Outer Life

The Future

I am exploring different futures for myself. Some of these futures will involve writing projects; some will not. Some of the writing project-futures will involve new forms, new sites and new identities, and may include shutting down this site. At this point I am not sure what will happen, or even if anything will happen. However, if and when something does happen, I would like to share it with the loyal readers of Outer Life. If you would like to be informed of my future writing endeavors, send me an email (outerlife at the gmail) and I will keep you in the loop, if there is, indeed, a loop in which to be kept.

Disillusioned

I can see and use a word hundreds or thousands of times throughout my life, barely noticing it, and then one day it magically appears new to me as if I’ve never seen it before.

This happened recently with “disillusioned.”

I’d seen and used this word countless times before, usually in a context meant to convey disappointment, but looking at it the other day I suddenly saw it as if for the first time. Dis-illusion. The removal of illusion. What is so disappointing about being freed from illusion? Why isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t disillusion be a happy word?

If you’re living a life filled with illusion, you are, by definition, cutting yourself off from reality. I suppose that could be a good thing if you live in North Korea or suffer from a debilitating disease or are serving 10 to 20 in a state penitentiary, but for most of us I would think that it is better to live a life in the realm of reality. Reality is more likely to give us a meaningful and rewarding existence, particularly when one considers that most of the illusions being spun around us these days are marketing-driven dreams designed to stoke our insecurities to the point where we spend money we shouldn’t on things we don’t need. 

So I’m looking forward to more disillusionment and, though I don't want to be greedy, I'm also hoping for some disenchantment too.

Vacation Planning

Growing up, our vacations were modest affairs. To save money we traveled by car, we stayed in the U.S., we camped out or stayed in cheap hotels, and we sought out free attractions.

Our goal was more to economize than enjoy. It was as if my parents were being forced to take us on vacation, and were determined to do it as cheaply as possible.

After one particularly miserable vacation, when we returned home hot, sweaty and caked in dirt (no showers or air conditioning), I started thinking the purpose of vacation was, perversely, to make our non-vacation life appear better. It was only after spending a week without a shower, after all, that I truly appreciated the shower in our house.

So upon attaining adulthood, and getting a job, when I found myself earning enough money to go on my own vacation I initially decided against it. Instead of traveling the world, I stayed in my apartment, reading. Pathetic, maybe, but at least I wasn’t hot, sweaty and caked in dirt afterwards.

Then along came a wife and some kids who have other ideas about vacation. Now I no longer spend vacations cooped up in my house reading. Instead, I must travel.

But I do so with conditions:

Having paid a lifetime’s dues as a child, I no longer rough it. Camping is simply not an option, and hotels must be comfortable and quiet. I used to insist that we had to stay in places that were nicer than where we lived, but I can no longer do that.

I do not do sightseeing. The idea of tearing through a country, guidebook in hand, manically snapping photos of every historical or natural sight worth seeing is simply not my idea of fun. If you want to see the sights, buy a coffee table book.

Meeting new people is also not something I like to do. Partly this is because I am not a meet-new-people kind of person, but mostly it’s because my view is that people are pretty much the same wherever you go, so if you really want to meet someone new, walk down your street and introduce yourself to the people you meet there. You don’t need to travel halfway around the world to do that.

So what do I like to do? I do enjoy getting the feel for the rhythm of life as it’s lived in different places. I like to rent a house and just live in a new place for a week or two or three or more. We usually take a few day trips to satisfy my family’s sight-seeing urges, but mostly we just hang around and marinate in a new place.

I have found that vacating-by-marinating works best for me when I am in a place I might actually want to move to. That gets me interested in its culture, its institutions, its immigration policies, its real estate market, how it stacks up next to where I currently live.

For me this is not some idle while-away-the-time pursuit. It is serious. I vividly remember as a kid reading about the build-up to World War II and wondering why more people didn’t get the hell out of Germany when they had the chance. I vowed to myself I would always have one or two back-ups lined up in case, for whatever reason, I chose to leave the U.S. So when on vacation, while my family is enjoying themselves, I am investigating whether I’d want us to move there.

This summer the family is voting for France, but it is very unlikely I’d ever want to move there. I am therefore trying to steer them towards Switzerland, a country that is much higher on my potential-move-to list. And if I really score, I might even convince them to take side trips to Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, thereby allowing me to investigate three countries on my potential-move-to list in one trip.

Looking back at what I wrote above, I can see that my attitude towards vacations is not all that different from my parents’. I, like them, approach vacation with a grim determination to do something other than enjoy myself. The only difference is they were determined to save money, while I am determined to find a safe haven.

At least I’m not hot, sweaty and caked in dirt when I return.

If I return, that is.

Staring Out My Window at the City Below

Staring out my window at the city below, I often think how amazing it is that so many people from so many other places decided to move here, and that so many people from this place decided to stay here.

There are now millions of people here.

What’s so special about here?

My here is like so many other heres. Travel up the coast, you’ll see plenty of places where a city could have grown, but didn’t. Those places look a lot like this place, back before the people came.

I’m sure there are many good reasons why people came here, but I’m also sure there are also bad reasons why people came here. Some of these reasons may have been better there than here. No place is perfect, all have their drawbacks, on balance it’s really hard to say one raw piece of coastal land is better or worse than another raw piece of coastal land.

Yet they all came here. Why here?

At some point, probably very early in the process, people started coming here and staying here primarily because other people were coming and staying here. This positive feedback loop may be the most powerful reason why millions of people decide to move to, and stay in, a particular place. As more move and stay, even more move and stay.

And when this happens at a time of dramatic increases in overall population, it’s like city growth on steroids.

This city creation force has been so powerful, it feels permanent. But it isn’t. Cities die. We know this from archeology and history, and we can visit Detroit and see a city in the process of dying.

People leave, which causes more people to leave, which causes even more people to leave. Sometime this city destruction force is more powerful than the city creation force, quickly unwinding centuries of creation. Other times it’s a slow aging process, as a city stops growing but its people (mostly) stay put.

By most accounts, the world’s dramatic population growth over the last century is slowing, and soon will stop. In my lifetime it will start declining.

What this will mean for my city is not clear. On one hand, I expect people will continue to want to live where other people live, so the dynamic that led to the creation of the city will continue. But on the other hand, so much of the vibrancy we associate with a healthy city is, in reality, that city’s success at replenishing and growing its ranks. As more and more of our cities find their ranks shrinking, how will that effect their vitality?

I’m not contemplating anything on the magnitude of Rome c. 100 turning into Rome c. 650, but I do sense that a lot of my world view has been constructed on top of an assumption that there will always be ever more people here. That’s how it’s been, but that’s not how it will be.

How will this change things? The realtor’s cliché “They’re not making more land” will no longer be true, for once we’re no longer making more people we will, in effect, be making more land as that which had been occupied is left vacant.

A lot else will change too, but staring out my window at the teeming multitudes below, I’m having a hard time getting my head around this future reality. All I can think is how amazing it is that so many decided to be here now.

Routine

I have a complicated relationship with routine.

On one hand, I fear and fight routine. It is anesthetizing. It puts my brain on autopilot. Day after day of the same old same old until I descend into senescence—that’s no life for me! Particularly when you consider that time flies faster when you’re in a routine, so if you want your life to feel shorter, by all means fill it with routine. To resist this I try to vary what I do, just by a little, breaking things up enough to force me to pay attention. 

On the other hand, I have a grudging respect for routine, and I believe there are good reasons why we so often seem to prefer it. There are things I would prefer to handle on autopilot. I don’t want to think anew about everything I do. Breakfast, for example, should never be an adventure. Stepping outside our comfort zones can be rewarding, but it is also stressful. Routine can be so soothing, even palliative, particularly at times when everything else seems to be going awry.

Through my life I’ve careened back and forth between two extremes: sometimes feeling like I can get through my days without ever turning my mind on, my life having become so filled with, and governed by, routine, then other times feeling like my life is wildly out of control, completely unmoored from routine. When I wake up from the former, I send my life spinning into the latter, which in turns seems to send me back to the former, and so on.

I guess that’s sort of a routine in itself.

My current plan is to balance the two, embracing routine even more tightly where I don’t care enough to think, and rejecting routine even more thoroughly where I do care enough to think. My hope is that by nourishing that part of my mind that craves routine, I will find it easier to avoid falling into routine in areas where I’d rather stay awake.

Embracing routine is the easier part, as I find my mind naturally gravitates towards routine, but still it has been a bit challenging. So, for instance, I’ve decided I don’t want to think about what to wear in the morning, so my ultimate goal is to wear the same thing everyday, but my wife thinks this is completely insane and, were I to actually do this, I think others would feel the same. Similarly, I would prefer to eat the same thing everyday for breakfast and lunch, but I find myself in situations, such as going out to lunch socially, where that isn’t possible.

Rejecting routine has been harder. When I determined to toss aside my old music listening habits and listen to completely new music, it was wrenching at first because I still liked my old music. I soon found new music I liked, but that just led to new music listening habits. Similarly, I tried to break out of a rut in my reading but soon found myself in a new rut as I started mining a different vein. At work I sought out projects in unfamiliar areas, figuring it would be stressful but I’d get my neurons firing in new ways. Once I found some success in these new areas, though, people started sending me similar projects, and I accepted them, motivated, I must admit, by a desire to avoid the stress of the new.

So my record is decidedly mixed. The lure of routine is difficult to resist. While I toy with extreme ideas to break free from routine, such as quitting my job and living out of an RV while traveling the country working odd jobs, these, I fear, are just idle dreams of one already well down the slippery slope of routine.

At Least She Cares

It intrigues me when people hate me.

The default is indifference. Most people I know are, like me, so self-absorbed that I’m happy just to be an occasional blip on their periphery.

So when someone cares enough about me to hate me, I notice.

A few years ago she married into a distant branch of my extended family, but one we see fairly often because they live near us. She has a job that’s superficially similar to mine so, at family functions, people pushed her towards me because, after all, people with similar jobs have so much in common.

We actually had more in common than they realized, for it turned out that she, like me, was self-absorbed but, alas, she, unlike me, made the all-too common error of presuming I was as absorbed with her as she was. Which, of course, I wasn’t, for no one could possibly be as absorbed with her as she was, and anyways I was already happily occupied being absorbed with myself.

Angrily unaware that no one cares, she regaled me with tales of personal woe and injustice, all punctuated by a common theme: her needs ignored by a heedless world. I tried to tune out her incessant jabbering, but she proved an especially persistent bore, attaching herself leech-like to me as I wandered through the room, trying to shake her off without success.

Thankfully we were seated far apart, and I managed an early getaway, so that was that, or so I thought.

A week later I got the email. In it she related what appeared to be a long and twisted tale of workplace intrigue and injustice that, I am sure, took her hours to write, and to it she appended a single-spaced narrow-margined multi-paged report that I think she was planning to submit to an ombudsman or news organization or federal authority or all of the above. She wanted me to read it, revise it, press it on a specific person she was sure I knew. It took only a minute of skimming for me to see her fevered ravings for what they were: a demand to draft me for her personal crusades. If I took one step in her direction, I’d plunge down the yawning chasm of a deep dark pit from which I would never return, so I pondered how best to divest myself of this unwelcome missive.

My choices were: (1) ignore it, (2) devote my life to serving her needs or (3) put her off as gently as possible. I chose alternative (3), or so I thought, for in responding to her I pointed out that in life other people don’t always see things the way we see them, and in fact other people may not even appreciate that others may see things differently, so it is always best in life to steer a course that doesn’t require, as an essential condition for its success, every single individual in the entire world to see every last thing your way. I also extolled the life-affirming value of looking forward instead of backward, and counseled her to cultivate an aura of bemused indifference when faced with life’s inevitable slings and arrows. I closed with a note about how most people don’t appreciate that time is their most precious asset until they have none of it left, and offered my sincere wishes that she would seize this opportunity to use her time wisely and move on with life, hoping she would get the hint and leave me alone.

Unbeknownst to me, I had not, in fact, chosen alternative (3). I had chosen alternative (4), which was put her off as gently as possible but find that, upon reading my response, she would interpret it as a brazen public statement of my traitorous alignment with the forces of darkness arrayed against her, my declaration of all-out war. Or so she managed to convey in many more hastily typed words sent by email in the early morning hours.

She plays dirty, but I admire her for that. She has convinced many on her side of the family that it is I, in fact, who hates her and that is I, in fact, who has threatened her and that it is I, in fact, who refuses to be in the same room as her. We no longer get invited to as many birthday parties, this year we are off the Thanksgiving list, and there are rumors that a competing Christmas get-together is being surreptitiously organized.

I am, of course, pleased with these unexpected spoils of my victory, but my wife, who values these things much more than I, is starting to chafe under the wartime restrictions and pressuring me to seek a rapprochement. I am holding out, confident that my enemy will, sooner rather than later, allow her madness to consume her, but I have to admit I am easy to hate and may, in fact, be helping her appear more normal to others, as I siphon off her hateful energies and leave with her none to share with others.

I’ve tried to convince my wife that in serving out the rest of my days as the exclusive outlet for her hatred I am performing a valuable public service, but I fear that if that competing Christmas get-together actually comes together, my wife will tell me public be damned and I’ll have to run up the white flag.

So, What Do You Do?

I try to avoid situations in which people ask me what I do for a living.

It’s not that I do anything particularly shameful, such as robbing banks or being a banker, it’s just that if I’m in a conversation where someone asks me what I do, it means  at least one of four undesirable things have happened to get us there: (1) I am speaking with a herd animal trying to figure out where I fit in his personal pecking order, or (2) he lets his job define him and assumes I’ve done the same, or (3) he is trying to figure out how much life insurance he can sell me or, most commonly, (4) we have nothing of substance to discuss.

Lately I find myself having more and more of these conversations, probably because my wife’s and daughter’s social obligations require me to attend ever more meet-and-greets whose rules of superficial social engagement self-select for a disproportionately high number of people whose gambit while working the room is to feign interest in what you do for a living.

Most discussions along these lines elevate form over substance. Who do you work for? What is your title? Where is your place of business? Does Bob still work there? The point seems to be to maximize the proper nouns, minimize the understanding.

To shake things up a bit, I’ve starting telling people I’m a “problem solver.” Although I do have a title, and a box on an org chart, and, at least in theory, a job description, which are exactly the factoids these people crave, I’m withholding this meaningless information and simply telling people that I solve other people’s problems.

This has the benefit of being the truth: I actually do spend most of my time solving problems. It also has the benefit, I hope, of increasing the likelihood that I’ll meet someone at one of these functions who can teach me something. Solving other people’s problems is often a challenging and solitary job, so I’d appreciate the opportunity to pick the brains of someone else doing this sort of thing. It’s hard to find problem solvers — it’s not the sort of job people put onto an org charts, you never see a “VP of Solving Screw-Ups” — so to increase my chances of finding these people I have to get behind the titles and start talking function.

If I ever do find a fellow-traveler at one of these functions, here are a few of the problem solving occupational hazards I'd like to discuss:

Superiority complex: I often see people at their worst, doing things I’m sure I would never do, so it’s a constant struggle for me not to over-extrapolate what I see into thinking (a) everyone is an idiot and (b) except me. Neither is true, but it’s hard to see that when you spend all your time mired in the dark underbelly of underperformance.  I try to stay humble, but I’m afraid someday I’ll have humility forced on me the hard way, by creating my own problem that someone else has to solve.

Decelerated learning: I learn more when I feel like everyone else knows more than me. Insecurity is a great motivator. Spend your time dealing with other people’s problems and you quickly lose that insecurity, as, alas, you discover that those around you aren’t supermen and women but all-too human people who make mistakes just like you. This realization might be psychologically healthy, but it’s a little too healthy for me. It makes me feel too secure. A few years ago I noticed that without my insecure edge I wasn’t learning as much as I once did, and ever since I’ve been trying to find people who’ll make me feel more insecure. It isn’t easy, what with all the problems I see, but I keep trying.

Grim reaper: While optimism is essential to human endeavor, pessimism seems to be the essential ingredient in problem solving. In the early stages of a problem, people are usually in denial, either out of defensiveness or an overabundance of optimism, so they fail to act quickly and decisively and end up letting the problem metastasize. I go in expecting the worst and often find that even I’ve underestimated the situation. All this gives you an overdeveloped sense of impending doom, one that ends up permeating everything you do, as you perceive fragility where others assume solidity. It’s a drag. It’s also, I fear, a particularly distorted lens through which to view the world.

The Bond Villain: A Reassessment

You have to respect the Bond villain.

Sure, he’s hell-bent on world domination, careless with the lives of millions, enjoys torture even more than Cheney, but think of the severe psychological afflictions he’s had to overcome, often with little or no outside support. With his historic level of megalomania, his massively outsized sense of entitlement, his complete lack of perspective, his issues with impulse control, that infantile fixation on revenge, it’s a wonder he gets anything done. And yet he does. In the biggest way. You have to give him credit for making the most of a tough hand.

And don’t get me started on the whole secret hideaway thing. I mean, do you have any idea how difficult it is to conduct large-scale real estate development free from the interference of neighbors, building inspectors, planning councils and construction unions? Can you imagine the logistical challenges of moving vast amounts of steel, concrete and other building supplies to a mountain top or an isolated tropical island? It’s hard enough to build a simple house these days of NIMBY BANANA, but our Bond villain, for all his faults, shows a remarkable facility for cutting through the red tape and construction delays and cost overruns and environmental impact reports to build efficient, often beautiful, hideaways in the most difficult construction environments imaginable.

In these hard times, we have to acknowledge that the Bond villain excels as a much-needed jobs creator, providing many high-skilled and presumably high-paying jobs in fields for which there isn’t always high demand. As anyone who’s employed anyone can attest, it is no small task to find and retain the right person, let alone an army of the right people. You can’t just post an ad on Craigslist for jumpsuit-clad machine-gun toting goons and expect them to show up ready for work. You have to work it, recruiting worldwide, competing against other employers seeking similar skills. Not an easy task, but one our Bond villain manages quite nicely, assembling a training a hoard of employees with the talent, dedication and high degree of discipline necessary to do the job.

Most of all, though, the Bond villain is a dreamer, one of the rarest of individuals who dares to be different, who rejects the comfort of the mundane and familiar in favor of the unknown and untried, who reaches for the stars and demands the most out of life. Sure, that often requires us to lose our lives, but don’t let one wrong turn distract you from the essential lessons of his extraordinary and singular journey through life. Don’t be one of the herd – dare to live the dream!

So although the Bond villain is, after all, a villain, I cannot help but feel a grudging though strong sense of respect for what he managed to accomplish before Bond dealt him his gruesome death.

My Funeral, if Famous

If I’m ever a famous statesman, I’m going to leave specific instructions that when I die, and the nation’s elite gather for my funeral service at the National Cathedral, the officiants will commend my teeth to the Tooth Fairy, telling the crowd that they are in a better place, finally free of the burden of cavity-causing sugar products and the scourge of gum disease, joined in bliss with my long-long baby teeth and looking down lovingly on us, occasionally providing brushing and flossing guidance to those who faithfully beseech them in times of need. Dressed in sober but inspiring robes emblazoned with an image of a smiling tooth, the officiants will then lead the congregation in a long, impassioned call-and-response exhortation to the almighty Tooth Fairy, humbly acknowledging her almighty reign, with a short but sad lamentation on the destruction caused by her enemy unchecked gingivitis, and end with an inspiring hymn to the efficacy of orthodonture and various tooth whitening products.

Then again, this is one of the many reasons why I’ll never be a famous statesman.

Vice Versa

Your greatest strengths are your greatest weaknesses. And vice versa.

The first part is a cliché, the “vice versa” part should be too.

I try to remind myself of that when I confront my weaknesses. Staring into the darkness of my inadequacy, it’s easy to overlook the strength that may be lurking in there as well.

For instance, one of my most glaring weaknesses is that I am not a social animal. I prefer to live in my head. I avoid social occasions. When compelled to be social, I have a hard time masking my disinterest. I could care less about others’ concerns, except on the rare occasions when they happen to intersect with mine, at which point I overwhelm them with learned discourses they’d prefer not to hear. I am, fundamentally, a deeply selfish person. So it’s no surprise that I don’t form connections.

This is not good. It has resulted in a great deal of unhappiness in my life, and in others’ lives as well.

However, it does have its advantages.

For one, my thinking is probably more independent than it would otherwise be. Avoiding people makes me less susceptible to social proof, that strong urge to follow the herd that so often leads us over a cliff.

My thinking is also more abstract and systemic; I am less prone than most to personalize complex phenomena. Creationism and the Great Man Theory of History are examples of attempts to personalize and simplify complexity. Normal social beings are more prone to take these mental short-cuts, and therefore more prone to their distortions.

Another benefit is I have more time to think, what with my social calendar being clear of obligations, my phone never ringing, my email rarely pinging me with new messages.

But the most surprising benefit, and one that I have only recently begun to truly appreciate, is that being asocial has actually taught me a great deal about people. Social interactions that come naturally to most people do not come naturally to me. What most do unconsciously, I can only do consciously. I have to analyze my social interactions in order to make them work. My analytical approach is artificial and can result in stilted interactions, but over years of trial and error I’ve managed to refine it to such a degree that I can navigate my way through most social situations while looking more natural than I am.

That’s not surprising to me. What is surprising is that I have also become a social resource for others in my family and small circle of friends. What could these naturally social people possibly learn from me? When they find themselves in social quandaries, and their own natural instincts fail to guide them, an artificial but analytical approach like mine can help reveal answers they otherwise couldn’t see. They never needed to develop analytical social skills, so their social strength is now their weakness, while my social weakness has led me to develop this strength that they sometimes need. So they increasingly consult with me, the most asocial person they know, about social matters.

On the whole, I still believe I’d be happier if I were naturally social. The lifetime benefits of being naturally social significantly outweigh the benefits I’ve outlined above, but rather than rail against the injustice of my weakness I will try to dwell more on its attendant strengths.