Andrew Einspruch's Blog, page 7

Eleven Things to Make You Smile

I mentioned that I was waiting for some rain to show up. Some of it did, thank goodness, and the water tank is full for the first time in a year. Buying water is one of my least favourite things, so glad to not be doing that now.

Today, I’m going to keep it short, and give you another list of things to make you smile, since I had such a lovely response last time, when I published Sometimes a Smile is Enough. So, here you go. Eleven things to make you smile:

A drone flying over the ocean happens to get a perfect shot of a breaching whale.
A video about Why You Don’t Want Super Strength, from a YouTube channel called Because Science. Warning: science (but handle-able).
A picture of a smiling baby giraffe.
A picture of a smiling baby human.
A picture of a smiling baby rhino sitting across his mother’s face.
That song from the Gregory Brothers where they songified the Charlie Sheen “Winning” interview. 61+ million views later, it still holds up.
Go have a cup of herb tea. Sit quietly by yourself and just drink the cup of tea with no distractions (screens, books, etc.).
This one’s for Americans: you know what the secret is to singing the American national anthem? Start it as low as possible for your singing voice. That makes the high bits easier later on. Try it. It works. Don’t be like Roseanne Barr.
Turn. Off. The. News. Now leave it off for a week. If that doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will.
My list of cool things from 2017.
A video of a baby laughing hysterically at ripping paper.

Do you have something that makes you smile? Leave a comment and let me know.

The Blue Marble

February 20, 2018

Marbles, magnets, desk-y things. This marble run has a satisfying Rube Goldberg-ness to it.

All the World’s Ills Solved with One Simple Thing

February 20, 2018

I hope this finds you well. In my part of the world, I’m tapping my foot, waiting for my backorder of rain to arrive (I think some might be delivered tomorrow, but you just don’t know with these things.) In the mean time, our main source of water (the creek) is dry for the first time in years. I much prefer a bit too much wet over a bit too much dry. Droughts bite.

Which brings us to empathy.

Remember Sting singing “I hope the Russians love their children too?” It was a call for empathy. McCartney wrote a bunch of them. “Hey Jude,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Another Day,” “Lady Madonna” — they’re all either expressions of empathy or invitations to experience it.

I think empathy needs more air time. Sure, you’ve got your loving-kindness and your compassion. Those are both great. And you can’t go past a good dose of caring, can you?

But I’ve been thinking about the value of empathy, and all of the things that might be different if our fellow humans experienced greater empathy with one another and the rest of the planet—if people really did walk that mile in another’s shoes.

Here’s a partial list:

We’d have a metric crud-tonne less violence in the world, because people would not be able to do unto others as they would not want done unto themselves.
There’s be less othering. If I can empathise with you, I see our commonalities. We’re more likely to reach a state of “us” rather than “you” and “me.”
Everyone would be vegan.
Everyone would rather be a breatharian.
You’d have a lot fewer examples of doctors living in a particular country for 40 years, and then being arrested by an out-of-control government department.

I’m going to go so far as suggest that *all* the world’s ills come down to a lack of empathy. Global warming? Lack of empathy of the future. #MeToo? That one’s obvious. Terrorism? War? World hunger? Nastiness in a comments section? Racism? Whatever-ism? The neighbour’s dog who barks in the middle of the night? Gun violence? Bad customer service? The ever-growing disparity between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots?

All of it could be solved with a radical empathy implant in all concerned.

So that’s my question for you this week. What in your life can you solve with your own dose of radical empathy?

Leave a comment and let me know.

Questioning Fundamental Assumptions

How often do you take a chance to question fundamental assumptions? I’m guessing not that often. For one, who’s got time for that? For another, it can be uncomfortable. What if we’re wrong about something?

But questioning a basic assumption can be interesting, if nothing else.

I’ll give you an example: Do we have to die? There are those who say “no.”

I’ve long been interested in the work of Aubrey de Grey a biomedical gerontologist, who proposes the possibility of regenerative medicine preventing ageing for radical life extension. He brings an engineer’s perspective on the issue of ageing, saying, as I understand it, that there’re only seven types of ageing damage, and that we can come up with ways to treat them without having to totally understand them (similar to the way we can fix a car without totally understanding them). From his questioning of the pro-aging trance to his founding of the SENS Research Foundation, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here.

Have a listen to this episode of The After On podcast, where de Grey is interviewed, where he talks about everything from how he got into it to the concept of a longevity escape velocity. Whether you agree with him or not, there’s a lot to consider.

So, yeah, questioning the fundamental assumption of ageing.

But fundamental assumptions can be anything. Do I need to keep this job? Do I need to have a job at all? Do I really need to eat animal products? Can I trust the government to do the right thing (maybe not such a hard thing to question)? Do I need [fill in the blank] in my life? Should I stay in this relationship? Could I give away all my possessions?

That doesn’t mean that you have to come away with an answer that’s contrary to your current position, but it’s a good way to shake up your thinking a bit.

So, what fundamental assumption can you question this week? I’d love to hear.

Seeking the “Oh, Thank Goodness”

How good are you at handling things that need doing? Some people have a tolerance for when things don’t work, and some people have no tolerance for that at all. I’m in the middle somewhere. The dripping tap. The door hinge that sounds like a sound effect from a horror film. The box of receipts that you need to sort for the accounting. That carton in the back of the closet that you know you could get rid of if you took ten minutes to have a look.

Handling things (little and big) can be a great way to clear out some mental clutter, and ease some psychic pressure.

Here’s an example.

We had an internal door that we had a builder swap the hinges on (so it opened a different direction into the room). The hinge change meant that the door knob no longer worked, and for some reason, doing the door knob wasn’t in the builder’s brief. So we lived with a door that didn’t have a knob for (*cough*) years (*cough*).

Then one day, I bought a door knob thingy from the hardware store. And it was only (*cough*)  half a year (*cough*) later that I installed a door knob (the first in my life).

When it was in place, there was this overwhelming sense of “Oh, thank goodness that’s handled. What a relief.”

It’s that “Oh, thank goodness” bit that interests me.

I know that it is physically impossible for me to do everything that I want to do or need to do. (Just like you know you can’t read every good book ever written, or watch every great movie.) But the things (big and little) that get handled and deliver that “Oh, thank goodness”–those can be precious. Sometimes they’re very simple (the dripping tap); sometimes they’re complicated (catching up with the bookkeeping). But inevitably, there’s an “Oh, thank goodness,” waiting at the end.

And that’s almost worth it on its own.

So this week, I invite you to look around, and find a thing that you can handle (big or little, your call), then handle it. Once it’s done, look for the “Oh, thank goodness,” and enjoy the heck out of it.

Seven Distractions

January 21, 2018

I wonder who came up with the term “one those days”.

Because I’ve been having one of those days for a couple of days now. My computer suddenly seems to have amnesia about who I am (thanks to an errant operating system upgrade).

How are things at your end? Do you need a distraction? Let me offer you seven (videos embedded below):

From C-3PO’s perspective, ‘Star Wars’ is a prolonged nightmare.
Sesame Street Puppeteers Explain How They Control Their Puppets (video)
Video of the most unsatisfying things in the world
Star Wars A Cappella Cover (video)
Still on the Star Wars theme, How Star Wars was saved in the edit (video)
900 Free Audio Books from Open Culture (legal, of course).
Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss singing “Go to Sleep You Little Baby.” (video)

There you go. Enjoy a distraction or two, and with any luck, when we talk next week, my computer will remember who I am.

 

Walking Back from the Outrage and Addiction

January 13, 2018

This week, I’d like to point you to an article by software developer Joel Spolsky, Birdcage liners. Spolsky discusses how he has given up reading Twitter and Facebook because they were making him angry.

Does that sound familiar? Ever come away from social media feeling worse than when you got there? Me, too.

What’s interesting to me is his software designer’s take on the problem. Spolsky essentially says that outrage and addiction to the services are baked into their very design.

Twitter, by limiting the number of characters in a tweet, strip communication of nuance, emotion, and sentiment. Says Spolsky:

The outrage and indignation, of course, are what makes it work. That’s what keeps you coming back. Oooh shade. Oooh flamewar. We rubberneckers can’t keep our eyes off of it. I don’t know what the original idea of Twitter was, but it succeeded because of natural selection. In a world where the tech industry was cranking out millions of dumb little social applications, this one happens to limit messages to 140 characters and that happens to create, unintentionally, a subtlety-free indignation machine, which is addictive as heck, so this is the one that survives and thrives and becomes a huge new engine of polarization and anger. It’s not a coincidence that we got a president who came to power through bumper-sticker slogans, outrageous false statements chosen to make people’s blood boil, and of course Twitter. This is all a part of a contagious disease that is spreading like crazy because we as a society have not figured out how to fight back yet.

I can so relate to this. If you search my Twitter feed (I’m @einspruch), you’ll find at least one or two instances where I’ve piped in something like, “Just tuning in. What’s the outrage du jour?” I’m sure I meant that ironically, but I think it is symptomatic of the hell hole of garbage that Twitter can be, and the lure of instant, daily outrage.

And the Book of Face (here’s my page)? Spolsky:

Whereas Twitter sort of stumbled upon addictiveness through the weird 140-character limit, Facebook mixed a new, super-potent active ingredient into their feed called Machine Learning. They basically said, “look, we are not going to show everybody every post,” and they used the new Midas-style power of machine learning and set it in the direction of getting people even more hyper-addicted to the feed. The only thing the ML algorithm was told to care about was addiction, or, as they called it, engagement. They had a big ol’ growth team that was trying different experiments and a raw algorithm that was deciding what to show everybody and the only thing it cared about was getting you to come back constantly. 

And:

Rather than providing a constant stream of satisfying news and engagement with friends, Facebook’s algorithm had learned to give me a bunch of junk I didn’t need to hear, and only gave me intermittent rewards through the occasional useful nugget of information about friends. Once in a blue moon I would hear about a friend’s accomplishment or I would find out that someone I like is going to be in town. The rest of the time I would just get the kind of garbage newspaper clippings circulated by someone who had too much coffee and is misattributing the kick from the caffeine to something they just read online and now MUST share IMMEDIATELY with EVERYONE because this news story about something that happened to a baby bear is SOOOOO important to THE ENTIRE WORLD.”

I encourage you to read the whole article.

These are very powerful tools that have, quite literally, changed the world. The connections that can be fostered and maintained are incredible. I’ve had brief connections with some of my heroes on Twitter, and meaningful engagements with lots of folks on FB. There’s no question that there’s value there.

But Spolsky’s words fit in with what I’ve seen in my own life, and in those around me. More than once I’ve said to people near me, “If you’re using Facebook and coming away feeling worse, you’re doing it wrong.”

As for the addictive quality, I’ve seen that in myself, too. “Oh! Look! That stupid red circle has a number in it! Better check if someone has liked a post!”

I’ve been on social media for a decade now. I have fed the Facebook content machine, and tweeted everything from humour and indignation. But my inclination these days is to try to keep a tight lid on my engagement with both of them. I wrote last week about how I close off social media when I’m writing or trying to do anything productive. I reckon I’m better off writing a few hundred words more than engaging in the outrage du jour.

My natural inclination in the past months is to go on there less and less. I don’t think I need to go cold turkey the way Spolsky has, but I find that, for me, less is better.

How about you?

Beginnings, Systems, and Habits, Not Resolutions

January 7, 2018

Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.

—  attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You can’t go wrong starting with a Goethe quote, can you? (Except, it appears not to be from him.)

Still, the sentiment holds. Welcome to 2018, a year in which I can promise you that all kinds of stuff will happen that will be outside your control, and which you’ll care about a lot, or you won’t, but there won’t be much you can do about it.

Good, we got that out of the way.

Let’s talk about things we *can* control. Let’s talk about beginnings.

I mentioned last time that I’m one of those whose not a big fan of new year’s resolutions (wait, we’re already a week into the new year, am I still allowed to talk about them, or do I have to wait until next December?). Instead, I’m a fan of systems and habits that help you achieve what you want to achieve. Want to lose weight or save more or write more words or whatever, think about systems and habits that will lead you to that. What would setting the alarm 15 minutes earlier every day help you do? What would parking further away, closing your Apple Watch rings, or setting up an automated debit nudge you toward?

Also, it’s important you don’t fall in love with the search for the perfect tool. If you’re doing the equivalent of being the writer trying out a hundred word processors instead of writing, then you’re doing it wrong. People (*cough* like me *cough*) who like tech, especially, fall prey to this. Get on with reinforcing the habit or strengthening the system or doing the work.

Here’s an example from my world: shutting down social media. When I’m writing and trying to be otherwise productive, I close down the Book of Face and the fiery hellhole of Twitter, and ignore (or turn off) their notifications. Some people have success by limiting the social media apps to one device (like a phone or an iPad), but for me, shutting them down works. Also, I relegate Wastebook to its own browser (I’m mainly a Safari user, so FB lives in Chrome, which I think also limits its ability to track non-FB activity, but I won’t swear to that in court.) So, what’s my system and habit? Shut ‘er down.

Finally, you have my permission (not, though, like you need it) to screw up, so long as you do better the next day. Did you eat the donut? Miss your word count? Watch Jane the Virgin instead of going to the gym? Not to worry. Tomorrow (or later today) is another day.

So, over to  you. What system or habit can you put in place to ring in the new year and help you say next December, “Well, that was worth doing.”?

Here There Be Gratitudes

December 30, 2017

Billie and I have a tradition. Every new year’s eve, we look back and list our gratitudes for the past year. Sometimes we’ll also look forward and do goals, but it is the gratitudes I enjoy more. It is a way to shape the year gone by with a positive spin, and focus on the things that brought learning, meaning, and value.

Here are some (not all) of mine for 2017 (I’ve omitted the more private ones).

This year, I’m grateful for:

You, for being part of this email thing. I’ve received so many lovely and encouraging responses, and every one makes me want to keep going, Which I will.
New music, which brought new joys. (Want a weird one? check out Festivalzeit (Apple Music) by Losamol Mundart. Did I mention I have a penchant for German pop and rock? This one is a bit more rappy, but catchy.)
Books, which also brought new joys. (I wrote about this last week.)
The various activists who made their voices heard, whether for marriage equality in Oz, a better deal for animals everywhere, or standing strong against dumpster fires.
Tamsin and Cheryl for being my first readers, and their great feedback and encouragement. If you enjoy what I bring out next year, you’ll have them, in part, to thank.
The self-publishing community, for being so generous with their information and support.
Vego bars, for being chocolate and vegan.
Podcasts and audiobooks for bringing me so much entertainment and information.
The artists who inspire me, like Aaron Sorkin and William Gibson.
Apple, for releasing the iPhone X and giving me a bit of delight back in the phone experience.
Every drop of rain that fell on our place. Every blade of grass that grows.
The animals who share our lives, for their inspiration and showing us there are other ways to be. Also, some of them are really characters and crack me up.
And always, always Billie and Tamsin, for sharing my life. I look forward to 2018 with you.

I invite you to join me in this tradition of gratitudes. What are some of yours?

Fellow human, I wish you blessings of the new year, and I’ll see you in 2018.

Scratching the Reading Itch, or Some of the Books I Liked in 2017

December 23, 2017

First of all, happy holiday of your choice, fellow human. We’re a celebrate-Solstice-then-act-like-sloths-for-a-couple-of-days kind of family. Which means that, practically speaking, any craziness of the season is behind us. As I write, Billie and Tamsin are enjoying future cool thing recommendation Jane the Virgin (no link, but it’s on Netflix), while I grab some quiet time at the computer.

This week, I wanted to share with you some of the books I’ve enjoyed in 2017, in case you need some written or audiobook entertainment over the holiday period. Most of them were not published this year, but were the ones I’ve read or listened to all the way through. You can see the full list of what I read this year up on Goodreads (and while you’re there, give me a follow, if you’re interested.) (Links below are all Amazon.)

I previously recommended as cool things my favourite books of the year. In fiction, it was Max Barry’s Lexicon (along with his Jennifer Government), and in non-fiction John Cleese’s So, Anyway…. You can read my thoughts about them on my Cool Things page.

So, let’s look at some others.

I’ve become quite the fan of John Scalzi, and read four of his this year. My favourite this year was Lock In, followed by his most famous work, Old Man’s War (book one in a series). One of my overall Scalzi favourites was read in a previous year, Redshirts, which might or might not have been inspired by the red shirted characters on a certain popular TV space-based show. If you’ve not read any of him, and like sci-fi with humour, he’s worth a go.

From the speculative fiction department is N. K. Jemison, who is a multi-award-winning author, including the 2016 Hugo for The Fifth Season, and the 2017 Hugo for its sequel, The Obelisk Gate, which I enjoyed this year. Both books include some second-person writing, which is pretty rare, and works in a very interesting way. Also, Jemison is female and a woman of colour, which is a pleasant change in a world of writing dominated white dudes.

On the non-fiction side, most of the non-Cleese books I read were writerly ones. If that is of interest to you, then I commend to your reading the most excellent The War of Art, Write. Publish. Repeat., The Story Grid, and Take off Your Pants (a book about plotting, not anything more salacious).

I hope there’s something in the above for you to enjoy. Happy reading.

So, what was your favourite book to have read in 2017? Drop me a note. I’d love to hear.