B minor

A friend observed, this weekend: 

“People talk a lot less now. We text, email, IM. But we don’t talk. As Siri takes hold of the next wave of advancement, what if we find ourselves talking to devices more than we talk to other people?”

Scary thought.

As more of our human interactions are mediated by technology, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern subtext, motive, and voice. I find more and more people I know trying to structure more intimate human interactions into their routine lately. I like this. It seems healthy.

But I continue to get weird reactions when I offer that I’d like to structure more “downtime” into my routine. I define downtime as quiet, reflective time – spent mostly alone, mostly unplugged. For me this manifests as time writing, walking, drawing or playing the piano. It is time where the primary focus of my attention is driven by me, not by a device or another person. I like this. It seems healthy. But it seems to put off some people.

Not only do I find the constantly-”wired in” trend to be unhealthy, I actually find it to be counterproductive.  The mind fatigues easily. Constant stimulation, constant attention – this stuff is taxing.

Consider this: I do some of my best thinking in the shower. Why is this?

I’ve read several explanations on this, ranging from speculation about hyper-oxygenation to standing in one place for a while. But the explanation I most buy into is this:

Showering is a routine. It is a routine we are intimately familiar with and one we do not need to think about. The fact that we don’t need to think about it is critically important. Our conscious mind – the one with which we evaluate and make decisions – is silenced by the routine. Because we don’t actively need to think, our subconscious mind is allowed to kick into gear and drive our thinking all over the place. We are truly creative in this time. I do my best thinking and creating during and immediately after periods of downtime.

Imagine if we built more time into our lives for this type of thinking.

Imagine if we “rehearsed” this behavior.

We’d have to start first by letting go of the need to be connected all the time. We’d also need for others to let go of the expectation that we be connected all the time. But we might find ourselves being a little more creative if we do. (And maybe we’ll start actually talking to each other more, too.)

Everybody’s talking about the plan by a church in Florida to burn the Quran this weekend (Google News). It’s been on the radio during my commute all week. I’ve been thinking about it.

I’ll state my opinion upfront, and then move onto what I’m left pondering.

I think the plan to burn the Quran is a bad idea. I don’t think there should be laws against it and I don’t think the government should intervene to stop it.

But I think it’s a bad idea:

Not because it is incredibly disrespectful. (It is.)
Not because it puts coalition forces in greater danger abroad. (It does.)

But because IT IS NOT PRODUCTIVE.

It’s the cheap and easy way to get attention for one’s own feelings. How about, instead of protesting by burning another religion’s sacred text, you protest by over-emphasizing the positive aspects of your own? Instead of protesting at all, why not engage the people you seem to dislike so much in an actual conversation? That would be challenging, rewarding, and productive. Burning books is not.

Next, I turn to the media. It is the first amendment of the US Constitution that extends to this Pastor the right to say whatever he wants in whatever form he wants. The same first amendment establishes his right to practice the religion of his choosing. That same amendment enables the press to operate freely in this country.

The media paying all the attention to this Pastor and his protest is a bad idea:

Not because it is giving too big a voice to someone who doesn’t deserve it. (It is.)
Not because it puts coalition forces in greater danger abroad. (It does.)

But because IT IS NOT PRODUCTIVE. Don’t we have more important issues on which to expend our national collective breath? The economy? Education?

Doesn’t the attention this man is getting just make him more likely to carry out this protest? And to carry on being noisy afterwards?

What is he protesting anyway? I’ve read a dozen articles and can’t figure it out. Do the journalists covering it even know?

If a religious text caught fire in a forest, would anyone notice?

As I was packing up to leave school in late May, I had a weird experience on campus. I had crossed the river from home to school to pick a few things up from my various lockers, closets, etc. It was about 10 days after  school had let out for summer. Most people had already left campus for travel before starting summer internships.

Being on campus, a place where I had had a million intense memories accumulate during the year, I had a rather vacant feeling. The type of vacancy you’d encounter coming to a place you’d never been before.

In my mind I started to feel nostalgic – remembering all the great things that had happened that year.

It occurred to me then that the place would never be the same. Granted, I still have a whole year to go at HBS, and many many more memories yet to create. But the notion that what had happened during the year – the experience – was more closely tied to the people and the circumstance than the physical place, made me realize how much I will need to capture every opportunity in the coming year.

Because once the moment passes: the people, the place, the circumstance – everything that happened there becomes a nice (but unrepeatable) memory.

I wonder what psychologists would say about memories – and the strength of them – relative to people or place.

I had to visit a US Post Office recently. After spending the year learning about operations management, process improvement, and organizational behavior, I must admit that the visit irked me on so many levels I could feel myself clamming up and needing to get out as fast as possible.

The thing is, I needed to mail my rent to Boston (from New York). This is probably the only part of my life that has not evolved into even the 20th century yet. I still pay rent by check and I still send it via the mail. In order to do this I needed two things: an envelope and a stamp.

Unable to find these things in single serving size at a deli (because why would I?), I set off to the Post Office. (Which, by the way is not conveniently located and keeps inconvenient hours). Imagine my surprise when I got there to discover A) no envelopes for sale (isn’t that kind of a natural COMPLEMENT (thanks Prof Collis) to selling postal services) and B) no easy way to get stamps. The line was 15 people deep, and I went to a machine where my only option was to buy 40 stamps. (Credit to the USPS 1 point for the “forever” stamp.)

Then off to Duane Reade to buy 80 (79 of which I don’t need) envelopes.

And then back in search of a blue mailbox.

Short point: postal mail sucks. The government should dissolve it, force everyone to go paperless, offer it as an uber premium service (or make FedEx pickup and manage the business), and be done with it as it is now.

Travel forms tight bonds among people. A passing thought crossed my mind recently:  I became close (or much closer) with many of my really good friends because of a shared travel experience. It may seem like a pretty obvious thought. And I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to some pretty amazing places in my life. (The experience isn’t limited to friends. I also realized I became a lot closer with colleagues after traveling together, too.)

This yarn of thought then continued unraveling. I began to wonder about life 150 years ago, and what it was then that made people form tight bonds. If the whole escapade of flight and cross country/continent leisure travel wasn’t possible, what was it that formed lasting relationships?

Travel seems to work this way for a number of reasons:

1. shared experience – doing anything together provides opportunity to reminisce forever
2. prolonged experience – enduring 2+ days of nonstop anything will have an effect
3. close quarters – it’s hard to disconnect / find alone time while traveling
4. no privacy – it’s hard to pretend to be anything other than what you are when all of the above are happening

It’s hard to replicate these conditions in the average day-to-day, so how do we form the tight bonds (the incredible relationships) that are borne out of incredible adventure in our daily lives? Can we?

(footnote: this is a running theme for me – trying to connect the dots on why people become friends with some people and not with others. expect more on this subject later. also i looked briefly for other writing on the psychology of travel, but didn’t find anything compelling. let me know if you do.)

Every year, the media runs out the door the day before Thanksgiving, parks the satellite trucks somewhere in the flow of traffic around the airport, and sets up to do travel woes live shots. Clockwork. Literally. And for a time, working in the media, I recall there being data to support the claim that the day before Thanksgiving was, in fact, the busiest travel days of the year.

This year, I think I’ve heard the term “busiest travel days of the year” about 10 times. Conveniently a little “one of” has been placed before the phrase most recently. I will even buy that a little.

But today! Today I heard on the television, the radio, and read online, that today would be one of the busiest travel days of the year. And when we took my brother to O’Hare today, there was the Fox News sat truck. Parked and ready. But guess what? There were no people there. Literally. O’Hare was wide open – moving cleanly – nothing to see. The highways to and from O’Hare… wide open – moving cleanly – nothing to see.

So. What gives? One of the busiest travel days of the year? Really? Really?