Plain English with Derek Thompson, “The Radical Cultural Shift Behind America’s Declining Birth Rate.” Related. What Are Children For?
This convo got me thinking about my running posse. Between the five of us, we have 12 children whose average age is somewhere between 25-30 years old. Between those dirty dozen, there is one child. There will likely be more in a decade, but time will tell how many more.
My fave—7. Top three, 7, 3, 16. Someone please explain 5.
Addendum:
So ultraviolet rays, jellies, insects, and other irritants can have at the exposed 90% of one’s self?
I’m only going to tell you one time. Stop using the word faggot!
I’m sorry, but as a professor I have to sporadically use unnecessarily complex words. Like “sporadically” in place of “once in awhile”.
More illustrative of this professional obligation is the term “dialectical dilemma” which is when two seemingly conflicting things are true at the same time. Por exemplar, I annoy people*, you annoy people, people inevitably annoy one another, a little or a lot, some of the time, or nearly all of the time. It’s just baked into our daily lives. We give and we get.
Social scientists keep learning about all the ways close interpersonal relationships, or more plainly friendships, are essential to our well-being. Especially as we get closer to senior discounts.
So what are we to do? We annoy each other, but need each other.
Some people choose to live in remote settings where they’re way less likely to interact with others. Thus, they’re way less likely to be annoyed, while simultaneously giving up the substantial benefits of social interaction.
To each is own of course, but I’m convinced we should embrace the risks of being annoyed by living in closer proximity to others. Put differently, we should design our lives so we have to interact with others on a regular basis. Knowing our feathers are going to get ruffled.
Zillow has a cool feature called the “Walk Score” for residences. Our old home had a Walk Score of 0. Our new one has a Walk Score of 65. From the country to the city we go.
One day last week, the Good Wife tricked me bigly. “Do you want to weed the front together?” she asked. I knew I was looking especially fetching, but that was a shameless come-on if I ever heard one. I pictured us rolling around in the dirt. Maybe? Instead, once I got into full tree trimming and power weeding mode, she announced she was going inside.
Then. It. Happened. It turns out we live on a major bike route. Someday, if you bike from downtown Olympia to the Westside, you will go right by our house. In an hour, 15-20 cyclists went by. Of all sizes and shapes. After a kitted-out BTorian passed on his mountain bike, he turned back and said, “Is that Ron Byrnes?!”
A little later Suzie, the owner of a downtown art gallery stopped on her ginormous Specialized e-bike. And we talked and talked and talked. She asked me when I’m getting an e-bike, which in hindsight, prob shoulda prepared me for the Burgerville bullshit.
And then Burke, from two houses down came over, and we talked. About how middle schoolers care about one thing, peer relations, and therefore will say ANYTHING to preserve them.
Long story short, in one hour I spontaneously interacted with more people than I did in eight years at our Nature Park residence. Which is good for me, because I’m an introvert.
So six miles and 65 points later, I’m damn near a social butterfly. A slight exaggeration, but don’t hate me because you ain’t me.
*Last week, when I was in too big of a hurry, I may have left my Costco cart against a curb in the parking lot instead of returning it to the cart stand. A women in a minivan slow rolled right by me, GLARED at me and then WAGGED her finger at me as if I had just run over a kitten and a puppy. It was so over the top, it didn’t have the intended effect. Instead of feeling shamed, I felt amused and amazed that I could annoy her that easily.
Dear Reader,
Apologies for denying you your need to Press Pause for so long. Please know, this time the extended Pause was not the result of lethargy or a lack of profundity deserving of your consideration.
It was due to a 5.8 mile move which, I am very happy to report, is largely in the rearview mirror.
TL/DR. . . I got my ass kicked every which way by The Move. Which begs an obvy question, why did I voluntarily sign on for unprecedented levels of stress?
Because one can only take so much of . . .
The Salish Sea. The Olympic Mountains. Eagle fly-bys. Water-slapping seals. Even directionally-challenged whales. Enough nature already.
In the end, all the nature just got to be too much for the GalPal to bear. And so, a few months ago, she sayeth, “Let’s live among the people. In town.”
To which I said, “Okay, let’s.”
Tonight, our first Saturday in the new hood, we ate among the people. After dropping the Good Wife off at the restaurant, and then parking, I returned to the restaurant via this alley.
Slow your roll. One setting is not inherently “better” than the other. Just different. The old hood was completely bereft of street art, any real weirdness to speak of, and rabbits outnumbered people.
Time to lean into the back alleys, the street art, the urban mess, the grit. This is my life with The Good Wife. Among the people.
“The ‘Golden Bachelor’ reality TV couple, who wed on national television after a romance that captivated viewers with the possibility of finding love late in life, announced on Friday they are divorcing just three months into their marriage.”
I was not among the viewers, let alone the “captivated” viewers, but this does make me wonder what else might not be real on t.v.
Karen Kreider Yoder’s story perfectly captures 2024.
“It was a June afternoon in the Rockies just after I retired when we agreed that we must be turning into ghosts.
We had been cycling in the mountains since breaking camp before dawn, and we decided to splurge on a private room in a hostel. We checked in and headed through to the bike-storage area, walking our rig by young hostelers congregated in the common spaces.
We must have been a sight: two bedraggled 60-somethings pushing a tandem bicycle laden like a pack mule.
Except no one seemed to see us.
We crossed the living room, where 20-something hikers with ruddy faces studied their computer screens. No one looked up. We inched through the kitchen, where others were sautéing onions for a group meal. ‘Excuse us. Sorry to interrupt,’ one of us said as we squeezed through. ‘That sure smells good.’
They turned a bit, giving us space. But not a word. Not a ‘How’s it going?’ nor ‘Where’d you come from?’ nor ‘Cool rig.’ Nor eye contact.”
Pedestrian safety is all about the “built environment”. From “Determining who gets blamed when cars hit pedestrians.”
“’But what we’re seeing in this research is that the built environment is a key factor. People make errors in judgment, but no one deserves to die or get injured for such errors. And they would be less likely to make these choices if there were more pedestrian infrastructure,’ said the director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at Ohio State.
One recommendation from the researchers is to redesign the crash forms completed by police to include information on the built environment around the crash site, such as distance to the nearest pedestrian crossing, to give more context on why pedestrians make certain choices.
The built environment for pedestrians isn’t just a problem in Columbus, according to the researchers. Many cities have similar issues. And the situation in Columbus is improving because of Vision Zero Columbus, a government effort focused on reducing crash-related fatalities and injuries in the city.
But this study shows the importance of a Safe System Approach to designing roadways to minimize the effects of human errors and allow pedestrians, as well as cars, to move safely through the city.
“We don’t have to design the streets the way we do. We can make fundamental design choices that could prioritize safety over the speed of traffic,” Miller said.
Put more simply, the relative frequency of cars crashing into pedestrians based upon the presence of cross walks and related pedestrian infrastructure is fairly predictable. No, that’s not surprising. The larger question, I suppose, is how can citizens get their municipalities to prioritize pedestrian safety over traffic speed?
Said one technology analyst this week on the heels of artificial intelligence chip maker Nvidia’s red hot quarterly results. Meaning just like when the internet caught fire in 1995, Nvidia is igniting a whole new technology whose trajectory requires educated guesses.
Let’s press pause and ponder whether we’re better off now than in the early 90s. Inevitably my privilege contributes to my belief that we are a lot better off. Partially because of convenience. Specifically, we take for granted the time we save on almost a daily basis from internet-based personal tech. Case in point. A friend recently posted a picture of himself on Facebook at the Westminster, CA Department of Motor Vehicles where I got my license 46 years ago and I thought, “Why the heck did he go in person?” because I can’t remember the last time I went to the DMV.*
Granted, not a substantive example of human progress, but I suspect it is the cumulative effect of relatively simple and smallish such examples that translate into an improved quality of life.
More meaningfully, here’s a far-out social media adventure I went on last week after an extended family member posted this gem to the ‘Byrnes Family’ group text.
That’s my oldest bro teaching me the sweet science in Muhammad Ali’s hometown. As I looked at it, my attention drifted to the background and my best friend’s house. Jimmy D and I were in separable from ages 3-9. Heartbroken over the end of our friendship, when we moved from Louisville to Ohio I sobbed in the back seat halfway there.
Where the heck is Jimmy fifty-five years later I wondered? A quick google search turned up his dad’s obituary from 2020 including his and his sister’s places of residence. A few seconds later, I was on Jim’s Instagram page looking at his island home just off the Maryland shore that he and his husband were selling.** Then I watched a video from inside his home art studio where he talked about his process. Another quick search turned up his new location. After scouring his instagram and admiring his big white fluffy dogs, I visited his sister’s Facebook page and saw a picture of Jim and his elderly mom. And then back to the obituary and some remembrances including an amazing picture of a very young Jimmy with his parents and sisters on the back brick patio of his Cardiff Rd home. . . the one in the picture.
A miracle of modernity.
I listen a lot to people on the forefront of large language models and my take-away from their predictions is that this technology will greatly accelerate economic productivity and further save people time to pursue more non-work interests and activities.
Not all boats will rise to the same degree, because they never have, but artificial intelligence will in all likelihood induce a much higher tide. White collar people in particular will work less while enjoying simple and smallish and quite possibly complex and more substantive improvements to their quality of life.
BUT will any of us be happier? One way to get at that is to reflect on whether we’re happier now than in the early 90s. Despite internet-fueled economic growth, there’s lots of evidence that we are not. In fact, some would argue that a large part of the internet’s legacy, especially among the young, is steadily worsening mental health. And a coarsening of civic life.
Another way to approach the question of whether we’ll be happier in a post AI world is to consider whether it will foster stronger interpersonal connections. Will it, I wonder, enable us to enjoy the company of more close friends? I also wonder whether it will enable us to slow if not reverse the environmental degradation that threatens our well-being. And will we, I wonder, experience more art that moves us more often, and in the end, makes us feel more alive. Alive in ways that renewing car tabs on-line and skimming friends’ Instagram pages never will.
In the same space of time, 29 years from now, in 2053, I suspect we won’t be much if any happier than we are right now. I would like to be wrong and still around so that you can recall this post and roast me for not being nearly optimistic enough.
*needed to do an eye test to renew his license
**someone in my fam asked if I knew Jimmy was gay, “LOL,” I said. “We were six, I don’t think I knew what ‘gay’ was.”
I would like to believe our obsession with our own images has peaked, but evidence suggests it still has room to run. Where does it end? If it does?
Museum selfie-takers are causing damage by backing into artworks.
Pressing Pause 