a couple of years. As for mastery, you had better be in it for decades. How many decades do you have left? If you've ever dreamed to learning to play an instrument, you ought to start now.

As for love, the time is simply now. Now or never. You offer your love to those who might want it today, or you waste your years away loving no one. Every day spent without love is a day never to be regained, and love itself evolves as we age, going from one phase to another. A truly mature love requires as much time as anything else, and probably more.

You may have supposed that my purpose in writing this is merely to say carpe diem. Sure, seize the day, that's a good idea. But my real point is to spend your time wisely. Invest in the things that you want to say that you did. If you want to say that you made great art, or achieved great work, or loved passionately, then do those things. Do them now. Invest yourself now.

Do not spend any more time "binge-watching" television programs. Do not waste any more time scrolling mindlessly through social media. Do not lose your hours to soap operas and other such time-thieves. Imagine how embarrassed you will feel on your death bed when you realize that the time you invested in The Sopranos could have taken you to The Matterhorn, or that the time you spent on Facebook could have enabled you to retire in the tropics, if only you had invested yourself a little differently.

Fantasy Novels And An Elongated Sense Of Time

A feature - I cannot exactly call it a shortcoming - of fantasy stories is their elongated sense of time.

That is, the "ancient ones" in a fantasy story have about the same level of technological development as the story's main characters. If anything, the "ancient ones" may actually possess greater knowledge in some areas than the main characters, but that knowledge was lost to the ages in some way. But in terms of civilization's fundamentals, the ancient ones lived no differently than the modern ones. The ancient ones had about the same level of metallurgy, of architecture, of textile-making and leather goods, the same level of agricultural production and mining, and so on.

When you stop to consider that the lost ages in the average fantasy novel often occurred thousands of years prior to the story's main plot, you begin to see how unlike the real world this sense of time really is. In the real world, the development of civilization has occurred far more rapidly, and the time periods we would be most inclined to associate with the setting of a fantasy novel - medieval times, or perhaps Classical Antiquity - were but a blink of the historical eye.

Consider the well-publicized fact that two of US President John Tyler's grandchildren are still alive. That means that merely two generations from the present day brings us back 230 years. Let's round this up to 250 years and call it a historical timespan of "one John Tyler."

Extrapolating from this means that 1,000 years of human history is only about 8 or 10 generations. The Middle Ages, then, happened "four John Tylers ago." Just four. This was a period of spreading Christianity across Europe, which means that the pagans who inspired fantasies about "the ancient ones" were already well on the decline - again, just four John Tylers ago.

Classical Antiquity - the Greeks and Romans with their fantastical gods, the impenetrable Egyptian empire, the great Druids, the brilliant architects of the Mesoamerican pyramids, and the authors of the great Hindi legends - ended just six John Tylers ago. Six!

Four John Tylers before the Roman Empire, we have the Bronze Age, and the Bronze Age lasted a relatively long time: eight whole John Tylers. And prior to that was the Neolithic age, when many societies were wearing loin cloths and had no written historical record beyond hieroglyphics.

In Robert Jordan's The Great Hunt, the antagonist tells the protagonist that they have done battle throughout the ages. "A thousand times," he says. "A thousand times a thousand." That's a million times they've done battle, and each of their battles constitues an "Age," which again constitutes a thousand years or more. So, the time horizon of Jordan's "Wheel of Time Series" stretches across some billion years. By comparison, human beings on planet Earth appeared about 70,000 years ago. Multicellular organisms may have appeared on Earth less than a billion years ago.

So human history in the "Wheel of Time" series stretches across the same amount of time as all multi-cellular life on Earth, and the novels seem to imply that metallurgy and stone masonry and agriculture have been roughly the same throughout all of those years. This is what I mean when I say that fantasy novels have an elongated sense of time. (I don't mean to pick on Jordan, of course. His aren't the only fantasy novels structured this way, they just happen to be the ones with which I am most recently acquainted, so I can easily draw from them as an example.)

Whether this elongated sense of time is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of opinion. It certainly lends an "eternal" nature to the stories, and that can be a very good thing. On the down-side, a society that lasts for a billion years and never has an industrial revolution of any kind is a little odd. Perhaps living in the 20th and 21st Centuries has spoiled me. I am so used to technological advancement that it seems incomprehensible that humans could exist for thousands upon thousands of years without ever progressing beyond the middle ages.

Inspiration For Better Blogging

Tyler Cowen links to Gwern.

Upon first encountering his website, the similarities between he and I struck me immediately, but so did our many differences. Gwern appears to be an interesting fellow (unlike me), arguing for many Stationary Waves-isms (like me) such as an extended cognitive time-horizon and the use of daily blogging to categorize, build, and improve upon personal thoughts. Gwern also appears to be hopelessly lost in the “Rationalist” culture of Silicon Valley (unlike me, and about which I recently wrote here). A trip to Gwern.net is a journey inside the mind of Gwern (unlike a trip to StationaryWaves.com, which is more like a journey inside an hour or so of my daily thoughts). Gwern self-experiments with drugs, including illegal drugs; I don’t do that, and in fact I’m quite vocally opposed to the use of recreational drugs. I do, however self-experiment with nutritional supplements that have no recreational benefit (see posts here and here).

One important thing to learn from his website is Gwern’s criticism of blogs, which is that they are throw-aways meant to be read once and more or less instantly discarded. Gwern feels instead that blog posts should be written to serve the long-term future. This resonated with me right away, because Stationary Waves serves basically one main principle at this point, which is to catalog my ethical and philosophical views for the eventual benefit of my daughter, should she ever want to know who I was and what I thought.

I sometimes like to think of my blog as a sort of insurance policy. Suppose I were to die suddenly. My young daughter would spend most of her life not knowing who I was, and barely remembering what I was like as a person. She would never have the benefit of knowing anything about my adult thoughts. She would never benefit from the advice I would give to her as she grew older and encountered teenage and young-adult situations. Perhaps, like many people who lose loved ones, she would occasionally wish I were there to help. Were that to happen, my blog could provide her with some of that help. It wouldn’t be the same, but it would be better than nothing.

Beyond the mere insurance policy aspect of things, however, there is a real benefit to writing down your most philosophical and well-thought-out ideas, and that benefit is that they begin to fuse themselves into a comprehensive whole. Having a good idea is one thing, but having it, writing it down, and then referring to it later not only helps solidify the idea, but it also helps you understand the basis of your future ideas. In other words, I never realized what my comprehensive philosophy really was until I started writing it down. Had I never started blogging, I probably never could have fully articulated my moral philosophy. But I did start blogging, and eventually wrote it all out in four glorious posts here, here, here, and here.

This “body of work” concept is another thing we can learn from Gwern. More specifically as it applies to me, Gwern appears to do a much better job of cataloging prior ideas than I do. I think this Is something I could really stand to benefit from. Keep an eye on this space, then, because I’ll likely be rearranging things a little bit, to make it easier to find the most important information on the blog. I’ve done that a little bit with the links on the top bar of the page. I’ve linked to the best health and fitness information available on the site, and to my “lexicon,” and my album reviews. But I’ve dropped the ball when it comes to my philosophical ideas. I have some work to do there.

Finally, seeing how well-organized Gwern’s website is has inspired me to put more in-text links in my posts. I stopped doing that a while back, mainly because I figured that nobody clicks-through anyway. And for the most part, I believe that to be true. But in the interest of making it easier to navigate my ideas and understand where they come from, I ought to pick that habit back up again. That explains why you’re seeing so many in-text links in this particular post.

Human Progress Requires Openness To Change

Theories abound as to why modern human progress seems stagnant. Here’s a book by Tyler Cowen arguing that we should place a higher value on future generations than we currently do. Here’s a blog post by Scott Alexander arguing that human progress of all kinds is subject to diminishing returns. There are those who believe that America is less innovative today as a result of additional government regulations that discourage innovation. There are others who believe that America lacks progress specifically because the US government doesn’t invest heavily enough in new technologies. Some feel that our lack of progress is a result of insufficient virtue; others feel that our puritanical hang-ups are precisely what prevents us from flourishing as a cosmopolitan society. Perhaps there is a grain of truth in all of these explanations. Perhaps each theory is correct within a certain sphere or in a certain manner of speaking.

So, we’re in no short supply of two-penny theories about why there isn’t more human progress out there. Even so, I’d like to provide an explanation of my own.

Frank Zappa once said, “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” One way of thinking about progress involves noting that every invention is a divergence from a prior norm. For example, the advent of interchangeable parts was a divergence from the prior norm that all parts be tailor-made and hand-made for the specific product at the specific time. The advent of the internal combustion engine was a divergence from the prior norm that powerful engines must be steam-powered. The advent of air travel was a divergence from a prior norm of land and sea travel. Every new thing is new precisely because it hasn’t existed before. It’s a challenge to the existing way of doing things.

Not every innovation is a good one, of course. Trans fats are universally understood to be harmful to the human body, and confer no culinary benefits that we did not already gain from preexisting saturated and unsaturated fat food ingredients. The widespread adoption of the use of trans fats by the food industry was a mistake, a step in the wrong direction. We expect new food innovations to involve supply food of better quality, and/or in higher quantities, and/or at lower costs, with no significant nutritional downsides. Clearly, in the case of trans fats, that’s not what happened. The food industry adopted the wrong kind of innovation, making us all worse off.

This presents us with a relatively clear-cut model for progress. Progress must be the adoption of new ideas, inventions, and methods that tend to improve the quality of human life both in the long and short run. Regress, therefore, must be the adoption of new ideas, inventions, and methods that tend to reduce the quality of human life in the short and long run. It’s possible for something to improve life in the short run at the expense of our long-run quality of life, or for something to reduce our quality of life in the short run while making things much better in the long run. In those cases, we’d have to evaluate the relative benefits and determine whether what we’ve seen is progress or regress. Assuming we can make such an evaluation, though, we can say that the adoption of any new idea, invention, or method will tend to be an example of either progress or regress.

With that in mind, consider the issues being tackled by people like Cowen and Alexander. Their point is not that society is regressing, but simply that it is not progressing, or not progressing as fast as we would hope, considering the arc of human history. In other words, it’s not that society is adopting the wrong new ideas, it’s that they aren’t coming up with enough right new ideas. In truth, this suggests that there aren’t very many new ideas out there; we’re not being inundated by bad ideas, but we’re not progressing much, either.

Perhaps, therefore, there is a fundamental lack of novelty in the world? This would be a surprising outcome, considering first that the human population is larger and more interconnected than at any other time in history, and second that society is more individualistic than ever before. Wouldn’t we expect, in such a world, that society would be full of new ideas and people pursuing them?

Indeed, we most certainly do not come away with the impression that people aren’t innovating when we spend any time at, say GitHub, where programmers and students are cooperatively innovating new technical methods, insights, and software technologies almost constantly. It’s also not the impression we get when we dive deep into the world of YouTube videos, featuring people who make all kinds of gadgets out of common household objects, compose and perform all manner of new music, create visual arts in stunning time-lapse, capture heroic athletic feats with GoPro cameras strapped to their abdomens, and so on.

In light of all this, my conclusion is that people are innovating out there, but their innovations aren’t being widely adopted. People in general aren’t looking to change things in their own lives. We’re not looking for new kinds of music to listen to – by which I mean totally new sounds. We want the new songs to sound roughly like the old songs. We’re not looking for radically new forms of transportation, as past societies dreamed of air travel. We’re looking for our new travel innovations to be a lot like the old ones. We don’t want the technologies of the future to put employees out of work, we want the same employees to keep their same jobs, but just somehow making use of new technologies. We don’t want to create a new kind of football, we just want a better-quality version of the existing game of football. We don’t want to live in a new kind of house, we want to live in a house that fits in well with the other homes on our street, but maybe with nicer doorknobs.

This might even explain the rise of Silicon Valley and the various Internets-of-Smart-Things. A video doorknob doesn’t offer us anything that a good old-fashioned peephole doesn’t already give us. It enables us to have roughly the same experience we had before. The new song sounds roughly like the old song. I remember when tablets first hit the market. I remember laughing to myself, “So it’s a smart phone that cannot make a phone call.” The technologies we’re inventing today are not functionally different from the old technologies, in terms of a means-ends framework. They are, however, beautifully presented.

If society is to progress at rates similar to what we saw during the Industrial Revolutions or the first half of the 20^th Century, we’ll have to become more comfortable with expressions of novelty. We’ll have to be more open to divergent musical sounds and artistic expression that bears no resemblance to the great works of the past. We’ll have to be more receptive to technologies that completely change our existing patterns of behavior by offering us something more than a coffee maker with internet connectivity, but an entirely new method of producing beverages from coffee beans. Better yet, we ought to be open to the possibility that other beans heretofore not roasted and brewed might also produce good breakfast beverages. We’ll have to open to the idea that, say, Christmas can still be Christmas without a tree or some house lights – not that those things are bad, but just that there might be a way of celebrating Christmas that we haven’t even thought of yet.

If we want to do better as a species, then we have to be open to what better might look like. As enamored with your own life as you might be, you might be better off by changing radically. If you’re not at least open to considering a radical change, then you’re in no position to lament a lack of human progress.

Comments Versus Blogs

I've been neglecting this blog. Instead of writing content here, I've been writing down my thoughts as comments under other people's blogs. I'm going to try to reverse that trend for the following reasons: (A) I have the sneaky suspicion that linking to websites abroad will increase my own traffic; the selfish motive revealed at last. (B) My gut tells me that removing myself from the fray of blog comments, at least when I'm making cogent and possibly useful points, will improve the cognitive time-horizon applicable to those points. Put differently, long-form thoughts are often of a higher quality than off-the-cuff improvising in commentary below the fold. (To be sure, there is gold to be mined in both media.) (C) Improving things along both of the aforementioned dimensions might improve my reputation in general, which is never a bad thing.

Alright, let's get started. I posted a long comment under a recent blog post, and after reading it, I realized it would have been better if I had written it here. So, with some modifications, here it is.

At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Jason Brennan writes:

Public reason theorists do not think actual consent is necessary for coercive government policies. But they also deny that “The correct theory of justice says we should do P” is good enough. They want something in between.

But they face a number of problems, including how to deal with real-life citizens, who are often quite unreasonable (according to their theory of what counts as “reasonable”), who might lack any potential to converge on or have consensus on policies, and so on.

So, every theory ends up “idealizing” citizens to a certain degree.

Brennan then goes on to highlight some criticisms of this approach.

Full disclosure: I don't know enough about public reason theory or its criticisms to provide strong input on this particular matter. However, in reading Brennan's post I was reminded of a point Jordan Peterson makes in his book 12 Rules for Life.

Many attempts in political philosophy to conceive of an acceptable justification for government policy begin with a policy in mind and then proceed to model a set of conditions under which that policy is justified. "When do I get to shoot people?" is an absurd question, even after engaging in philosophical rigor, and even when ultimately concluding that "the only appropriate time to shoot someone is in self-defense of a credible existential threat." Here, there is nothing wrong with the conclusion, it's the question that's problematic. Why are we wondering when it's okay to shoot people?

Peterson might that we've gotten it backwards. The more pertinent question is, "Why not shoot people all the time, whenever you want to?" At first, this sounds like an even more ridiculous question; yet, it's in answering this question that we demonstrate why the first question is wrong. It's the answer to this second question that demonstrates a comprehensive philosophy of non-violence.

So, back to politics. It seems to me that political scientists and philosophers are often tempted to ask "When can I do X?" or "Under what conditions can society be forced into Y for its own good?" Wrong questions. The real question is Why shouldn't the government do X and impose Y on all of society all the time, irrespective of what anyone else thinks about it?

My guess is that, if you have a good set of answers to that question then the former questions and their possible answers are no longer relevant.

The Best Advice I Never Followed

I was eighteen years old and planning my college career when I had a very interesting conversation with an old mentor of mine.

This man, let's call him G, was about six years my senior and had been a star distance runner in high school and had gone on to have decent college running career afterward. I had met him when he was still in high school, but at the time of this particular conversation, he was donating some of his free time to being an assistant coach to my own high school cross-country team.

Because my school had never had a particularly great running program, it did not tend to garner a lot of attention from college athletics recruiters. As a result, I had to spend some of my time as a high school senior writing letters to college athletics programs in which I was interested, making them aware of both my interest in their program and my athletic career thus far. I certainly had the race times and competitive results to qualify for an athletic scholarship. What I didn't have was the attention of any of the recruiters.

So, as I went through this letter-writing and phone-call-making process of attempting to get an athletic scholarship, G presented me with a rather novel idea. At the time, my focus had been on local schools, where I wouldn't have to pay out-of-state tuition fees and would be close to home. G questioned my approach.

"I went to an out-of-state junior college for my first two years," he told me. "You save a ton of money on tuition, because you're at a junior college. If you get good grades for those two years, you can get an academic scholarship to a major university, no problem."

It got better. "Everyone [that was, all of the best high school distance runners - ed.] goes to a four-year university straight out of high school. You'll be a big fish in a small pond, one of the best runners at the junior college level, and then you'll be able to get a great scholarship to a four-year college once your two years are over."

His argument swayed me immediately. Part of it was the fact that it was a good argument that made a lot of sense, but I have to admit that the main selling point to me - which he never mentioned - was that I'd be able to escape the rather oppressively conservative Utah culture and hopefully find a place I'd fit in better.

After my conversation with G, I excitedly presented the argument to my parents. To my great disappointment, they poured water all over the idea. That alone was frustrating, but what really broke my heart was that they presented no argument for their case. They simply became angry and shut the conversation down. For reasons still unclear to me, they did not want me to leave the state. I guess they wanted me to stay nearby. I invested a couple of frustrating hours just trying to get them to admit to the bare minimum: that even if I didn't take G's advice, it was still good advice for somebody. My parents stubbornly dug in their heels and refused to admit even that much.

I stopped pursuing the idea and eventually found my way to a local university. I spent one year on an athletic scholarship, running for the team, but the environment was a bad match for me. Surrounded by the same "Happy Valley" culture from which I was desperate to escape, I eventually slipped into depression, quit the team, and found my destiny elsewhere.

In hindsight, though, I now wonder why I didn't completely disregard my parents' irrational insistence. Why didn't I just take up G's advice and go out of state? I was the one reaching out to all the college-level coaches, so I could have easily written a few letters to some out-of-state colleges. Had I been offered a scholarship from one such college, I would not have been reliant on my parents' money for my education. I could have found my own way there. In short, I can think of no reason why I didn't just do it anyway.

In fact, later in my university career I would spend summers taking "general education" courses from junior colleges, anyway, because the tuition was much less than what it would cost to take the same courses at my university. I'd take my diploma-track coursework during the Fall and Spring semesters at my university, and the gen-ed courses at a junior college during the summer while I was working. This, of course, highlights the fact that junior colleges are in many ways a much better deal than four-year universities. This was the late-nineties, and we were just discovering this; by now, it's common knowledge. G was ahead of his time.

College is a time for young people to find themselves and start out "on their own." Perhaps I just wasn't ready to cut the cord during my senior year of high school. Still, if I had done so, I would have avoided years of depression, saved a ton of money, and probably would have spent more years running in college. I'd likely be a more independent person than I am today.

G's advice might have been the best advice I ever received. I'll never know.

"I Don't Run Unless Chased"

When the original P90X videos were filmed, instructor Tony Horton was forty-five years old. In a number of the videos, he mentions this fact in support of his argument that a dedication to healthy living – eating right and exercising regularly – will help combat the ravages of age. Or, to put it in his actual language, “That’s why a 45-year-old guy like me, going on 46, still looks like this.”

It’s easy to dismiss his claims as unempirical. After all, he probably has “good genes.” But exercise is perhaps the single best way to combat aging, extend longevity, and prevent chronic, age-related illness. (If you really need to see a citation for these claims, then, okay. Start here.) The simple fact is that exercise will keep you looking and feeling younger for longer.

When I was young – in my teens and twenties – people I knew used to make all sorts of comments about how running is “crazy.” They didn’t say it with admiration, they said it derisively or defensively. They made “jokes” like saying, “I don’t run unless chased.” Har har har. They exalted in their propensity to eat too much crap, drink too much crap, watch too much TV, and do too much nothing. Even in my thirties, people have made these comments to me. They continue to laugh and joke and be some combination of derisive and defensive about how much I like to work out.

But, as I write this blog post, I am thirty-seven years old: decidedly middle-aged, past my prime, and so on. That means that all the people who ever said these things to me are also middle aged, past their prime. We’re all showing the signs of age. But some of us are aging faster than others. I often get ID’d when purchasing alcohol. In one recent case, a cashier checked my ID, shook her head, and said only, “I wouldn’t have guessed it.” A coworker of mine once had a little freak-out session when she found out that I was married, with children. She demanded to know how old I was, and when I told her, she couldn’t believe it. Overweight and with mostly grey hair, she is only a few years older than I am. As a matter of athletic performance, I can still out-run most twenty-somethings and can probably do more pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups than most people.

I don’t mention all this to brag, because it’s not anything to brag about, in my opinion. I worked out hard all my life, and I continue to do so. If you want to know what that feels like – to be able to do certain things physically, and to be able to pass for ten or more years younger than your age, and to maintain high energy levels into middle age, and to not really feel your body slowing down as much as everyone else’s seems to – then you have to work out. It’s not too late for you, either. But work out you must.

All that is to say, I’ve finally reached the age when none of my peers are quite so interested in talking about how “crazy” it is that I run every day (56 consecutive days and counting!) or that I do P90X on top of that in the morning. It doesn’t seem crazy, because now they understand that it isn’t crazy. It’s wise. It makes you better off. And they now wish that they, too, had run when not being chased.

Don't Listen To The Haters - Marriage Is An Accomplishment

Yesterday a friend of mine came across an article in The Huffington Post entitled “Getting Married Is Not An Accomplishment.” The article is not too terribly long and does not break new ground the pop-feminism world, so if you haven’t eaten recently, you might want to go ahead and read the whole thing. But if you don’t want to – and who could blame you? – I’ll provide the most relevant excerpt:

My frustration is this: It is 2016 and being popped the question is still more celebrated than academic and professional pursuits of women. Yes, college graduations and landing a great career and receiving wonderful promotions are all received with happiness from friends and family, but not even close to the same level of elation received when you announce that you are getting hitched. This is my experience, at least.

I am so grateful for the excitement surrounding my upcoming marriage, however, I often wonder why the event of getting married is put on a higher pedestal than the true successes that come along with an education and career. 

Truthfully, this kind of article is easy to obliterate because it is both predictable and poorly reasoned.  I don’t believe in punching down, but there are a few points that I think I’d like to make about this article, points that may slip through the cracks for most readers.

The Obvious

The first couple of points I’d like to make are obvious, but important enough that they deserve being articulated.

The number one thing is this: The author is simply wrong.  Marriage is a much greater accomplishment than having some success at work. Marriage is a lifelong project that requires a level of patience, growth, and commitment to personal growth that many people simply do not possess. I won’t say it’s hard to be married, but I will say that when you’re having a bad day at work, you can still go home at the end of the day, and if things really start to suck, you can get an even better job if you leverage your past successes. In marriage, there is nowhere to go other than back to the marriage to try to make it better; and if you, sadly, find yourself having to leave a marriage, you always end up worse-off than you were before, definitely in the short run and quite possibly in the long run. Compared to work or school, the stakes are much higher in marriage, the time horizon is much, much longer, the effort is greater, and the rewards are much more deeply satisfying – not just according to me, but according to happiness research. To suggest that getting a promotion at work – even a really big promotion and a nice raise – is a greater accomplishment than marriage is, well… insane.

The other obvious point that goes along with this one is that many, many people in the world aren’t lucky enough to get married, ever. A great many more people are lucky to have been married, but sadly haven’t ended up in a successful marriage. Still more people had wonderful marriages that were destroyed through acts of god or circumstance. In short, the author is quite fortunate – or, to use the language du jour, privileged – to be getting married. Her article and her perspective is warped by her good fortune; she is oblivious to the plight of the many people who aren’t so lucky as to be getting married. This makes her article seem cavalier.

The Less Obvious

By the time I had finished the article, I had recalled an old blog post that dispenses with most of the arguments made in this one. You can find it here, and do read the whole thing, because it’s excellent.

The knee-jerk reaction to an article like this, the one that The Huffington Post is counting on, is that we all sit around and pat each other on the back for knowing that a woman’s worth is more than her ability to attach herself to a man. And while we were all patting ourselves on the back for thinking this, the author sprung this little doozy on us:

I can’t blame anyone for being more curious about my relationship status than my career, as I too have been guilty of doing the same with other woman. After all, we are all taught through expertly crafted commercials and advertisements that it is of utmost importance for a woman to get a ring put on her finger.

Perhaps it’s time for society as a whole to re-evaluate what aspect of women’s lives we put the most value on.

There are two very important things to point out about this passage. The first is that the author has the audacity to suggest that advertisers are partially responsible for our having been brainwashed into thinking that marriage is an accomplishment when her own article is a piece of advertising for the Chevrolet automobile company:

That’s bad enough, but there’s something else going on here that strikes me as being incredibly odd. Let’s suppose that the author is correct, that having a successful career is a greater accomplishment than marriage. If the author has a successful career – and she sure seems to, because they aren’t printing my articles in The Huffington Post, then why does it matter to her what society thinks about that?

Stay with me here. This woman has a marriage, and a successful career, so she’s got it both ways. She’s not satisfied by those things, however, because people don’t ask her about the biggest accomplishments she’s had. In other words, her successes aren’t satisfying to her because nobody is asking her the right questions. She’s seeking external validation for her accomplishments. Without it, she doesn’t feel that they are accomplishments.

Let’s say that, instead of having a great career, the author’s biggest accomplishment was learning how to play “Leyenda” for classical guitar. Would she then be arguing that society needs to change so that “we” value classical guitar performances more than marriage? No, of course not – but the point isn’t that not all accomplishments are created equal, the point is that what society chooses to ask you about in casual conversation has nothing to do with how satisfied you feel by having achieved something. It doesn’t really matter that nobody ever talks to me about my accomplishments because, to the extent that I have achieved anything at all, those achievements stand on their own merits. I know I did them, whatever they are. I’m not waiting for people to pat me on the back for having achieved something, and if I did need that, how insecure must I be about those accomplishments?

Befuddling.