Thirty-eight
Every year that goes by seems to be not only moving faster than the one before it, but packed with larger and larger milestones: meeting Diana, adopting our pup Miles, marriage, house moves, career wins, career losses, sometimes a couple of those things thrown into the same year. (And, in the case of marriage, we threw three weddings in the same year, because why not celebrate ourselves a little?)
This past year, keeping with the accelerating slope, has been the most action-packed yet. It was the one where I learned to become a dad. Me, teaching him all the things I know about the world. Him, showing me what it’s like to learn about life for the first time––a beginner’s mind in its purest form. Me, learning to up my dad joke game. (Truly, having a child is the sign of a groan man.) Him, testing his boundaries and exploring what he’s capable of, and oftentimes, making us laugh out loud in the process.
At last year’s birthday, I was too caught up in the thick of taking care of a newborn to think about what it means to be a dad. At this time last year, I spent most days with Crosby napping on my chest, dreaming of all the activities that I would do with him. This year, I’m doing a lot of those same things dreamt because he’s older, walking, and eager to discover the world around him.
With my wife having more free time away from work for the first time in a long time, and Crosby beginning to really interact with his surroundings, I think this year will mean more time exploring New York and seeing the world around us anew. One cold winter morning, as we were strolling the west side of Manhattan with newly-arrived Baby, my wife (who, let it be known, has long been seeking warmer climes than our brutal New York Januarys) said: “This will mean we’ll get to explore New York all over again.” So, knowing we will move at some point to who-knows-where as our family grows, let’s start with what’s there now in front of us: let’s explore New York all over again.
This past year has been spent trying to figure out how to stop chasing things endlessly – in work, in accolades, in likes, in what others have that I also want but that maybe I can’t quite explain why I want. To be confident in knowing that whatever comes, will come. Some of it was spent thinking “Well, now that we have all this family and kid stuff to work out, we won’t have time for anything else”. Now that we’re chasing Baby, how will we have time to chase anything else? And why, when all Baby wants and needs is us, do we want, or need to chase anything else? But in the past year I’ve learned to view all that time away from the “other chase” as a superpower of sorts. After Baby, I feel I know more now about life and other things I wouldn’t otherwise have. There’s some feeling like I’ve always known these things, but now I know these things. I seek closer, fewer, more meaningful friendships. I seek out books and places that I didn’t before, that give me experience and meaning without wasting time that I could otherwise be spending with family. I’m more mature now. I think of ideas and life differently now. I’d like to think I’ve always treated everyone as I would like to be treated, but I think I’m even nicer to everyone now, especially when I see other parents. A silent “Baby on Board” network no matter where we go.
This past year, I chose to spend most of my time with Crosby and Diana. You won’t get this time back. Time only goes one way.
At thirty-eight, I’m not just thinking of what I’ve done (or not done) in thirty-eight years, but what life will be like when Crosby is thirty-eight. And that, like my own life and my own thirty-eight years, it will all move just too fast. We won’t get this time back. It only goes one way.
This coming year, instead of just measuring age and accolades, I plan to use a different sort of measurement for my life. One that encompasses family, happiness, health, and success alike. I’m reminded of Clayton Christensen’s, How will you measure your life?
In pondering that question, I realized that my success lies not in just what I will achieve in my lifetime, but what my son will achieve in his.
Super wicked stories about a warming planet
After seeing a few people recommend it at year-end, I read The Uninhabitable Earth this weekend. Beyond wanting to learn about the things I didn’t know about carbon emissions and the feedback loop, I was seeking a better way to understand the state of the world we’re in today, and what we can still do about it. (Hint: beyond just acting now, because every day or year that goes by it becomes a bigger problem for us to solve, it’s to elect better politicians and to build more-efficient carbon capture plants and nuclear power plants and move us off of fossil fuels).
One can barely put the book down, because besides feeling a bit of panic as you read it, you think, “why isn’t this constantly in the back of everyone’s minds all the time?” Is it that I’m thinking more about it because of Baby and because I wonder what world we’re leaving for him between now and the 2100s? Is it because there isn’t a clear thing one single individual can do or even know what to do? I’m reminded of a Simpsons episode, where Homer and Marge are having an argument about something which he can clearly solve, but he just asks “What can I do? I’m only one man.”
Above all, one particular part stood out to me most: why is it so hard to tell the story of climate change?
Others call it “cli-fi”: genre fiction sounding environmental alarm, didactic adventure stories, often preachy in their politics. Ghosh has something else in mind: the great climate novel. “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ”
His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in conventional novels, which tend to end with uplift and hope and to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the miasma of social fate. This is a narrow definition of the novel, but almost everything about our broader narrative culture suggests that climate change is a major mismatch of a subject for all the tools we have at hand. Ghosh’s question applies even to comic-book movies that might theoretically illustrate global warming: Who would the heroes be? And what would they be doing? The puzzle probably helps explain why so many pop entertainments that do try to tackle climate change, from The Day After Tomorrow on, are so corny and pedantic: collective action is, dramatically, a snore.
The problem is even more acute in gaming, which is poised to join or even supplant novels and movies and television, and which is built, as a narrative genre, even more obsessively around the imperatives of the protagonist—i.e., you. It also promises at least a simulation of agency. That could grow more comforting in the coming years, assuming we continue to proceed, zombie-like ourselves, down a path to ruin. Already, the world’s most popular game, Fortnite, invites players into a competition for scarce resources during an extreme weather event—as though you yourself might conquer and totally resolve the issue.
As Harari wrote, telling stories and believing in myths are what gave us a lot of the social constructs we have now. It is one of the things that not only separated us from the animals, but also brought us closer together as humans and achieved large-scale human cooperation – from tribes to farming to churches to cities. Sure, we have disaster movies, and books like The Uninhabitable Earth and leaders like Al Gore making it easier for all to understand. But all of those just seem…so far away…there’s always bad stuff going on in the world, and there always has been. Not only do they seem like, “What can I do? I’m only one man”, but there’s no way to wrap the story around one’s head. There are no heroes, there are no clear villains, there is no “we will randomly discover some pathogens that will destroy the attacking Martians immediately”.
Telling this story requires a different way to tell a story – beyond just your usual structures like the hero’s journey. As Wallace-Wells writes, we need an alternative: many problems we face now aren’t just one person’s problems where they go out into the world, selfishly solve it for themselves and come back home victorious. Most big problems are hard to define and hard to tell stories about. Global climate change, in particular, is known as a super wicked problem. We just may need some super wicked stories.
AirPods Pro
I got a pair of AirPods Pro as a holiday gift. Unlike previous versions, these have been the first ones to properly fit my ears, especially given the old ones were hard shell only. So, these are the first pair of Apple AirPods I’ve ever owned!
The call quality and noise cancellation are great. I hardly ever have to worry whether the person on the other end can hear me. And, on the go, working in various spaces these days, it’s far better to carry one pair of headphones that can swap seamlessly between iPhone and MacBook. (The Jabras only work on your phone, and not on your computer for some reason).
I still use my Jabra Elite Sport when I walk the dog, because even though the AirPods fit better, I still don’t trust them to stay in during the fast walks we do. The Elite Sport is made for exercise and running and they stay in no matter how much you’re moving around or how much you sweat (probably within reason). I find the Jabras are also better when used in a single ear – the noise cancellation on them when in one-ear mode is just that much better. I prefer to walk the streets of the city like this, as opposed to completely oblivious, because it’s easier to keep your dog and yourself safer that way. Depending on what you do, where you might use them, whether you listen to music while you workout, I would still highly recommend the Jabras to others.
One thing I’ve been wondering: will one ever be able to get custom silicone tips for the AirPods that are form-fit to your ears so that they fit even better than the standard S/M/L tips? For instance, I’m fairly sure my right is shaped differently than the left, because the right always keeps falling out. Given that you can swap the soft tips, it only makes sense that there exists some small market for custom in-ears. There is a custom attach point – see the iFixit teardown of the AirPods Pro – so not trivial for just about anyone to make replacements here, but if there ever was a custom option, I’d be first to get them.