Anxiety

One of the most important things that has been lost, or at the very least undervalued, in current thinking about ourselves psychologically is the role anxiety plays in our lives.   I’ve often railed in these pages about how psychology has sacrificed too much in its desperate efforts to appear “scientific.”   Understanding anxiety has particularly suffered from directing large scale research activities and public awareness away from our inner lives.   Many well-educated people have so absorbed the genetic and biological causation models of human functioning that they are all but oblivious to psychological dynamics, the delicate yet enormously forceful, interplay of our conscious and not-so-conscious emotional worlds.

Anxiety is critical in this picture.  Anxiety is two things in one: an emotional state and a driving force.   As an emotion, anxiety is an unsettled state, confused, tinged with an edge of vague fear and discomfort.   As a driving force, it makes many “escapes,” with a hundred different diagnostic labels, seem “attractive” in the sense that they relieve this anxiety.

But perhaps even more important than the “symptoms” of anxiety that appear in the multitude of ways we can screw ourselves up, we, i.e. we garden variety neurotics, let anxiety stand in the way of growing, of getting the most that we can out of our lives.

More to come…

I was filling out a form recently that asked me my hair color.   Immediately I began to put down “brown,”  as I’d done my entire life, and realized it was completely untrue.   What hair I have is a whitish shade of gray.   Has been now for a long time.

Funny how we sometimes picture ourselves as we were earlier in our lives.    Everyone does it, not just old folks.  My sixth surely looked back at my fifth grade self in wonder and dismay.

So I scratched out brown and wrote down “none.”

Nobody has ever had hair like Einstein’s.  So my first question is:  Is that why we think he was such a genius, because of his phenomenal hair?

No.  He was both a genius and a man with incredible hair.

Most of us take it for granted that Einstein was not only a genius (and a man with true genius hair), but also that what he concluded was correct.  But we shy away from the consequences of his conclusions.   We do not like to admit that Einstein’s exploration of the inside of the atom gave rise to an age in which universal destruction is not only possible but seems more than likely.

We also do not like to acknowledge that Einstein’s conclusions place the Earth in the universe as extraordinarily isolated.   It nothing, including sound waves, can travel faster than the speed of life, then the nearest organisms that we could conceivably communicate with must be very far away indeed in the scale defined by human existence.   If, as Einstein predicts and virtually all of contemporary physics accepts, mass increases logarithmically as we come anywhere near the speed of light, that the near star to our sun (Alpha Centauri) is over 4 light years away.   Then, even if there were beings we could communicate with — something we have obviously attempted to the absolute limits of our ability — it would take 8 years to say “Hello” and get a “How ya doin'” back.    It turns out we could travel rather far by gradually increasing our speed relative to light, but when we returned hundreds of years would have passed on Earth.  So as far as communicating with other species is concerned, they’d have the same problem we’d have if they tried to come to Earth, the simple answer is that it is an extraordinarily unlikely occurrence.

What does this add up to:  That we may or may not be God’s only creation (another thing that seems extraordinarily unlikely, but not something science can answer one way or another), but we sure as hell are out here in the great vacuum of space on our own.  So we damn well ought to be making better use of our unique situation!

Anyone who goes around searching for truth all the time must be hiding something!

“I don’t know anything, I’ve been in California for the last four years.”  — Nick Charles

Well, Dashiell Hammett, really.  Nick Charles is the character played by William Powell in the classic 1930’s film, The Thin Man.  I’ve been watching it lately and greatly enjoying it.   Nick and Nora — the lead character — are totally inebriated virtually the whole movie.   Delightful!

I grew up in California, so I really don’t know anything.

Most of the lines I like to quote are from early Dylan (as in Bob, not Dylan Thomas).  If you’re curious to see some of my personal favorites, check out  Endnotes and Quotations.

The Rock River, a mere trickle you could sometimes walk across without getting your feet wet, become a roaring river a hundred yards wide…
….pulling full grown trees up by their roots

and…

Houses were washed away, bridges collapsed.    This one has cracked and fallen seven feet.

Has Godzilla taken a liking to pavement?:

It was Wednesday afternoon, or was it Sunday?  A small cup was out of place.   It was not in any immediate danger.  It was under the armchair.  I put it there, but it nevertheless wasn’t where it should be.

But what me started me to look at the odd juxtaposition of the tiny expresso cup and the oversized chair was when my cat came down and meowed loudly at me.  She’s often like that, these days: nibble a little, yelp for more a lot;  she’s an old cat.

But she caught my attention and I noticed that my keys were on the floor.  “How did that happen?”   I wondered.  Were the cat’s cry and the keys being on the floor connected?  I surely didn’t think I’d put them on the floor.

That was when I noticed that part of the little flashlight I keep on my key-ring had, apparently, been knocked off the ring when the keys fell to the floor.  But there was no evidence whatsoever of what had become of this small, but hardly invisible item.

I’m sure there’s a logical explanation.  There always is.  It’s so disappointing.

Hell isn’t other people,  it’s bureaucracy 

In George Orwell’s 1984, “deviants,” any who questioned authority in any way, were brought back in line by being tortured by whatever means terrified them the most.  The story’s hero, Winston Smith, is made to betray the woman he loves by being encaged with hungry rats.   As a child, I figured that this must be what Hell would be like:  to have the thing you hate and fear the most done to you every day for Eternity.

I’ve come to conclude that my personal hell might be much less dramatic than being overcome by rats or being chained to a rock like Prometheus to have my liver eaten by an eagle every day.  My eternal hell, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, would be to be endlessly on the phone trying to get customer service to resolve a simple problem.

I doubt if there’s anyone who hasn’t had this experience:  Some screw-up has occurred: a large surcharge has been added for no apparent reason, a product has been delivered that you didn’t order, a reservation has been made and confirmed but isn’t fulfilled.   After wading through the phone options and informational messages you don’t care about and perhaps being on hold for half an hour, maybe disconnected a couple of times, you finally get a human.

Once you get through, you do your best to calm yourself, to be polite, to realize that the person you’re talking to is just a working jill or joe like you are. You explain as calmly as you can what has happened and what you think would be a reasonable way to solve the problem.  But you quickly realize it’s not going to work:  The customer service rep has been trained to do certain things, has a computer that will allow them to do certain things, and what you’re quite reasonably requesting simply isn’t one of those things.  No they can’t reverse the charge, no you can’t return the item for cancel your order, no they won’t reimburse you if you send the product back.

So you stay on the phone and argue.  Perhaps you “demand to speak to a supervisor.”  Sometimes you’re told there the supervisor “isn’t on the floor at the moment, would you like to call back?”   You try to restrain your emotions when you get the supervisor who asks you to repeat everything you’ve just told the customer service rep.  Sometimes the “supervisor” is just a smoother version of the person you started out with; sometimes the supervisor is a “heavy” who is just more brutal in telling you, no, it just doesn’t work the way it reasonably should.

Finally, you lose it.  Maybe you use a swear word and get hung up on immediately.  Maybe you raise your voice and are warned that you will be hung up on if you continue.  Maybe you start to feel that you’re actually having the heart attack you’ve been telling these people for an hour now is what’s going to happen to you from trying to get them to understand your perspective.   Maybe you’re the one who hangs up in disgust.   Either way, you feel like crap.   You feel stupid.  Why did I get wrapped up in this?   For what?  It isn’t worth it.

You’re drained by the effort, with flashes of fury, and probably more than a little embarrassed by some of the things you’ve said in the course of the argument. And you’re exactly back where you started before you picked up the phone!

I figured this would be the most likely scenario for my personal hell:  desperately trying to get customer service to resolve a legitimate problem in a reasonable manner.  Eternally.

That was before I had to deal with governmental bureaucracy.  A little background:  I’m the chair of our local town council in a small town in southern Vermont.  There’s no mayor and no county government, so little councils like these handle everything from whether a dog that bit a child should be euthanized to cell tower ordinances to creating and managing a budget of over a million dollars in taxpayer money.  Tropical Storm Irene upped the ante:  our town of 1700 people was hit with four and half million dollars in damage to the municipality alone (roads, bridges, and culverts).  Some people’s homes were destroyed entirely, many faced severe hardship.

Small towns like ours obviously aren’t in a position to absorb expenses on this level and, this being an officially declared disaster, the state Public Assistance office and the federal government (FEMA) have to be turned to for the financial wherewithal to repair the damage.

In fairness, a lot of the process goes fairly smoothly.  FEMA holds workshops on applying for aid, sends reps to help figure out how to complete the mountain of paperwork;  the state expresses its concern and serves as a conduit between the municipality and FEMA.   All goes reasonably well:  Contractors are hired to re-build roads, culverts, and bridges;  banks lend the money to the town to pay the contractors in anticipation of state and federal reimbursement to the town;  eventually funds flow back to the town to pay the banks.

It all works fine…until it doesn’t:   The state says that the repair must be done in such and such a way and FEMA says it won’t reimburse doing it that way. They’re locked in some kind of arm wrestle with each other.  Or, a different example, the FEMA rep “helping the town”  gives verbal approval for how to handle something, only to be replaced by a new FEMA rep who says what the first guy said is completely wrong.  Long after work has been done and contractors have been paid, FEMA informs the town that paperwork the town didn’t know about at the time they were handling the emergency, must be provided or FEMA won’t reimburse or will even take money back from the town.

But the worst is the equivocation, the ability of bureaucrats at all levels to pass the buck, to refuse to make any commitment.   Though FEMA reps will bang the table and say “You MUST do this and you MUST NOT do that,”  it turns out they are neither “approving” nor “denying.”  They are simply “interpreting the regulations.”  They are not making a decision, they are informing you on how they believe some other bureaucrat will interpret the regulations months ahead and thousands of miles away.

And if, as has happened innumerable times, your own particular situation doesn’t exactly fit the cookie cutter of the regulations, if it’s slightly different from what’s obvious, then no one will commit to anything.  A bridge is down and must be rebuilt.  How should this be done?  The regulations say it’s supposed to be built back to the way it was and at the lowest cost.  But it turns out what’s least expensive and the best solution, isn’t what was there originally.  What should the town do?  No one will give a straightforward answer.  Each caveats what they say in words like “the regulations require that…” …blah, blah, blah, but don’t answer the direct question.  The state guys says what they “think FEMA will approve,”  and FEMA says it can’t answer at all until it sees all the paperwork, at which time tens of thousands of dollars will already have been spent that the bank gave and the bank wants their money back, now!. And, oh yes, there are time limits on everything.  Did you miss a deadline?   Oops.  Too bad.  Now we can’t give you any money.  Sorry.   Missing a single deadline could cost a town hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If this were an isolated case, I wouldn’t write about it.  It isn’t.  The more money is at stake the more onerous the rules are and the less real guidance, let alone actual written approval, is given.

For the record,  this has absolutely nothing to do with partisan politics.   The faces of FEMA and the state agencies may change under Democratic vs. Republican administrations, but bureaucracy has its own logic and inertia that transcends party politics.  Nor is this a rant against government spending.  If there were no federal aid to disaster hit areas, we’d have no roads.  No way to get from point A to point B.

We like to believe that bureaucracy is a term that applies only to the former soviet empire and the novels of Franz Kafka,  when, in reality, the bureaucracy is as deeply as entrenched in our culture as in the most dystopian nightmares.

So perhaps when I am damned to hell for all I’ve done wrong in my life, I won’t find myself talking to customer service, I’ll be on the line with some government bureaucrat trying to get them to commit to telling me whether the my town’s new bridge should be have a deck made with reinforced concrete or with yellow and blue (no red) Lego blocks!

I propose the following as an example of what is wrong with the so-called free enterprise system:

Like many people who used PC’s for decades, I switched to Mac later on.  Ok.  I was somewhat horrified by how reverent Mac users and question-answerers were about “If it’s Mac, it’s right,” but otherwise it worked fine for me.

Then one day I sent a very important email that had its attachment in the middle of document and what I wanted to say about it below the attachment.  Looked fine  on my Mac:  “Here’s this document, blah, blah blah.”  Then the document.  Then “Here’s what I urgently need you to do.”  EXCEPT: The person I sent it to is using a PC, so all she gets is the “Here’s the document, blah, blah, blah,” followed by the document, but NO “Here’s what I need urgently you to do”!

How many decades anyone claim that Apple and Microsoft “compete in a way that benefits the consumer” when they can’t even manage to agree how to send and attachment back and forth without completely screwing it up?

How many times do we run up against competing companies who don’t seem to mind failing to do what they’re supposed to, as long as every other company’s just as lousy at as they are, or, better yet, if they can blame the other company?

Anyone who as ever flown anywhere understands that’s the way the airlines work.  Had a miserable experience on Delta?  Fly American!  Then who will you turn after your next miserable experience?  You won’t care. You’ll accept the fact that you’ll show up two hours before the flight in order to be treated like excess baggage, at best, and eventually you’ll get where you’re going.   Eventually.

The point being that more often than not what we get is the lowest common denominator. If we need these companies to cooperate minimally with each other and not have Windows cut off the whole point of an important message while  Mac and Windows happily blame each other, then we’re really in trouble.

The “market decides.”   What a parody!  Why is it to the financial benefit of either party to devote serious resources to interfacing well with each other?  It isn’t.  Economically, it makes no sense for them spend more than is absolutely necessary to interface with each other.  Since it’s easy enough to blame the other guy and both system work equally badly, what is the marketplace incentive for the to improve the way they work together?  They can both be happily lousy.  Much less expensive.  This is not cynical, it’s simple economics.

Maybe you’ll build a computer from a kit in your garage or use a Linux operating system, but you’ll still end up having to interface with Apple and Microsoft and they will not be kind to you.

Is this really the best economic system that humans can come up with?   That’s what I’d call cynical.

If you found this interesting, here are essays that might interest you:

Welcome to the Monolith

Why Socialism matters

 Or in a different vein:

Amateur

It’s definitely my bet that there are endless others — conscious beings enough like ourselves that we will clearly perceive them to be conscious beings like ourselves — out there in the universe.

To imagine that we are absolutely alone would mean that everything we perceive is either a) part of a unimaginably unique random event causing consciousness in one minuscule planet-ful of people or b) a God or gods who went to enormous trouble to create everything around us just for our benefit.    Neither of those seems remotely possible to me.  This falls into the rather large category of things that I believe to be impossible to know for certain, but it sure seems more likely that neither a nor b is true and that there is a universe of conscious out there, not a huge pyrotechnic light show.     Science fiction hasn’t done terribly well as imagining beings similar but different from ourselves.    We marginally understand our family pets, how would we understand an alien species or they understand us?

But our distance from these other conscious beings brings us back to being pretty much on our won.   They are so far away, on a human scale, that it as though we were alone in the universe.   Perhaps, centuries from now, people will have come to the conclusion that Einstein was wrong and people just thought he was so smart because his haircut or lack of it.    And maybe there will be twists and turns in what we think as a smooth world of time, but if we’re really stuck with the speed of light being the speed limit of the universe, then we ain’t gonna be having any long conversations with any space creatures, perhaps ever, perhaps as long as our species survives on Earth.

Which always leads me back to figuring we ought to be doing everything we can to manage a life together on this ball in space.   And it might make it a lot easier if we’d ease off on trying to get everyone to believe things that make one group of people “better” than another,  that “everyone should believe what I believe and if they don’t they’ll get what the misery the deserve.”

2013.   What will it come to mean to us?   Life, both our individual lives and our collective life as a species, moves along way too fast to dare think about it.  It’s hard not to be a pessimist when the end of life appears, for all that we fantasize otherwise, to be death, pure and simple:  gone, that’s.  And we kind of know that’s true for our species, too.  We have a life span.   And we are acutely conscious of the decay we see along with the growth.  Pointless to be obsessed by it, I suppose.