The Season for Trying to Step off the Treadmill

My 19-year old daughter Charlotte recently commented: "Time seems to go by faster now than it did when I was in high school." Yes, indeed! And it speeds up more and more, especially if you love what you are doing with your life, and if you treasure your family and friends.

This seems to be the perfect time of year to try to step off that ever-accelerating treadmill in order to live in the moment, to appreciate the many things that went extraordinarily well this year but to also appreciate lessons learned where things didn't go as planned. What better way to kick off this season of contemplation than to spend time with your people and to share stories with each other. That's what many of us are doing tonight, of course. To me, that is the magic of the season. My family's tradition is to celebrate Christmas Eve with a feast of tacos and other Mexican food at my house in South St. Louis. My immediate family includes my 87 year old mother, who lives independently, and her five children (I have four wonderful sisters). My mom would proudly add that she has many grandchildren and also some great-grandchildren. But wow, is time ever flying by . . .



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The Catastrophic Story-Telling Failure of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

When they stop celebrating “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” I’ll pause my efforts to reframe this story as having one of the worst endings in the history of story-telling.

Just when the Whos of the Who Village almost learned an extremely important lesson, just when they were having an epiphany that all of that Christmas kitsch and all those baubles actually corrupted the holiday and distracted from the meaning of the celebration, that’s when the Grinch got three times more evil that day.

A proper way to end the story would be for the Grinch to confidently dump all of that glittery tinselly crap into the abyss high above the village. He would then triumphantly ride down into the Who Village to be welcomed as a hero. They would sing odes praising the Grinch for conducting his dramatic intervention. They would deeply embrace the idea that Christmas would proceed in a more pristine and sincere form because the materialistic cravings--those jingtinglers, whohoopers and glumbloopas--had been exorcised from the process. The Whos might even celebrate that the Grinch was channeling the Jesus who drove the money-changers out of the temple. Instead of singing the “Twelve Days or Christmas,” the Whos would compose a new carol called “O Little Town Where Less is More.”

The actual story ending is a sad one, however. Because the Grinch allowed schmaltzy emotion to prevail over principle, he decided that Christmas should NOT become like traditional Thanksgiving (before the concept of Black Friday). He decided that the celebration needed thousands of materialistic distractions after all. The Whos, glitch-addicts that they were, put up no resistance. The story ending consisted of a lesson almost learned. No denouement here—that metaphorical sleigh just couldn’t quite get over the crest of the hill. This kind of almost-story could inspire a remake of “A Christmas Story” where Scrooge almost learned his lesson. In that revised ending, post-nightmare Scrooge would march back to the Cratchit house and spray paint anti-Cratchit graffiti on the walls.

Damn. The story of the Grinch was almost such a great story. See you next year for more of the same.

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Opponents of Effort to Privatize Lambert St. Louis Airport Celebrate

Just when the opponents of privatizing were digging down and getting ready to wage serious war against big money, Lyda Krewson, Mayor of St. Louis, flipped her position.

As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,


Mayor Lyda Krewson on Friday abruptly ended the city’s exploration of privatizing operations at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, citing criticism from residents, business leaders and other elected officials.  “They have expressed serious concerns and trepidation about the process, and about the possibility that a private entity might operate the airport,” Krewson said in a letter to members of a city committee weighing privatization.


Big money didn't win this time, but it took a huge village of people who are not motivated by money.  Today's events proved that bad ideas + lots of money = bad ideas.  I was out of town today, but got back to the city just in time to join the celebration at Yaquis on Cherokee. It was a good time for a photo with my hero, Cara Spencer, who is right on the issues, time after time, and who will fight the fight whenever necessary, with the help of hundreds of dedicated people who go above and beyond because they recognize her for the treasure she is. I don't know the next big challenge for Alderwoman Spencer, but I am certain that she will take the side of her constituents.

Another hero is Tony Messenger, reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On this web page to the Lambert Airport Sunshine Law website that I recently created, I have listed only some of the articles Messenger wrote regarding the effort to privatize.  He recognized the problems from the beginning and wrote his articles with a laser beam.  There's no doubt that his efforts allowed many others to coordinate their energy against privatization.

Someday, we might know what caused today's death of the airport privatization effort. My best guess is that this deal had such a pervasive multi-faceted stench that it collapsed under various ongoing pressures to expose the details of the process, including the sunshine lawsuit filed by Mark Pedroli. There was a lot to hate about this privatization effort, including the warped incentive structure of the contract with the "Working Group," the apparent self-interested motives of the various players, the sham public hearings and the pie-in-the sky promises of magic wealth-production made by the "Working Group."

All of this must be viewed in the following critical context: the current airport commission, led by Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge, has been doing a fantastic job by any metric imaginable. Tonight is a night to celebrate, because the good guys won. Big money failed to completely twist local government to serve its profit-driven whims. The dark lining on this silver cloud is that big money got as far as it got and that it took so much work by so many people to put the brakes on the process.

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What To Do About Your Broken Heart

A broken heart can really hurt. It can physically hurt and it can be distracting, obsessive, depressing and unrelenting. The internet offers a lot of advice about what to do when your heart is broken, but this advice is anecdotal, hit and miss at best. That's why I then searched for articles based on science and I found one the offered an effective way to lessen the pain of a broken heart.

At Scientific American, Psychologist Guy Winch discusses a study that considered three strategies, to see which of these best helped heartbroken subjects reduce their love feelings.

In the first condition, subjects focused on negative reappraisals of their ex-partner (eg, by responding to prompts about their ex’s annoying habits). In the second condition they were asked to reframe their loving feelings as less problematic (eg, by endorsing prompts such as ‘It’s okay to love someone I’m no longer with’). The last condition used distraction (eg, questions about the subjects’ favorite food) to get the participants’ mind off their heartbreak. The researchers found that only negative reappraisals were truly effective in reducing love feelings. However, doing so did increase feelings of unpleasantness.

According to Winch, although this unpleasantness might seem to be a big price to pay to reduce feelings of love, there are two ways to address this unpleasantness: 1) Remember that "when we are heartbroken, our mind is likely to bombard us with highly idealized snapshots, memories and thoughts both about our ex and about our relationship." When we force ourselves to remember the downsides of the relationship, we are correcting for these untrue idealized images that are causing the pain 2)  We shouldn't contemplate only the person to whom we were attracted. Instead, we should force ourselves to think of the dynamics  of the relationship itself.  That's where we can best see the problem, because quite often a relationship consists of two smart good-hearted people who merely lack the chemistry to be a pair.

In my experience, it might take some work to see the downside to a relationship, especially when one is the dumpee rather than the dumper. But it's not always difficult.  There might be low-hanging fruit, things like addictions or rampant dishonesty, things that would have been absolute deal-breakers on Day One.  If only your lover had revealed these things at the very beginning of your relationship.  Imagine a Match.com profile indicating: "I will tell you the opposite of what I'm really feeling when we discuss important issues."  Or "I will become annoyed when you come over to spend time with me because I'd rather spend time with my other friends, who like to get drink heavily."  For most of us, dysfunctions like these, if revealed up front, would destroy the possibility of ever having a first date.  Once a romance has been going on for months, the confirmation bias encourages us to overlook any evidence pointing to major problems like these.  Once the relationship fractures apart, major issues like these often become obvious, sad and embarrassing memories.  But once the relationship is over, stark bad memories like these are also the best medicine to lessen the pain of your broken heart.  The better the hurt, the better the cure.

Even in the absence of major issues, there are doubtless various reasons why any particular relationship failed.  There had to be friction and frustration, even if nothing "major," and even if the cause is ineffable. Even where one doesn't understand why the relationship was not smooth sailing, one certainly experienced that it was not smooth sailing.

Winch suggests the following as the best salve for a broken heart, whether the issues were major or minor:

If you are trying to get over heartbreak, make a list of the person’s faults as well as of the shortcomings of the actual relationship and keep that list on your phone. Whenever you find yourself having idealized thoughts and memories, whip out your phone and read a few reminders in order to balance your perceptions and remind yourself that your ex was not perfect and neither was the relationship.

I have tried this approach to the letter and I highly recommend it.  Reviewing your own long list of real grievances turns a wonderful movie about you and your ex-lover into a sad and frustrating movie that makes you want to throw popcorn at the screen and walk out.  Once you see your ex-lover as they were, not merely as you crave them, it's much easier to turn the page to a new chapter of your life.

What follows is Winch's TED talk on this same topic:

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Donald Hoffman’s version of the Matrix: Things might be Extremely Different than they Seem

I enthusiastically recommend this podcast featuring Donald Hoffman. Sam Harris and (his wife) Annaka sound, in equal parts, skeptical and intrigued, which makes for some deeply engaging conversation. Hoffman's thesis might challenge almost everything you think.  Hoffman argues that evolution has not honed us to have veridical perception (seeing things as they really are). Rather, natural selection has privileged evolutionary fitness to prevail over veridicality. This topic dovetails nicely with Andy Clark's theory of predictive processing, in which Andy portrays perception as a "controlled hallucination."

The first hour is free for non-subscribers. Here's the promo for the podcast:

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam and Annaka Harris speak with Donald Hoffman about his book The Case Against Reality. They discuss how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of the world, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, the threat of epistemological skepticism, causality as a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, a mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, and many other topics.

Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, Edge.org, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quanta. In 2015, he gave a mind-bending TED Talk titled, “Do we see reality as it is?”


This teaser for this podcast is not mere hype.



An obvious example for illustrating Hoffman's thesis is color. We don't perceive wavelengths, much less the quantum physics even deeper down. To perceive these things would be too expensive (in terms of bandwidth) for rough and ready biological processors like human brains and bodies, and we don't need to fully understand the physics of the process in order to make use of color (or sounds or pain or shapes). For most of us, most of the time, we are trapped in the Matrix.

It is critical to note that there is NO COLOR in the objects "out there." Wavelengths of light are not colored. Color is something that is created only by the interaction between whatever is out there and our ability to engage with the world because it increases biological fitness. Here's the kicker . . . for Hoffman, everything is like color.  We don't need to understand the electronics and physics of the "objects" on our computer desktops in order to make excellent use off them.  Similarly, we often make excellent use of the things that we seem to encounter in the world, but it is entirely consistent with this observation that we don't deeply understand these things or we barely understand them.  A similar concern provoked Immanual Kant to divide the world into phenomena (how things appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves).

The bottom line is that things might be incredibly useful to us as creatures trying to survive day-to-day, even when our understanding of these things is extremely lacking or even false. Useful trumps veridically-true to those of us who are often merely trying to survive to the next day. We human animals are happy to satisfice, even though we often conflate our hacked-up understandings of things with veridical truth.

In Paragraph 121 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche also pointed out that things that are untrue can often be useful:

Life is not an argument. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live--by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error

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