Tag Archives: writing

It’s 1995

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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.”

It’s My Parents’ Fault

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Suffice to say, my personal life has gotten significantly more difficult of late. Obviously, this isn’t the time or place for any details. Just know, as your humble blogger, I am “compartmentalizing” these days.

The GalPal wants me to find a therapist to help make things less difficult. I know lots of people who are benefitting from therapy, and intellectually I am definitely pro-therapy, but when push comes to shove, I am Resistant to seek the help of a mental health counselor myself.

Not only am I pro-therapy, I believe our well-being depends largely on the quality of our closest interpersonal relationships, and those relationships depend largely on our willingness to be vulnerable about our inner lives.

The gender stereotype that males think and talk almost exclusively about tangible objects—whether news, weather, or sports, okay maybe cars too—doesn’t apply to me. I’m always thinking about deeper things than just how bad UCLA men’s basketball is this year.* What to do with the nearly constant deeper inner dialogue, that is the question.

Two imperfect answers spring to mind. The first was modeled by a friend a week ago when he asked if we could talk. He suggested a bike ride, and despite the frigid temps, of course I was in. Looping FishTrap Loop shoulder to shoulder, I initiated, “So, what’s up?” “It’s a long story,” he started, but really it wasn’t. It was a very good talk/ride and I’d like to think he felt better afterwards.

What’s imperfect about that? With occasional exceptions like the one just described, my closest friends, being of the male persuasion, aren’t as adept as women at talking about their feelings. As a result, it’s rare for a male friend to genuinely ask, “So, what’s up?” Could I take more initiative with my friends in digging deeper into “real” life? Fo sho.

In theory, writing could be a helpful outlet too. That is, if I could figure out the endlessly convoluted privacy concerns of those nearest and dearest to me. Which I can’t. And before you suggest it, journaling ain’t the answer, because that’s just a more visible form of the inner dialogue.

So, given those limitations, why not just “do” therapy? Asked differently, what the hell is wrong with me, that I’m so resistant to “professional” help?

I’ve been mulling that around and around.

What I’ve concluded is that the Good Wife doesn’t fully appreciate just how much I am a product of my parents’ “too extreme for their own good” intense independence. Both my mom and my dad grew up without much, during the Depression, in eastern Montana. When my dad died, his obituary was in the New York Times. Individually and together, they developed resilient, “grin and bare it” approaches to life that worked for them.

Mostly. Better for my dad than my mom who would have benefitted greatly from therapy after my dad’s death, from which she never really recovered.

Again though, that knowledge of how helpful therapy can be is overridden by my parents’ modeling which was rooted in the brutal conditions of eastern Montana in the 1930’s. Suffering was synonymous with living. You just endure it, in whatever form it takes.

Asking me to just dial up a therapist feels like asking me to break from my past and my people, to defy my DNA. Despite all the decades, I am still of eastern Montana, still of Don Byrnes, still of Carol Byrnes, still of believing that I must grin and bare it mostly alone.

For better, or more likely, for worse.

*thank goodness for the women

Sometimes There’s A Breakthrough

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The final paper. A self-assessment of one’s writing progress. Which admittedly, is a bit presumptuous.

A fave excerpt from one student’s paper.

“But this prewriting is different than what I thought it would be; my prewriting involves putting my professor into a (metaphorical) box, and I put that box into another box. Then, I put that box in the garage and forget about it. Only at this point do I return to my brainstorming and drafts. I have learned that if I do not do this I expend too much energy trying to inject the professor into my creation. Once I realized that my writing is for myself, not the professor, I found that writing is an engaging process of self discovery and growth. This is most evident in my penultimate paper on the concept of soulmates.”

Typically, academic writing is an impersonal jumping through hoops, with students preoccupied by grades. Students inevitably develop a teacher-centric orientation when writing in school, asking themselves, “To get the best grade possible, what and how am I expected to think and write?”

If I could only get all of my students to put me in a box, inside a box, in a garage. Yes, I would prob suffocate to death, but I would die happy.

Sometimes

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Sometimes you get an amazing student from Ethiopia by way of Turkey. Who says he’s never been asked to be introspective or write personal essays about existential questions. A student who explains that where he comes from people are preoccupied with food, shelter, and clothing. That there’s no context or momentum for what I’m asking.

Maslow and all.

He’s quiet in class. As in silent.

But, as it turns out, he’s listening closely and reading with an open mind. And oh, what a mind. As a result, he takes to being introspective like a duck to water.

And so he writes personally and beautifully about his family’s struggles and his own in a way that belies his youth. And starts to think that maybe he can help Ethiopians, and others in developing countries, start thinking about existential questions in ways that will benefit them.

A computer science major with serious math chops, he asks to talk after class.

“How can I improve?” I tell him, “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing—reading our texts closely, being introspective, and writing honestly about what you’ve overcome.” And “don’t deprive us of your insights during class discussions.”

He doesn’t think other students will relate to or understand his experiences since they’re so different. I suggest he might be surprised by the exact opposite, that they’ll be especially interested in his life experience because it’s so different.

He smiles at the thought and commits to contributing more. Meaning some.

I tell him he’s talented, that he could be a writer, that he has unique and compelling stories to tell.

And then, he says it. “I want to be a writer.”

My guess, he’ll travel the world; knock the technology ball out of the park; and become a popular, widely read writer.

To have played a small part in his journey is pretty damn cool.

I See You

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Alternating this afternoon between reading student papers and watching college football.

And reading this email from a Somali-American student of mine. “I just saw my grade and your feedback on it. I appreciate the well thought out and thorough feedback! I’ll be sure to apply it to my next paper! It feels nice to have educators in higher Ed that actually read my work with thoughts opposed to my high school.”

The most important roles I play are all related—listener, reader, assessor. “Professing” is overrated.

I have 53 students this semester. A lot of high school teachers have 153. I teach 12 hours a week. Most high school teachers teach 25. High school students aren’t truly listened to or read closely because there’s too many of them and too little time.

The distinguishing feature of the factory model of education, where secondary students come at you in waves of thirty every hour, is that it’s impersonal.

Read New York Times Opinion Pieces Like You Hit A Tennis Ball

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Follow through by reading the top “Top Comments”. They always expand the “discussion”.

Por ejemplo, here are two of the top comments from today’s Mauren Dowd essay titled, “Coup-Coup-Ca-Choo, Trump-Style“.

Excellent point H.A. And then there’s this from Jim in Cincy.

Touché Professor Snyder.

Siddhartha Mukherjee Writes In Bed

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I sang his praises here. He won a well-deserved Pulitzer for general nonfiction for Empire of All Maladies. And he deserves a Nobel Prize for science writing for helping a knucklehead like me (mostly) understand cellular biology.

I’m just settling in with The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.

Here’s the backstory to the book and his writing process.

Put A Fork In It

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The semester is a wrap. My parting words to my students.

“The very end of my first class as a brand new professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC ended in a humorous manner. I spoke for about ten minutes, doing my best to tie together all the course’s loose ends. I was pulling out my egghead professor vocab and thought everyone was listening closely. After I finished, Josh raised his hand. ‘Oh great,’ I thought, ‘Josh is going to thank me for the brilliant summary and the course more generally.’ Instead, he said, ‘Dude, you have a pierced ear!’ Then the discussion devolved into why I had never came to class with an earring. Lesson learned, keep the end-of-semester spiel very, very brief.

Price writes that ‘the more we train ourselves to notice delights—the everyday beauties and kindnesses and amusing absurdities, the things that make us laugh or that we feel grateful for—we will feel more positive.’ She goes on to suggest we say ‘delight’ out loud whenever we experience anything that sparks joy. I’m trying to adapt this practice. This morning, on my drive in through the Nisqually Delta, I saw a huge flock of birds flying in ‘V’ formation. I said ‘delight’ to myself. Then I immediately thought of this class and what I wanted to say to you now that we’re at the finishing line.

And here it is. Delight.

It’s been a complete and total delight to get to know each of you individually and collectively. I hope the rest of Year 1 goes well and that we cross paths again sometime in the future.”

Ron