Introduction
I thought I would write a third act, maybe a year or so later, to show how the surgery experience changed me. To explore what remained as real changes in my character, what passed into nostalgic memory, how my body and mind was changed by the experience. There were a number of false starts because each time it seemed that everything was different. The world has rapidly overrun my bourgeois self-centered musing. Shortly after I felt basically well, one of my college roommates who had been sick for a long time, started a steep decline. I spoke to him weekly and then his passing and funeral loomed much larger than my own intellectual fascinations.
Ok, maybe I could write about that. Maybe I could write about the experience of trying to be there for him, on the phone, occasionally in person. Maybe I could write about his funeral and seeing his kids, his ex-wife — I officiated at their wedding! — maybe I could write something about that. I started to think about writing a eulogy, something that respected who he was but was also true and about him as a real person. And then the pandemic swept over us with a sudden change in everything about day-to-day life; most negative, but some suspiciously positive. What is the death of my one friend in the face of the millions of COVID dead?
Maybe I could write about that too, but only maybe, because everybody is writing about it. But I have some thoughts, some feelings, some experiences and maybe I could write about it, and then, boom. Racism, Black Lives Matter, suddenly my discussion of diversity in the previous essays seems so small in light of the wave passing over the country.
And in my own family: My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and we needed to prepare for a harder future. My daughter in California evacuated during the pandemic because of smoke from wildfires and the risk of them coming closer.
And throughout, the drum beat of Trump destroying the country.
The small, the introspective, the detailed view is overrun with exaggerated, garish, over loud events. We are living in a time where the news of the day is bigger than our personal thoughts. Seemingly this whole structure of essays I started is worthless in light of current events. What needs writing are revolutionary manifestos, bold policy proposals, political diatribes. The tenor of the times is screaming. Should I scream this third act? Is there any worth in writing about thoughts? Or is the only writing worth reading the kind of writing that will cause the reader to do something: To get off their couch and take action.
Fucking vote. The very existence of a world suitable for human life depends on it. Vote out Trump and all the weak, hypocritical, corrupt assholes that have enabled him. You can see I have made many attempts at writing this introduction and happily Trump is out, but now we have a war in Ukraine and it looks like a fascist is coming to power in Italy.
Instead of waiting for the world to pause while I finish and distribute these words, I’ve decided to wrap them up and maybe reading them will be a welcome change of pace and focus.
The End of Surgery
It is more than three years after my surgery and I’m happy to say I don’t think about it anymore; almost never. I don’t feel the dent in my skull behind my ear. I don’t focus on the tinnitus. If I have trouble swallowing something, I just drink some water and swallow harder and don’t give it a second thought. I’ve already had three MRIs confirming the surgery’s success and the absences of any tumor regrowth.
Is my balance worse? Perhaps a little, but I’m 62 now and it might not be worse than it would’ve been. That is the same comment I can make about any symptom I can name. With swallowing, maybe I have a weaker swallow reflex? Or maybe I’m just used to being a slower eater. Perhaps I’m more forgetful? Or maybe I’m more aware and that awareness allows me to notice when I’ve forgotten something.
Sometimes I wonder if having had brain surgery raises my chances for other problems in the future, but even if it does, I’m sure the preventative advice would be the same as it is for staying healthy in general.
I hardly ever think of the surgery in my daily life, and I don’t talk about it either. It’s just something dramatic in my past. Something big I went through which is surprising both to me and to whoever I mention it to if the subject comes up.
For anybody reading these essays with a medical motivation, the message is clear. It’s not pleasant, but the surgical miracle can be real. I’m fine, you or your loved one can be too.
Has the experience changed me?
Two Definite Changes
I am more relaxed when facing unpleasant medical procedures. Getting an IV, a tooth drilled, a vaccine shot, donating blood and even getting my ear trimmed a little as an anti-cancer preventative measure are procedures I’ve had post-surgery. It’s not that I like them and not like I’m immune to pain, but I have a certain detachment before and during which makes it easier. I feel certain I won’t like it, but also that it won’t last long and that I will survive and be fine afterwards. They are just unpleasantness to be endured.
It's an unexpected example of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” because in this case, being stronger is all about learning to relax, submit and endure. I am sure this is a product of living through the surgery experience.
The second change is my increased patience with people has remained. The understanding that sometimes, eventually really, the physical body fails, and people cannot be who they once were or who they want to be. It’s not necessarily their fault and regardless, it would be presumptuous to assume their behavior had anything to do with me directly. Sometimes people need to be slow. This increased empathy was unfortunately put to the test.
Death of a Friend
I met Cary my freshman year of college. We were friendly, but not quite friends. We grew into real friends by sophomore year and junior year decided to room together. We had a lot of fun that year. I didn’t see as much of him senior year, but the summer after graduation we went on a bike trip together in Europe.
Cary was an unusual person; brilliant, creative and sometimes painfully frustrating. We had a lot of fun together and seemed to understand each other effortlessly. There were a group of friends in college, some of us closer than others, certainly all of us with other friends outside of that group, but finally, in our senior year, we realized all of us had at least one parent in the business of psychotherapy. We are a strange tribe and subconsciously (of course) had managed to find each other. Once I realized that, I noted that my best friend from high school had the same pedigree.
Cary, like myself, was a full-fledged member of this group with both parents in the business.
When talking about Cary, it is hard not to focus on his unusual exploits – like filling his dorm room with six inches of water and stocking it with fish for his roommate’s birthday. Thankfully, I was not that roommate (the room truly stank after that prank – he hadn’t planned how to get the water out). People that knew him in college might also comment on his unbelievably bad diet. Donuts, pasta from a can, pizza, some chocolate when needed – though as I was his roommate, I can attest that he did eat real food on occasion; Chinese food or out for pancakes and eggs at 4am. In college, he slept in a sleeping bag on top of a mattress with no sheets. I don’t know if he ever cleaned that sleeping bag.
But he did shower, and he was funny and personable.
Cary was my roommate during junior year of college when I had to choose a major. He suggested computer science. He argued it would be easy to find a job and it wasn’t necessary to go to lectures. Given my state of mind at the time, the lack of classes might have been the stronger argument. I could debate whether this was or wasn’t a good decision, but I can’t deny it paved the path I have followed.
We moved to different cities after college. Then he moved to California and stayed there. When he married Nadine, they asked if I would officiate at their wedding. How could I say no? I signed up as a minster of the Universal Life Church – “We believe what we believe, and we believe what we believe is right.” – and performed the ceremony at a private wildlife preserve for endangered animals. It was a memorable experience; me realizing that I had to respond seriously to the question “so, do you have a church back in Boston?” and Larisa playing the role of the minister’s wife after two years in the USA.
We moved to California for a couple of years, but our lives were too different to be close in a practical way. I still felt very much that he was my friend, but we both had small children and were raising them differently. We kept our kids on a strict sleep schedule; their kids slept when they dropped and woke when they felt like it. He had his own business and never traveled for work. I worked at a big company and often found myself traveling to the east coast or Japan. They lived in San Francisco: We lived in Palo Alto; not that far apart but in two years we only got together four or five times.
I saw him more after we moved back east. Whenever I traveled to the Bay area I would try and stop by for dinner. We would chat for a bit and then I would head home. He was having a progressively harder time. He was sickly. His marriage broke up, and he shut down his business. As you might imagine, both were hard. The end of his business was hard in a way that might not be apparent. His dream had always been to have a video game company – and he did – and discovered he didn’t like it. He was lost after that.
And then I stopped traveling for work and stopped seeing him. Time passed. He got sicker.
Cary died after a a long and protracted decline. He didn’t have ALS, but something similar where gradually his nerves stopped working. Bit by bit he became paralyzed and then over the space of a year he found it harder and harder to eat and talk. A year and a half before he died, he got in touch with me and asked if I would visit because he thought he was losing the ability to talk. I found a way to visit him in San Francisco and was shocked by what I saw. He was bedridden and paralyzed. He was hard to understand, and he was worried about declining further and how fast that might happen.
His mind was focused and sharp and he was able to describe memories of things we had done together which had been buried deep in my mind. Those recollections brought forward feelings of friendship and closeness from our shared past and amplified the sadness and desperation of his situation. When I left his house and was walking to my car, a loud “FUCK” came out of my mouth.
When I got home, I decided I needed to find a way to stay in touch with him and so we set up a weekly call. Every Wednesday at 5PM Eastern I would call him. Sometimes I would be late and sometimes we would have to reschedule, but we talked pretty much every week. Because the call was at 5PM, I would take it from my office. I tried once or twice to speak to him from home, but it didn’t work as well. For one thing, the audio at the office was best – high quality call center headphones. But the bigger factor was the lack of visual distraction in my work office. I would sit at my desk, often staring at a white wall, sometimes looking at the ground with my head in my hands and I would focus solely on the words he was trying to say. What words might he want to say in that sentence? Could I guess?
I found the mental exercise of imagining myself sitting next to his hospital bed in the middle of his living room made it easier for me to understand him. Why would that be? Is it establishing a mystical connection? Is it just a way to tune my communications for the person and place I was imagining? How much do we tune ourselves to people? Or did it help to turn on all the Cary related brain cells and quiet the rest?
We talked about the most serious of topics. How he didn’t want to live anymore but couldn’t make the decision to end his own life and how if you take a cheeseburger with ketchup, pickles and bun and blend it into a mush, you can still taste the different ingredients.
We had a conversation where, with few words, we thanked each other for our friendship and being in each other’s lives. In that conversation, I was speaking from my most authentic self in a way that was connected both to the joy of being alive and reality of being mortal. We said goodbye to each other when he was still somewhat intelligible.
As time passed, he continued to lose the ability to speak. Often, I didn’t understand and would ask him to spell the word and sometimes that didn’t work either and I would guess at the first letter, which might be enough for me to guess the words, but sometimes not. During my last conversations with him, I might understand twenty words in the space of an hour. Towards the very end, I would just talk to him and near the very end, I would talk to him, over the phone, and not hear him at all. I would only hear a person who was with him who said that yes, he was listening and wanted me to continue.
I’d like to believe I would have gone through this experience in just the same way if I hadn’t had brain surgery, but repeatedly I felt myself finding extra levels of empathy. The fear of what is going to happen. The loss of control of one’s body. I had briefly been in contact with those feelings. Sometimes we compared experiences, but most of the time, my brain escapade was something underneath providing more patience and understanding. In the scheme of things, my problem had been minor. The doctors knew what needed to be done and did it, successfully. In Cary’s case, there was no hope.
His ex-wife and two sons were at the funeral. His younger son was the same age as Cary was when we first met and looks a lot like him. There is nothing positive in Cary’s passing, but I’m happy some of his essence remains in the world.
Meaning Part 1
I have read that patients who find meaning in their troubles are more likely to have a better outcome. This worried me because I couldn’t find any useful meaning to having a tumor that needed to be removed.
Post-surgery, the question was less urgent, but it still gnawed at me. It was such a big experience, what did it mean? Did it have any significance? What was the lesson and what could I learn from it?
During the pandemic the meaning has become clear to me. The surgery is a signpost, a marker, the point of transition. There is before the surgery and after. The transition had started earlier, but I wasn’t taking it seriously. There were steps along the way that I could have taken more seriously but didn’t. I was still sleep walking.
First, we became empty nesters, but unlike my departure to college, thankfully, we retained a strong connection with our children.
Then we moved houses from the town where we raised our kids to a house in the trees with no sounds but nature outside. It was a big change, but a very comfortable one.
Then I had my left hip replaced. That was big, but wow, it went so smoothly that it didn’t cause much reflection. I still was not getting the message.
But then, finally perhaps, there was the bright light and big pause of the brain surgery experience. Shortly after we paid the last college tuition bill, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and the pandemic started. Then I turned 60. It was the first birthday that has given me any pause. The first time that I felt like my life was slipping by and my time was getting limited.
The meaning or perhaps better, the value of the surgery is as a bright line separating life phases. Before, I was primarily a father working to support my family and doing my best to be there for my wife and children. I’m still a father and still married, but this is a new phase. The question of how I want to live and what I want to do now has an urgency to it. I have both less responsibility (more freedom to choose) and less time.
When I think of the surgery now, I think of the last few days of my recovery when I was mostly better, but still had no obligations. The question of what to do with myself was difficult and would have caused more anxiety, but I knew I would soon be back at work.
I did get back to work and certainly that fills my time, but the question of the meaning of my surgery was percolating and perhaps it has saved me a decade of working blindly, because it has caused me to think hard about this new phase. I could not ignore the experience. Could not give up on finishing this last set of essays.
Which brings me right back to the eternal, but now more urgent question of how I want to live the rest of my life.
Learning from my former self
Jimmy Kimmel (a late-night TV host) has a segment where they go out on Hollywood boulevard and ask people questions. The usual humor is the discovery that people are clueless. I don’t know how much they put their fingers on the scale. How many people that get everything right in the first guess do they simply not show? But it doesn’t matter, it is amazing how ignorant some people are – or is that just a way of making us feel better about ourselves? How much are we being manipulated? But this is not my reason to bring this up.
One segment had the host on the street questioning a young man / boy. How old was he? I’m not sure, he could have been anywhere from 14 to 25, but what was most obvious was that he was stoned, high, baked, wacked, pick your slang. My next thought was wow, he looks like I looked (roughly) when I was 16 and sometimes, I walked around NYC stoned, high, baked, pick your slang. My 60-year-old current-self had a sudden feeling of empathy for that poor lost 16-year-old, stoned, on Jimmy Kimmel displaying excessive ignorance. Poor kid, doesn’t anybody care about him? What is he doing out on the street stoned by himself? And by extension, I looked back at myself in 1976, what was I doing?
After a week of mild shock at this revelation of the sad picture of my teenage self, poor stoned lost waif, I started to hear a voice from deep inside. It was my 16-year-old-self answering. He said,
“First of all, no problem answering questions while stoned. It’s like getting stoned at lunch before chemistry. You remember? In chemistry we would raise our hand to answer one question only to discover the question had changed before being called. “What? What was the question?” And then we’d answer the new question on the spot. It was an extra challenge that spiced up the class. That year, junior year in high school, that was peak coolness. You haven’t beat it yet. Friends, excellent grades, the run of New York, and parents that don’t pay attention to where I am or what I’m doing.
“Poor? Lost? I always seem to have a dollar or two in my pocket. A slice of pizza is always an option. I have a subway pass that gives me free transportation wherever I want to go. I have a coat that is warm enough for the weather and pockets big enough for whatever I need.”
My sixteen-year-old self says, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you so uptight? Where is your swagger? Why are you working so hard? For what?”
Indeed, my 16-year-old self has a point.
But I respond, “You’re just a kid, you don’t know about responsibility. In fact, if you would have been just slightly more responsible, we would be in much better shape right now. Just a little bit more homework completed in college would have set us up – “
He interrupts, “College, I’m 16, that’s on you. And no, more homework? Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember deciding, we thought about it, that it was more important to spend time on the phone with friends building relationships than spending more time on homework? We thought that through, and I was right. What do you do now? Math? No, you manage people. Don’t you even know yourself?”
I, the 60-year-old, answer “Ok, it’s true, talking to people is my profession, but don’t you think it is a bit sad how we were so lost in high school? No purpose? No direction?”
“Again, wrong. Unbelievable, is that what I’m going to turn into? Purpose? Direction? I know what I want to do every hour of the day and I do as much of it as I can. That’s my purpose. Dig down, remember me, the person you were. High school is fine.”
My High School Manifesto
My 16-year-old-self is right about that. Not always, but often, I was happy in high school, and I had little doubt or hesitation about what I wanted to do at any particular moment. Here’s an attempt to write the lifestyle manifesto that I should have written then.
A good life is centered around quality experiences that increase your connection to the world around you and which brings personal growth and joy.
An important concern is making sure the world around you is one you want to be connected to. The most important attribute of your world is people – friends and partner-in-love. [I was pretty good with friends in high school, but it took me a long time to figure out how to find and keep lasting love.]
There should be all sorts of arts in your life. I was spoiled in this regard. I didn’t have to work hard to have exposure to art, it was part of my world, museums, galleries, artist parents of friends and maybe most influential, public art. I was outside a lot. We had a nice neighborhood library and tons of bookstores and people selling books in the street. I took pleasure in reading, and I always had music playing. In those years, in NYC, you didn’t need to be a certain age to get into a place where music was being performed. I don’t know if that’s because there weren’t rules or because nobody was checking.
Living creatively is important. Inventing ways to have fun. Being artsy without being an artist; I made my own pot pipes and won a Halloween costume contest. Learning was important too. I liked to learn things, but never had a future goal related to learning. On the street I bought a biology textbook and read it. Similar for physics. I was curious. They were interesting. I did not follow up either with further reading, I was on to the next thing. E.g., reading all of Kurt Vonnegut and whatever they suggested at the Science Fiction bookstore – yes, we had a bookstore filled solely with sci-fi.
There were two hidden features of those years which were foundations of my happiness that I sadly didn’t understand. The first is that I didn’t let my obligatory activities (school) take too much of my time. I figured out that if I wanted truly exemplary grades I would have to work hard, but if I wanted just excellent grades, that was easy. My 60-year-old-self bemoans the fact that I didn’t learn how to work hard towards a goal and how the lack of challenge didn’t force me to figure out what I cared enough about to work hard for. But my 16-year-old-self would surely point out the days exploring New York City, evenings reading, listening to music and talking to friends; that time made me who I am. At college, I learned the Mark Twain phrase (thanks Mike) ‘Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education.’ In high school, I was living that advice. (Apparently Mark Twain might not have literally said that, but I’m sure if we asked him, he would agree he wished he had.)
Sensuality
Much of this fell apart when I got to college, but some of it continued. While academics were a mess, I continued to live as a sensual person. Here I mean sensual in the full definition of the word. A college manifesto, if I had written one, would probably focus on sensuality. I didn’t go to classes, so I had plenty of time to live at my own pace. Sometimes I lived at night, awake for only an hour or two of daylight, and enjoyed the way the world is when everybody is sleeping. It was a different perspective.
If the weather was nice, I had to be outside and would think carefully about which place was right, just outside on the college green? A city park? A drive to a beach? A picnic on the grounds of the Rhode Island Capital building (at midnight) for fun? The roof of some building on campus? Maybe walk around the east side taking in, appreciating and adjusting to New England architecture?
Extra money was often spent on restaurants, exploring both high and low cuisine. And there was always music, recorded and live. And yes, of course sex was a priority, but I’ll go elsewhere for a description of my sensual college life. It is evening, 1981, Providence, a hot summer night. I drove to a laundromat and did my laundry. That’s the short version of the memory.
The longer version:
It was a warm summer night, not quite hot, humid, just humid enough to be comfortable if you stayed relaxed, but too much if you did any work or exertion. Humid just enough so that you could feel the air. Feel yourself moving through it, feel that you were in something, not just standing on the earth, but in the atmosphere. The warmth meant that moving quickly in the car, with the top down, yes, a convertible, moving in the car quickly was a sensuous passage through the air.
The top down, the exhaust ringing out in a steady burbling rumble, smooth, working fine, and working fine in a car that didn’t always run fine, so when it did, it was special, a comforting noise and the top down and the wooden steering wheel and the snug seats holding me comfortably moving me through the air and feeling the air blow over me, cool when moving, warm at a stop light and some music playing. Not streamed music, not music chosen by an algorithm in a computer in a datacenter a thousand miles away, but music on a cassette which I had recorded after spending time thinking about what songs to have next, which would be best for the car, which songs, in which order and to make the tape I had spent an afternoon playing each song on vinyl, because that’s where they were and pushing the record button on the tape deck for each song, pushing stop at the end and all in real time, no speeding up the process and while the song was being played and recorded maybe I looked at the lyrics, maybe I looked out the window or sorted through the albums, records, 13 inches square, to pick the next song, but during that time I did not check my phone for email or facebook or Instagram or anything else because there were no such phones, it was 1981.
So in the car, this music, where I had read the album cover of every song, the lyrics, the picture on the album and remembered the day when I was in the record store and decided to spend my week’s extra money on that particular album after looking through the bin – yes, this was a physical process, you physically went to the record store and physically flipped through the records and picked one – imagine how much I knew the songs and the order on this tape – and like food that you cook yourself, this made the music all that much better. They were my favorite songs for that period of time.
The light turns green, and I pop the clutch for a little chirp from the wheels and accelerate away – yes, a clutch, controlled by my foot and each gear selected by my right hand, some people still do this, but it is almost gone. Even I finally gave up my last manual transmission car to move to electric, but that night, each gear shift a question of how fast to accelerate, how smooth to move through the gears, which gear to choose, how high to rev the engine and with the top down, hearing the motor and the tires against the pavement and the air on and around me flowing faster and then slow and finally stopping by the laundromat.
The door of the place is open, and the bright fluorescent lights are lighting the sidewalk sharply in front of the big plate glass windows. The light is so sharp that small bumps in the sidewalk create sharp shadows; like a moonscape which looks cold in the hot night. The laundromat is almost empty, but with the door open you can hear some of the machines running with that steady hum and some water sounds, calming, mesmerizing, primal, clothes in mechanical wombs getting clean. I take my laundry in and pick some washers.
In spite of the loud background noise from the washers and dryers, the sound of coins dropping is sharp and distinct and nicely signals the start of my laundry.
I look at the people in the laundromat, but don’t talk to them. We are doing laundry on a summer evening and there is something very intimate about it. Talking would be too much. With clothes in the washer, there is literally nothing to do.
No wonder I remember this night. No wonder the memory comes back to me often. What a different sense of time there was. What deep relaxation in the simple chore. What privacy in the moment. Compared to now, what absolute freedom. No cellphone, no email, no connection, no need or ability to do anything but the laundry.
To sit in the seat of a car and just listen to music for half an hour while watching the world go by, in my life today that is close to a determined effort to meditate or the kind of thing that would only happen during a carefully arranged off the grid vacation.
The clothes come out of the dryer hot, and the night is still warm and I start to sweat. I’m not great at folding but I get them back into the bag somehow. Driving home is even nicer as I need the breeze to get the heat off of me.
Living in the world as a physical being. Head turned off, skin, ears, all senses turned on. There was a lot of Zen in my life in those years, but I didn’t have a label for it.
Surgery and Sensuality
The surgery and especially the six weeks of recovery are now clouded with a healthy haze of nostalgia. When I think back on that time, it is mostly positive memories that come back to me. I had absolute ‘freedom in the small.’ It started when I woke up, with no alarm clock, whenever I was awake and wanted to stay awake, that was my time to wake up. I would have breakfast in bed and read the newspaper – or whatever I wanted to read – with no obligation or rush to do anything else. What amazing luxury.
The weather was nice and often I would read on a lounge chair on the deck. Frequently I would lay in the sun with my shirt off and make vitamin D. It felt therapeutic; ten to fifteen minutes per side. It also felt good.
It was during my recovery that I discovered minimalist shoes and had time to take slow walks where I could adjust to no heel and no padding – and one of the points of minimalist shoes is your feet can sense the texture of the ground underneath. It’s not quite barefoot, but with socks off your feet are woken from their sensual slumber; pavement feels different than grass than gravel, than walking on pine needles or bricks.
Living in our house in the trees with a real need to take it easy and move slowly; filtering out the hard parts, there was beauty in the experience. Peace and freedom and the love and care of my family. This is the part of the experience that I want to remember.
Meaning Part 2
Purveyors of advice suggest doing something meaningful. The books are filled with stories of people quitting Wall Street and becoming teachers or volunteering for the homeless or similar. Meaning is simplified into doing something hands on for others. This answer has never felt satisfying for me.
In those stories, most of the activities pursued by the protagonists are helping other people. I don’t have a problem with that notion in general, but there is something about the specifics which is confusing. The stories assume the person is being selfless in some way; that they have found a calling which is both good and good for them. I can’t help but separate the good and the ‘good for them’ parts of the story.
Compare two activities which I might pursue; one, serving food at a homeless shelter and the second, going to work and doing my current job. Experts say that serving food might provide a lot of positive emotional reward. Feeding people in need is a primal activity. It might be good for me. And I would be helping – especially if I also donated food or money to help the operation.
Now consider my current job. We make software that helps companies design things. Nine years ago, I started a program to make it easier for startup companies to adopt our software. This raises their chance of success. Over 5,000 startups have taken advantage of this. As an example, and more directly related to this topic, over 400 of those startups are designing medical devices (most of the rest of the startups are doing interesting and good things, but to keep the example clear, let’s stick with medical devices). Almost all of these devices are novel and inspiring; robotic eye surgery, better control of radiation in cancer treatment, exoskeletons to allow paralyzed people to walk again – these are real examples. Even if access to our software only creates a small advantage – even if only one percent of those startups succeed because of our help – that is four companies whose devices have the potential to help thousands of people in need.
If I want to spend an extra few hours doing good, why wouldn’t it be an evening doing extra work on the startup program?
In that case, I am just an influence in a chain of people, so it doesn’t provide that ‘good for me’ emotional boost of ladling out some soup, but in terms of doing good, it’s really hard for me to see the leverage in serving dinner to a few people. But maybe I need to do some good directly for my own mental health?
What is meaningful anyway? This has been difficult because I have always wondered about meaningful in an absolute sense. But I don’t believe in God and humanity won’t survive forever, so what can be forever meaningful? It was only this year that I had a breakthrough on this topic. I realized that meaning could be meaningful for me and me alone. It doesn’t have to connect to some absolute set of values and doesn’t have to stand a test of time longer than my own experience. It’s a simple change, but rephrasing from “What is meaningful?” to “What is meaningful for me now?” makes it more conceivable that I might find an answer. What raises that feeling for me? What do I feel to be meaningful?
When I passed around the first set of essays to friends and family, some people were moved to contact me with a response. I felt like I had communicated, and it felt meaningful. That is the strongest motivation for me writing this third set of material. An urge to communicate and connect.
What is meaningful for me?
My America
It has taken the Trump disaster to make me realize that I have always had two visions of America. One I was comfortable talking about while a second was often hidden from my own consciousness and certainly one I never acknowledged. Let me start with the one that is easier to talk about.
For most of my life, I have been on the side of the opposition. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s in a neighborhood that was pro civil rights, pro gay rights, against the war, against Nixon and incredulous that the rest of the country wasn’t with us. I remember talk of New York City seceding from New York State and, for that matter, leaving the United States completely. At the time we assumed everybody in the government was corrupt, on the take, out for themselves: I grew up fully believing, a belief as strong and as sacrosanct as a born-again’s faith in Jesus, that the government was filled with self-serving, egotistical, blow-hards. My first self-directed experience of political events was watching the Watergate hearings after school.
And it wasn’t just corruption, the government was horribly incompetent. Whether it was the stupidity of the Vietnam War, New York City approaching bankruptcy, the physical condition of the streets, subways and parks or the decline in quality of the schools — everything seemed to be getting worse. How could this be?
I was not consistently politically active, but I remember demonstrating at 8 years old (anti-war), at 10 years old (anti-war), at 14 (legalize marijuana), at 15 (against teacher lay-offs). These were large demonstrations, and their size enforced my cynicism. Clearly the rest of America was not with us, or worse, maybe it was, but democracy was a sham. How could it be that 8th avenue was full of people all on the same side and nothing was changing?
In that first phase, I did not consciously reflect on the positives. The Senators doing the questioning at the Watergate hearings. I knew I was on their side, but it didn’t sink in that they were government too.
At the same time, there was something else going on. Without realizing it, unconsciously, I was absorbing the dream of America. The country that welcomed my grandparents and while those grandparents stopped school between 4th and 8th grades, their children, my parents earned PhDs and a different life. We learned about the beginning of the unions and worker protections. The building where the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (1911 a famous disaster where a sweatshop burned and 146 people died. It accelerated the move for worker’s rights and the growth of unions.) happened was in my neighborhood and that added reality to school lessons. Civil rights was happening. Still needed, but happening, and there were signs of progress. Gay rights and women’s rights were expanding. And maybe one reason for the Vietnam war being so painful was how it tarnished the remarkably positive stories of the main conflicts we learned about: revolutionary war, civil war, WW1 and WW2. There’s fault one can find in the execution of those wars, but at least the basic premises were something one can support. (independence, end slavery and keep the union together, save Europe and save Europe and the rest of the world again).
Unconsciously, I was a complete believer in the dream of America. The founding documents and principles. The idea that I was a patriot would have struck me as ridiculous, but at the same time, in all my international travels, I never came close to wanting to emigrate. Consciously, I was with the opposition, but unconsciously I was (am) a patriot.
I’ll focus on George Bush for a moment. He doesn’t seem so bad now that we have Trump in the White House, but he was terrible in so many ways. The turning point for me was his stance after 9/11. He chose the simplistic, bring the bastards to justice, get revenge stance which set the country on a path to war and more war improving nothing. Especially at that moment, with the whole world sympathetic to the United States, how might things have been different if he instead treated the individuals as criminals and used the crisis as a way to open dialog. Maybe absolutely nothing would have changed with respect to curing root causes, but we wouldn’t have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and setting in motion the regional crisis which helped create the Syrian civil war. I won’t dwell on this because it is presumptuous to think that any path would have made things appreciably better, but at the very least, rhetoric that positioned the US as a mature leader as opposed to a wronged middle schooler could have helped.
I’m sad for our soldiers and military; especially because they all volunteered. For reasons practical or patriotic, they chose to enlist in the military and put themselves, their lives, at the disposal of the politicians. How will they feel about the wars we’ve been fighting? How did adults feel in the 1960’s when soldiers went off to war? No doubt most of them were filled with patriotic enthusiasm for the mission and pride at our military marching off to prevent the spread of communism (or whatever it was that proud people thought then). But adults in my childhood neighborhood, viewed the draftees as victims.
I remember being in camp during the summer of 1968. There was one night, a summer night in a simple wooden bunk house with screens and crickets outside and the smell of unfinished wood; our two counselors were huddled around a small AM radio. The younger of the two was very fit. He did 100 pushups every morning. He had a sort of bowl haircut. I remember them both as being reasonably nice guys, if not all that attentive. They were huddled around the radio because the draft numbers were going to be called. It was the younger one’s year. I had no idea of the details of how this worked – and still don’t – but I knew that he was packed and if his number came up he was going to get in his car and drive to Canada. We were in upstate New York. Canada wasn’t far. I don’t think he had a plan. He had a car and some money. Remember, it was 1968, no cellphones, no GPS, no ATM machines for cash. If he went it would be with a map, the cash in his pocket and not much else.
It was late, at least for eight-year-old me. I had trouble staying awake and I don’t remember being able to make out the words on the radio, but I do remember the relief in the two of them as they shut it off and that counselor was there the next morning to do his hundred pushups. There had not even been a question. He was ready to flee. The war was something to be avoided.
I don’t want a draft, but I do wonder what the country would feel about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars if every 18-year-old male had a chance of being called to war.
Much smaller morally, but equally disappointing for me, was Bush’s tax rebate. To stimulate the economy there was a decision to give people money. I remember getting a check for something like $250. This struck me as a completely pointless waste of resources. Some people might desperately need that $250, but if they did, it wasn’t going to help them for very long. Some people might save it, but most probably spent it on some random impulsive purchase. And random impulsive purchases are often cheap consumer goods which are manufactured overseas. The US Government was taking a loan to give to its citizens so they could squander it on junk which would likely be purchased from China and similar. That is not investing. Pick your cause; almost anything would have been better; infrastructure, education, research.
George Bush did change me fundamentally. Since the moment I had considered the question “do you believe in God?” I had been agnostic. I knew I didn’t believe in an old man with a white beard high above the earth or Santa Claus, or Zeus, but as a scientifically oriented youth, I didn’t feel like I could prove that there wasn’t some kind of spirit or force that was bigger than humanity. There could be something, how would I know? In fact, I’ve always been sure that we don’t really know what’s going on. We don’t yet understand how things really work. We might think we do; civilization always thinks it does, but science keeps advancing and almost always, we find we had some core assumptions incorrect.
I was agnostic and then along came George Bush and the evangelicals. It pissed me off the way they acted as if the United States of America was a Christian Nation. All my reading said that most of the founders were distinctly not Christians in the George Bush sense of the word. Many of them were Deists. The Deists thought there was “a creator,” but this creator had no involvement with humans. A clockmaker that built our universe and was now eating popcorn and watching creation or maybe off creating another universe with better weather.
Suddenly being agnostic seemed insufficient. People asking, “do you believe in god?” were not asking an intellectual question about first causes or mysterious forces. In the United States they are asking about old or new testament God – or perhaps about the god of Islam. From that perspective, I realized that I was as atheist as anybody and started saying so. I am a non-believer. At first, I found it difficult to tell people I was an atheist. I thought people might be offended, but interestingly, they didn’t seem to take it that way.
Why did I think that people might be offended? It’s the flip side of a Christian thinking that a sinner is damned. I say I’m an atheist and they have pity on my soul. People don’t seem to think through what an atheist might think of a religious person – because they are too stoned on the opium of the masses.
I remember talking to one religious friend about George Bush. About how he supposedly heard God talking to him. I pointed out that most European leaders would take that as a sign of psychosis, not virtue. Perhaps because we were not talking about each other’s views, I said it a bit too bluntly. I think that friend sometimes hears from God (whatever that means) and so I was subtly calling him delusional.
Over time, saying “I’m an atheist” has gotten easier. I just say it as a matter of fact and it might be my imagination, but I think people have respected me more for it. Perhaps because they secretly are too. Maybe they feel vaguely guilty for not following the rules of their birth faith. Or feel as if others will criticize them for their lack of faith. And then here I am, a seemingly reasonable, caring and moral person and I’m saying I’m an atheist with the same lack of gravitas as pointing out that I wear glasses and that is like absolution for how they truly feel about the world.
Are you an atheist? Don’t literally believe in a land of milk and honey and pearly gates and all the rest? Don’t be shy, just say “I’m an atheist” and see how people react. That is thanks to George Bush.
I won’t write about the republicans blocking Obama and I won’t write about Trump. I will say that the last four years seem to confirm my worst prejudices. That Trump is who he is, while disgusting, is not particularly surprising. That he got elected in 2016 is surprising, but explainable. What is shocking is that after four years of him being as bad as I expected, 70 million people voted for him. I won’t write about that either; it’s ground that has been tread over time and again.
Rather than stew in that negativity, how about we get our mojo back. Here’s my view of America, and I’m including myself in it. On a typical day, if we can, we’ll cut school and go to the beach. We’ll laze on the couch with the biggest pizza we can find playing video games. We’ll surf the Internet shopping for garbage until we find the right garbage and then we’ll buy it on credit and throw it out a month after we get it. For this America, progress is the number of states legalizing marijuana.
Sure, there is a percentage of Americans who don’t do this, who are fit and disciplined because they know they should be, but those people are not what makes America special. The special thing about America is what happens to the masses when we get motivated. When there’s a reason to get off the couch and make something happen. Not because it’s good for us individually, not because somebody is telling us we have to, but because it is the right thing to do. A cause, something bigger than ourselves, a challenge. Individuals, of their own free will, deciding to commit themselves to a higher purpose. We know how to self-organize. How to lead when we need to and how to follow the neighbor who seems to have it figured out. We don’t need to wait for the government to tell us how, we just need a purpose, a direction. We can figure the rest out on our own.
Here are three examples of Americans being great. As is often the case when you learn something about yourself, the first insight comes from a foreigner.
1. I used to go to Japan on business often. One time a customer (Japanese) told me about how Americans were great at self-organization. I didn’t know what he meant, so he proceeded to tell me that after the Kobe earthquake, (also known as the Great Hanshin earthquake, 1995, over 6,000 people died), after that quake, some people in the government noticed something deficient in their response. They thought Americans were better and made a fact-finding trip to study how Americans deal with disasters.
The difference was that in Japan, in the immediate period after the disaster, people didn’t know what to do and so they didn’t do much. In contrast when they observed Americans, they saw groups of people spontaneously jumping into action. He talked about a flood; I don’t remember which one. You can see it. Somebody with a boat finds another person, they find a rope and other random useful stuff and start searching the neighborhood for people that need help. Other people gather together and set up a field kitchen. Some people lead and some people follow. Sure, eventually the helicopters need to arrive to pull people off roofs and we’ve had some amazing government fuck-ups, but the point is that people are willing to take initiative as individuals.
2. One winter there was a huge ice storm and we lost power. A constant fire in the woodstove kept the house somewhat livable, but we don’t have water without electricity. Short power outages are no big deal but by day four we gave in and booked a night in a local hotel; the Westin on 128. We checked in and walked to the elevator to go to our room. There were tons of workmen in the hotel, obvious because of their hardhats. And there was a small crowd of them waiting for the elevator.
I got into a short conversation with one of them while waiting. Half the hotel was contracted by the local power utility and was filled with out-of-town crews. The reason for the rush at the elevator was that dinner was being served and they were all going to a basement ballroom to be fed. He went on to tell me that he had retired the year before but had made way more money in the past year than he ever had. This is because he went to Puerto Rico to work on their grid after Hurricane Maria and had worked 12 hours a day 7 days a week for months. Free room and board, overtime, bonuses to stay on; it all added up. He said the hardest thing in Puerto Rico was the lack of accurate records. Finding the equipment was often the biggest repair challenge. The elevator doors opened, and he left.
We dropped our bags in our room, took quick hot showers, what luxury, and went down to the restaurant for dinner. After ordering, while sipping cocktails, I noticed four workmen talking to a waitress as they made their way to a table. She was explaining that the free dinner was served in the basement ballroom, but was over, so they would have to pay for their food. They looked disappointed but didn’t argue.
When the waitress next came to our table, I did something for the first (and so far only) time in my life. I said I’d like to buy a round of drinks for their table. A little while later, one of them came over and we chatted for a couple of minutes. He said they couldn’t drink because they were on the job, but he thanked us for the gesture. I don’t remember, we might have bought them a round of soup. But then I got their story and that’s the point of this vignette:
The four of them lived spread across Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee – I think there were two in Arkansas. They were all retired, but still licensed assessors. (I think they were called assessors). Their job is to go a place where the power is out and figure out what is wrong so the right kind of crew, with the right parts, can be summoned to do the repair. When they heard about the size of the ice storm in the northeast, they decided they would come help.
I want to emphasize that while this could have been automated on the internet with them applying and registering in advance, etc., that’s not the way it was. It was them calling each other and deciding on who would pick up who, gathering their gear and from Tennessee driving nonstop, rotating between the four of them until they arrived in the Boston area, found the gathering point, registered, and got to work. They were late for dinner because they hadn’t finished as much as they could do in a day. We told them we were in the hotel because our power was out and were as appreciative and thankful as we could be.
Not to overly dwell on these four heroes, but a quality documentary that follows disaster recovery workers could be good therapy for America. Imagine the scene. An older, slightly pudgy male is watching TV in a small house in Arkansas. The phone rings.
“Hey, what you doin’?”
“Just watchin’ <I have no idea what they watch>”
“Well look, I was talkin to Jimmy and we’re thinking of going up to Boston, you heard about the ice storm?”
“Yea, that’s a big one.”
“So you in?”
“OK, sure, I’m not doing much anyway.”
“You gotta’ leave real soon though – we’re meeting 10AM at the Walmart near Jimmy’s”
“Here to Nashville, drive all night –I’m not taking the first shift tomorrow.”
“Sure, Jimmy will start, we’ll take his Suburban.”
In less than two hours our hero has downed some coffee and is on the road with his gear. I’m writing these words just after hurricane Ian turned off the lights for 2M people. How many electrical workers are, right now, driving south on 95 with their gear bags and license paperwork?
Is this uniquely American? Would four retired Spanish lineman pack their bags and head up to Hamburg, Germany in response to news of an ice storm? If they did, would the Germans let them touch their wires?
Our power was on the next day.
Before continuing to the next point, I need to spend yet more time with our linemen. For reasons that have more to do with tradition than reason, these gentlemen would be viewed as “blue collar” or perhaps “skilled workers” with all the implied prejudices about educational level, political party and intelligence. I think it is time for many of us to drop our elitism.
One of the supposed sources of the rise of the uneducated republican is the way the democratic party became associated with identity politics, “east coast liberal elites” and urban white-collar workers – less emphasis on Unions, the Trades and the working poor.
To my fellow college educated knowledge workers: Many of us like to think of ourselves as being highly skilled in careers which are more valuable than others. And because these careers are more valuable – pay more in the market – than others, we sometimes start to think we are better than those in the less valued careers. We think we’re smarter or better adapted. We think our future prospects are better or at least our path is different from blue collar workers.
Since our path is different, our politics start to diverge. For example, I think that healthcare should be a right and everybody should have it, but everybody I know does have it. We either get it through our employers or have enough money to buy private insurance. That’s my cohort. I think its distressing when people lose their jobs because they can be done cheaper elsewhere, but for the most part, this has not affected my cohort either – or at least the ones affected have been able to switch to other jobs without too much disruption. But note, the fact we can do our jobs during the pandemic (virtually) means they can be done elsewhere for less.
I’d like to break down some of these attitudes. With some perspective, it is quite clear to me that many jobs which originally looked like they could only be done by geniuses are no more complicated than all sorts of jobs which are often associated with people that didn’t do well in school.
Take software. When people talk about writing software, there is a huge range of possible activities. Some of them indeed are best done by geniuses, but many of them are no more complicated than almost any job done in the trades. The difference is that it is something of a new career, a new skillset. Until recently, you weren’t likely to learn about it from your parents or your relatives. Until recently it wouldn’t have been taught until high school. There was a time when connecting to a network was a high-tech specialty. Now “what’s the WiFi password?” is a question everyone can ask.
Some of this is due to the processes getting simplified, but a good portion is due to familiarity. It’s hard doing something for the first time which you’ve never seen done. Even having the confidence that you can do it at all can be a hurdle. But once you know that anybody can do it, trying is not so scary. Once you’ve seen the benefit of doing something, you have more motivation. When you have five friends or colleagues who can point the way the first time, the hurdle is lower. And then you realize there’s nothing to it and off you go.
I write this in an attempt to create a little more mutual respect between blue and white collars. Or at least respect from white to blue collars. It’s clear to me that many “high tech” jobs require no more brilliance or education (learning about the job) than advanced manufacturing, plumbing or electricians.
Our political concerns should be much closer than they are. A very large portion of software jobs could move to India, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Equally likely, a large number of them could become obsolete; replaced by packaged applications and automation. Same for financial services jobs and a good number of other high paying careers. How does that make you feel? What do you want to happen in the country based on that feeling?
There used to be a big computer industry in Massachusetts. It’s basically gone. First it moved to the west coast, then the manufacturing portion moved to Asia. Unless you own the company you work for, you are a worker and are just as disposable as textile workers in the south or auto workers in Michigan.
I’m not advocating for any particular policies, just for more empathy.
3. In approximately 1994, I was traveling on business in Italy and had a good conversation with a local. He was commenting on how Americans were too ready to abandon traditions. He thought we were taking frightful risks with our society. The issue that was bugging him was women going to work. I find this ironic, because I think Europe has done a better job of supporting women at work, but I don’t know when that happened, and I don’t know any meaningful statistics tracking the number of women in management or other measures comparing the US to Europe. He viewed the change in family responsibilities as a big risk. What would happen to society if women didn’t stay home and take care of the kids?
I saw the point he was making, but for me, it just didn’t matter. Women want real careers, they are capable and if that’s what they want to do, why would anybody have the right to stop them? Sure, there might be difficulties, but there are always difficulties with change and we’d figure out how to adjust – or maybe some would choose to have one parent stay home and not work. At a deeper level, he was assuming that things should mostly stay the same and staying the same was both possible and positive. My baseline assumption is that nothing can stay the same. Everything is always changing, and the goal is to make the changes positive instead of negative. Nothing stays the same.
When I worked at AMD, I had people in my group in Texas. I managed Texans, how unlikely is that? During this period there was a spike in gasoline prices. The spouse of somebody in my group had a nice truck and a long commute. One day she did the math and figured she could trade in her truck for a new Honda and completely cover the car payment with her savings on gas. In a week she had a new car. I contend that true Americans are highly pragmatic and not afraid of change. We’ve been selected for that trait. Most of us are less than a few generations from immigrants who decided to roll the dice on a new country.
4. In approximately 2006 I had a conversation with a guy from the Department of Energy (can’t remember his name, but I do remember his face). He had a vision for fixing America which was simple and built on classic American traits; pragmatism, DIY and willingness to change – and the ability to fit items up to 4’ by 8’ in the back of their vehicles. His vision was based on just a few technical advances, most of which are now almost here.
a. Electric cars with big batteries (here and more on the way – CA and NY have already announced no new gas cars after 2035)
b. Ability for households to sell power back to the grid – already here in some states.
c. Ability for the batteries in the cars to be used as part of the house power supply – just starting to be possible.
d. Ability for these power transactions to be done over the Internet – I contend that everybody with an electric car has Internet and Wi-Fi.
e. Crucially, for it to be easy and obviously a good deal for a homeowner to self-install solar panels. Throw those panels in the back of the pick-up, put a roof on your patio and connect it to your house battery. The technology is here. Any minute now Home Depot or similar will wake up, put the package together, and a bank, maybe with government backing, will make credit available. What farmer wouldn’t do this? Why drive into town for gas when you can charge your Ford Lightning pickup with your own electrons?
This time, for this round of great awakening, we don’t have to kill anybody. We only have to save the planet. The country has it all, we have deserts with unlimited sun, onshore and offshore wind, geothermal, tidal power and a good bunch of fusion startups. We can do this.
We need to rebuild our infrastructure to be more efficient and less carbon intensive than every other country on the planet, and in so doing, we can again become the leader that we all want to be. Free, equitable, fun, the place the whole world wishes it could move to.
And when we have cheap clean energy and fusion powered reactors pulling carbon out of the atmosphere; when we’re using smart agriculture to produce yet more food with less water in a way that builds the soil instead of destroying the rivers; when the wealth created from these activities is properly funding healthcare and education; then we can spend a decade or two on the couch, eating pizza, playing video games, getting buzzed and relaxing until the next global crisis.
We can do this.
In Contrast, Skip the Second Planet for Now
I have recently read some very intelligent people coming out in favor of us working to move to space. There are different versions of this proposition. A base on the Moon, settle Mars, work towards interplanetary travel, they have different reasoning, some of it well argued, some inspiring, but recently, I’ve found I fundamentally distrust the motives behind these urgings.
Consider the history of our species. Amazingly, we colonized all continents except Antarctica well before the invention of GPS or travel insurance. In fact, before the invention of writing. Sure, some of that migration might have been at a rate of a few kilometers per generation, but some hardy souls got into boats and wound up on Hawaii (for example). Likely plenty of people died trying, but we’re descendants of the survivors.
For most of our existence, it has been a reasonable strategy to pick up roots and leave town in search of something better. That urge even has a cliché which describes it; “the grass is always greener…” And that cliché reflects the problem I have with the go-to-space crowd. In that cliché there is an assumption that there is grass on the other side – which implies water, breathable atmosphere, and a reasonable chance there are edible plants and animals.
The problem now is one of investment, aka gambling, is it better to spend a trillion building a base on Mars or on figuring out how to control the climate on earth? It’s a question of odds, expense and timing.
My opinion: let’s secure our home base before searching for the next thing – control the climate, unlimited clean energy, stable population size, global peace – if we can’t do that for ourselves, what right do we have to pollute the rest of the universe with our barbaric species?
Three Pandemic Observations
1. My Career Rises in Value
The early days of the pandemic made me feel better about my career. I’ve spent my adult life working on different aspects of computing technology – networks, computers, software tools for engineers and scientists. It has always been an unproven leap of faith to believe that the people using technology for good were doing more good than the people using it for evil. It’s the problem of building tools for others. You never know exactly how they will be used.
During the early days my work was confined primarily to the people using computing for science and civilian purposes and those using it to build weapons. But as time went on and the general public became users – Internet, smart phones, social media, games – there was a new question of whether humanity’s day to day life was truly benefiting or if we are all just addicted to our devices for the profit of commercial interests. Faster cheaper computers for what? So we can stare at our phones instead of visiting friends?
But then the pandemic happened, and lock downs started – and it worked! In the space of a week a huge percentage of the population was doing business from home on video calls. So much had to work to make that possible, fast networks, powerful computers cheap enough for most people to have them, vast server farms orchestrating our connectivity – I’ve spent time on all those topics. And then there was the cure; vaccines, ventilators and all the rest of the medical devices to help people survive. Most of those companies use software from my current employer. My involvement is small and only supporting, but it helps validate my original leap of faith.
And once humanity’s focus moves from pandemic to climate crisis, information technology is likely to play a significant role in finding and building solutions. I feel good about this.
2. Sharing Something with Some of You
I don’t know what percentage of people will relate to this, but I know I’m not the only one. Many of us are spending a lot of time on video calls now. Some of us have taken the trouble to organize our offices properly with webcams on top of large monitors and some of us haven’t. Some people use software to blur their backgrounds. Some people have nice bookcases behind them and some haven’t bothered to move their dirty clothes off the floor because they are out of range of the camera (like me).
I was on a video call with a woman who was clearly just using her laptop. Her face was in focus and the background was the blurred off white of the ceiling. Her laptop was sitting on her desk about two feet in front of her and the camera was a foot or so lower than her face. I was looking up at her from close range. The angle was unusual but also somehow familiar.
You got it? Enjoy the rest of your intimate work video calls.
3. Anxiety Comparison: Brain Surgery vs. Pandemic
There’s plenty of anxiety going around, but pandemic anxiety feels different from brain surgery anxiety and for the most part, pandemic anxiety is worse. With brain surgery, there were a finite number of things to worry about and very well-defined time frames to worry about them. For example, once my surgery date was set, there was no problem with us leaving for a vacation in Quebec City where we had quite a nice time including visiting the Ice Hotel and going dog sledding. For the most part, I didn’t worry about the upcoming surgery.
The worries were specific and the list of actions I could take to prepare was short; there wasn’t much else to be done. For the most part, the bad outcomes would be primarily on me. In short, for brain surgery, there is some fear and some worry, but it is possible to go through all the scenarios until it is boring and then put them aside. Sure, they will pop up from time to time, but it isn’t interesting to think “what if I lose control of the left side of my face?” over and over, because the answer is always a simple “that would suck, but it isn’t very likely and it would suck worse to eventually lose control over much more if I don’t get this tumor out.”
The pandemic is quite different. The timeframe where new and different problems can arise is unknown. It’s December, 2020 as I write this and we don’t know when we will get vaccinated, whether the vaccines will be effective and that leaves off the gazillions of other kinds of problems this pandemic can cause. Most importantly, it’s not just me. Family, friends, co-workers, all of humanity is suffering at least a little and some have been stricken; either by the virus directly (sickness or death) or by problems caused by the virus; loss of work and everything bad that can flow from that.
It’s not possible to ask three simple questions, have three simple answers and move on when thinking about the pandemic. Literally anybody I know and care about could catch the virus and wind up in a bad state. Any of them could lose their jobs or have their lives disrupted in countless other ways. Spend 10 minutes thinking of bad possibilities and you’ll never get to the end of them. It’s the same with timing. The schedule for the pandemic is not known. Brain surgery was May 18th and an expectation of 6 weeks initial recovery. For the pandemic, who knows?
The solution to the pandemic is troubling in another way. With my surgery, I was impressed with my team (my surgeon, Massachusetts General Hospital and my family that would care for me during recovery). All of them were eminently qualified to do what would need to be done. Contrast that with the pandemic – a global problem needing coordinated and quality responses across a vast number of people including our government agencies.
Unlike my pre-surgery essays, where I planned to trust that even the mechanic who was responsible for making sure the back-up generators were ready, here during the pandemic, we can see vividly how unprepared, it might be more accurate to say how anti-prepared the federal apparatus has become. Imagine the poor government workers at the CDC. The very same workers that made Ebola a non-event in the US. The very same people that debated and hassled amongst themselves over every word in the pandemic playbook – the playbook that many other countries followed, but which their own country ignored. I pity those people.
Maybe I’ll meet one someday (once we get back to meeting people.) What incredible anger they must have. To be so skilled and so prepared, so ready to lead the country and the world with well-considered best practices and pre-positioned supplies and then, to have it all descend into stupidity and chaos and instead to see their colleagues, family and friends suffer and their whole country be such a disaster on the world stage. I hope some of them go into politics. Like veterans returning from war, perhaps some of the first responders, medical people – essential workers even – perhaps some of them will be motivated to run for office and get the idiots out of power.
No End to the Story
The advice from my younger selves feels useful. To rekindle the ability to put all obligations aside and deeply experience and enjoy the current moment, to be present in the moment. It is almost cliché. But there are so many reasons why it feels important. Some that are obvious, but one that is deeper.
The obvious: Current life is endlessly diverting. Smartphones make you change your focus before you even realize that you were focusing in the first place; a text from somebody close, a reminder for a task you need to complete, and then once you’re looking at the phone, the risk of being taken further afield with social media, news or many other distractions. Also obvious: I’m not a kid. I have responsibilities and often, they take almost all of my time. Work, chores, feeding myself, making sure I get some physical movement. Frequently life is like a time jigsaw puzzle and a free moment becomes an opportunity to check off a task which has a chance of fitting that slot.
Less obvious is a bit of reality that I have started to consider. Out for one evening walk, it occurred to me that I was unlikely to live long enough to know if humanity would rise to the challenge of climate change. I might have a good idea of the end of the story if I live a long life, but I’m unlikely to know the full story. That started a whole series of similar realizations.
Will the US and China find a way to lead the world to a better place or will we fall back into typical human competition and eventually warfare?
Will the bike trail from Boston to Northampton be completed?
Will fusion power become viable, and will it be needed by the time it is ready? (or will solar and wind continue to improve to the point that fusion is redundant)?
How much Spanish will I learn? Will I ever get back to trying to learn Russian?
When will Cape Cod be inundated by rising seas? And what about the three eastern cities where I’ve lived most of my life; New York, Providence, Boston – what will they do when the seas rise?
How long will the dollar be the world’s reserve currency and what comes after?
How many species will go extinct before we fix the world – assuming we do fix the world?
And then, more personally, my daughters, how will their lives go? Where will they live? Will they marry? What kind of work will they do? Will they have kids and if they do, what about the kids? How will their lives go?
The point is, I’m not going to know the answer to most of these questions. More generally, the older I get, the fewer active questions are going to fit into my remaining lifespan.
What does this mean? If you knew you were going to have to leave a movie in the middle, would you still go? Would you start reading a book if you knew somebody would take it from you before you were done?
And if you went to that movie or started that book, how does knowing you won’t get to the end change the experience?
I see three answers to this question. The first is probably the worst. The answer could be to narrow my focus, withdraw from the world, not commit to anything new or long term. This often happens to people when they become seriously ill and contemplate death. Fewer friends, no new activities, don’t go far from home. This is not a happy state of affairs. It has been shown that when people recover from a serious illness, they open up again. But I’m not talking about illness here. I’m fine. It’s just that I’m 62 and even if I assume I’m going to live to 105 (a very generous assumption), that time is finite. I’m not going to suddenly recover from my mortality.
The second answer is how I lived before that evening walk. It is the answer that suffices for childhood and for the unaware. I could just forget it. Act as if I’m going to live forever and deny the reality of my mortality. Stay busy. Follow topics of interest with no thought of any impending end. This is not terrible. Ignorance is bliss. In fact, after surgery and realizing I was going to recover, I did broaden my horizons. That’s when I started learning Spanish, got back to reading books, got back to work and started learning about any number of new topics. But I don’t think this is the best answer.
There is value in watching the movie fully aware there is no guarantee of getting to the end. It’s easier to describe what I mean using a book example. Imagine you’re reading a mystery. The usual point of a mystery is tracking the clues and thinking about who did it. Waiting for that big reveal at the end. Reading that sort of book, I would tend to read quickly, searching for clues, pushing as fast as possible, a page turner, how is it going to turn out?
But if I’m not going to get to the end, either I will quickly decide I’m not going to put up with low quality writing or, hopefully, and here is the key, I’m going to linger deeply on every phrase. The description of the type of hat the detective is wearing and the way he jams pens into his back pocket to the point of punching holes in his pants. I’m going to wonder if the ink leaks or whether he pokes his butt when he sits on those pens. I’ll remember a time I put a pen in my shirt pocket and it leaked and I had to go into a meeting sporting a big blue ink stain.
Every paragraph of life becomes the whole story. There is such infinite depth in every moment when you allow yourself to dive into it. The question is not how my kid’s lives will look in thirty years, sure I’m curious about that, but how much more important and rewarding it is to focus on being as present as possible with them in moments when we are together.
For now this my answer to how to spend the rest of my life: living it much the way I do every day, but from moment to moment, every moment, seeking the deeper wonder in present existence.
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