A Remedy for Loneliness

I continue to read The Power of Fun by Catherine Price. The book is about how to have fun more in our lives, showing how to do this. Before doing so, the author starts a little dark discussing in part how we all need to face our own mortality. Then she goes on to review the science behind how True Fun is actually a health benefit. One of the study results that she reviews is the devastating health consequences of loneliness. Some scientists compare the effects of loneliness to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day! And since True Fun is defined by the author as the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow, having more True Fun is an effective remedy for loneliness.

I’ve now finished the first part (Fun, Seriously) and am moving on to part two (How to Have Fun). I am looking forward to learning that. And since the book came out this year, I am hoping it will take into account the greater restrictions we have all felt to connecting brought on by the pandemic.

Governing in a Democratic Republic

I’ve been reading the latest issue of The Atlantic (January/February 2022). The cover story is January 6 Was Practice. The author, Barton Gellman, argues that the most important issue in politics today is the steps that Trumpist Republicans are taking to make it possible to override the next presidential election if it doesn’t go their way. He writes about how Republicans are dismantling the checks that prevented this from happening in 2020/2021. It is a frightening piece.

Yesterday President Biden held a press conference where he tried to claim that his first year was largely a success despite his nearly worst ever polling numbers (only Trump was worse after his first year in office). One reporter asked him if he had overpromised. He said no. He definitely did. It seems absurd to me that the Democrats would attempt to make so many large changes when they hold the slimmest of majorities in Congress. Given what I read in The Atlantic it seems that it may be more urgent to address the state of our democracy so that we may continue to have one.

I also listened to the latest episode of The Argument podcast on Supreme Court reform. As usual, the host had two guests, one on each side. One of the guests was former Senator Russ Feingold who argued repeatedly that the court has already been packed and that two of our current justices were seated illegitimately. The other guest argued that nothing illegal was done but that norms and traditions were abandoned, as indeed they were. Feingold continued to essentially argue “They did it first!” with the idea that we now need to add justices in order to right the wrong. This is completely wrongheaded and continues to worsen the problem that caused this issue in the first place.

A good example of this is the call to end the filibuster in the Senate. The Democrats cannot get their rather aggressive agenda through because they only have a one vote majority. With the filibuster, they can’t even get to a vote. What is referred to as the filibuster is the requirement to have 60 votes in the Senate in order to end debate. The Senate has long been considered the more deliberative house of Congress. In order to filibuster, someone used to need to stand on the Senate floor and speak. There didn’t need to be any actual debate, but someone needed to speak. The speaker could change but someone had to do it. This process was changed that while Obama was president. Now you just have to say you are “filibustering”. No one needs to speak. That makes filibusters too easy. It needs to be harder.

This is a symptom of our divided politics. It used to be that neither side wanted to make these kinds of enormous changes to how they govern. For a long time, no president resorted to executive orders to govern when he couldn’t get his legislation through Congress. The concern was that the other side could then easily undo those orders. Obama struggled with Congress and resorted to executive orders. When Trump got into office, he undid Obama’s orders and added many of his own. The same thing happened with Biden. This has gotten us further and further from democratic government.

The Constitution makes it hard to get things done through government. This is on purpose. It is a feature not a bug. It was intended to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. All citizens have rights. Those in the majority do not get to do whatever they want because they won. And those who have lost do not get to manipulate things because they feel their ideas are better. We need all sides to weigh in on legislation and governing. And we need compromise. That is how our government was designed to work. Too bad our politicians, both Democrat and Republican, don’t seem to be up to the job.

Meaning and Mortality

I am noticing a recurring theme in the books I am reading and even some of the shows I stream. All of these explore very directly our human mortality. In other words, they all deal with the fact that we will all die. Not a cheery topic and one most of us spend a lot of time trying to avoid. But oddly, all of these authors have managed to turn this morbid focus into something that is actually uplifting.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman uses our mortality as a basis for time management. Instead of pretending like we can get everything done in our lives, we should use the finite nature of our existence to give ourselves permission to bring some sanity to our task lists. Since we only have about four thousand weeks in our lives, we should be much more discerning about how we spend them and what we do. And somehow this is very freeing. I no longer feel that I need to “do it all”. In fact, I know I can’t. So instead of trying, I focus on the things that are most meaningful to me.

I am currently reading The Power of Fun by Catherine Price. For a book about how to learn to have more fun, it starts off in a somewhat dark manner. She also points out that we are all going to die. And because of that fact, we all need to learn to prioritize adding to our lives some True Fun. The author defines True Fun as the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. Rather than spending all our time on serious pursuits and putting off fun until later, we need to mix it up and find a place for True Fun in our lives while we still can.

The third and final season of After Life came out on Netflix this month. The series stars Ricky Gervais (who also wrote it) as a man who is struggling to find a reason to live after losing his wife to cancer. Doesn’t sound very funny, though it is a comedy and quite funny. The main character feels like his life is meaningless without the love of his life and in season one he seeks to end it. By the end of season three (spoiler alert!), he decides to live despite the fact that life has no meaning. But he finds that uplifting as it means he is free to give his life any meaning he chooses.

So due to each of these exposures, I am finding myself happy to consider my own mortality and the fact that life has no inherent meaning. And I no longer find these thoughts morbid or depressing. Rather, I find them freeing. I get to choose my own meaning and what I will do with the precious little time I have, that we all have.

Proper Business Leadership

I recently finished reading Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. This book provides the best perspective for how to lead business in a capitalist world. And the author demonstrates that not only is this the right way to do business, but it also the most successful. He uses the experiences of leadership and how it is taught in the US military as well as good and bad examples of leadership in business. And he grounds all of this, surprisingly, in biology.

Throughout the book the author continues to refer back to the foundation of biology and four hormones that he presents in chapter six. He splits these into two groups: selfish chemicals without which he argues we would die (endorphins and dopamine) and social chemicals without which we would be cold-blooded (serotonin and oxytocin). Endorphins make us feel good and give us what is known as the runner’s high. Dopamine gives us an incentive for progress. Both of these are focused on individual biological survival. He calls serotonin the leadership chemical which helps us to survive collectively as a social species. And oxcytocin is the love chemical that drives engagement with others.

All this together is presented in a very engaging and informative format that really resonated with my own experience as a US Army officer and business manager. It was enlightening to have the science and examples from others that confirm that.

Policy Making in a Democracy

Governors at podiums during COVID-19 emergency

I just read an article in the the February 2022 issue of Reason Magazine that takes a stand on a political issue where they don’t take sides politically. We need more reporting like this.

At issue is when does an emergency become a crisis? At the beginning of the pandemic, governors across the country, both Democrat and Republican, locked down their states. Why? Because the COVID-19 virus was new and unknown. We didn’t know how it was transmitted, didn’t know how to treat it, and didn’t have a vaccine. We needed an emergency response to protect public health, create space to figure out what we didn’t know, and create policy to address this new reality. But when is the emergency over? When do we go back to following our democratic methods to determine policy?

The way many governors have behaved, they’ve treated COVID-19 as a two-year emergency. While it continues to be an ongoing crisis, the article argues that it is no longer an emergency. We now know how it is transmitted, how to treat it, and we have vaccines. But politicians of both major parties continue to govern with emergency powers. And may citizens are taking action because of it. The danger of this situation is that we are likely to overcorrect and eliminate emergency powers altogether. There is a place for acting in an emergency. And there is a time to go back to governing under our democratic principles. I hope this is a lesson that we will effectively learn from this pandemic.

Snow (Reading) Day!

It is currently snowing, and we have a winter storm warning active where I live until early Monday morning. We are expected to get up to a foot of snow mixed with ice and rain. Yuck! But it reminds me of a snow day when I was going to school. It makes me want to curl up on the couch with some hot tea or cocoa and read a book. In fact, I think I’ll go do that now.

A Short Review

I finished reading Archenemies, and I loved it! It reminded me of how I felt when I watched The Empire Strikes Back. The story was full of action and twists. I was at the edge of my seat in anticipation; I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. The end was a cliff hanger that left me wanting the next in the series right away. Fortunately, the next book has already been published so I don’t have to wait three year for the sequel like I did with Star Wars.

Lessons from History

Map of the US Presidential Election of 1824

It is often reported and lamented that today in the United States of America we are more divided than ever. We long for some long forgotten time when politics was more civil and less personal. While we do face unique political problems today, there never was a time of civil and less personal national politics. And the election of 1824 is an excellent example.

As I learned while reading the Jackson biography mentioned in a previous post, the presidential election of 1824 was extremely ugly. The two leading candidates were John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Adams was serving as Secretary of State, a role many previous presidents served in prior to being elected. Jackson was the hero of the battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. These men did not like each other at all. Adams was allied to the strict and elitist version of republicanism that the first presidents had practiced. Jackson was a man of the people. Both men struck out at the other personally in the contest, even maligning members of each other’s families.

The election was complicated by two other men running for president, William H. Crawford and Henry Clay. As a result, no candidate won a majority of the Electoral College votes. According to the constitution, the election was decided by the House of Representatives with each state’s delegation getting a single vote. Only the top three candidates were on the ballot, so Henry Clay was dropped.

Like Adams, Clay could not stand Jackson. It is widely thought that Clay made a deal with Adams to give him the election in exchange for being made Secretary of State. Jackson was the big winner in the popular vote with 41% to Adam’s 31%. Jackson even won 15 more votes in the Electoral College (99-84). Due to the machinations of Clay, Adams won the election and became the next president and named Clay as his Secretary of State.

This happened during a time in US history as more and more people were getting the right to vote. There was a philosophical shift toward popular rule and elections and away from powerful elites controlling them. As is often the case in transitional times, things were ugly. It is often said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. It certainly seems to me that our times could be considered to be rhyming with this time in history.

How I Read

Most typically, I read books on my ereader. I have an older model, high resolution, eight inch Kobo Aura ONE ereader. I also wanted something slightly larger than a pocket ereader. The one I have is about the size of a trade paperback. I picked an e-ink reader because I did not want to be distracted by all the things that a tablet could do. I wanted something dedicated only to reading.

Another reason I chose Kobo over Kindle was Kobo has library integration. I can use my ereader to borrow and read library ebooks from the comfort of my own home. And I borrow and read a lot of books from the library.

Probably my most favorite feature of using an ereader is looking up word definitions. Every ereader that I am aware of includes a dictionary. So, as I am reading and I encounter a word I am unfamiliar with, I simply long press the word with my finger. Then a separate small window pops up with a definition of the word. I simply close the window and go back to my reading. This is much less of an interruption than putting my book down to find a dictionary and lookup the word. I am so used to it, I sometimes find myself reaching a finger to long press a word in a magazine article or print book.

I also carry many books with me. I read around one hundred books a year. When I finish one, I start the next one pretty much right away. So instead of waiting until I am done to find my next read, I have quite a few from my “to read” list already on my ereader ready to go. When I am done reading a book, I return it to the library and pick one of the others already on my ereader.

I also take my ereader with me. When I am waiting in line or for an appointment, I take it out and read a bit. That’s how I am able to read so much in a year. I love reading on my ereader.

Why I Read

We are a storytelling species. We are in the age of “Peak TV“. People are driving and jogging while listening to audio books. But my favorite way to engage with story is still the good, old-fashioned book. Or more often these days, an ebook. In short text read line by line. Not watched nor listened to. Read.

As a child I loved libraries. My favorite people in elementary school were the librarians. As a teen I walked to the library to comb through the card catalog (remember those?) to find my next read. When I became an adult I continued to visit the library to borrow books while also building quite a large library of physical books. While today my physical library is much smaller, I still use the library to borrow ebooks as well as buy new ones regularly.

And I read all genres. Literature. Science fiction. Fantasy. Memoir. Biography. History. Science. Psychology. Philosophy. Recently I began to wonder, why is reading so important to me? I have so many other choices for learning and entertainment. Why reading? I’m still working on a full answer to that question, but here are some of my preliminary thoughts.

Reading is slow. Or maybe it’s more that it happens at my own pace. Watching and listening happen at a predetermined pace. Sure I can sometimes speed it up, but for me that degrades the experience. The fact that I can easily reread a passage to clarify is part of what I love about reading. And I can read at whatever pace suits me.

Reading is broader and deeper. I have never heard of a movie that had more story than the book it was based on. Books also go to much more depth as they aren’t limited by a two hour running time. It is also easier to access the thoughts of characters in a book.

Reading is low tech. I don’t need any special tools to read a book. I can sit under a tree on a sunny day and escape to another world or learn life lesson’s from someone long dead. Even with an ebook, my ereader only needs to be charged once or twice a month, and it doesn’t do anything but let me read ebooks.

Reading is old and reliable. Books have been around for thousands of years. And books written that long ago are still accessible. I don’t need a special program to run them or read them.

But most of all, books and reading transport me to other worlds. They allow me to live vicariously through others, both real and imagined. And when I am done or take a break, I return to my real life having learned and grown in sometimes unseen ways. This is true magic that I cannot imagine living without.