Hugh Howey's Blog, page 9

The Phases of Life

Life comes in three phases:

1) Ignoring all advice.

2) Finally trying things and wishing you’d done them sooner.

3) Being an advocate of things and no one listening.

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A New World

Ten years ago I lived in Boone, in the mountains of North Carolina. Boone has an interesting mix of the political spectrum. There are good old boys mixed in with flower children. It’s a bit of a hippie enclave amid a sea of conservatism. In one day, you hear a very wide range of what’s-wrong-with-the-world.

One of the few things everyone agreed upon was that there were too many tourists moving into town. Too many people in general. Overpopulation is a rare area where the left and right both see a problem. Except that the problem does not exist. It hasn’t for a long time. And it’s not going to become a worse problem in the future.

When the “population bomb” books starting coming out in the 70s, they were already wrong. Population growth was no longer accelerating upward; it was decelerating. How was that possible when the number of people on the planet was going up, up, up? To understand this is to understand the difference between velocity and acceleration.

When I throw a ball straight up into the air, I accelerate it with my arm, using my muscles to impart lots of energy into the ball. When I release the ball, it soars higher and higher. But it’s no longer accelerating upward. Even though it has velocity, that velocity is shrinking and shrinking. Pretty soon, the ball reaches the top of its flight and falls back to the earth.

Population growth is possible even when acceleration is negative, if it already has a lot of energy imparted. This is because acceleration can have velocity. It’s like stomping on the gas or letting off the gas. Letting off the gas gradually is one way to come to a complete stop. At any one point, it’ll look like you’re still accelerating (your foot is on the gas), and you’ll think your velocity will continue forever. But the direction of acceleration tells the whole story.

Another example, because it helps to hear it twice. This time with more accuracy about what acceleration is. Right now, you are experiencing the accelerating force of gravity tugging you toward the center of the earth. It’s just that the chair or floor is in the way. The heaviness you feel of your own weight is due to the acceleration of G, or gravity.

When a rocket sits on a launch pad, it is accelerating downward as well. It’s just not moving, because the concrete pad is in the way. So its velocity is zero while its acceleration is 9.8 m/s^2 downward. When the rocket fires, its acceleration slowly reverses. That downward arrow becomes smaller and smaller until it becomes zero. At that point, the rocket has zero velocity and zero acceleration. This is when the people who built the rocket feel their butts clench up. Velocity moves upward as the acceleration becomes positive, overcoming that constant 9.8 m/s^2 of gravity.

As the rocket shoots upward, velocity becomes massive. Here’s where we found our population explosion of the early twentieth century. Lots of velocity and lots of acceleration. But the rocket soon runs out of fuel and the nozzle goes silent. That was us decades ago, no longer accelerating upwards. Now the rocket is coasting. Soon, it’ll crash back to earth.

It may seem laborious to detail this interplay of velocity and acceleration, but numbers mean nothing without understanding where they came from and where they are going. Understanding trends is to understand numbers in motion. It requires some grasp of these concepts. If I tell you the replacement fertility value is 2.1 (the extra 0.1 to account for not every child surviving to adulthood), and then tell you that our current value is 2.5 globally, you’ll think we have growth with no end. Except that the number of children per couple was twice this number fifty years ago. Our foot has come off the gas in a very big way. By 2050, we will be close to the 2.1 number of mere replacement. That’s when the rocket starts falling back to earth. The nozzle is already sputtering, and there are zero indications that it’ll turn back on.

That year of 2050 is significant in that once you see it you won’t stop seeing it. That’s because any article or statistic meant to sow fear of population growth will only list that year and none further. It’s the last year we expect to see the world’s population tick upward. For the last twenty or so years I’ve seen that 2050 number from all the fear-mongers. It’ll be interesting to see how little effect this tactic has as we inch closer and closer to the actual year. 2040 is not so far away, and by then we will all be discussing population collapse in our everyday lives. It’s worth boning up on the subject and preparing for those discussions today.

I started thinking about this anecdotally many years ago, because of personal trends around me. My grandmother had nine siblings. I had two. Among my brother, sister, and myself we have zero children. Looking around at my peers, I noticed a handful having two kids, many having one or none, and almost nobody having five or more. I often wondered where all these extra billions would come from. For every couple you know isn’t having a child, think of how many who are having four to compensate. Or for every only child, how many parents have three children. Anecdote is not data, but the data supports your observations in this case. And it’s not just here.

Today, almost all population growth in the world comes from India and Africa, but they are also letting off the gas. They are the last sputtering of the rocket’s nozzle. The same trends will take place there as elsewhere, only slightly delayed. This makes sense, because lower fertility rates generally come after women have more wealth and opportunity. When women have the freedom to choose, some choose a balance of work and family, or to focus solely on work, or simply to not have kids. The lowering of the stigma of being single, of being gay, also contributes. Population explosion was mostly a measure of women and men not having the choice to not have kids. Now, many choose other focuses. And they have the means to do so.

There are all kinds of forces at play here to affect those choices. In agrarian societies, kids are a source of labor and wealth. In a consumer or services society, kids are a drain on finances. They have gone from being the workforce to being the work! Parents make choices accordingly. The aggregate of these choices is leading to a shrinking world population this century. What will that look like? Some people are absolutely terrified. But it’s difficult to understand why.

One fear is that demographics will change to the point that we can’t care for the elderly. There won’t be enough young people to work in an economy to support the aged and infirmed. This is a really, really weird fear considering that our current economy is based upon caring for a huge number of young people who are economically worthless and physically feeble. We care for children from the day they’re born to at least 18, if not 25. (My mother would say it never ends.) Parents spend a good 20-30 years making sacrifices for a demographic that doesn’t contribute much in return in the way of GDP. The idea that we can’t or won’t care for a population in their 80s and 90s is absurd.

It’s even more absurd because we are already showing how it will be done. Partly by the older populations taking care of themselves and each other. My mom doesn’t need any help in life (except with an occasional Friday NYT crossword), but she lives in a retirement community with a wide range of those needing help and offering help. She has never been more physically and socially active in her life, and I for one am counting the days until I can qualify for a neighborhood with a minimum age requirement. A small number of staff (not necessarily young themselves) is able to care for a larger group of people. Exactly what our school systems do now to care for a youth demographic reliant on others to feed and clothe them. We won’t have both of these challenges at the same time. Society will slowly shift from managing large groups of children to managing large groups of elderly. The amount of work may even be far less, and we will have many tools and advancements to help us by then. (We will also have an elderly generation that is wholly comprised of digital natives who will likely be clamoring for video games, VR headsets, social media, and Netflix).

The future will be very different from the present, and I believe in a good and interesting way. We will see more people my age living with their parents, and not just to help them but for the enjoyment and the company. This might seem alien, but we will adapt. Future generations will marvel at the idea of us having lived with three siblings all under the same roof, just as today’s generation marvels at the idea of ten siblings living together. Things change.

Another thing that will change in the future is the world’s racial makeup. Much of the political upheaval in the US and UK today is a reaction to these trends. Brexit was enacted amid tabloid headlines of the dangers immigrants posed, and Trump won largely on the promise to build a wall. The fear of racial shifts in the short term are an interesting contrast to the flow of racial makeup over the longterm. Populations are not static and never have been. If you watch a historical time-lapse, you’ll see adventurers from Asia sailing across the Pacific to the Americas, then a burst of Europeans appearing, then Africans. The mix moves and shifts. The United States will have briefly appeared mostly white, but it will only be a blip. Attempts to forestall the shifts or control them are both futile and misguided. (A recent report suggests that racist policies from the Trump administration will delay whites becoming a minority by a whopping five years. All that evil for the briefest of delays.)

Trying to control the racial makeup of a country is a bizarre fascination. For the racists, there will always be enclaves to go join, gated communities that are hostile to diversity, so why not enjoy the bunkered and sheltered life and stop worrying about population trends around you? One theory that rings true is that those who stomp on minorities do not look forward to becoming one. If you think being in a minority is bad, perhaps work harder to shore up equal treatment methods while you can. Because the population of the future is going to be darker than the present. If this disturbs you to any degree at all, you have some racism to work on. If it doesn’t disturb you how the Americas were conquered or how Africans were enslaved, then ditto. I think we can simultaneously accept that history has happened, know that history, be disturbed by it, love ourselves and each other in the present, and also grasp that the future will be alien to us. All these things are true.

Some very clever people will continue to attempt to sow fear about population changes. For many years these were the folks who thought the Earth couldn’t support us all. They were wrong. Now you’ll start hearing from those who say population declines will be the end of us. They are also wrong. At some point we will find an equilibrium. It might be a few billion. It might bounce up and down between some minimum and maximum. But we will never go back to the days of uncontrolled growth, because choices will not diminish going forward. There will be more and more interesting things to distract us and more control over our sexual outlets and our reproductive outcomes. What some fear, I believe, is that population contraction will lead to economic contraction. To which I say, “so what?” It is very possible that economic contraction means we no longer have the job specialists required to build large yachts, nor the compounding interest in a small number of hands to afford said yachts. That may be the end of some people’s worlds, but it won’t be the end of the actual world. Speculating about the future that awaits highlights our values, doesn’t it? As cities empty out and entire countries no longer have the growth needed to support their populations, we will probably gather in smaller pockets of the earth. Large areas will return to their natural state, and we will visit these areas and live only sparsely there. Will anything be lost if Venice is abandoned while Milan becomes more diverse? Sure. But only if you hold the naive belief that Venice was ever going to be permanent.

The very continents we live on will no longer exist some day. They will slide back to the magma while other continents rise. It’ll happen so slowly we won’t notice it, but shorelines have already changed in my lifetime. Demographics have shifted during my 45 years. That will continue. We won’t need to flee to Mars or fly off to the stars to see a new world, because one is forming as you read this. It’ll be very different, but we’ll still be here in some number, in some mix of colors, hopefully caring a lot less about measuring either of those things.

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Tomorrow is too Late

I used to take some chances with my bad guys. I’ve written my fair share of them. But if I wrote a scene where cops teargassed clergy off the stoop of their own church, so a president who has never believed in any god for a day in his life could get his photo taken with an upside-down Bible that he’s never read a word of, I’d have to delete it before my editor got a chance to berate me for being ridiculous.

I’m also guilty — most writers are — of relying on coincidence in my stories. Something huge will be unfolding in my plot when another major event happens! Didn’t see that coming, did you innocent reader?! But my inner editor will always warn me to make some effort to link the big events. It can’t seem like major things are happening on top of one another “just because.” I certainly couldn’t get away with throwing police brutality and mass protests on top of a global pandemic, with a recent backdrop of presidential impeachment over blackmailing an ally for dirt on an election opponent. Who would want to read that? Who would be crazy enough to write it?

In May of 2018 (over two years ago!), John Joseph Adams reached out to me about putting together another triptych. A few years prior, we’d released the Apocalypse Triptych, three amazing anthologies full of every conceivable way you can imagine the world ending by an all-star collection of science fiction writers. The series had been a big success, so we decided to do something similar for dystopia stories. We sent a call out to some of our favorite writers, and I started dreaming up my own contribution to the anthology. It needed to be three stories that showed the beginning, middle, and end of a world descending into some kind of dystopian ruin. I knew I wanted to write about the wealth gap and race relations, two things I’d been wrestling with as I sailed through poor islands in Captain Cook’s wake. I tried to come up with a world that pushed beyond the plausible just far enough to be satire, but not too far that it doesn’t serve as a warning.

Two years later, and the world has passed me by. My upcoming stories are going to feel like ones that take place today, rather than tomorrow.

At the end of June, you’ll be able to read a series of stories in which Detroit descends into a warzone, in which the United States breaks out into a cultural civil war, in which minorities are being caged, a young black man is beat up by cops because a woman phoned in a suspicious boy sitting on her stoop (he was tying his laces). There’s even a president willing to kill not for anything as grand as gaining political power, but because it might help make their grandkids a little wealthier.

It’s ridiculous. It’s heartfelt. I cried while writing these stories, and I cried every time I made an editing pass. The characters in these stories feel real to me. My plan now is to turn these stories into a novel to give them even more room to breathe. Because they deserve that. It’s the bare fucking minimum in this world that we all deserve to breathe.

It’s hard being a writer today, not just because reality wants to make fools of us all, but because our creative output needs to spark joy in the end. Even the sad stories have to be told with the joy and pride of getting them out there. But how do you celebrate art while your cities burn? While so many are hurting? With so many lives lost to a pandemic that could have been mitigated?

There’s a part of me that thinks these stories don’t matter, because we are living them. But there’s a bigger part of me that screams out how important these kinds of stories have always been. When we came up with the titles for this triptych, we decided to honor three of the great dystopian novels of all time. Because those books serve as timeless warning of what can happen when we let our guards down, when we succumb to the baser elements of our natures, when we forget our past or don’t pay attention to the present. These are stories that aren’t always comfortable, but they are necessary. They are marching stories. They are protests.

As writers of speculative fiction, one of our jobs is to plumb the past and current events and tell stories that seem absurd, but serve to highlight our faults and our injustices. As human beings, our job should be to make such art completely unnecessary. Unfortunately, that day has not yet come. These stories are more necessary than ever. We have to raise our voices however we can. We have to keep writing. This is our march. And it will be toward progress.

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World Building

When we sit down to write a novel, we start with a blank page. The world we create can take any shape we like. It doesn’t need to have our rules. It doesn’t need to have our history. The only constraint is our lack of imagination.

Oh, but what a constraint this is. Our imaginations aren’t very good at conjuring up worlds dissimilar to the ones we know. When we create new lifeforms, they tend to look and act pretty much like us. When we predict the future, we tend to be too optimistic about some kinds of progress and technology, while being way too pessimistic about advancements we can’t seem to imagine. True world-building is hard. In reality as well as in fiction.

If you created a world from scratch, what kinds of rules would you create? How different would it be from our world? How different from the American constitution?

We change our rules slowly and begrudgingly, even when the answer is obvious. It’s partly because our imaginations are poor, and partly because of the heavy weight of existing systems and biases. Many of the American founders wrote poetically about the equality of all men, but pragmatically settled on a compromise with the southern states to retain slavery in their new government. Again, a blank page isn’t as blank as we imagine. We bring all our old thoughts and knowledge with us.

How would we structure our government today if we were starting from scratch? Would we really come up with an electoral college, where votes count more based on land area rather than people? Would we enshrine gun rights in a world where governments have tanks and flying bombers? Or would we need to arm people with tanks and nukes to keep ourselves safe? Would we make voting as difficult as it is today? Or would we make it more difficult? Would we lay out our infrastructure based on car ownership? Or some other means of transportation? What would our cities look like? How would the internet work?

What we have today is a mish-mash of what’s come before, much of it hammered roughly into place. For a country based on cries of equality, we’ve had to constantly amend our constitution to include more people in that universal claim. The Supreme Court has several times declared that we aren’t all equal. Wouldn’t this be one of the first unbendable rules we’d create?

The reason I read and write science fiction is that the genre allows us to explore these questions. The future as a blank canvas … this is what I spend a lot of my time thinking about. Inspiration often comes from questioning something we all take for granted. My newest short stories came about as I questioned the notion of inheritance. It started with this idea: What if we had an inheritance tax of 100%? What if every penny you owned went to the state the day you died?

The reaction most people have to this question is anger and barely controlled violence. People want to leave their things to their loved ones, and they often rely on acquired inheritance to pay off lifelong debts. But let’s think about it for a moment. Because everything would change if we couldn’t control where our money went after we died. And if we had all the things we could fund by wiping out generational wealth.

First, let’s think about the children of wealthy parents who balk at the notion of not getting a huge lump sum one day. For most of these kids, a 100% inheritance tax would be a massive gift to them. Rather than hoarding away their money in large piles until the day they died, wealthy parents would suddenly feel the pressure to provide more to their kids while they are still alive. The threat of losing it all to the government would loosen most pursestrings immediately. And wealthy kids don’t seem to get that many of them will be in their 60s, 70s, or 80s by the time they inherit anything. With a total inheritance tax in place, parents would be transferring money to their kids immediately, funding college, investment accounts, providing housing, everything they can. So the fears of trustfund kids is unfounded. The results would often be the opposite of what they imagine.

Now think about it from the wealthy parents’ point of view. I had a long talk with a friend of mine who grew up poor and had to fight and scrape for everything he has. So did his wife. Both were successful and managed to save and acquire several million dollars of combined assets. They have three kids, and they wrestled with how best to make sure their kids didn’t suffer undue hardships, but that their kids also learned the lessons of independence that they had. How could they take care of them without spoiling them?

Their solution was to let the kids know from the earliest of days — as they were first learning about money as kids — that they would be taken care of until they graduated high school, and that their college would be paid for, but no other money would be coming their way. They’d be on their own. They’d need to plan for their futures. Don’t expect a windfall late in life, and don’t expect handouts or help with the bills throughout life. Here are some solid values and lessons, here is a college education, you can handle this, prepare yourselves.

It seems like a fair balance. A complete inheritance tax would annoy the vast majority of wealthy people, but some would probably find on further reflection a hidden benefit or two. Questions on how not to leave too much would no longer drive a wedge between family members. Everyone would know not to expect a windfall late in life.

Those are the outlying cases, of course. The people who have vast sums. Wouldn’t this really punish those who have very little and rely on inheritance to get out of debt late in life? This is where our lack of imagination traps us inside a system that benefits the wealthy few. Those of us who know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck will suffer a system that gives us a glimmer of hope for a big payout one day. A lottery win. A wealthy aunt or uncle. We want a big pile shoved our way. Why? Because housing is expensive, healthcare is onerous, and college debt is crushing.

Let’s go back to our blank page for a moment and talk about building a world. We might build a world like we have today, where most people are born into poverty, where the middle class barely exists anymore, and these people live with the stress of making ends meet, they acquire debt in the form of credit cards, college loans, and mortgages. And when they are sixty years old, they might get a lump sum that erases most of that debt, just in time to build up a tiny lump sum to leave to their kids, who have been struggling and acquiring the same debts right behind them.

That’s one way. Here’s another:

Every person is born into a world where college is free, healthcare is free, and housing is guaranteed. Those debts will never accrue. You’ll never have to make those payments. If any unlucky accident happens to you, you’ll get patched up without a bill. If you want to get a college degree, you just need to make the grades and get admission. If you can’t afford a mortgage or your rent, there are non-stigmatized rooms waiting for you. All of it is funded by a 100% inheritance tax and higher taxes on luxury goods.

What fascinates me is not that the latter system makes more sense, but that human psychology would still have most people choose the former system. Our current system. Even many of those who have to struggle to make those payments, and who acquire those debts, have an animalistic attraction to an unfair system that rewards luck and handouts to a system of equal opportunity. An entire blog post could be written on why I think this is. Part of it is that we live in a diverse society, and for many the assumption is that people of a different demographic will gain more power in this new system. Part of it is the irrational belief people have that it’ll be them who gets lucky and wins a fortune, and they want an unfair system to step inside once they join the club. Whatever these psychological failings, it creates a system that harms those who keep voting to maintain that system.

My upcoming short stories in the Dystopian Triptych coming out next month are about inheritance, and they were inspired by these economic musings. In this future world I’ve built, a medical researcher has discovered a way to unlock a newborn’s full potential. With a bit of DNA manipulation, their every dial and knob is turned up to the max, so you get the most physically and intellectually gifted version of that child and that adult. It’s the gift that every parent dreams of, for their kids to maximize their potential.

Of course, the people who can afford this procedure are already those with the most to leave their kids. The gap between the haves and have nots is going to become a chasm. This researcher quickly realizes this and decides to go rogue. She destroys her notes and takes her procedure underground. She starts giving this gift to the very poor. The idea is to level the playing field. Since we refuse to distribute money fairly, she has found another way to tilt the scales back toward equality. The children of the poor will soon catch up. They’ll become the leaders and the wealthy of tomorrow. And someone else will get this gift of hers.

But of course it’s not that easy. Because the people with money and power aren’t going to stand by while their advantages are eroded away. They’re going to attempt to wipe out these upstarts and steal the process for themselves. They want it all. One advantage is not enough.

The scariest thing about writing these stories is that they feel entirely believable to me. Like the dystopian works I love to read, they don’t seem to have come from a blank page, but from the world in which we live. There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about our current systems. If I were designing a world from scratch, it would be a lot different from our world. One of my foundational rules would be that there could be no profit from suffering. Prisons, healthcare, military contractors, could not make a penny. Because the incentive becomes to have more inmates, more procedures, and more war. A lesson capitalism teaches but then does all the wrong things about.

There would be no inheritance in the world I’d build. But there would also not be so much debt accrued by basic human needs. Doing this would prevent money from pooling up in static, stagnant accounts. There would be inherent pressure for that money to flow and change hands, to never sit still, which is what drives a vibrant economy and creates widespread wealth. Right now we have wealthy people buying artwork that sits unseen in warehouses because they’ve run out of viable investments. That does not create jobs. Handouts to the wealthy does not create jobs. More money injected to the bottom is what drives spending and boosts everyone’s fortunes.

In my world, where you were born would be irrelevant to where you can choose to live. As long as you pay your taxes and obey the laws, you can go live anywhere you choose. We hear much about the benefits of competition among businesses, but we rarely espouse the same forces among geography. And we often hear the dangers of allowing new people into our society, but we are free to have as many children as we like. Why do we fear the former and not the latter? I have guesses, and they aren’t flattering.

What about you? What things in our current systems of governance make little sense to you? What kind of world would you paint on a blank canvas? Unleash your imagination. Assume everything you currently believe is wrong. And then start writing.

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Sincerity and Song

Do you remember the first time you went outside in the blackness of night? The first time you walked away from all light and felt darkness surround you, wrapping itself across your shoulders like a blanket of shadow?

I was seven or eight years old before I ventured into the deep black. It was different than the darkness of unlit rooms in our house at night, which gave me creeps enough. It was far more palpable than my closet and my under-the-bed, where I knew terrible things lived. This was the darkness of the whole world I was feeling, with woods of swaying trees and an old barn loaded with ghosts. I was in the country, at my dad’s farmhouse, and the barn lay several thousand away, down a grassy hill and up a gravel drive, past the brick woodshop and the derelict sheds full of old tools and tractors.

The dare was to run all the way to the barn, touch its white clapboard siding, and come back to the house. A walk I’d done a million times in the safety of day. But this was different. The horror started as soon as I stepped out of the carport and into the grass. There was a deep black out there that I’d never seen nor felt before. Chills ran through my body, but also a small laughing voice that knew I was being silly, that knew there was no such thing as ghosts. Right? They weren’t real, were they? I could do this. I could never do this. I would act calm and cool in front of my friends. I would come back from the barn running and screaming and feeling a million ghosts clawing at my back and my ankles ready to devour me and drag me into the pits of hell and we would collapse in fits of laughter and shivering and breathless wheezing and dare the next one to do it now, your turn, don’t be a wimp…

Do you remember?

Can you write about it?

What about the first time you kissed the lips of someone you liked and you hoped they liked you back? Or the first time you realized your parents were regular people? Or the first time you saw a magic trick? Or the time you wished you’d done something completely different with your life? Or back when you still believed in fairy tales?

That’s what you should write about.

Sure, your story should have wizards and aliens and pirates and professors having affairs with their students (gotta include the Literary types!). But what is your story really about? What are these people going through? Don’t you remember going through those things as well? You probably aren’t alone. Remind your readers. Write with sincerity about the things you know and feel and fear.

The only other thing to master is writing with song. Write with a silent voice in your head that hears the words. Embrace the iambic pentameter of rise and fall, of the sharp and the sonorous, of the words that live in the roof of our mouths vs the words that escape through the teeth. All words have sound, even when read silently. Give them flow.

Look at that last paragraph as an example. Note how the word “roof” lives where I describe it lives, up in the top of the mouth when you say it, when you think it. It’s a word that doesn’t escape the lips so much as scurry back toward your sinuses. Compare that with the words “escape through the teeth,” which does exactly what it says it does. When you write, have your words do the actions described by your words. When you write about a young child running back from a scary barn, do not give him or the reader or your words a place to stop.

Sincerity and song. Truth and timbre. Put all your feelings into your craft, and craft your words carefully. Know when to repeat yourself. Know when to say something new. Know when to capture attention, and when words should flow simply as the sea across the sand, that soft hiss and bubble of white foam receding into the next curling wave, no need really to convey information in a rare moment of instead giving your reader a chance to catch up, to regain their breath, to think about what they’ve already read, before you fuck their shit up again.

When you sit down in front of your blank page and blinking cursor, your mind a billion scattered ideas of singular genius, your fingers unwilling to move, just think back on all the moments when you felt something deeply and powerfully. Think about the places you have feared and the places you have dreamed of seeing. Think of who you are and who you wish to become. Write that. And make it sing.

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Changing the World

Zoom out with your mind for a moment and picture planet Earth from a distance. Note the clusters of light at major cities on the night side. Picture the airplanes and container ships slowly creeping vast distances. Cars like ants along their sugar highways. Everyone jostling and bustling and hustling.

When I do this, I see humanity mostly obsessed with pulling ores out of the ground and piling them up to make cities. If you were trying to make sense of an ant colony, you would see them doing the same sort of thing as they moved dirt one direction and food the other way. Nearly eight billion of us, spread across the globe, all moving things around in a dance of city-building.

Then a small bit of chemistry came along, too small even for microscopes. A virus, which isn’t even a thing alive, but more an environmental detritus that persists because our bodies are receptive to its programming. Our bodies have cell walls that need to allow good communication through, and material for making copies of good cells, which leaves us open to all kinds of mistakes and marauders.

This tiny strand of chemistry jumped from a (likely) single bat to a single human. And the whole endeavor shut down. The planes quieted. The humans quit moving piles of dirt into cities. Everything froze and the economy stalled. It’s pretty remarkable when you think of the size and scale involved, how something vanishingly small exposed the fragility of civilization.

Of course, it is a temporary stall. We have enough altitude to pull out of this glide. China is already rebooting their economy. This thing will move like waves, and it’ll resurface and bounce back, but a cure will be found and life will go on, but we’ll be changed by this global scare. Hopefully in more good ways than bad.

The United States has yet to receive the full brunt of this pandemic, but some of the potential good can already be seen. Politicians on the right have called for what amounts to a universal basic income, which is an inevitable good that ought to arrive sooner rather than later. More businesses are going to realize their workforce can be productive from a distance, which will reduce commutes and traffic, make child care easier, increase happiness and productivity, and increase profit margins as costly real estate is reduced. Hopefully, hygiene will go up and handshaking will disappear for good, which will mean fewer people getting sick from other bugs and a reduction from the tens of thousands who die from the flu every year.

But the big lesson for me is this: We’ve always been told that to make change in our system, we need to take to the streets and stay in the streets until we are heard. I’ve always wondered how we could be expected to pull that off. How do you use the bathroom? Where do you get your food? How do you rest? Or stay focused or entertained?

Turns out we had it all wrong. Before I point out the obvious, I think we should all be angry. Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, Green, whatever. Because we keep hearing that the things we and our families need (healthcare that’s universal and guaranteed, loan forgiveness that kills us with payments and debt, free education for ourselves and our children, a smart grid, a switch to green energy) is all too expensive, that there’s no way to pay for it. But without debate and with no delay, another 1.5 TRILLION dollars has been handed to banks, investors, and corporate interests. The fed rate has been slashed to zero. Extreme measures just to keep the stock markets happy. Meanwhile, nothing for you.

Imagine this for a moment: Imagine if 60% or 70% of Americans agreed on a handful of points. Imagine if we made a list of demands so that everyone has housing, education, healthcare, opportunity. And instead of having to go out in the streets, all we had to do was slowly stock up on canned ravioli and then start catching up on our reading lists and our TV. Just stay home. Kill the engine that right now benefits the people at the top far more than those who are truly driving that engine. All the ants stop until the queen is forced to listen.

Strikes helped win concessions that all workers enjoy today. The refusal to allow inequities to continue. One of the most brilliant and pernicious propaganda campaigns of the last century has been to highlight where unions have been corrupt in order to get enough workers to reject the idea of unions altogether. Unity was the key to so much of what we won. Since we’ve been divided, our wages haven’t kept up with the price of keeping ourselves and our families healthy and educated. Since we’ve been divided, minimum wages have stayed put while inflation makes everything more expensive and those in charge have given precedence to the stock markets.

Changing the world ended up being simple. Just a little strand of chemistry making a tiny leap. Imagine if we went about it in a smarter way.

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Following the Math

Before we talk about numbers, let’s talk about empathy. Death sucks. It’s probably the number one worst thing about living. Otherwise, living is mostly great. But death kinda mucks it up in the end.

Over 4,000 people have died from the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s more than died in the US during the 9/11 attacks. It’s painful when large numbers of people die from something new and seemingly sudden. That’s happening right now. My heart hurts for every one of those who will pass away or suffer. Even if it was 400, it would be terrible. Even if it was four. And it’ll get worse before it gets better.

But it will get better. The curves don’t lie. In China and South Korea, new cases are leveling off and flattening. South Korea is a great case study, because it’s a more open society. Doubts about its numbers can be chalked up to good ole paranoia rather than the very prudent doubts we can have about China’s numbers. It’s also reinforcing how well the numbers from both countries align. You can see the end of exponential growth below.

You can read more about the above graph here, and what it all means. This is a few days old, and the new data only reinforces the author’s view. Yesterday in South Korea, new COVID-19 cases fell below 150 for the first time since late February. And South Korea is testing LOTS of people. Well over 10,000 a day. They have drive-thru clinics that should be replicated elsewhere (the UK is following suit).

So the lower cases in South Korea aren’t for lack of testing. And they are following the trends in China, where less than a hundred new cases were added yesterday. So what’s happening? Good medicine and good habits are happening. Notably, it isn’t the draconian quarantine procedures in China that seem to be working in South Korea, because they haven’t been as harsh. It’s mostly huge amounts of tests being performed, so that every social crack the virus attempts to flee through can be sealed up tight.

Testing is critical. It is also the biggest stumble so far in the United States. Thankfully, we are starting to see testing kits roll out from universities and the private sector, because the CDC was woefully unprepared for this and slow to act. With increased testing, we will see an explosion of cases. We will witness the same exponential growth here we saw elsewhere. And then the asymptotic leveling before the big declines. These are the same sorts of curves seen during other pandemics.

A note here about a terrible book I read years ago called THE EARTH IS FLAT. It was a really awful book about economics where exponential growth was forecast to continue indefinitely, which led to terrible conclusions that were wrong before the book even went to print. The same thing is happening here with the virus as people assume exponential growth is some law of nature that can ignore other human behaviors.

Exponential viral growth occurs when we are being our normal, gross human selves, sneezing into our hands and in each other’s faces, shaking hands all the time, picking our noses, chewing our fingernails, standing in line to shake the pastor’s hands, kissing on first dates, etc. The idea that these behaviors and our gatherings would continue while millions were dying is and always has been paranoia and fantasy. Our behaviors and our policies change in light of pandemics such as these. There is historical and modern precedent. When schools close and conferences are canceled, that’s both an inconvenience and a very good thing. When a friend refuses to shake your hand, that’s them being responsible. When a colleague calls in sick, that’s them being a goddamn hero worthy of medal. These reasons and more are why this virus will not infect the world and kill tens of millions of people. That just will not happen.

Now, there is still lots to follow and process about what’s happening around the world today. I’m writing this from Portugal, where you’d hardly know anything was happening. There is toilet paper and hand sanitizer on the store shelves. Restaurants and museums are packed. No one is hoarding or wearing masks. Meanwhile, two countries away, Italy is on lockdown. And the US is bracing for impact.

While this will eventually get better, for the next few months it’s going to be a rolling thunder of a pandemic. While it spreads to one country, it’ll be beaten into submission elsewhere. While one place handles it efficiently, another will blunder and stumble. There are going to be international travel restrictions for a long time, as countries attempt to limit blowback. A few weeks ago I was suggesting that China will soon be one of the safest places to be to avoid this virus. They are now trying to limit travel back INTO their country from other parts of the world. A far cry from a month ago when it appeared the virus was more likely to move from China to elsewhere.

This asymmetric aspect of the pandemic will mean some place is always in crisis, while other places recover. The headlines are almost all going to focus on the former. The green steep part of the curve above will be the only math people do. No one will report as wildly about the leveling of cases and the return to normalcy. Panic will always sell more than reality. And there will be enough bad news to come … tens of thousands of people will die from this. Hundreds of thousands eventually. This virus will likely resurface in the fall and sweep around the world again, possibly stronger than before. A vaccine will be critical in the next year to end this for good. And we will need to be ready for the next virus, because our living density, our constant travel, and our poor hygiene and social habits will leave us vulnerable to pandemics for as long as we’re around.

For now, the best advice is still to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water. Soap is a miracle destroyer of viruses, even better than hand sanitizer. I know that’s hard to believe, because we take soap’s miraculous chemical structure for granted, but it’s true. Soap up. Lather. Get every nook and cranny. Stop being so damn lazy with how you wash up, and stop being self-conscious about it. Inspire good habits in your friends and family. Also: Clean your devices and keyboards. Wipe down frequently touched surfaces. Stop touching your face all the damn time. These things will not just vastly reduce your chances of getting this virus, but also the colds and flus that already wreak ruin. It’ll also reduce the likelihood of you infecting others.

The last bit of math to discuss is sobering and sad. The average age of those dying from COVID-19 is currently around 80. This virus is cruel to the elderly and the ill. As this becomes more widely known and understood, please don’t feel invincible if you are younger and healthy. You can still get sick, which can lead to real issues in small numbers of cases. You can get your family sick. You can get the vulnerable sick. It behooves us to all treat this seriously in order to protect our loved ones and our communities.

I leave you with a video of a doctor rubbing paint around her hands to show you how terrible we normals are at doing this. Watch it. It’ll change how you wash up, and it could save a life.

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All the Stories We Tell

I can’t stop thinking about the science-fiction post-apocalyptic nightmare we’d be living in right now if the regular flu didn’t exist until December of 2019 and it suddenly appeared and started spreading in the age of the internet.

32 million Americans have gotten the flu this year so far.

310,000 needed hospitalization.

18,000 have died.

This year. Imagine if this were a new thing or being reported with every single case. We’d be locked up in our homes eating our shoes by now.

COVID-19 has a very good chance of killing more Americans than the regular flu this year alone. The death rate is higher; we are lulled into complacency because we think this is just another flu (it isn’t); and we have an incompetent president who has almost no checks on his power and cares more about the stock market than he cares about your life. (Yes, you)

But the biggest difference is going to be the reporting and monitoring of this. It won’t take very big numbers to create a panic. The good news about a little panic is that large assemblies of people, where these viruses love to party, are going to get cancelled or postponed. That’s a good thing. It’s also going to get people washing their hands and touching each other and themselves less. Also a good thing. Click here for an excellent study on how these precautions helped in 1918 (comparing cities that took this seriously and those that didn’t).

It’s an odd in-between state to follow this outbreak. Each individual life lost is a tragedy. Those who suffer for weeks and recover are also worthy of our utmost sympathy. Then there are those who are in the medical community who are going to work long hours in terrifying conditions. And those whose lives are going to be disrupted. There are event organizers who are going to watch a year of work go down the drain. Business who will shutter due to loss of economic activity. That’s a story we can tell, and it’s an accurate story.

We could tell a very similar story about cars, air pollution, global warming, guns, heart disease, smoking, depression, drug addiction. There are dozens of major epidemics out there worthy of our respect, their sufferers deserving our sympathy. This is yet another valid story. And another story that can be made less tragic through good judgement, sound action, and science.

The other story we will be able to tell one day is how we responded to this crisis. What were our individual and collective actions? China clamped down on this hard, in a way that by accounts from residents of Wuhan were very difficult to endure (and remain difficult). But there are also reports from the streets of Wuhan full of pride for having sacrificed in a way that helped limit the spread. That’s another valid story to tell.

All of these stories can be true at once. Because they highlight many things that we keep at bay from our daily consciousness: Our time here is limited; many of us die earlier than we hoped we might; we leave so much undone in our lives; there are so many things that might sweep us away…

But also: Our lives are wonderful and worth preserving; science is incredible to the point of being miraculous; we can do things as a group that none of us could do on our own with a million lifetimes; the suffering of our neighbors should be something we can feel and sympathize with.

We rarely have to tackle the multi-faceted truths of life. Normally, we worry how our hair looks or if we unplugged the iron. We worry about getting the next bill paid or our email inboxes. Life is bigger, fuller, richer, and more tragic than this. Keep that in perspective as we wrestle with the challenges to come. And wash your hands.

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The Two Kinds of Pleasure

A popular refrain from writers is that they don’t enjoy writing, but they enjoy having written. I find this is true for so many things in life. There’s the joy we experience while doing a thing, and then there’s the joy of having done the thing. The “have had” pleasure.

Exercise is a good example. Some exercise I love in the moment, especially if there’s a sport involved. Other exercise (like hot yoga) makes me miserable while I’m doing it, but afterward I feel so good that I wonder why I don’t do it more often. It’s difficult to commit to these “have had” types of pleasure, even when we know the reward will be worth it. That’s why I often say you have to force yourself to get started (sit down in front of your story. Or get the yoga mat out and just lay on it and stretch). Once you get a taste of the “have had,” you can often push yourself to keep going.

Where it gets tricky is with diminishing returns. There was a lot of joy in sailing across the Pacific Ocean. There was also a thrill in having had done it. No one can take that accomplishment away. I would enjoy doing it again, in the moment, but would I enjoy the “have had” aspect? Probably not. I don’t think I’d feel anything extra from having done it twice.

This can be a challenge for writers, especially if their best work comes from the “have had” type of excitement. For me, this was overcome by not telling the same story over and over. Or even by exploring new genres. With exercise, it comes from shaking up the routine now and then. Or setting different goals.

These are just different tools to motivate ourselves. We have to find the things that will give us long term contentment and pride (the “have had” pleasures), and also find ways to enjoy the journey until we get there. Just as importantly, we have to understand when and how these two types of pleasure decouple for each of us so we don’t get stuck pursuing the wrong experiences.

What makes you happy? How are you managing your time so you experience more of that? And how can you tweak the necessary things in life to derive more joy from them? I listen to podcasts on my commute and while I’m folding laundry or doing the dishes, because I learn from podcasts and so I get a huge “have had” pleasure from them. Music gives me more pleasure in the moment, but it doesn’t last. What about you?

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This Season was Written by Dicks

One of the more pernicious effects of the Trump administration is that non-crazy people now have to distrust government agencies. And that conspiracy theorists are difficult to mock.

Neither of these things used to be true. The idea that government is inherently untrustworthy or that they are inefficient at their jobs … is mostly wrong. Most government agencies work quite well, and lots of government officials are very good at what they do (and they provide amazing services).

For every long-line DMV anecdote, I can point to several amazing NOAA predictions and services that saved lives. For every weird OSHA regulation that seems unnecessary, I can point to fewer workplace deaths and accidents. Our rivers are no longer on fire because of the EPA. Fewer die from lung disease because of the Clean Air Act. Government works really well quite often.

An aside: Capitalists love to point out areas of governmental weakness while never mentioning the Bernie Madoffs, the Enrons, the tech bubbles, or the epic crashes that mar their favored system. And those who loathe governments and socialism paradoxically lust over the police, fire departments, and the military that are pure examples of both. No system is perfect — and searching to reinforce a bias against one system is dangerously easy.

Another aside: I highly, highly, highly recommend Michael Lewis’s fantastic book THE FIFTH RISK if you want to change your mind about the effectiveness and efficiency of government agencies and employees.

Government is largely good. Conspiracy theories are largely bad.

I really hate conspiracy theories. They’re not just dumb, they aren’t even very imaginative or entertaining. And when I say “dumb,” I’m talking epically stupid. As in: not even internally logical or consistent. And they usually don’t lead anywhere interesting; they just peter out or lose their legs after a few leaps of logic. Example:

Democrats colluded with Russia to assemble fake dossier on Trump to sabotage his election and then kept it super secret from everyone to get Trump elected, so they could infiltrate the government and form a deep state which then sat around helplessly while Trump did all the stupid things he wanted to do anyway, and all the people we don’t like are being rounded up and sent to Gitmo while body doubles take their place, because…

I’m not making that one up. It’s a real theory. How about this one:

“There’s a super secret cabal of people in charge, and they manufactured a virus to sow panic and released it in China. But … they are covering it up because they don’t want to cause panic which might wipe out the markets, because they want to make a lot of money when the markets go up. But … they are also behind the big drops in the market because they also shorted it, and it’s all to make us learn Esperanto and pay with Euros because a global government will mean … something bad somehow?“

Conspiracy theories are addictive because of the sense of secret knowledge that only you know. And since no one can be trusted, anything that doesn’t fit your narrative is a lie. Which gives you the freedom to concoct any cool story out of the ginormous froth of information out there. Remember the Bible Code? How a computer algorithm found all kinds of predictions in the King James version of the Bible? Gather enough noise, and you can create a signal.

In the off chance that someone from a usually distrusted source says something you agree with, you can suddenly trust that information and say they screwed up and mistakenly said the truth for once, or they are a hidden do-gooder, or the secret cabal didn’t kill them in time. Or really whatever you want. Incidentally, this is how books are written. My books, anyway. You come up with semi-plausible things that string along in twists and turns … the more sensational the better.

The idea that governments couldn’t be trusted was never that big of a leap. Governments keep secrets all the time, and have all kinds of hidden agendas. They’re just usually not as idiotic as most conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies are usually bros doing insider trading, or rich parents bribing schools to sneak their moronic kids past admissions. Or perverts covering up their molestations and people in authority hiding their bigotry.

It was never as dumb as any actual conspiracy theory. And then along comes Trump. Now I don’t know the difference between the regular conspiracies that have always gone on, the idiotic conspiracy theories I love making fun of, and headlines on www.TheOnion.com.

These days, official government hurricane forecasts get Sharpie edits because Trump is worse at geography than a second grader and there are inter-agency squabbles about not being able to correct Trump when he screws up which state is where because he’s a man-baby with a glass ego. These days (not kidding), the National Archives is ordered to blur out protest signs in inauguration photos to protect that same glass ego. Or press secretaries are told to lie about the size of a crowd. Like … the stuff that happens now is just about as dumb as the conspiracy theories I enjoy mocking. And government agencies are leaned on to fudge stuff or risk getting fired … which feeds into the conspiracy theorist’s most powerful tool: the ability to cast doubt on truth and evidence.

Not sure if any of you follow the Qanon stuff, but it is gloriously dumb and highly entertaining and also scary as hell. I mean … people who believe this nuttery are allowed to vote. Some actually serve in office. They really think liberals are being rounded up and replaced with body doubles. And other wacky stuff.

While working on this blog post, I had an email exchange with a fellow writer who has much more elaborate theories than I could ever come up with (probably why they sell more books than I do). One theory is that COVID-19 was developed and deployed as a weapon (I would never write a series based on so facile a stunt). It was deployed in Wuhan, near one of China’s two bioweapons laboratories, so the maker of the weaponized flu strain could blame it on China and destroy their economy while also blaming them!

But we all know that if this virus came from a lab, it escaped when a worker snagged their hazmat suit on the corner of a lab bench, sweatily put some tape over the rip, snuck out of the lab without telling anyone about the incident, and called into work sick the next day with a terrible cough, only to kiss his girlfriend on the mouth in super-slow-motion with spittle on his lips…

Look, all conspiracy theories are bunk. And we are right to mock them. The only people we ought to trust in this world are scientists who work with facts and deliver the straight truth. Speaking of which, the current best theory for why our universe seems empty of intelligent life is that we live in a simulation. No, for real. It’s pretty much a mathematical certainty that none of this is real. Scientists can prove it.

Which would explain the terrible writing. It would explain how we ever got a presidential ticket of Bush and Dick, how our last election was probably decided by a guy named Weiner sending out dick picks, and how there was ever a professional race car driver named Dick Trickle in a sport where access to bathroom breaks is heavily restricted for hours at a time.

Conspiracy theories aren’t real. Because none of this is. It’s all a poorly written mess written by a bunch of dicks who are obviously obsessed with penises and who probably look like little mushroom men. And they’re just jerking us around.

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