ezola

my take on the inuit condition, informed only by conversations with biased observers:

for tens of thousands of years, a small group of people lived in the tundra, where no one else wanted to live. they survived as a nomads; their peripatetic struggle against the elements made for a hard life and a young death, but it was their way and I would like to think, though I have no way of knowing, that they found as much happiness in their lives as we do in ours.

then the white men came with guns. they told the inuit to stop moving around. the inuit could not stop moving around, they knew of no other way to live. so they kept moving around, following the fish and the caribou. and so the white men shot their dogs. and that was the end for the inuit.

the white men built communities for the inuit and gave them snowmobiles, which require gas to run, and suddenly the inuit man needs something he’s never needed before: gas money. the inuit man does not know how to make money, he knows how to survive in the tundra.

two generations later, the inuit still do not know how to make money, and even if they still knew how to survive in the tundra, it is a skill no longer of any use. they are trapped in between two lifestyles and trapped in settlements isolated from the western world around them by thousands of miles of roadless snow and ice. in exchange for stripping them of their lives, white men pay white men and women double-salary to come up to these settlments and run them like white towns. because there are almost no opportunities to make a living here, most of the locals are given money. all health care, including medications and plane flights to see white doctors in the south, is free. white teachers, social workers, policeman, and pilots put an ivory sheen on the long, dark winters. many of the quebec inuit are taught french instead of english, which in my mind is like taking a dying animal and pouring battery acid on its wounds. the snow, of course, couldn’t be any whiter.

as a result, inuit communities are devastated by the plagues of boredom, alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, hopelessness, helplessness. my solution: either build roads to montreal and toronto so that they can construct a contemporary life for themselves, or give them back their dogs and let them follow the fish and the caribou.

Part of the Puvirnituq photoset.

I come across a lot of content that has to do with mindfulness and being here now and the meditative breathing buddhist. It’s clear to me that those who are able to exert more control over their thoughts derive much satisfaction from it. I believe, however, that many adherents conflate two separate phenomena.

First is what Benson and Klipper* refer to as The Relaxation Response, in their book of the same name. Their thesis is that across many cultures and religions exists a ritualistic activity that brings about a sense of calm and well-being in its participants. Benson & Klipper take an anthropologic approach to this activity and propose a simple maneuver that they advocate as a distillation of the common elements in these various practices, which all tap into a physiologic reflex to bring about that peaceful, easy feeling. This approach boils down to focusing on your breathing and repeating the word “one” to yourself between breaths.

It works. After a few earnest minutes you start to feel tranquil; anyone who has done yoga or anesthesia knows it works. I suspect Benson&Klipper are correct about the reflex, and it’s a useful skill to tap into when you’re anxious or can’t fall asleep. More than just relaxing, it feels good. This is distinct, however, from mindfulness.

I discovered mindfulness accidentally while doing drugs in my late teens and early twenties, and I think a lot of stoners make a habit out of marijuana–which has little if any physiologically addictive properties–because it promotes mindfulness(though nobody in those circles refers to it by that name, and I didn’t understand it as such until many years later).

One of the most important effects of marijuana is that it potentiates sensation. Experienced users learn to take advantage of this in all sorts of interesting ways, but its most immediate and accessible form is the heightening of sound and taste.

Now if the ability of marijuana to make music more compelling were limited to the time when the user is intoxicated, it would be neato and fun but not important from a lifehack perspective. The genius of this drug is that it teaches us to compartmentalize our attention. Unlike the meditative breathing buddhist, who must train herself to exclude distraction and be here now, this ability forces itself on the stoner as the sensation at hand is so overwhelming that to divert any neurons from its appreciation is abhorrent.

The type of mindfulness I practice in my sober thirties has to do with recognizing how an activity’s perceptual resolution** affects my appreciation of that activity. For example, reading is an inherently high resolution task–if you want to get anything at all out of what you’re reading, you have to devote a lot of attention to it. Since the total amount of attention you have is fixed, like the space on a computer screen, every pixel of attention you devote to one activity takes away from your appreciation of another activity. So, if I’m eating six-day old rice and beans, I’m happy to yield to my urge to read this week’s New Yorker at the same time. But when I have butter chicken from Bombay Mahal delivered, the magazine is put away and the music turned off.

I take the concept of perceptual resolution a step further and organize my tasks into high resolution (studying, flirting) and low-resolution (paying bills, talking to mom), so that I can plan my consumption of high resolution content (talk show podcasts, bob dylan records) and low resolution content (jazz, Boing Boing).

I have also become very protective of my attention pixels and am frustrated when they are unwantingly expropriated, by construction workers across the street, the bus-riding mobile phone user, or my email program. In addition to lengthening the refresh times of my email and RSS feeds, one of my all-time greatest lifehacks has been the purchase of insulating headphones.

*Herbert Benson with Miriam Klipper, “The Relaxation Response.” Copyright 1975 by William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-380-00676-6.

**Elliott Malkin named this concept.

In today’s New England Journal of Medicine, there appears an
article that describes the differences between boys and girls, for those physicians who skipped that lecture. Allow me to quote:

1. Fertility differs considerably between men and women. Men are
fertile from puberty through at least the 9th decade of life, and
some men are fertile into the 10th decade. Although there is some
decrease in fecundity, spermatogenesis is active throughout these years.

2. Women are fertile only for the 12 hours after the monthly
discharge of an egg from the dominant follicle in the ovary.

3. The other main difference between male and female fertility is the
rapacious apoptosis that occurs in ovarian follicles. Of the 3
million to 4 million follicles present at the time of fetal ovarian
differentiation, only a million or so persist at birth; 400,000 to
500,000 at menarche; and none beyond the sixth decade.

Men are fertile almost every minute of the time they spend on earth,
women are fertile 12 hours a month for 35 years, amounting to a grand
total of 30 weeks’ fertility over their entire lives. This fact
explains much of how men and women relate.

My sister Rachel has recently entered single adulthood and often
seeks my counsel on matters dating. I have discovered, while trying
to use my expertise in this area to optimize her love life, that
today’s woman is fucked.

I know this when I hear her describe her latest date, she’s so into
this guy she says, and he seems into her, but she’s not sure. She
describes him to me. Bright, successful, attractive, socially
intuitive, jewish. How much interest should she show? How much
cleavage should she show? How long does she have to wait to have sex
with him? Trying to answer these questions, I sense a sort of
futility to all the attention they’re paid, and it is the feeling of
futility that brings it into focus: Men and women want different
things, everyone knows that, but their discrepant goals are not
fairly distributed. The evolutionary expression of our biology sets
men and women in a Darwinian rivalry that women can not win.

A woman, if she becomes pregnant at every opportunity between
menarche and menopause, can have at most thirty or forty children. A
man can repopulate the world in a week. Is it therefore any wonder–
given that our instinctual purpose is to produce as many offspring
that survive to reproductive age as possible–that men seek variety
and women seek security?

Since women can have so few children, a woman maximizes her
evolutionary potential by assuring that each of her children is
offered the best individual chance of survival; it is thus in her
best interests to find a partner likely to effect an environment
where each child will survive to reproductive age. This instinct
manifests itself in modern society as the desire for a protector and
provider: a big strong rich man.

That man maximizes his evolutionary potential by impregnating as many
women as possible. Since there is essentially no limit to the number
of children physiology permits him to father, it is in his best
interest not to maximize survival of any one of his children but to
maximize his number of children. This instinct manifests itself in
modern society as the desire to fuck every woman on the planet.

These goals intersect at every encounter between a man and a woman.
While women channel their energies into finding and retaining a big
strong rich man, men are busy disseminating inseminating. The result
is that once a couple has sex, the man becomes more and more
valuable to the woman, while the woman becomes less and less valuable
to the man.

That sense of dread I have when Rachel describes this guy–I now know
exactly why she’s headed for a broken heart.

Related commentary from 2000 and 2004.

Elliott and I had planned to drive all over New Orleans and explore the ruins, but lost interest after finding this flyer in our hotel lobby, and felt kind of ashamed of ourselves.

We got over that feeling though, and the next day spent several hours touring deserted neighborhoods and abandoned, flooded houses.

FREE:

Microwave. Acquired in 2002 from a friend in Dallas who had just
purchased it but then moved into an apartment with a built-in one.
Works perfectly, except that after approximately 50 seconds at high
power, it bursts into flames.

Although at first this is alarming, you will soon learn that you have
three to four seconds of warning with flashes of light and that
“bzzzzt” sound before the right side explodes into a ball of fire and
burning plastic. The fire is easily put out by turning off the
microwave and blowing out the flames. On only one occasion have I had
to use my fire-extinguisher equivalent (windex), and the inside
needed cleaning anyway.

This microwave is perfect for heating up things that need less than
50 seconds. I have been using it mostly to melt butter. Now that I
have a new microwave, this gem of a japanese appliance is looking for
a new home. Goes to the first person who can carry it away.