Category Archives: Discussion and Philosophy

Here is where I can rant about issues, or just calmly discuss them.

"For Instant Human, Add Coffee"–are we really that tired?

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So, I’m looking at a paper napkin in a popular coffee shop and it has a picture of a mobile phone that says “Download the mobile app” and the words “Because at 7 a.m. you can barely tie your shoes, let alone count money.” I laugh at image it conjures up.
Wait, what?
Caribou Coffee paper napkin with joke about lack of sleep
Do we really live in a world where lack of sleep is so pervasive, so ordinary, that the thought of people trying foggily to count their change makes us laugh? If I were thinking straight, I would take this as a compelling reason never to drive anywhere near a coffee shop before 10 a.m., lest I run into these people (literally).
But of course, I’m not thinking straight. I’m here for the caffeine, too, albeit in the form of tea. And I already knew that we lived in this world—jokes about coffee and cranky grown-ups abound. You can find them on t-shirts, magnets, and, of course, coffee mugs.
How in the world did this become normal?
There are some people who are painfully aware of how precious sleep is—people with insomnia, or chronic pain, or perhaps a new baby. No doubt they would trade all the coffee in the world for a good night’s sleep. There are other people who can’t keep their eyes open past nine p.m. and who awaken in the morning… well, who awaken. As opposed to crawling out of bed still half-asleep. They probably wonder what the big deal is with morning coffee.
Back to the question—how did being tired become normal for so many people?
Electric lighting surely helped. It’s a lot easier to stay awake if you have bright lighting. (I was going to bring up slide shows and people falling asleep in the darkness, but does anyone do slide shows any more? I think Powerpoint “slides” might be a lot brighter than typical photo slides.)
Not only is it easier to stay awake, there’s a lot more you can do. You can easily read, play cards, make model planes, etc. That’s before we bring in television, then videos, then computer games and Netflix. Now you can be highly entertained twenty-four hours a day. If you do fall asleep, it won’t be from boredom.
Or you could work, if your work involves using computers, answering email, reading professional journals, or anything that doesn’t require you to be on site. You could try to catch up on the endless list of tasks.
Going to bed is boring. Reading or watching a movie is fun. Going to bed means putting yourself that much closer to having to get up again and go to work.Staying up playing a computer game squeezes in a couple of hours more enjoyment before the whole work cycle starts again. No one wants to let go of those precious evening hours.
The consequences are many and varied and have been written about at length (so I’ll be brief). Impaired driving. A tendency to road rage. Short tempers with family members and friends. Accidents, both major and minor. Foggy thinking, and all that follows.
I can tell I’m really tired when I hit myself opening cabinet doors and start dropping things. I snap at whoever is around. I am not a happy camper. Admittedly, I may deal with fatigue worse than some people, but the sneaky thing about being overtired is you can’t always tell how much you are affected, because your judgment is affected as well.
The point I’d like to make here is that this is not merely a health problem, or an inconvenience, but a moral problem as well. Even if you don’t endanger anyone by driving when tired, if lack of sleep leads you to bicker, yell, or fail to pay attention to your family when you should, then it is contributing to your behaving badly.
I have no solution to offer. Saying “Well, just put down the phone/turn off the TV/close the book and get to bed earlier” is like saying “Eat less sugar and starch, exercise at least a half hour daily, and drink enough water.” It’s true, but it doesn’t help us do it. By now, most people who aren’t getting enough sleep are probably well aware of the problem. We have reasons to change, but no urgency. Next week is soon enough for an attempt to change our bedtime. Or next month… And it’s hard to make any change that feels like a sacrifice (“But I don’t wanna go to bed yet!”)
Maybe the right routines would help. I know, for instance, that I shouldn’t start reading a new book after dinner, unless it is very short. It’s easier to avoid starting a book than it is to put the book down when I’m halfway through. Still, sometimes I just want to read.
Maybe we need some collective agreement, some kind of peer pressure? I don’t know. But the problem doesn’t seem to be going away.
Till next post.

Words and Character

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It seems as though people are judging others more and more by their political positions—their stand on particular issues or even specific bits of legislation. While this is certainly one point of reference, it might be more useful to look at how they treat others, both in person and in writing.
What initially got me thinking about this was an article in The Atlantic (December 2017) tracing the personal history of a major neo-Nazi. The article included a discussion of what this man was like in high school. Some of it is perhaps not surprising—problems with drugs and destructive (and self-destructive) behavior. The surprising part was that his political positions seem to have been quite different.

“He often wore a hoodie with a large F[***] RACISM patch on the back…. [He] set up his own website, for a fake record label… that he used to dupe bands into sending him demo tapes. Here, his leftist leanings were on full display: He wrote posts encouraging people to send the Westboro Baptist Church death threats from untraceable accounts, and he mocked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations.” (p.59)

The article doesn’t say whether he did anything of a productive nature toward reducing racism and homophobia—I’m inclined to doubt it. It sounds like his way of responding was to hurl threats at and mock the opposition.What interested me was that while his targets have flipped 180 degrees since high school, his way of treating them remains unpleasantly the same.
It seems to me that there has been an increase in the amount of public name-calling and general nastiness all around. One of the things we’re taught as we grow up is not to blurt out everything we think. Words can hurt. Treating others with respect requires that we consider the effect of our words before we speak.
Of course, there are some people who just don’t care whether they hurt others, and some people who positively enjoy upsetting people and making them angry (or frightened.)  That says enough about their character right there. The neo-Nazi in the article seems to be one of those.
But I would hope there hasn’t been a sudden increase in the number of people like that. I’m hoping that what is happening is that people are getting careless, writing messages and posts and comments and so forth while in the grip of white-hot rage, and sending them off into the world without taking a moment to calm down,  reread what they’ve written, and consider the likely effect of their words. Calling names will not change anyone’s mind. It can, however, lose you a lot of sympathy.
Could that be what’s happening? I started writing this, thinking that people can change their views on issues and even sometimes their prejudices (in both directions, apparently), but that maybe how they treat other people doesn’t change very much.  It would be interesting to find some data on this. But now I’m hoping that people can change how careful they are with words. Hopefully for the better.
Till next post.

Sewing, Knitting, and (Un)happiness

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This week I’ve been sewing myself a pair of pants. Loose-fitting, double-pleated pants in emerald green, feather-weight corduroy.

It is a fact about sewing (and pretty much any other craft) that I cannot complete a project without mishap. I only use one pattern for pants, but I always seem to be making some minor change—trying to deal with their distressing tendency to split in the seat, or else fiddling with the waistline yet again to keep it current with my own.
Even when I don’t run into trouble with the changes I’m making, there’s usually a piece that gets sewn wrong-side out, or a seam that extends where it should not. Or something completely different—this time I spent over half an hour searching for my seam ripper, which eventually turned up under a sofa cushion. It’s frustrating.
So why am I sewing pants instead of buying them? Granted, stores don’t carry pants that meet all my criteria. (Double-pleats, loose-fitting, not too tight at the waist but not too loose in the seat, soft fabric, useful pockets…) Still, I could probably pay a sewing pro to stitch up a pair to my specifications. I could even get them to finish the seams properly, which I haven’t done for this pair.
Maybe it’s the same as my reason for trying to make French bread. It’s the challenge of the thing.
That’s probably part of it, but I don’t think the situation is quite parallel. At any rate, while thinking about this, two other things kept coming to mind. The first is a comment that my husband made. It echoes something in a book by Stephanie Pearl McPhee, the Yarn Harlot. If I could remember which book, I would quote it, since she puts things so wonderfully. But I can’t, so I’ll have to approximate.
Knitting projects, like sewing projects, often go awry. Knitters end up ripping out mistakes and having to re-knit chunks of their project. Other times, they discover that the size small sweater has somehow turned out to be a giant’s size small. And so forth. Unless the knitter is restrained and keeps her frustrations to herself, at some point her spouse may inquire, “Do you really enjoy knitting?”
It’s a reasonable question, given the amount of grumbling.
And the answer is, “Yes, I really do enjoy knitting.” Even if this blasted hat won’t go around my head…. Grumble grumble.
It’s easy to see how sewing projects and knitting projects are connected. Less clear is why I kept thinking of a section from a book I had recently looked at, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, by Daniel M. Haybron. The part that struck me actually comes right near the beginning of the book. First, the author comments on an experience that led him to the topic of the book. He used to spend summers on a small fishing island as a child, and remembers it as being a very different world, a good place to be, “the only place I’ve ever felt like a fully developed human being.” Later, he compares two hypothetical societies, A and B, and describes them like this:
“Consider then, two communities, A and B. A typical member of A, on a typical day, is in more or less the following condition: at ease, untroubled, slow to anger, quick to laugh, fulfilled, in an expansive and self-assured mood, curious and attentive, alert and in good spirits, and fully at home in her body, with a relaxed, confident posture. A denizen of B, by contrast, is liable to be: stressed, anxious, tense, irritable, worried, weary, distracted and self-absorbed, uneasy, awkward and insecure, spiritually deflated, pinched and compressed. The differences, let us suppose, owe mainly to difference in the prevailing ways of life in these communities.”
A bit later he says,
“Notice that the descriptions of A and B made no explicit reference to happiness or unhappiness. But it should be reasonably apparent that, nonetheless, happiness is precisely what they were about: what A has in its favor is that its residents tend to be happy, whereas the people of B tend not to be.”
What has this got to do with my experience sewing pants? I’ve just said that sewing includes a significant amount of time spent fussily trying to adjust the pattern and then discovering that I’ve messed up and must rip out some seams, all of which tends to produce frustration and anger. The author’s description of society A involves people feeling good in various ways, while it is society B that is described as habitually tense and frustrated.
But then I thought about the origin of his example—the island community that he described and the hard work of its inhabitants—and the fact that they undoubtedly had moments of similar frustration in making things work, but also presumably moments of great satisfaction with their work and its results. I thought about the fact that I genuinely do enjoy sewing, and what that means, and I’ve come up with two possible connections:
1.  Enjoyable activities don’t always look enjoyable.
2.  “Difficult” doesn’t equal “not happy-making.”
I’m stuck for a conclusion here. It seems trite to conclude simply that worthwhile activities involve some work, some parts that aren’t fun—but isn’t that what I’m saying? Or is there something more?
Maybe if I reread the book, which I don’t remember very well, I’ll have more to say. Meanwhile, I’ve got a nice new pair of pants.
Even if they do make me look nine weeks early for St Patrick’s Day.

green corduroy pants with two pleats sewn at home
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Till next post.