Problem #30: Finishing What You Start

Problem #30: Finishing What You Start

Note: I actually wrote this in the 29th of Elul, but neglected to post it to the blog. Given this to title and subject, I kinda needed to post it today.

OK, I’ll readily admit that this might not be so much of a global, universal problem. In fact, the argument could be made that the bigger problem is people finishing things that they should never have started in the first place- unjustified wars, bad economic policies, etc. But I feel like I haven’t always finished what I’ve started.

A goal of mine over the past few years has been to fix this aspect of my personality. And, well, I think I’ve done reasonably well at it. I started towards a Master of Science in Information Systems degree from Drexel University, and I got it. I wanted to be a better guitar player, so I practiced, and I got better. I wanted to play out in real life more, and I’m doing so. And, finally, I told myself I was going to write a series of 30 essays about fixing problems, and I did it. As I told a friend at the outset, the essays aren’t of equal length or, frankly, of equal quality. But I finished them.

I’d like to think I’ve learned a lesson here, and perhaps solved a problem: set a goal, making sure it’s manageable, and then just bloody do it. Don’t set impossible goals- then you’ll surely fail. Set a reasonable goal, but then hold yourself to it. If it helps, establish a set time to do something- like, ½ an hour a day to write, or practice guitar, etc.

I’ve heard it said that just as the Hebrew word for a person- Adam- is related to the word for Earth or land- adamah- the fact that land can potentially be anything means that a person can potentially be anything as well. On Rosh Hashanah, we have the potential to direct set goals, and start towards them. But if this month’s project has taught me anything, it’s this: bloody do it. The essence isn’t to think, or even to plan: the essence is to do.

Problem #29: Sleepless in America

Problem #29: Sleepless in America

Here’s another ironic problem for me to discuss: overscheduling. Me, the person who’s working a full-time job that often requires more than forty hours a week, has a side job fixing computers, is married with two kids, plays live guitar gigs in real life + Second Life, and is writing daily articles on how he’d fix the world. If anything, I’m a case study in overscheduling.

But it’s true: we Americans overload our lives with things, both in our working and leisure lives. This has negative consequences to our health, in both stress and lost sleep. While the Mayo Clinic recommends that adults get between 7 and 8 hours of sleep per night1, nearly 30% of American adults reported an average 6 hours or less of sleep per night between 2005 and 20072.

How do we deal with this lack of sleep? We consume copious amounts of caffeine. The average American consumes 300 mg of caffeine per day- that’s the same as 3 No-Doz pills. In the 1950s, the average cup o’ Joe was about 5 oz, containing between 70 to 100 mg of caffeine; today’s 16 oz. cup at Starbucks contains 330 mg. And, naturally, all this caffeine consumption during the day makes it more difficult to sleep at night; the “sleep market” was estimated at $23.7 billion in 2007, including $2.7 billion in sales for prescription sleep aides4.

My suggestion is a simpler one: rather than pumping ourselves up with stimulants and then slowing ourselves down using CNS depressants, we should try to practice better sleep hygiene. Not necessarily Ben Franklin’s “early to bed and early to rise,” but at least so that we can get an average of the 7 or 8 hours of sleep that the medical community says we need. Good sleep hygiene practices include:

• Avoiding caffeine too close to bedtime (personally, I usually have my last cup of regular coffee before lunch)
• Avoiding eating just before bed
• Exercising
• Establish a regular bedtime pattern. For me, this includes knowing when I want to be awake, and turning in 7 to 8 hours before then.5

Sometimes, the best solutions are the simplest ones: the solution to not enough sleep is more sleep.

Endnotes:

1. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/how-many-hours-of-sleep-are-enough/AN01487#

2. http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssleep/#

3. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/17/amp-up-america/?page=all#

4. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/06/prweb1006354.htm#

5. http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/ask-the-expert/sleep-hygiene#

Problem #28: The Golden Hammer

Problem #28: The Golden Hammer

No, I’m not talking about some mythical token of power. I’m speaking of a famous quote from Abraham Maslow: “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” In other words, people tend to address a problem by looking at their favourite tool, and then deciding how that tool is, in reality, the perfect one for the problem at hand. Or, to look at it from the opposite direction, the way they see the problem depends on the solution that they want to use.

Sadly, that’s completely backwards. For instance, for a bad back, a chiropractic adjustment may be absolutely perfect. But for a broken leg, a chiropractic adjustment could well be worse than useless. In economics, if there’s a problem with demand, increasing supply isn’t likely to help. If the problem is that nobody’s buying your cars, tailfins aren’t likely to convince people otherwise. Each problem has a tool that is ideally fitted to it; perhaps even multiple tools. But if you begin to look at a problem by trying to figure out how your favoured tool will fix it, you could well make things worse.

Problem #27: Rail in the US

Problem #27: Rail in the US

Rail travel- passenger and freight- has taken a big hit in the US over the past 60 or so years. For passengers, private cars- typically carrying only one occupant, the driver- have become far more popular than any form of mass transit, including commuter rail. Over longer distances- that is, outside of the northeast corridor- air travel is far faster than rail. For freight, while long haul freight continues to move by rail, much of it is via truck and air.

The latter fact, though, gave me an idea this afternoon. Historically, the main- if not only- reason that railroads like the Pennsylvania and New York Central carried passengers at all was that the Federal Railroad Administration required them to do as part of the condition for issuing them a license to carry freight. Freight was where the profits were, but passengers were the loss leader.

My thought is this: rather than breaking up Conrail and selling it to CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern, it should have been merged with Amtrak. Then, as part of its requirements to run freight, it could have been required to maintain and upgrade the nation’s rail network.

Consider this: the main reason that Amtrak is able to run Acela- which is, incidentally, purely mid-speed rail by any world standard, hardly high-speed- on its Northeast Corridor tracks is that the Pennsylvania Railroad did a complete systems upgrade… in the 1930s. That tells us two things: first, that the PRR was really good; second, that we really need to upgrade our rail network.

Problem #26: Obesity

Problem #26: Obesity

Obesity is, pardon the pun, an enormous and growing problem in the US. The US Centres for Disease Control reports that 35.7% of adults in the US are obese, defined by them as a Body Mass Index (defined as mass in kilograms divided by height in metres) of above 301. The US also has the highest percentage of overweight adults in the English speaking world, with 74.1% of American adults defined as overweight (BMI of greater than 25), as compared to 63.8% in the UK, and 46.6% in Ireland2. Obesity in the US has also increased over time, going from less than 50% in 1962 to over 75% in 20103.

Causes of obesity can be- and have been- much discussed. But, it strikes me that what people want is a magic pill that allows them to eat as much as they want, not exercise, and yet remain skinny. Sadly, that’s not how the human body works. Humans evolved in times of scarcity- food was not readily available, and life was hard (hunting, gathering, later farming). As a result, we evolved to use food efficiently- to get as much mileage as we could out of each precious piece of food. And the ability to store scarce food in the form of fat could well be the difference between life and death in times of famine.

Sadly, adaptations such as the above become maladaptive in times of plenty. As such, obesity is a classic first world problem. Fortunately, it doesn’t call for a fancy solution. If you take in more calories than you expend, you will put on weight; if you take in fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight. As I say, it’s not science, it’s accounting. Anyone who tells you anything else is either lying to you or trying to sell you something.

My suggestion, though, is a fairly simple one: it’s easier to maintain 2 moderate changes than 1 extreme one. This means that, while you may not be able to maintain a crash diet, or keep going to the gym for 2 hours a day every day, you will be more able to cut out some between-meal snacks and add a little walking. Moderate changes are the kind that you can maintain, and that’s the key to a healthy diet.

Endnotes:

1. http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States

3. http://www.win.niddk.nih.gov/statistics/

Problem #25: Certainty

Problem #25: Certainty

Here’s a somewhat ironic problem for me to solve: certainty. That is, the certainty that you, and specifically you, are right. The certainty that you, uniquely, have access to the sole truth, and that everyone else needs to listen to it. This is ironic, of course, in that I’m in the midst- coming to end end, actually- of a project in which I aim to solve a large chunk of the world’s problems. But here’s the thing: while I think I’m reasonably bright and widely-read- and there are independent measures to back up this assessment- I’m not always right. I can’t be- that’s impossible. The only One who is always is right is G-d, and I’m certainly infinitely far from that.

We see this in politics all the time: one side or another will insist that, not only are they right, and not only is the other side wrong, but the other side is so wrong that they must be being wrong for some deviant, evil purpose. They’re not just wrong, they’re less-than-Ameican, they’re evil; they’re The Other. And, as I’ve noted elsewhere, you don’t negotiate or compromise with evil, you destroy it.

Here’s a little math to humble anyone. If the universe is infinite, it logically follows that the sum total of knowledge in the universe is infinite. We are finite creatures, from which it logically follows that our minds are finite containers of knowledge. And any finite number, no matter how large, divided by infinity is zero. Therefore, even the wisest of us literally knows nothing. It would be genuinely helpful if more of us stopped to consider that on a regular basis. Yes, I’m clever; yes, I have good ideas; yes, my ideas could well help; but I could be wrong. Those may be the four most helpful words in the English language: I could be wrong.

Problem #24: Syria

Problem #24: Syria

If you read my earlier posts on war + foreign entanglements, then you probably can guess my position on what should be done in Syria: nothing. That’s right, nothing. At least: nothing that’s being serious discussed.

Simply put, the idea that the US has to be the world’s policeman is, in and of itself, a big problem. This is- or at least should be- an Arab problem. Let the Saudis, Jordanians, Egyptians, etc. handle it. Were the US to attack in any way, the best-case scenario could very well be to empower Al Queda-aligned militia groups in Syria. Yes, Bashar Al Assad is a right bastard- no question about that. But he’s killed 100,000+ of his own people already; what about chemical weapons means that the US needs to get involved? Barring a clear threat to the US from Syria- that does not exist- or a UN resolution- which won’t happen, given Syria’s patron Russia’s veto on the Security Council- any US attack on Syria would, by definition, be a violation of international law.

The US needs to do less, not more, on the internation stage; let Syria non-intervention be a good start. If the US wants to “do something,” then it should fund humanitarian aide to all sides: doctors, food, etc. Not weapons, and not air strikes.