My Time as a Human

Laura used to drive down the street towards the river while looking around under the seats for her glasses as we screamed in terror. In high school, she was one of my first girlfriends and Sunday she found me online and gave me a call. I couldn’t even recognize her from her picture, but the second I heard her voice she was the same cute and completely insane girl I remember. Suitable to my current end of game experience we joked about how she had cheated on me with a sailer while diving in Florida and she caught me up on what she’d put time into over the last years.

In hearing about her life I felt suddenly like a very exotic creature. After college she focused on having kids and a long marriage and has hardly left the state. Her husband gathers the neighborhood guys to watch football once a week. I’ve never watched football and there may be only two states I haven’t visited, let alone the rest of the world. I’ve never even had a TV.

I realize that I live in a bubble, surrounded by freaky programmers, filmmakers and artists. Sometimes, though, I forget how significant the gap can be and Laura really grounded me. In particular, she connected me to the reality of our current financial situation here in America.

I hear about it on the radio. My friends have lost jobs, but most of my friends are the kinds of people who are laid off all the time. They work at small businesses that fail or contract jobs that are temporary to begin with and are used to free falling in between. Without kids or a huge attachment to material things, I myself consider hitting the road with a guitar and a backpack more of a romantic vision than a terrible hardship.

She lives in Michigan. Her friends are losing their critical long time jobs right and left. They have families and mortgages and people are so desperate they are literally abandoning their homes to foreclosure and heading to places like Florida and Arizona to live with relatives and friends. That’s the reality behind the ranting I hear from commentators as I cook in the evenings or sneak in Morning Edition while I write software and read email in the morning. That’s what is happening to real people in this country, the people behind the numbers.

The next few years are going to be rough, and things are only going to get worse as we run out of oil and water. I’m not sure if it’s time to ditch my extra guitars and load up my camping supplies but you never really know until it’s too late. I’m certainly feeling a little too far from Canada’s forests at the moment. I’m also glad that I have no debt and don’t need much to survive. If anything, I’ll be a resource for those in worse shape. At least, I know how to start fires with sticks.

Lately I’ve had this strange sensation that I’ve reached the end of a long game. The last die was rolled, question answered, or strategy played out and with a cheer or a groan everyone’s hands went up and they stepped back from the table a few months ago. Now we’re all relaxed and talking openly about the strategies we used on each other and filling in the blanks where things were previously unsaid.

I’m not sure what’s lead me to this point, or why I feel that everyone is with me. I know that I feel much more at peace with myself. I’ve finally reached a point where I’ve accepted my skills and talents. I’ve given up some of my bigger ambitions, which has freed me to focus more on what excites me and less on sacrifices that might lead to future gains. I’m less concerned about how my actions affect other people, and I am not obligated to let anyone know where I am or what I’m doing at any point. I feel like a more genuine expression of myself, less driven by my innate desire to meet the desires and expectations of the people around me. It all feels very sexy.

I’m not sure why I feel like every one else is here with me. Some of my older friends are starting to reach the point where the ups and downs of life affect them less and they’ve even begun preemptively laughing at the absurdly awkward or terrible times as they happen. My younger friends are learning some of the same tricks, or perhaps I’ve chosen younger friends that have already been moving in that direction.

I can say that after telling this story a few times I’ve had at least one person tell me that they have no idea what I’m talking about and they don’t feel the same way at all. So again, maybe this is just me and I’m projecting this little worldview on everyone around me. But I think everyone should accept my projection and get in on it. It feels great! So go tell someone something you’ve never told them about an old conflict between the two of you, a secret love you had for them, or a crazy view you had of them before you knew them better.

Right now. Go.

In my brief time with Weishi’s Da Gu, we talked quite a bit about censorship in China, something that fascinated me. I had already spent a little time watching some of what passed for television news. Each day there was a long string of stories about officials shaking hands or greeting each other on the phone in some likewise congenial matter. The content of the stories didn’t get much beyond the fact that they were on good terms. Then, suddenly, no more than a few frames flashed by of empty fields as a voice mentioned massive famine in northern China. If you blinked, you’d miss it and be right back to the safe world where well dressed men politely shook hands.

At the China Daily where Da Gu was an editor, every collection of news stories for the day would have to pass by a party official who would strike through most of them with red ink. It was just part of the process that you had to accept as a journalist in China. It certainly explained the news.

When television is about as entertaining as a sleeping beagle, it’s no wonder that so few people stayed indoors to watch it. Instead, people piled out of their houses at night and filled the streets. Neighbors laughed together and swapped stories over games of Chinese chess until late into the night. It was actually quite wonderful, and something I never experienced in all my time growing up in America. It wasn’t until years later, when I moved into a much poorer, older neighborhood, that I experienced the same sort of evening camaraderie.

There was also no sense of crime. Not that there wasn’t any crime, but no one had any idea how much there might be or where it occurred. There had been a murder in one of the many huge buildings of apartments we were visiting, somewhere around ten years earlier. The rumor, which was the only information available, was that it was about drugs. Without any legitimate news sources, rumors and the stories of travelers were the only information available about the rest of the country. Some talked, for example, about drugs problems that were growing into an epidemic in Shanghai, but no one knew anything with any certainty.

I have to wonder whether not knowing about these things gave people a sense of security that we lack in the U.S. Here, every act of violence is held up and flashed before our eyes. Stories of violent crimes are used as tactics to frighten Americans into owning guns and dogs or giving up their civil liberties. It certainly doesn’t encourage anyone to meet or talk to strangers. It certainly doesn’t create an environment where neighbors become friends and spend time together outside on the streets. With the China streets filled with people, I’m certain that this in turn makes it safer for everyone to be out.

The real solution is clearly not to tidy up our world into a baby’s playpen, but rather to educate people to the point where every scary story doesn’t create an instant fear response. Marvin Minsky talks a bit towards the end of this talk and there are many better talks by brain people about how reverting to a purely emotional fear state strips we humans of our higher level resources. Steven Levitt talks (if I’ve found the right talk here) more about the general inability of human beings to evaluate the scale of a threat, and how quickly humans will base their estimations of risk or danger on the proximity of single events.

But I’m still hopeful that education can help, and you can’t properly educate people without free access to information. So despite some of the potential downsides to what might be available, I will continue to believe that in the long term, full and open access to information will bring the population up to a level where they can better understand the viability of threats, the world around them, and each other.

I was extremely fortunate to have been in China just weeks before my girlfriend Weishi’s Da Gu (first aunt) died. For some reason the thing I remember most about her house was the old wooden box full of smooth stones near her back door. Each morning she took off her shoes and walked barefoot up and down over the stones. Whether a way of stimulating certain nerves in the soles of her feet or just serving as a meditative practice, it was supposed to help somewhat with the extreme pain of the stomach cancer that was slowly killing her.

Da Gu was an extremely tough woman. She never once let her physical ailments get in the way while spending time with us, and she insisted on making us tea and having ranting, passionate discussions with me. After growing up in China as a child, she had traveled to England to study english literature. She returned to work as a reporter and, ultimately, editor for the China Daily, China’s english language newspaper. Her use of the english language was so far superior to my own that I felt almost as ignorant saying hello as when I tried to discuss American history and politics with her.

Da Gu’s ex-husband was a literature professor, and apparently just as tough, opinionated, and stubborn as she was. They had been divorced for more than fifteen years, and to the day still took the time to argue with each other. She explained that two people so strong willed could simply never make it work. What she said next etched itself forever into my brain. “But if I was ever going to get married again, it would only be to him.” Weishi assured me that he had said the same thing to her.

Several weeks after I left China, the cancer finally won out. Someone likely scattered the smooth stones that took in so much pain, leaving them, too, to rest. I wonder how her ex-husband felt now that she was gone. To me those almost, but not quite, solvable problems that linger forever are the most tragic. Is there a point when they should have given in and cut off communication forever? Or was it the dynamic struggle that made what was left of their relationship so irresistible? Maybe, once again, the only answer is to continue to ask.