Getting Hairy

All through college, and when I first moved to NYC, I kept clean-shaven.  But when I was 22 or 23, initially for the convenience during a period of frequent travel, I decided to try growing a beard.  Quickly, I realized that anything over two or three weeks of growth looked pretty terrible—overly patchy, like a mangy dog.  But with a trimmer, I could hold at one or two weeks of scruff, which I liked.  Every month or two, I’d shave it off completely.  And once or twice a year, I’d do a few weeks of 70’s porn ‘stache, until mounting protest would get me to shave that, too.  But otherwise, for the last decade and a half, short beard has been pretty much my default setting.

Over the years, as I’ve gotten older, my facial hair has also gotten thicker and heavier.  I first noticed the increase of heft during those mustached stretches, as in recent years I could get a surprisingly Tom Selleck/Sam Elliott thing going if I gave it time.  Which made me think: if I had vetoed the grown-out full beard on account of thinness, perhaps that would no longer be an issue.  So I resolved I’d let my beard grow for at least a month or two past my normal 3-week cap, and see what happened.

And, indeed, it did grow in, quickly and remarkably thickly, auburn red (the color of my mother’s hair, and, according to 23&me, the remnant of a Scandinavian streak in my otherwise solely Ashkenazi Jewish Eastern European Mutt ethnicity) with the occasional speckle of gray for a touch of gravitas.  But, as it grew for month after month, I also began to realize it wasn’t really veering towards mountain man/special forces/polar explorer in the way I had hoped.  Instead, I looked, in a word, rabbinical.  All I was missing was payis (the sideburn curls), a long black coat, and a black felt hat.

So, after four solid months, I eventually shaved back to ground zero.  And, based on the immediate feedback, I dropped about a decade of perceived age in the process.  Thus, it appears the answer remains: a week or two of scruff or less.  Any more and it’s oy gevalt indeed.

June 9, 2018

Break it Down

When I was a kid, my parents splurged, and bought the (at the time, rather expensive) Encyclopedia Britannica.  My father had wanted to own it himself as a child, though the purchase was clearly mostly for my benefit, as the heavy volumes lived in my room, taking up the entire bottom rows of my three bookshelves.  And, frankly, I loved it.  As anyone who, in the years since, has fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole can attest, it’s remarkably easy to get engrossed in random encyclopedia entries, whether on how the Tower of Pisa got its famous lean, or on the mechanics required for a snake to swallow and digest animals (including whole people) wildly larger than itself.

The Britannica was divided into three parts: the Macropaedia, which had long-form articles on major subjects; the Micropaedia, which had shorter entries on a far wider array of topics; and, my favorite, the Propaedia, a single, relatively slim volume.

Let’s say you wanted to construct an encyclopedia.  Where would you start?  How would you decide which topics to include?  Britannica’s answer was the Propaedia, a taxonomy of all the world’s knowledge.  Like the phylogenic tree of life, it started from a single root, and sub-divided endlessly: ‘Matter & Energy’ split to ‘The Universe’ then to ‘Galaxies & Stars’ to ‘Extragalactic Radio Sources’ to ‘Quasars.’  ‘History of Mankind’ broke into ‘The Modern World’ then to ‘Western Europe 1500-1789′ to “The European States’ to ‘France’ to ‘The Age of Louis XIV.’  I spent almost as much time poring over that single volume as all the others combined. I loved the structure, the organization.  I loved the way it linked across seemingly disparate fields and bodies of knowledge. I intuited, even at a young age, that the better my framework for the big picture, the more easily I would be able to understand, retain, and connect all the details.

These days, I’ve been thinking about the Propaedia a lot, as I’ve been spending much of my time working on the algorithm for Composite.  The idea is simple: if you’re a professional athlete, or a movie star prepping for a role, you have an excellent, experienced, and educated coach who designs a workout plan, a nutrition plan, a set of lifestyle changes, etc., all tailored specifically to you and your goals.  And those plans, plus accountability to the coach to help you actually stick to them, tend to yield extremely impressive results, as a trip to the ballpark or cinema illustrates.

The rest of us, however, just go for a run, copy workouts from fitness magazines, or hire trainers at local gyms whose primary credentials usually include having played D3 football and being great at yelling “it’s all you, bro, it’s all you!”  None of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, work quite as well.  So, fundamentally, Composite is about leveraging the power of AI (as well as technology in general, plus recent research in sport science and behavioral medicine) to let everyone get the pro athlete/movie star custom treatment—and results.

Composite’s algorithm is a neural network, so it will evolve over time, continuously improving its prescriptions as it learns from members’ results (as measured on things like blood panels, body composition, and benchmark workout times).  But, to set the algorithm up, we had a sort of Catch-22: you can’t train a neural net without a ton of data, but because there’s never previously been a use for that kind of data in the fitness world, it doesn’t really exist (at least not in a central, digital way).

To get around the chicken and egg problem, we’ve had to do some heavy lifting, initially building the algorithm using GOFAI (“good ol’ fashioned AI”), setting the symbol weights entirely by hand.  Doing that, in turn, has meant coming up with taxonomy after taxonomy after taxonomy.  We’ve had to reduce all possible, beneficial exercises, all possible nutritional approaches, all training periodization structures, all healthful lifestyle changes, all stretches and mobilizations and pre-hab movements, etc., into meaningfully structured trees.

Which, on the one hand, is kind of bananas.  But, on the other, has been absolutely the best part of the job.  All of those taxonomies have gone through a crazy number of iterations already, and I still regularly jump out of bed at 3 AM to scribble down an epiphany that sends at least one of them straight back to the drawing board.

Each time I work on those taxonomies, I think back to the Propaedia.  And I’m still not sure: did all that time perusing it change my brain and how I look at the world?  Or did it just so perfectly fit the way I already saw things, and gave me a master class in structured thinking, done rigorously and at scale?

Either way, that book was the best thing I could have had sitting on my bedroom shelf.  And I wonder if my own future kids, skipping around Wikipedia, but unable to hold in their own hands a single, unifying big picture, won’t be missing something beautiful and important as a result.

May 21, 2018

How to Make Lemonade

Over the past couple of years, I’ve faced a handful of major personal disasters.  And, in response, I’ve floundered through a wide array of coping mechanisms.  Some worked well; others, not so much.  In the hope that I can save you some pain, here’s what I learned through that experience, the things that were actually helpful in carrying me through difficult (and sometimes exceedingly difficult) stretches of life.

But, first, let me start with what doesn’t work: numbness, rage, and despair.  That said, at least in my own case, when shit hits the fan, they’re my inevitable first response.  For some initial period of time – hours or even days – I’m completely numb. Then I alternate like clockwork between feeling wildly angry and wallowing in misery.  Neuroscience research suggest it takes at least an hour for your brain to recover from even minor slights and setbacks.  And, at the other end of the spectrum, Judaism  “shiva” – the period of intense mourning after the death of an immediate family member – at seven days.  So, based on the severity of your disaster, find somewhere in that range: no less than an hour, no more than a week.  During that time, cycle through raging / despairing / feeling numb (or whatever else you personally default to) without chastising yourself.  Just let it rip.  Then stop, because it isn’t actually helping, and do this instead:

  1. Envision the Future.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust as a prisoner in several concentration camps, losing his entire family along the way (so, in short, he had it worse than whatever you’re dealing with) said, “with the right why, a man can survive any how.”  In his case, the ‘why’ was the drive to write a book about his experience, to share the psychological insights he’d gained with world.  (And if you haven’t read the resultant Man’s Search for Meaning, go do that now.)  But the specific why doesn’t matter, so long as it’s extremely compelling to you, and at least a year or two (and possibly ten or twenty) in the future.  I recommend strongly that you commit your why to paper, whether it’s a (to use Jim Collins’ famous phrase) Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal that you’re excited to pursue, or just a detailed description of a better future – where you’ll be, with whom, what you’ll be doing, what you’ll have done.  Whatever it is, write it down, and then re-read it frequently.  At least daily at first, if not more.  Tell yourself that’s what you’re gunning for, that’s what on the far side of this current, seemingly unsurvivable mess.  Use that ‘why’ as your north star, and let it carry you through.

  1. Then Focus on Today

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “there’s no burden so heavy it can’t be carried until nightfall.”  So, as Sir William Osler advised, “live your life in day-tight compartments.”  Thinking about that distant-future ‘why’ will buoy you up.  But thinking about any future short of that – how you’re going to make it through tomorrow, or the next two weeks, or the next year and a half – will drive you into the ground. You project your current misery forward, multiply its weight by all those future days, and are sure there’s no way that you can possibly deal with all the unhappiness you see stretched out ahead.  But as the Zen Buddhists say, thinking you can’t survive another second of a pain you’re feeling is a lie; you survived this second, so you can survive the next, too.  So make that your focus: surviving one more day.  Make it into bed, this evening, in one piece, and call that victory. Worry about today today, and deal with tomorrow once it arrives.

  1. Get Moving

First, literally.  Especially right after something terrible happens, I’ve found that walking is the very best thing I can do.  My mind may be reeling, but just taking step after step after step seems to slowly dissipate some of the overwhelm.  Similarly, going to the gym, and working out hard does more for my mood than almost anything else.  But after that, get your brain moving.  When things go wrong, I usually feel like I’m facing an endless number of problems, all piled up on top of one another.  But, in fact, while your problems may be terrible, they’re also finite.  So when everything is crap, I start by making a ‘cloud list’ – an inventory of everything that’s a problem in my life at that moment.  In my own experience, and for the people who I’ve helped do this during their own crises, just making a concrete list, seeing it down on paper, helps a surprising amount by itself.  Then, for each problem, figure out a first thing or two that you can do in response.  Some problems can’t be ‘fixed,’ but for all of them there’s still some concrete, positive action you can take.  You have terminal cancer with three months to live?  Fine; draft a plan for how you’re going to make the most of those three months.  Similarly, for some problems, the action might be a long-shot Hail Mary, unlikely to even work.  Which is also fine.  You’ll still feel hugely better knowing you’re at least going down swinging.  But, in short, find something you can do, and start doing it.  In my experience, forward motion helps more than anything else.

  1. See the Moon

One of my favorite poems is a Haiku by Basho:

Barn’s burned down.
Now,
I can see the moon.

Or as an old cowboy couplet has it

Two men looked out from prison bars;
one saw the mud, the other saw stars.

Sometimes, life sucks.  And I wouldn’t suggest pretending otherwise, becoming a mindless Polyanna.  But eventually, after you let yourself rage and despair, after you find your future ‘why,’ focus on today, and get moving, the only other thing you can do is to start looking for what good there still is in the world.  Sitting surrounded by the ashes and embers of your burned-down barn of a life, at some point, you have to look for the moon.  To be honest, I’m still puzzling out the best way to do that, the best way to snap myself back to seeing the glass as half-full.  Often, just reading that Basho haiku does it for me.  And when that doesn’t work, I’ve also had success with giving myself a daily journaling assignment: for a week (or even a month), starting with the prompt, “[Disaster x] is the best thing that ever happened to me, because…” and forcing myself to complete the page.  But, at the end of the day, it comes down to making a choice: deciding that you’d rather focus on whatever is positive in your life, rather than the negative that’s been weighing you down.

That’s the four-step plan that works for me.  So now, when things go wrong, I may still be launched into a first stretch of numbness and rage and despair.  But even then, I know there’s a reliable path out the other side.

May 3, 2018

Communication Breakdown

Twenty years back, I read Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand in a gender linguistics class at Yale.  A few weeks ago, I stumbled across the book again.  Paging through the introduction, I decided it might be worth a second read.  After two intervening decades, full of a lot of dates, a failed marriage, and a truly wonderful current long-term relationship, I thought I might get something different out of the book with older, wiser eyes.

Indeed, it turned out to be great, and more than worth the repeat time.  Previously, I remembered it mainly as the origin of the ‘men don’t ask for directions’ trope that has since pervaded cultural common sense.  After this second pass, while I still don’t agree with everything Tannen concludes, and am sometimes not a fan of her methods (she bounces back and forth between citing research-based conclusions, and then riffing broad theories based on anecdotal excerpts from random short stories and plays), I found nearly every page a source of insight or food for thought.

Fundamentally, the book starts from the proposition that men and women have different conversational aims: women are primarily concerned with intimacy and use communication to establish connection; men are primarily concerned with independence and use communication to establish hierarchy.  While generations of subsequent self-help books (like the seemingly endless Men are From Mars series) have been penned using a dumbed-down version of the same argument, they pale painfully in comparison to Tannen’s original.

But the book goes well beyond that simple start, illustrating the myriad other ways that things can get lost in translation between men and women, and between any number of other divergent groups, too.  For example, in a chapter about interruptions, Tannen makes clear that ‘interrupting’ is much more complicated than just the mechanical question of whether two people’s words overlap.  In certain cultures (what she calls “high involvement”) people over-talk as a way to egg each other on with questions, agreement, support, etc.  Whereas in others (“high consideration”) the exact same over-talk might be seen as dismissive and rude.  She analyzes a transcribed conversation between six friends at a dinner party, and concludes:

In my study of dinner table conversation, the three high-involvement speakers were New York City natives of Jewish background.  Of the three high-considerateness speakers, two were Catholics from California and one was from London, England.  Although a sample of three does not prove anything, nearly everyone agrees that many (obviously not all) Jewish New Yorkers, many New Yorkers who are not Jewish, and many Jews who are not from New York have high-involvement styles and are often perceived as interrupting in conversations with speakers from different backgrounds, such as the Californians in my study.  But many Californians expect shorter pauses than many Midwesterners or New Englanders, so in conversations between them, Californians end up interrupting.  Just as I was considered extremely polite when I lived in New York but was sometimes perceived as rude in California, a polite Californian I know was shocked and hurt to find herself accused of rudeness when she moved to Vermont.

The cycle is endless.  Linguists Ron and Suzanne Scollon show that midwestern Americans, who may find themselves interrupted in conversations with Easterners, become aggressive interrupters when they talk to Athabaskan Indians, who expect much longer pauses.  Many Americans find themselves interrupting when they talk to Scandinavians, but Swedes and Norwegians are perceived as interrupting by the longer-pausing Finns, who are themselves divided by regional differences with regard to length of pauses and rate of speaking.  As a result, Finns from certain parts of the country are stereotyped as fast talking and pushy, and those from other parts of the country are stereotyped as slow talking and stupid, according to Finnish linguists Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara.

The whole book is chock full of this kind of stuff, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Indeed, if you’re a man or a woman, and you regularly talk to men or women (and, especially, if you’re in or would like to be in a heterosexual relationship), I’d say it’s an essential read.

February 12, 2018

Shoot ‘Em

Per my last post, I have a pretty anal-retentive approach to goals, habits, and projects, which has helped me to push forward on a wide array of big pursuits that I care about.  But, over the years, I’ve also slowly accumulated a list of small, random skills I’d also like to improve or acquire.  And, precisely because I don’t care that much about them, I never really get around to doing anything about them; they seem to perpetually live on my back burner.

This fall, however, I came up with a new idea: each quarter, I’d choose one of those random back-burner pursuits, and commit to spending 5-10 minutes on it daily for three months.  At the end of the quarter, I could make a more permanent, ongoing habit of anything I discovered I really cared about; for everything else, a quarter’s worth of daily progress would be enough to check the box, and to make me feel like I had put in the effort.

So, in September, I started off with chess.  Prior to that, I had played perhaps five games of chess in my life.  I knew how the pieces moved, but that was about it.  So I read a handful of chess books (in case you’re on a similar quest, I highly recommend Bobby Fischer Teachers Chess), and then started playing games. Three months later, I’m still a bit short of grandmaster.  But I can, at least, hold my own in a casual game – well enough to play with a friend, or against a simulator on the iPhone to kill time on a plane or train ride.  Which, really, was all I wanted.

This week, with a new quarter, I moved on to a new skill: playing pool.  Fortuitously, there’s a pool table in my building lobby, which is almost always abandoned in the mornings.  So, for five or ten minutes on the way to work, I stop in and practice some pool drills.

Much like with chess, I think I’ve played maybe two dozen pool games in my life – usually while in a bar, fairly drunk. It’s a frustrating game for me, as, in my mind, I’m excellent.  The geometry and strategy make perfect sense.  But somehow, when the stick hits the cue ball, things never unfold quite like I envisioned them.

We’ll see how much that changes over a quarter of practice.  But if I’m diligent, I think I should be able to make it from horrific to just moderately terrible.  And, for me, that should be good enough. I can move on next quarter to massacring drawing instead, and can keep crossing those little things, one by one, off my back-burner bucket list.

January 6, 2018

Taking Stock

My freshman year at college, neck-deep in starting my first company, I got an early taste of worrying about work/life balance.  How much time should I spend on the company, I wondered, versus on classes and homework, or on boozing, socializing, and pulling crazy pranks with friends?

At that point, I had also just re-read Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and I still remember being struck by the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat.  When Alice asks the Cat for directions, he asks her where she’s headed.  “I don’t much care where,” says Alice.  To which the Cat replies, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

With that in mind, I set out trying to envision an ideal future life, a clear sense of where I wanted to end up, so that I could choose the right roads going forward.  By the time I turned 50, I asked myself, what did I want to be doing?  What did I want to have already accomplished?  Who, really, did I want to be?

To keep things structured, I broke my life down into four broad categories: Work (the things I did for a living, and to make a broad impact on the world), Play (things I did just for my own enjoyment, like writing, playing music, or travel), People (friends, family, and eventually building a family of my own), and Self (mind, body, and spirit).  And, for the better part of a year, I tried to work out a vision for each of those areas that seemed right, that excited and inspired me.

It’s now some 20 years later, and though the age of 50 has inched closer (I’m now just 12 years off), my vision has changed surprisingly little over that time.  Which is excellent, as those long-term goals serve as the basis for my short-term planning, too.  I work backwards from them to 5-year goals (where do I need to be in 5 years on a given goal, to be on track to hit the overall goal by 50?), then to 1-year goals.  And then I translate those, in turn, into either habits for the year (like daily meditation, a monthly museum visit, or a quarterly weekend trip) and projects (big but finite things, like building the Composite client app, which I sort into a long ordered list, then knock off by focusing on one at a time for the first couple of hours of my day).

Most days, I can just get down to work, knowing that, if I stick to those projects and habits, I’m on track to my longer-term goals.  But twice a year – once on my birthday (which happily falls on the middle of the year, in July) and once at year’s end – I stop and take stock.  I look at the big picture.  If I spend the rest of the year climbing the ladder as quickly as I can, those two times, I pause to make sure the ladder is on the right wall.

I start by reviewing my goals – the age 50 ones, as well as the 5 year, 1 year, and project/habits that stem from them.  And then I take a careful look at where I am right now.  During the week between Christmas and New Years, I write in-depth reviews of the four areas of my life – Work, Play, People, Self.  For each, I summarize where I stand, how I fared the past year.  And, for each, I give myself a letter grade, and then see if I need to make any tweaks to my upcoming projects and habits to do better in the year ahead.

Sure, it’s a pretty wonky and time-consuming approach.  But as the world basically shuts down this week anyhow, it’s easy to fit in.  And, for me at least, it pays dividends in purpose, productivity, and sanity for the next twelve months.

January 3, 2018

Forget Me Not

One sunny afternoon two or three summers back, I headed down to Battery Park City on a whim, to take the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty.  I had spent more than 15 years as a Manhattanite staring out at her, but had never gone out to see Lady Liberty up close.

Except, it turns out, I had.  As my mother informed me after I told her about the trip, she and my father had taken my brother and me when I was nine or ten. Sadly, that’s pretty much par for the course, as I’ve similarly forgotten a wide array of childhood adventures and experiences; enough so that my mother frequently suggests she should have just locked my brother and me in a closet for our first ten or fifteen years of life, and then told us that she had taken us to the places that they actually did, as it would have saved a lot of time and money but yielded the same result.

So when I mused a few years ago that I’d always wanted to eat at The French Laundry, and my mother informed me that I’d already been as a young teenager, I wasn’t surprised.  But I did feel torn between mourning that non-memory as a colossal waste, or celebrating it (even in conscious absentia) as perhaps one of the formative experiences that molded me into the snotty foodie/serious cook I am today.

More generally, I’ve been trying to take comfort in the idea that those forgotten memories are still somehow locked inside me.  Because, otherwise, all the time I’ve spent reading novels and non-fiction books, watching great films, taking classes, etc., has gone completely down the tubes, given that pretty much none of that content is still available for voluntary mental recall.

Recently, for example, I started re-reading 1984.  And though I for some reason remembered verbatim the lines, “The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see,” I had otherwise completely forgotten the entire novel, except that it had something to do with Big Brother and telescreens and the Thought Police.

Or, take Indiana Jones, about two minutes of which I caught in passing on a lounge-area television this past weekend. There, too, while I can visually picture certain iconic scenes, and remember a handful of pithy lines, I couldn’t even roughly outline the plot any longer, except that it had something to do with lost artifacts and being chased by Nazis.

In short, it appears I’ve lost the details of pretty much everything I watched or read prior to this decade.  Though I suppose it could be worse: my mother can read an entire book, and only when the twist ending seems oddly predictable, realize that she read the book previously, six months back.

Perhaps that’s what I’m trending towards myself, especially as I age.  But, on balance, I’m not sure I’d really mind. It must be nice to take something you already know you love, and then experience it again for the first time.

December 6, 2017

Wintertime Sadness

While most people assume that emotions start in your brain, and then spread into your body as physical feelings, cognitive science has long backed the opposite.  It’s called the attributive theory of emotion, and it posits that you first feel the bodily physical sensations, and then your brain notices, interprets, and labels those sensations as emotions.  In one famous study, subjects held pencils in their mouth in one of two different ways, which surreptitiously used the same muscles as either smiling or frowning. After just five minutes, the subjects rated themselves significantly happier or sadder, respectively, than just before they started with the pencil holds.

But many body feelings are fairly nebulous, and could match up with several different emotions.  So your brain also looks at context cues to try and figure out what you’re feeling, and why.  Fear, for example, is physiologically indistinguishable from excitement.  Which, in fact, is the basis for a great Cognitive Behavioral Therapy trick for dealing with anxiety or phobias: if you feel fear in your body (racing heart, sweaty palms, clenched stomach), but then consciously label that feeling as ‘excitement,’ the feeling matches the label well enough that your brain will play along.  So you’re not nervous about giving a speech – you’re excited to share your message.  You’re not afraid of flying – you’re extremely excited imagining how great the vacation is going to be when you land.  (Try it out – it works surprisingly well.)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about that in the context of Seasonal Affective Disorder, the wintertime blues that many people feel, especially in less sunny climes.  During the winter, people are often tired, slow, and low-energy; they want to stay indoors, huddled up in a blanket on the couch.  Because the physical feelings match, we call that feeling sad and depressed.  And so we treat the feeling, either with drugs, or with exposure to intense daylight-spectrum light and mega-dosing of vitamin D (the latter two of which are often as effective as the drugs, in case you want to Google those options up).

But over the past decades, we’ve increasingly realized that a lot of the ‘negative’ physical reactions your body produces actually serve positive purposes.  So if you get rid of those reactions, or substantially tamp them down, it often comes at a longer-term cost.  Consider inflammation – say, as a child’s fever, or in an athlete’s sore quads and hamstrings after a training run.  Sure, if a fever pitches dangerously high, meds to keep it down saves lives.  And if the athlete’s muscle soreness is bad enough to keep her up all night, the lost sleep may offset any upside from the training.  But, at slightly lower levels, that fever is actually helping the child’s body fight off the infection – something it would do less quickly and effectively if he’s given meds to drop his temperature back to normal.  And while a handful of Advil will make our runner feel better today, it will also interfere with the hormone signaling pathway needed to build muscle; in other words, those NSAIDs negate much of the point of going for the training run in the first place.

Human bodies fluctuate cyclically over a number of time periods, from our daily circadian rhythms, to our yearly circannual ones.  And many of the aspects of these cycles are still a mystery.  Though it takes up a third of our lifetimes, for example, we’re still not sure why people need to sleep, or what, exactly, it does for us.  Similarly, we know that there’s a swing over the course of the year – during the spring and summer, we have more energy, need less sleep, can more easily shed pounds of fat; whereas in the fall and winter, we bulk up, conserve energy, and want to curl up and sleep somewhere warm.  While a bunch of that likely stems from a basic evolutionary fact – it was harder to find sufficient calories in winter back in our hunter-gatherer days, so it made sense to hoard them during that time – I strongly suspect there are other physiological reasons for the swing.  Much as a field needs to lie fallow to recover between harvests, perhaps the winter slowdown allows for longer-term recovery in our bodies and brains, much as sleep allows at the daily level.

So, in short, I’m not sure ‘winter mode’ is something we want to cut out entirely, even if we have the tools to do so.  At the same, time I am also sure that calling that winter mode ‘sadness’ and ‘depression’ is a quick way to feel, well, sad and depressed.  So, take a page from the CBT book, and see if you can make that winter shift seem less terrible by smarter labeling.  I’m done with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and am instead referring to it – in my brain to myself, and in conversation with anyone else – as Happy Hibernation Mode.

Embrace the fact that being low-energy in the winter actually feels good – in other words, it’s nothing to be down about.  Happy hibernating!

November 26, 2017

Epicure

Though I read Aristotle, Plato, and Seneca – in school and after – I’d previously never made it to Epicurus, a philosopher I therefore knew only through the eponym ‘epicurean’: from the OED, “devoted to the pursuit of pleasure; hence, luxurious, sensual, gluttonous.”

This past week, however, I actually dove into Epicurus’ direct teachings. And, on at least one level, his legacy in our vernacular is well-deserved. Consider:
“I don’t know how I shall conceive of the good, if I take away the pleasures of taste, if I take away sexual pleasure, if I take away the pleasure of hearing, and if I take away the sweet emotions that are caused by the sight of beautiful forms.”

Or:

“The beginning and root of every good is the pleasure of the stomach. Even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.”

But on further reading, it becomes clear that our current usage of ‘epicurean’ miss Epicurus’ intended mark, at least in some rather important respects.

While Epicurus extolled pleasures, he was first and foremost interested in simple ones. “Send me a pot of cheese,” he once wrote to a friend, “so that I might spread it on bread, and have a feast any time.” Indeed, most of what Epicurus ate were vegetables grown in his backyard garden. Sure, he was happy to eat richer meals, too. But he doubted whether those foods – or the finer thing more broadly – actually made for a better life. As he explained, “one must regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than water to a container that is already overflowing.”
Epicurus didn’t believe that having more was bad, but rather that it wasn’t sufficient or necessary for happiness. As he succinctly put it, “nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied by little.”

So what did Epicurus think was necessary for happiness? His list is rather short:
1. Basic shelter, clothing, and food.
2. Good friends with whom to enjoy it.
3. The freedom and flexibility to spend our days as we choose.
4. And some time each day reflecting and self-analyzing.

Less flashy, perhaps, than the eponym he’s come to define. But, so far as I can tell, not at all a bad recipe for a good life.

September 12, 2017

Game, Set(point), Match

I’ve long been fascinated by the set-point theory of happiness, which suggests that our level of emotional well-being is mostly determined by heredity and early-life-ingrained personality traits. As a result, our level of happiness remains mostly constant throughout our life, transiently changing due to events before returning again to a baseline over time.

Fortunately for me, my own set-point seems to be quite high. As Scott Adams put it, “my optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return.”

Earlier today, I had to deal with the tail end of a long-looming disaster, and two former colleagues were there, too. They seem to be wired precisely the opposite in terms of set point, as, though they came out standing objectively better than me, I watched them mope out the door, angry and miserable nonetheless.

Which made me realize: being happy by default is an enormous blessing, and one I shouldn’t overlook.

June 27, 2017