Magic in a Bottle

July 7, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

I recently exchanged emails with someone I knew from a writers’ group several years ago. We’d had great fun sharing stories with a lively, imaginative circle of friends. Even the silliest stuff usually found an appreciative audience who understood it in the playful spirit it was intended. But after a while, we just got busy with other things and drifted away. We talked about how much we’d enjoyed the group and how we missed those days.

“Sometimes my husband asks if I’m ever going to get back into it,” my friend told me, “but I don’t know that it’s possible to recapture magic in a bottle.”

After the conversation ended, I thought about all the moments that we don’t fully appreciate until after they have gone by. We chase around after our kids when they’re young, and we feel exasperated because they’re so noisy and they make such a mess. Maybe we snap at them, “Grow up!”—and then they do, and we’re left looking at their empty places across the quiet dinner table.

Or we complain about trivial annoyances at work, even though it’s a pretty good job and we get along well with our coworkers. We let the small stuff get blown totally out of proportion, and we grumble about every careless or inconsiderate thing someone does. We fantasize about how much better a new job would be. But after we’ve moved on, we don’t remember the little annoyances; it’s the good times that stick in our minds.

Of course, we learn something every time our circumstances change. Our perspective broadens, and we become more resilient. Even though change is stressful, we’ve come to expect it, as creatures of our busy modern society. If we stayed in the same place doing the same things all our lives, as most of our ancestors did, we’d get bored and restless. Besides, we have much longer lives than our ancestors, so naturally we’re going to fill them with a greater variety of experiences.

The way I look at it, those magic-in-a-bottle moments aren’t really lost. They just get moved farther back on what I envision as a memory shelf, as present-day moments take their place. We write more stories and find other groups of readers who enjoy our creations. When our kids are grown, we still have conversations with them, even though they live somewhere else and we talk about different topics. Maybe we become grandparents, as more time passes. We find new jobs that challenge us to develop our skills in unforeseen ways, and after a while we discover that we’re pretty good at them.

Before we know it, we’ve built up a lovely collection of antique bottles sitting proudly on the imaginary polished hardwood of the memory shelf. They sparkle in different colors, glowing inside with fragments of the magic they once held. Here’s one that gleams softly in warm green-brown hues, holding memories of a beautiful summer morning at the river. There’s another, flickering a bright fiery yellow like the candles on a birthday cake. And look at that perfect red—it’s just the color of the roses around grandma’s porch, fragrant and humming with bees on a Sunday afternoon.

The magical moments we encounter in our daily lives can easily go unnoticed. We rush from one activity to another, worried about completing our tasks and staying on schedule. Often we don’t pause to be mindful of the dazzling sunlight coming through the window after a dark gray morning, the soft comfortable fabric of a new pair of blue jeans, or the affection in a loved one’s voice greeting us when we return from an errand. So many little details don’t find their way into our conscious awareness until many years later, when a scent or sound unexpectedly triggers a wonderful memory.

When we take the time to notice life’s small details as they unfold around us, we’re opening a door to invite the magic into the present.

Interruptions

June 1, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

We’re always busy doing something, or at least it seems that way. When we’re not at work, we’re running errands or doing household chores. On top of that, many of us regularly work out at the gym, watch our kids’ soccer games, attend religious services, volunteer with a charity, or fill our schedules with other obligations. Even the things people do to relax—such as watching TV, going to the movies or a sporting event, and playing video games—often take up distinct chunks of time too.

Because most of us have so little unscheduled, free-flowing time in our lives, we feel like we’re always being interrupted. We let the phone go to voicemail because we’re in the middle of something, no matter when we get a call. We feel annoyed when a coworker asks a question because it breaks our train of thought. When a family member wants help around the house, it’s a nuisance because we have to put aside whatever we were doing. Even if it’s nothing but Facebook or a mindless video game, we’re still getting interrupted, and we don’t like it.

In today’s society, interruptions often are described as wasting time, which in turn causes us to resent people who interrupt us. A common cultural script goes like this: “How inconsiderate they’re being! Don’t they know our time is valuable? We’ll never get anything done if they keep bothering us!”

When I’ve had a day with a lot of interruptions and start feeling annoyed, I find it helpful to remind myself that it’s not really a natural instinct to react this way, even though that’s what it may seem like. Getting angry when we’re interrupted is a culturally conditioned response—or, in other words, a collective bad habit. We can change how we react to interruptions by reframing them in our minds. When our coworkers or family members ask us something, it’s probably not because they want to waste our time. On the contrary, if they didn’t value our input, they wouldn’t be asking for it.

Living in such a busy world gives us both opportunities and challenges. Every year we have more choices about how to spend our time, and we can put together a schedule better suited to our needs and interests. We have far more opportunities than at any time in the past. But the more choices we have, the more mental energy it takes to navigate them effectively. We don’t have much left over for dealing with unexpected changes. Without predictable routines, we’re likely to get overwhelmed by stress. So when someone interrupts us, we may perceive it as a threat to our fragile coping ability. As such, it triggers the fight-or-flight response. We may snap at the person or storm off in a huff before we even stop to think about it.

Because so much of how we respond to interruptions takes place on a subconscious level, if we want to respond differently, we have to change our subconscious perceptions of what an interruption is. Put another way, we have to tell ourselves different stories. Humans are by nature storytelling creatures, and we filter all of our experiences through the narratives we use to explain them. Therefore, if we don’t want to get stressed out by interruptions, we have to convince ourselves that the interruptions are not really a problem.

Parents do this as a routine matter when teaching children good time management habits. We might, for instance, tell our kids that it’s time to do their homework now, and they can just pause the cartoon or the video game—it’ll still be there afterward. But often we don’t think about applying this simple lesson to our own busy schedules. When we get interrupted at work or while we’re doing something around the house, we’re likely to react without thinking and get annoyed about it. We’d do better to remind ourselves that the task isn’t urgent (which it usually isn’t) and can get done later.

As with many of the things we do, taking control of the interruptions in our lives is chiefly about developing better habits.

Surly Peasants

May 13, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

Back in the 1990s, my favorite computer game was an empire-building game called Lords of the Realm. Players began with a small medieval fiefdom and had to grow its economy, raise an army, and build a castle. As the game progressed, players could build stronger castles. Armies invaded nearby lands and conquered them through battles for control of the castle. Different prices had to be paid to equip soldiers of various types, and peasants could be conscripted. Although peasants got killed quickly going into battle with their pitchforks, they were useful for digging when a moat around an enemy’s castle needed to be filled in.

I enjoyed the sound effects for the battles, which included dialogue. Professional soldiers such as knights or pikemen replied with an eager “Yes, my lord!” or “Right away, sir!” when sent into battle. The peasants, however, made their lack of enthusiasm abundantly clear. When they were selected, they grumbled something surly like “What now?” or “Where to this time?”

I don’t suppose the authors of the game had in mind today’s employment practices when they composed that dialogue, but it struck me as an amusing and very apt bit of social commentary. Modern corporations no longer expect to keep employees for a lifetime, or indeed for any amount of time. Company pension plans are vanishing. Instead of training young workers, which was once common practice, managers insist that new hires must already have all skills required for the job. If no applicants can be found who have the perfect background, work goes undone or is contracted out. Very little thought is given to the long-term effects of cutting costs; only the next quarter’s profit matters.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone in management, under these circumstances, when the employees grumble like surly peasants. Corporate executives give rah-rah speeches and bestow small perks such as letting employees wear jeans to work, but that doesn’t change anything. When their decisions reflect the attitude that any worker can be replaced at any time by someone who comes cheaper, they can’t reasonably expect to enjoy the steadfast loyalty that a medieval knight would give to his liege lord.

Eventually, as globalization progresses, the multinational corporations will exhaust their supply of low-wage workers in underdeveloped nations. I estimate that in less than two decades, companies will be faced with widespread labor shortages. Thereafter, advances in automation won’t keep pace with a shrinking labor force and an increased demand for better-trained workers. When that happens, the most successful companies will be those willing to invest the money needed to retain skilled employees. Competitive pressure will force employers to raise wages, improve benefits, hire the most qualified applicants without discrimination, and generally treat their workers with more respect.

Many executives won’t like it, of course, because they’ve gotten so accustomed to treating their employees like peons. They’ll have no choice but to face the facts, however. If they don’t… well, another feature of the Lords of the Realm game was that if the peasants got too unhappy they’d revolt. They would abandon their fields and go marauding across the countryside. If the revolt wasn’t put down quickly and the peasants’ happiness level raised, the castle would be lost. Those who want to manage the corporations of the future would be wise to take a lesson from that.

Defining Values

April 23, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: ,

What are you?

The answer most of us would give, according to the customary social script, is an occupation: truck driver, teacher, sales clerk, or whatever we might happen to be doing for our paycheck. If we’re older and no longer working, then the answer changes to retired, perhaps with our previous career description tacked on. As students who haven’t yet entered the workforce, we might talk about our particular course of study and a career plan based on it. When we’re married and spending our days taking care of small children, we occupy a traditional niche in society as a stay-at-home parent.

But there are no good answers in this script for those without jobs who don’t fit the categories of retiree, student, or homemaker. Unemployment doesn’t just leave a person with no money—to a large extent, it also strips away his or her identity. Our society has plenty of words to describe the jobless, but that lexicon is viciously pejorative: bums, slackers, moochers, takers, lazy, useless, and a burden to others. So when we’re unemployed, that means we’re not only faced with the stress of looking for a job, not finding one right away, and going through our savings (if we’re lucky enough to have some). We also have to deal with the perception that anyone who doesn’t have a job is a worthless social failure.

And right now, although things are slowly improving, there are a lot of people who don’t have a job. We live in a society that is struggling to adjust to the massive impacts of globalization and modern technology. At present, the world’s economy is fragile and all too easily disrupted. There are many more people looking for work than the number of jobs available.

It’s not always going to be like this. As the world becomes fully industrialized and birthrates continue to fall, we can expect that many industries will face chronic labor shortages. People who are looking for jobs will have no problem finding them. But we’re not there yet; and in the meanwhile, we have to ask ourselves—on both a collective and an individual level—how we’re going to deal with today’s difficult job market.

Without getting into the political debate about whether the government ought to focus on job-creation programs or tax cuts, I’ll simply note that both sides recognize there is more involved than money. Politicians, whatever their party affiliation, commonly talk about work in terms of a person’s dignity and ability to contribute to society. Work is generally understood to make up a large part of our identity.

Before the modern era, when there was very little social mobility, defining people’s identity in terms of their occupations made a lot of sense. If your father was a blacksmith or a carter, you probably were too, if you were male; and you would never do anything else, unless you had the bad luck to get conscripted by a passing army. Everyone in your town would refer to you as John the smith or Tom the carter. A man’s occupation was a quick and easy way to distinguish him from others who had the same given name, back when common folks didn’t have surnames.

Now we live in a complex, unpredictable society where most workers will change jobs many times. Career retraining has become commonplace as old industries shrink and new ones emerge. It’s not unusual to get a college or university degree in one field and then end up employed in another. Modern workers are more likely to migrate to another city or country, and we have more diversity in our personal characteristics and interests. As a consequence, a person’s job says less about his or her identity than at any time in history.

And yet, we still ask children what they’re going to be when they grow up. The dominant cultural narrative is much the same as it was centuries ago, defining our personal identity and value in terms of how we earn our pay. If we get laid off and can’t find another job, or if we’re stuck in a low-paying job and have had no luck applying elsewhere, it’s hard to look at the situation objectively and not feel like we’ve been rejected by society in general. Our culture takes it for granted that a person’s dignity and value depend on employment status.

There are many variables that go into determining that status, however, and often they’re not under our control. We can’t reasonably be expected to predict an economic downturn that causes our company to go bankrupt or a technological advance that makes our work experience obsolete. Prejudice or nepotism can cause a less qualified applicant to get hired instead of us. Maybe our employer decides to cut costs by moving production overseas. We can’t prevent any of these things from happening, so why do we allow them to change how we feel about ourselves and about other people in our community? We might do better to think about redefining our values, in more ways than one.

What We Say About Ourselves

March 27, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Researchers have found that people who often complain about being old or fat have more health problems than others of the same age or weight. And when older people leave their usual environment and go somewhere that they associate with youth and physical activity, their health improves. For example, blood pressure might be significantly lower after spending a few weeks at a hotel in the mountains, surrounded by hiking trails and furnished with dated décor reminiscent of one’s younger years.

When articles describing these studies appear on news websites, readers often post skeptical comments downplaying the effects of attitude. People complain more because they’re in worse health, not the other way around, the commenters suggest. And they argue that when someone’s health improves during a vacation, it has nothing to do with feeling younger—it’s simply because of a better diet and more exercise.

Some readers gripe that the scientists are being unethical by conducting studies that have the effect of encouraging people to lie to themselves. After all, if someone is old or fat, that’s the truth. It’s nonsensical to pretend otherwise, they say; and it gives people false hope that magical thinking will cure serious medical problems.

My take on it is that categories like “old” and “fat” are chiefly matters of opinion. Their boundaries can and do change as our cultural expectations shift over time. A century ago, when the average lifespan was much shorter than it is today, people thought of themselves as growing old earlier in their lives. And before the modern era, when food was much harder to get, a substantial waistline often was thought desirable—both because it was a sign of prosperity and because it improved survival odds in times of famine.

We also differ in how we sort ourselves into categories based on our life experiences. For instance, I would call myself middle-aged because both of my children are grown and are close to getting their university degrees. To my mind, it wouldn’t make any sense to describe myself as a young adult when my kids are now young adults. But nowadays, because of second marriages and fertility treatments, there are plenty of people my age who started their families just recently. They are likely to spend much of their time associating with young parents of toddlers and, as a result, to think of themselves as being nowhere near middle age.

Another factor in how we classify ourselves, which is even more individual, has to do with the connotations that we attach to the words. One person might despair upon approaching middle age, believing that it means the best part of life is over. A more optimistic person might view it as having many more years of a long and happy life remaining. Although they’re both using the same term to describe themselves, what they mean by it is totally different.

As to the health effects of what we say about ourselves, I believe the skeptics have a valid point that there’s more to it than positive or negative thinking. When someone is in better health after a vacation, it probably has to do with being more active than usual. The person isn’t just sitting around the whole time repeating affirmations, visualizing a younger and healthier self, and so forth.

That said, however, it’s all interrelated. When we think of ourselves as healthy people in the prime of our lives, we’re likely to act accordingly, getting regular exercise and taking better care of ourselves. To a large extent, humans are creatures of habit. What we say about ourselves is a strong factor influencing what habits we form, which in turn goes a long way toward shaping our circumstances.

Do What You Love, For Its Own Sake

February 19, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Finding work in today’s economy is not easy. The recession has had lingering effects, and many people have been put out of work by globalization and automation. Some of those jobs are never coming back.

Retraining programs are available to help people start new careers. Many workers are skeptical about the long-term benefit, though. Getting certified to operate a manufacturing robot, for instance, wouldn’t be much use if the robot became obsolete soon afterward. Rapidly advancing technology has created the specter of a nightmarish future where workers routinely get laid off every few years as their occupations vanish.

Modern technology also has created great wealth for those in the right place at the right time. So it’s not surprising to see people changing careers in the belief they’ll find more success pursuing their dreams. “Do what you love, and the money will follow,” is a common adage nowadays. It often goes along with the New Age notion that visualizing success creates good vibes and thus naturally attracts the desired success.

We all filter our reality through the narratives we use to describe it. When we frame our circumstances in more positive terms, we’re likely to believe that more is within our reach. Visualization can be an effective tool for self-hypnosis and focusing the subconscious mind on a goal. The subconscious doesn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality as the conscious mind does.

To that extent at least, we do attract what we imagine, simply because we pay more attention to events that fit the storyline. We are more likely to overlook things when they don’t match what we expect to find. Some of that is just confirmation bias; but visualization also has a dress-rehearsal effect, making us more aware of the necessary details.

Regardless of what opinions one might have about attracting success with good vibes, I think it’s helpful to consider just what success is. Today’s culture encourages finding ways to “monetize” whatever we do. Until very recently, that usage of the word wasn’t even in the dictionary; monetization was something that governments did when they printed money and managed the public debt. But nowadays, there is a widespread belief that anyone who loves something ought to make a career out of selling it.

Of course, not everyone feels that way. The Information Age also has brought about a huge explosion in free creative content, such as open-source software, wikis, Creative Commons, and so forth. Free access is very important to these communities. Their philosophy can be summed up as “Do what you love, for its own sake.”

Although these two very different approaches to “Do what you love” may seem to be diametrically opposed, I see a lot of practical overlap. Putting time and effort into a hobby can improve an existing career. For example, when a software developer spends his evenings writing open-source code, he may end up getting a better job as a result of keeping his skills sharp. Hobbies and volunteer work also can provide valuable networking opportunities. And even if a hobby is completely unrelated to a person’s real-life career, developing a new skill has general positive effects such as feeling more capable and confident, which can lead to more success on the job.

Starting a new career based on one’s passion may seem a tempting idea. Anyone seriously thinking about it needs to be aware, however, that passion often is not the determining factor in whether a new venture succeeds or fails. Having a great love of gardening, for instance, does not ensure that a new landscaping company will be a success. The owner also must have enough business savvy to find clients, keep the corporate paperwork in order, manage the employees, and so forth.

Even if a small business owner does everything perfectly, the business may fail if the economy turns sour. Many companies went bankrupt during the recession because some of their clients went out of business or placed smaller orders, and the banks didn’t have credit available to cover the cash-flow shortfall.

That said, a business venture that doesn’t work out should be viewed as a temporary setback, not as a lifelong failure. Much can be learned from trying new things, whether or not they make money. As to both hobbies and career changes, when we do what we love, something good is likely to follow. It’s not necessarily going to be money, though, and we need to frame our expectations accordingly.

Falling Birthrates Won’t Make Humans Extinct

January 21, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags: , ,

Sometimes I see articles discussing how far the birthrate has fallen in many countries and pointing out that this is a worldwide trend. Families are much smaller than they were in the past, and many young adults are opting not to have children at all. The authors often make dire predictions as to what will happen if this trend continues for another millennium or so, leaving a tiny human population on the brink of extinction.

There aren’t enough reasons to want children in today’s society, they say. In past generations, large families had economic value because children worked on the family farm. As they grew older, they took care of their aging parents, who might otherwise be left destitute upon becoming unable to work. But nowadays, a child is just an expensive, time-consuming luxury item. Even in countries where the government provides good child care and pays generous stipends to parents, birthrates remain low. Simply put, modern-day humans have many other things they’d rather be doing than raising families.

While I agree with the short-term prediction that the world’s population will soon reach its peak and then begin falling, I don’t see this as a cause for alarm. As I see it, the resulting labor shortage and high salaries will be very good for wage-earners. Raising a family on one parent’s salary, while the other parent stays home with the children, will be an affordable choice. Lost career opportunities won’t be as much of a concern because the average lifespan will continue to increase. A parent who stays home raising a large family until age 50 might reasonably expect to have a productive career until age 100, or perhaps even longer. Employment discrimination will be much less of a problem because of the labor shortage. Because the young adults of the future will not have to face today’s social and economic constraints with regard to families, their choices may turn out to be very different from what we’re seeing now.

When I wrote this post, my main purpose wasn’t to reassure worried readers that humans are not heading toward extinction. Nor am I suggesting that all children would be better off with a parent who does not work outside the home. Rather, this post is meant to illustrate how current trends often become absurd when they’re extrapolated out too far. We lack a sufficient frame of reference to predict what will happen in the long term because our baseline assumptions soon become outdated. Thus, although a calm, well-reasoned focus on solving present-day problems may not get as much attention as shrieking about a coming apocalypse, the former approach generally results in wiser policy decisions.

Secret Arrows

January 12, 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

Among the items that my husband and I keep on the desk next to the computer monitor in our study, there is a metal nail file. If I notice that the pointy end of the file is facing toward me while I’m sitting at the computer, I pick up the file and turn it around. Having a sharp object pointing toward me seems disturbing, even though the file has never actually poked me. I expect many people in our modern culture would dismiss this as a neurotic worry, or perhaps wonder if I have an obsessive need to arrange things in particular ways.

But according to feng shui—the ancient Chinese art of design—avoiding sharp objects in one’s environment is both a natural response and an effective way to improve one’s mental health. Sharp objects or corners pointing toward a person are called “secret arrows,” a phrase that refers to the subconscious disturbing effect they have when they go unnoticed. When something sharp in a home or workspace gives the impression it might cause injury, it leaves people subconsciously feeling that they need to be on their guard. This can cause anxiety to build up over time.

Feng shui designers recommend being careful, not only about the placement of sharp objects on desks and tables, but also about the corners of the desks and tables themselves. If a piece of furniture has a sharp corner positioned in such a way that it might bother a person looking at it, moving the furniture or placing a houseplant or other harmless object in front of the corner is advised. Even sharply angled corners of nearby buildings can be secret arrows; when this happens, interposing a tree, a fountain, or another landscaping feature can help to create a more relaxed feeling.

Although some aspects of feng shui may simply be old superstitions or otherwise unsuited to our modern society, I believe there is merit in the basic premise that how we arrange our physical environment affects how we feel about our lives. Rather than adopting the view “that which does not kill us makes us stronger” and forcing ourselves to put up with small irritants in the belief that doing so improves our coping ability, we might do better to arrange our surroundings in ways that leave us feeling more at peace and refreshed.

Things That Don’t Have a Place

December 29, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

People accumulate a lot of stuff in today’s society. We have a vast abundance of material goods, far more than at any time in the past; and often we don’t give much thought to what we’re going to do with them all. Our homes are overflowing with things that don’t have a place. Even if we are not classic hoarders or struggling with a garage that’s too full of junk to get the car inside, we still have to decide where to keep the things we buy.

Put another way, for every purchase we make in our modern consumer society, there is a corresponding drain on our mental energy as we ponder what we’re going to do with it. And after that gets sorted, we often need to rearrange other things in turn. We don’t always notice when we do this, and we may not trace the cause-and-effect chain all the way through.

By way of illustration: During the summer, my husband and I decided to buy a Keurig coffeemaker. We never drank enough coffee to make a standard coffeepot worthwhile, but we bought occasional cups at Starbucks or the gas station convenience store. So we thought a single-serving coffeemaker would be ideal—no bags of old coffee getting stale, and we could have a carousel with several different flavors.

After we made these purchases, we had to decide where to put them on the kitchen counter. The carousel fit into the corner well enough. The coffeemaker took more time to get situated because some decorative items already occupied the preferred location, which was the counter space underneath the cabinet that holds the dishes. We got the decorations rearranged, after a few tries, in a way that made enough space for the coffeemaker and still looked almost the same. We also bought travel cups, which we put in the corner cabinet above the new carousel.

At first we bought only small boxes of K-cups, the contents of which mostly fit into the carousel. Space didn’t seem to be a problem. But then, not surprisingly, we found that we were drinking more coffee because it was so much more convenient. After we had sampled various flavors and decided which ones we liked best, we thought it made more sense to order large boxes online and get the volume discount. When the boxes arrived, we had to make room for them in the pantry. That wasn’t too difficult; but, as it turned out, there was still more to be done.

We already had a set of cups that matched our dishes. I regularly used them for hot tea before we got the coffeemaker. I thought they would be fine for coffee, too; but after we started drinking coffee more often, my husband told me that he would prefer to use mugs, rather than cups. We had some promotional mugs with various logos, none of which matched. Because we hadn’t used them, we kept them in the high cabinet above the refrigerator. To make space on an easily reachable shelf of the cabinet above the coffeemaker, we first had to take out some plastic glasses, and then we had to rearrange the contents of another cabinet to make room for the displaced glasses.

At this point, my husband had two mismatched mugs in the preferred spot above the coffeemaker. One was a large red mug that had been a blood donor freebie, and the other was a smaller white mug with a college sports logo. That looked awkward because almost everything else in the cabinet was part of a matched group. While doing some Christmas shopping, I found a nice boxed set of two mugs that read “Joy to the World” and featured a cheerful winter scene. Problem solved, or so I thought.

But I never did move the old mismatched mugs to the cabinet above the refrigerator because it occurred to me that my husband might want one of them if he drank more than two cups of coffee in a day, or if we forgot to run the dishwasher. So at the present time, all four mugs are residing in the cabinet above the coffeemaker. They still look awkward and don’t fit well either.

I’m probably going to move the old mugs to the cabinet where we put the plastic glasses when we first made space for the mugs. But right now, the remaining space on that shelf is taken up by a box of K-cups in assorted holiday flavors. I have the options of moving the box to the pantry, which would be less convenient because the pantry is farther away from the carousel; moving the box to another cabinet and doing more rearranging; or finding another place for the old mugs, which would also require more rearranging. And so the saga continues…

I have been enjoying the coffeemaker, and I very much appreciate the wonders of modern technology making such small indulgences possible. This post isn’t meant as a complaint, but simply as an observation that our consumer culture takes up more of our mental energy than we may realize. We shouldn’t assume that if people are having trouble clearing away clutter or adjusting to small changes, there must be something wrong with them. Today’s world requires us to deal with more clutter and more small changes as part of our everyday lives. These are cultural issues, not just individual problems. We should consider how our social structures might be adapted to better suit our needs in this regard.

Creatures of Habit

December 10, 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Musings · Tags:

Most people don’t like to be told that we are stuck in old habits of thinking or that we are behind the times. We prefer to believe that we are sensible people who can adjust our thinking when the circumstances change. But in fact, we often have no idea how many outdated instructions we’re carrying around in our mental checklists.

Not long ago, my husband pointed out one of mine when he asked why I loaded the dishwasher a particular way. He had noticed that I didn’t put spoons next to other spoons in the basket. I explained that my mother had told me to do it like that, when loading the dishwasher was one of my chores as a child, because otherwise the spoons might nest together and not come clean. He replied that maybe this was a problem 40 years ago, but it wouldn’t happen with a good modern dishwasher.

After I thought about it for a moment, I realized he was correct. The spoons always came out just as clean when he was the one loading the dishwasher and put them next to each other. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that there might not be any real need to keep them separate.

I believe that most of our social prejudices have equally simple underpinnings. They’re based on things that were said long ago—that it was best to keep certain kinds of people separate, or to have different ways of treating them. Maybe some of those ideas made sense in their original context of a world with vastly different cultural expectations and more primitive technology. Maybe they never really made sense. But however it might have happened, they ended up as entries in society’s collective checklist of how things ought to be done.

Whether our antiquated notions have to do with the proper placement of the spoons in the dishwasher or of the people in our community, we feel uncomfortable when someone points out the flaws in our thinking. After all, we’ve always done things the same way without seeing any reason to change, so how can there be anything wrong? We’re reasonable people, and we certainly would have noticed if we had been doing something that made no sense—wouldn’t we?

Once we get past our initial feelings of denial and annoyance, though, we generally do acknowledge the facts in front of us. Although humans are creatures of habit on both a social and an individual level, we are capable of changing our ways, even if it might take a little while for new information to sink in.

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