J.D. Moyer

science fiction author, beatmaker, against fascism

Year: 2010 Page 12 of 13

The Tyranny of Stuff

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On February 1, 2010

In Culture Rants/Shares

VINYL IS DEAD, LONG LIVE VINYL

Last week, Spesh, Silencefiction, and I drove to the dump and dropped off approximately 1100 pounds of vinyl records.  This amount consisted not of our personal collections, but of Loöq Records back catalog material from 1998 to 2002 (the years we were pressing our own vinyl and selling directly to distributors and stores).

Losers on the digital battlefield

Spesh posted a picture of the sad, large pile of records on Facebook, and received a range of reactions.  Some people were concerned that we didn’t recycle the material (in fact, SF Recology, aka the San Francisco dump, is a zero-waste facility, and hosts artists-in-residence — experts in creative reuse).  Others were horrified that we were throwing out valuable music.  Others seemed a little sad, but accepted it as a sign of the changing times.  DJ’s play CD’s, or laptops, these days, and buy (or beg/borrow/steal) all their music online.  Only the hardcore holdouts, and diehards in Berlin, still play vinyl.  Vinyl is making a comeback among indie rockers and the like, but in the realm of dance music its essentially dead (except, as noted above, in Germany).

Back in the day (before digital distribution like iTunes and Beatport) it was hard to estimate how much vinyl to press.  You could base your pressing quantity on pre-orders from distributors, but then get stuck with no inventory if the record took off (and thus miss the boat with a slow repress time).  You could take an optimistic stance and press a lot of records (often the same price as a lower pressing quantity — most of the costs are in setup) but then get stuck with a large pile of 50lb-boxes of worthless plastic disks.  Once in awhile we would press the perfect amount, but usually we’d overshoot on the initial pressing or repressing.  This was generally my fault — I hated being out of stock of anything (this was all before digital distribution or high-quality mp3’s — when you were out of stock that meant there was NO WAY TO GET THE MUSIC).

Orders from distributors used to come in for a few weeks after a release — sometimes for a few months (or even up to a year, if a record really took off).  Everything left after that initial run became back-stock, or back-catalog.  For a while Loöq Records was able to move its vinyl back-stock steadily.  Drive to a record store, leave as many records as they would take on consignment.  Drive back in a month or two and collect money with about a 50% success rate (usually the records had sold, but half the time the paperwork was lost or the guy who could pay you wasn’t working that day).  Surprisingly, we moved a lot of vinyl that way … hundreds if not thousands of 12″ singles.  DJ’s liked and bought our records, when they could find them.

Then all the record stores went out of business.

We held onto our precious back-catalog vinyl for years (over ten years, in fact).  But over time, the boxes on the shelf started to loom over us oppressively.  They just weren’t moving.  DJ’s were buying (and we were now selling) all of our music on Beatport, Juno, iTunes, eMusic, and other digital outlets.

When the time came to move out of our old office on Brannan, it was time to let the old vinyl go.  We’ve kept some, of course, for the archives, or to satisfy the odd request from Germany, or in case the original artist requests a few additional copies.  But the bulk of it went to the dump.  Here’s a clip of me hurling a Jondi & Spesh 12″ (Sky City, I think it is), against the wall, shuriken style.  Enjoy.

LIMITS TO DIGITIZATION, THE RETURN OF PERMANENT POSSESSIONS, CORE QUESTIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY

I think that people, in general, are better off with music commerce being digitized.  Music is now universally available for the price of an internet connection, and quality is simply a matter of bandwidth (I pay an extra buck to download the WAV format on Beatport, and I wish I could on iTunes).  Books, and certainly newspapers, seem to be on a similar trajectory.  Within a few years (or decades, at the most) physical information formats will exist only for diehards, fetishists, and the eccentric elite.

Music, print, photographs, film, and software products can all be distributed and utilized in a digital format.  What about everything else?  Are there any general trends worth noting regarding the development of products in general?

I would argue that one significant trend is temporal appropriateness.  Most products last either too long (plastic bags) or not long enough (laptop computers).  Ideally, I’d like my plastic bags to harmlessly biodegrade after a few weeks, and my laptop to be an indestructible, perpetually useful item that can be passed down through the generations, like a silver pocket watch or a samurai sword (instead, I buy a new one every few years, either because the keyboard gives out, the screen goes black, or the damn thing is just too slow).

Side-effect of civilization.

If we keep making disposable, non-biodegradable stuff, then we’re going to drown in a heap of our own garbage.  Annie Leonard discusses the ins and outs of this cycle in some detail in The Story of Stuff (my friend Ariane turned me on to Annie Leonard’s work).  I buy industrially produced products — I’m part of the problem.  I’m not sure how NOT to be.  If there was a laptop out there that would last a hundred years, I would buy it (if I could afford it).  My friend Thor Muller‘s thesis is that we’re currently entering a long recession, and that one positive effect of long-term lowered consumer demand will be that product quality will actually improve; things will once again be made to last.  I, for one, would love to buy a laptop that doesn’t break after three or four years, even if I DO always type like I’m angry (I’m not, I swear, I just like definitive keystrokes).

Even if we — human beings — drastically reduce our ecological footprints, carbon gas emissions, and toxin-spewing industries, we may still run into the problem that there are just too damn many of us.  Seven billion and counting?  Even if we manage world peace, sustainable ocean management, zero-emission vehicles, giant solar farms, vast areas of protected old-growth forests, high-rise greenhouses, intensive soil-enriching polyculture, and a 99% non-renewable resource recycling rate, we may still run out of food, space, energy, and raw materials.

Is this likely?  Probably not.  Humans are fairly clever — we’ll find a way to muddle through and survive.  The rate of population increase is already decreasing due to factors like higher literacy rates, availability of birth control, and the fact that it’s frikking expensive to raise a modern child.  What worries me more is how we’ll deal with the eventual, inevitable decrease in human population.  It’s not likely to be pretty — our entire global economic system is based on perpetual growth, and how can you sustain perpetual growth when you aren’t adding new people to the system?

The character Daniel Aoki thinks, writes, and acts on these questions in my first (and as yet unpublished) novel, A Falling Forward Motion.  One possible escape route for humanity he hypothesizes (escape from the closed system of living on a single planet with limited resources) is for humanity to evolve “into the box.”  Virtual people — not simulations but discrete instances of human consciousness — living in full resolution virtual worlds.  The Matrix, more or less, but without the secrecy.  A next step for humans after a full lifetime of corporeal living.  I think that after a century or two on this planet in the same body (even if I manage to rejuvenate and maintain a perpetual 25-year-oldness, Aubrey de Grey style), I’d probably be ready to change it up a bit.  Presented with the option, I would totally upload into a digital reality where I could switch bodies, fly at will, teleport, and perform any other tricks that the programming allowed.  As long as I could still experience myself as a human being, why not?

THE TYRANNY OF STUFF

Right now I have renter’s envy.  I’m engaged in several kill-me-slowly projects.  I mean home-improvement projects.  Things not in their place, cans of paint lying around, half-assembled IKEA furniture waiting for a missing wall-mount screw … it’s death by a thousand cuts.  OK, I exaggerate.  I have a sensitive psyche.  But I don’t understand how people manage things like getting their kitchen remodeled.

One element of our home improvement efforts consisted of the recent destruction of half our storage space (in order to make room for an additional home office).  Getting rid of old stuff in storage requires a great deal of mental energy (why am I keeping this?  will I ever use it?  will I ever be featured on Hoarders?).  But it’s  ultimately rewarding when you take the leap; give something away, sell it, recycle it, or chuck it.  Straight up chucking it is underrated in this eco-conscious day and age.  It can be satisfying to send certain objects straight to the landfill (once again, I’m part of the problem).  The ex-roommate’s furniture that you never liked but somehow ended up with.  Electronic toys that make awful noises that someone gave your toddler (and your toddler left out in the rain).  You know the kind of stuff I mean.

Unless we’re vigilant, we accumulate stuff throughout our lives, kind of like the way our DNA accumulates cumulative damage from minor replication errors.  This crap weight us down; it oppresses us.  Buying a bigger house, renting storage space — these things might temporarily mask the symptoms of having too many things but they don’t solve anything.

THE PRACTICE

This method won’t do anything for the landfills, but it might lift a layer of detritus from your abode (like a face lift, or chemical peel, for your house).  The idea, introduced to me by my friend Stephanie Morgan, is to get rid of 10 things a day for 10 days.  Easy enough to do — for the first pass you can probably wander around your place almost selecting objects at random — but after a few days there is a noticeable decluttering effect.

What else?  Next holiday season, why not conspire with your loved ones to engage in a Buy Nothing Christmas?  Or pool your resources and make a charitable donation to Heifer International, Doctors Without Borders, charity:water, or another organization involved in good works?

My next big purchase … I’m still considering it.  I’d been thinking about picking up a PS3 (ever since my XBox got 3ROD’ed — my DIY repair only lasted a couple months).  But you know, that’s just another piece of crap that’s going to break or be obsolete in a few years.  I should buy something that can stay in the family for generations; a permanent possession.  Something like this.

Eating Animals, Getting Eaten by Animals

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On January 27, 2010

In Health/Body-hacking

I’ve often thought about the ethical implications of eating animals.  I can’t say I’ve struggled with the issue, because whenever I’m presented with a roasted chicken or a sizzling plate of bacon, ethics are the furthest thing from my mind.

Would I kill an animal myself, in order to eat it?  Certainly I would, though I’d prefer not to.  I’m all for division of labor in this case — so thank you cattlemen and butchers.  On the other hand, if left to my own devices in the forest, I’d probably try to sharpen a stick and spear myself a deer to accompany my foraged chanterelles, roasted grubs, and wild greens.  As for my chance of success at this imagined endeavor — admittedly slim.  But it wouldn’t be zero; I spent a good deal of my free time in junior high developing my spear-throwing skills (not to mention nunchucks and throwing stars).  An ancillary skill I developed, related to these activities, was the installation of new windows.

Foraging ... perhaps easier than hunting.

Both sides have some good arguments.  No animal wants to be eaten, and many animals show every sign of being conscious creatures with emotions.  If you follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, then it makes no more sense to kill and eat animals than it does to kill and eat each other (and not just because of the prion issues).

Ethically concerned meat-eaters, on the other hand, might argue that many animals have become much more successful, on a species level, exactly because they are so yummy.  Chickens, pigs, and cows excel in this regard (there are more chickens roaming the earth than people).  For this group, the question is not so much if we eat animals or not, but how we treat them while they’re alive.

Unfortunately, most animals raised for food in the United States (and most other countries) are treated poorly.  This sort of animal abuse is well-documented, as on this site.  If you find this kind of treatment of conscious, living creatures to be abhorrent, then you’re probably 1) a vegetarian or 2) a buyer of ethically raised meat whenever possible.  Niman Ranch claims to raise their animals humanely, Glaum Egg Ranch doesn’t cage their hens, and hundreds of other producers provide (or claim to provide) their animals with environments that include open pasture, normal socialization with their own kind, and other animal perks that make animal eaters like me feel less guilty.  Pretty much all the meat, eggs, and dairy products that I buy falls into this category, but there are definitely some items in the unknown category (like salami).

And when I go to a dinner party, I never quiz the host.  I suppose there must some sort of cognitive dissonance going on here.  I do care about animal welfare, but even more so, I don’t want to be an obnoxious guest.  And when the steaming roast comes out of the oven, I’m not even thinking about the life or last moments of that unfortunate beast.  My baser instincts take over — I just wanna eat it.

Care to discuss Omega-3 fatty acids with this guy?

Does this make me a hypocrite?  Probably.  I do sometimes feel guilty about eating meat (especially when I’m not hungry).  I would have no problem with animals eating me when I’m dead, but surprisingly few animals would want to (vultures, mountain lions, great white sharks, tigers, and hyenas would all happily consume my flesh, but none of the animals I like to eat [sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, fish, oysters, mussels, octopus, squid, and snails] would have any interest in reciprocating, thus disrupting the potential symmetry).

What about vat-grown pork?  This will soon be a viable option.  If there’s only pig meat — no pig brain, and therefore no pig consciousness — there can’t really be anything ethically wrong with this approach, can there?  Unless you’re Jewish and kosher, I suppose, or Muslim, or hung up on vague nonsense concept like “natural.”  In any case, it sounds like the meat turns out a bit soggy, and lacking in muscle tone.  I think I’ll stick with Niman Ranch, and tolerate the occasional twinge in my conscience.

What About Health?

The healthfulness of eating or not eating animals, and what kind of animals, and what the animals themselves eat, is a hugely debated, highly divisive topic.  At social events, bringing up the topic of what a person should or shouldn’t eat has become a taboo equivalent to bringing up politics or religion.  It’s just not done in polite company.  Of course I do it all the time (all three) and usually end up regretting it.  These topics are simply too personal, too hot to handle.

When one person suggests to another person that they might be better off by changing their diet in some way, what usually happens is kind of an emotional head-on collision.  The person giving the advice is thinking “I care about you,” and “I want you to be healthy.”  The person receiving the advice is thinking “Do you think I’m so much of an idiot that I don’t know what foods are good for me?” and “You’re a totally obnoxious busybody.”

That dynamic aside, most of us are at least somewhat interested in the health effects of food.  Since there are financial interests backing every single food out there, there are no shortage of industry shills and scientists-for-hire presenting evidence that that you should consume their particular food item in large quantities.  Dark chocolate is good for your heart, as is red wine.  Milk is good for your bones.  Meat can prevent anemia.  Broccoli can prevent cancer.  But much of the information out there is contradictory.  There are advocates for all-meat diets and all-vegetable diets.  You can even get contradictory advice from the same person.  During the time that I was a vegetarian (approximately three years, during high school, which I am now convinced stunted my growth — my evidence for this is my 5’8″ height vs. my 5’11” arm span) I was an evangelical vegetarian, so much so that at my 20 year high school reunion some of my old friends still seemed to be carrying some resentment against my overzealous lectures, those that had occurred two decades previous.  These days I believe in the health benefits of a modified paleolithic diet, but I’m a much more cautious advocate.  I’ve learned that people don’t like to be lectured, and also that the content of my own advice can change over time (radically, in this case).

Eating whole foods and avoiding processed foods (like high-fructose corn syrup) probably has more impact on a person’s health than whether they do or don’t eat meat.  Genetics also has something to do with it — my ancestors co-evolved with cattle and thus I’m capable of producing lactase (which breaks down lactose) as an adult, while some of my friends won’t come near a glass of milk without a package of Lactaid.  So what about meat — is it bad for you or not?  It’s possible that eating large amounts of red meat (even from grass-fed, humanely raised animals) may raise the risk of some chronic diseases.  But if you look at the actual evidence that MEAT = BAD, it’s quite weak.  A lot of diet/health research studies are based on self-reported eating habits, which is about as accurate as  self-reported incomes on all those subprime loan applications.  The evidence that saturated fat is bad for you is even weaker (the latest evidence shows that small dense LDL’s — those that are produced from eating carbohydrates — are much more dangerous than the big fluffy LDL’s that are made from saturated fat).

Michael Pollan, in his book In Defense of Food, warns against “nutritionism,” a dogmatic belief in the value of individual nutrients, or itemized components of food rather than the food itself.  He points out, quite correctly, that conventional wisdom about food changes over time, so we should be cautious about food fads.  (He would probably call the paleolithic diet a fad as well, but at least it’s a fad backed by several millions years of hominid evolution.)

Bottom line?  I’m going to keep voting with my dollars, buying animal products only from suppliers that treat their animals humanely.  I may also continue to feel a twinge of regret when I see a cute pot-bellied pig at the zoo, after having eaten bacon for breakfast (or, if I haven’t eaten breakfast, maybe I’ll feel a twinge of hunger).

And if I’m hiking in the Oakland hills and a mountain lion eats me, well, fair is fair.

You look good ... to eat.

The Joys of Throwing Out Long-term Plans and Lowering Quotas

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On January 22, 2010

In Creative Work/Career, Fiction Writing, Life Purpose & Goals, Metaprogramming, Writing

This year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions or making a list of goals for the year (something I’d done since 2006, with mixed success), I decided to take on one big goal for Q1, and leave the rest of 2010 unplanned.

My planning/goal-setting horizon has been getting shorter and shorter over the years.  I remember having grand life-arc type plans in college, and even as a child.  Once I entered the working world and decided I that I basically liked what I was doing (having my own music business and doing freelance database consulting), the “future-vision” shrunk to two or three years, and finally to one year.

Why shorten my planning horizon to a mere 3 months?

A big part of it has to do with reading Tim Ferriss’s blog and, more recently, reading his book The Four Hour Workweek.  Ferriss makes the point that long-term plans often function as dream deferrals.  Why start something now if it’s on the agenda for 2015?  The problem is, it’s too easy to defer those large, difficult, potentially life-changing actions indefinitely, perhaps so long that we die before we try.  This is true even if the deferred plan of action is a central part of our identity.  I’ve been thinking of myself as novelist since approximately age six, but it took me another thirty-four years to actually write my first novel.  Talk about procrastination.  Anything you’ve been putting off for thirty-four years?

Already a novelist in his own mind.

There’s a natural tension between identity and intention; some parts of our identity evolve out of performing the related actions (if you play soccer enough, you might start to feel like a soccer player), while in other areas the identity and intention come into being first (a high-school student decides to become a doctor and starts planning their academic path).  The distinction has less to do with the profession than it does with the character of the agent.  You could just as easily decide at a young age to become a professional soccer player, or, in your adult life, fall into practicing medicine (perhaps a weak example — of course you can’t just start practicing medicine without a medical degree — but many people do learn a great deal about human physiology as a hobby and end up giving informal health advice to their friends and family).

It’s the intention-related parts of our identity that are vulnerable to deferral, as opposed to the professions that sneak up on us.  For myself, writing is in the former category; computer programming and music production are in the latter.  Who knows why.  What about you?

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

I decided to take on one big, potentially life-changing goal in Q1 of 2010, and that was to write a first draft of my second novel.  It’s a big enough goal to get me excited and motivated, and simple enough to keep in my head every day without constant review (if you have fifteen goals for the year, it’s hard to remember them all — not to mention that by August half of them are irrelevant).

At the same time, I threw out any preconceptions about what the latter three-quarters of 2010 might look like.  Maybe Kia and I and our daughter will spend a few months working remotely from somewhere on the Mediterranean coast (I recently ran the numbers, this option could potentially be less expensive than our current lifestyle, especially if we can get in on some of that free European pre-school — you parents of young children living in the Bay Area know what I’m talking about).  Or, depending on the availability of Spesh or Mark Musselman, maybe there will be a new Jondi & Spesh or Momu album in the works.  In any case it’s exhilarating not knowing.

So — back to my grand plan.  I came up with what I thought was a fail-safe strategy to bang out novel #2.  I whipped out (or rather, clicked on) my digital calculator and figured out approximately how many words I would need to type every day in order to have a more-or-less novel length manuscript on my hard drive by March 31st.  I gave myself weekends off, as we don’t generally have childcare on the weekends (you try writing a novel while a two-year-old is clambering onto your lap demanding to look at pictures of choo-choo trains on your computer) and also planned on taking several “creative sabbatical” weeks where all I would do was write.

1150 words per day, on the regular working days.  That’s what the calculator said.  Okay, no problem.  My work was cut out for me.  Here’s what the first few writing days in January looked like, in terms of actual output:

Day 1: 297 words
Day 2: 402 words
Day 3: 351 words

Ouch.

I wasn’t spending eight hours each day in front of the laptop — nor was this ever the plan.  I still needed to eat, after all, and running Loöq Records takes some time.  I was hoping to hit my quota after two or three hours of focused work, first thing in the morning.

I liked the material I was coming up with, but at this rate it would take me all year to get a draft.  I kept thinking of Stephen King’s observation that after three months, “the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave radio during a period of severe sunspot activity.” Nope, don’t want that to happen.

It was my favorite goofy-hat-wearing vloggers, Tim Ferriss (again) and Kevin Rose, that came to the rescue, with this video post.  It’s long and (as the title warns) random, but somewhere towards the end Tim makes a reference to a story of how IBM achieved the highest sales by setting the lowest quotas.  The idea was to boost productivity by removing pressure, and in IBM’s case it worked.  Tim Ferriss is currently applying the low quota idea to his own writing project, with the goal of writing “two crappy pages a day.”

That sounded good to me.  I needed less pressure.  The 1150 word quota was looming over me every morning like a flying Nazgûl.  I reduced my quota to 750 words a day.  The next two days my word counts were as follows:

Day 1: 1147 words
Day 2: 1120 words

Go figure.  This was just two days ago, so we’ll see if the trend continues, but at the moment I’m feeling the lower quota.  I think the point of a quota is to get one’s ass in gear, and to have a minimum standard of productivity.  Quality is more important than quantity, but you can’t get to quality unless you produce something. Ideally, you get started and catch a wave, you achieve flow … then you hit your goal before you know it.  But for me having a quota is useful; it’s a guardian against sloth and inertia.

Did Rodin have a sculpting quota?

Willpower as a Commodity, Part II (counterintuitive sleep tips)

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On January 17, 2010

In Health/Body-hacking, Metaprogramming

It’s strange starting a new blog.  On jondiandspesh.com I mostly wrote about dance music, clubbing, and the like.  I don’t think this blog will have any sort of focus.  Some of my favorite blogs are similarly unfocused.  Art de Vany‘s blog became popular because he posted pictures of his grain-free paleolithic lunches and his muscle-bound 70 year-old body, but he also wrote about statistics, Hollywood films, and economics.  Now he’s made his blog private (his bandwidth fees were getting out of control and he didn’t want to deal with advertising) but I enjoyed the eclectic nature of his writings for a long time.

I think the main reason I like to blog is to make sure I can express myself without boring my friends to death with info-dumps that they may or may not be in the mood to hear.  I assume nobody is making you read this — you’re here voluntarily.  You can stop reading at any time.  It’s a perfect arrangement.  I can “talk” uninterrupted for pages on end about whatever is on my mind, and you can leave at any time without any fear of an awkward social moment.

WILLPOWER AS A COMMODITY, PART II

In my last post I stated my opinion that willpower is more like an expendable resource than a muscle you can build, and that the two aspects of willpower management are:

1) Stopping the Leaks

and

2) Doing What’s Important

By “Stopping the Leaks” I mean finding the areas of our lives where we’re expending effort and tweaking our behavior and rituals so that those areas no longer drain our daily reserves of willpower.  I think most of us can “trim” willpower expenditures in at least a couple of the following areas:

  • Fighting sleep deprivation
  • Fighting carbohydrate cravings
  • Enduring annoying behavior
  • Doing unnecessary tasks
  • Excessive exercising
  • Ignoring inclination and mood
  • Having excessively high standards

SLEEP DEPRIVATION

Fighting sleep deprivation can be exhausting.  Being anywhere but in bed when you’re tired is a fast-track to misery.  When you’re tired, the simplest to-do items feel like Herculean (or Promethean?) tasks.

I’m going to try to avoid saying mind-numbingly obvious things in this blog.  I’m not going to say anything about the effect drinking ten cups of Peet’s coffee every day, or eating an entire bar of 85% dark chocolate right before bed might have on your sleep cycle.  I’m not going to suggest that you wear earplugs if your spouse snores like a wheelbarrow being dragged down a gravel driveway.  I’m just going to mention a few things that have had a drastic positive effect on my own sleep cycle.

ARTIFICIAL LIGHT 30-DAY EXPERIMENT

Last June Kia and I tried a 30-day experiment; no artificial light in the evening.  I first became interested in the effects of artificial light on sleep after reading this book and this article in the New York Times.  We wanted to experience what sleep might have been like in the pre-electrical era, so after when the sun went down (around 8:30 or 9pm), we turned off (or didn’t turn on) all lights, computers, TV’s — we even taped the fridge-light lever down.

A typical evening at home that month involved reading by candlelight from 9 to 9:30 (yawning the entire time), and finally succumbing to sleep around 10pm.  We *were* co-sleeping with our one-year-old daughter at the time (so we were more tired than usual) but nonetheless we found ourselves going to bed significantly earlier than we had the previous month.  It was a bit like going camping every night, except we were living indoors.

For the first few days we both slept longer than usual; I think about ten hours a night (paying off sleep debt).  After that, we probably both slept eight or nine hours a night.  Some nights I would get up around 2am and read for an hour or so (the NYT article discusses how the eight hour block might be a recent norm or expectation; pre-electrical people may have often slept in four hour blocks).

We both felt good that month.  We didn’t get sleepy during the day (which is unusual, considering we had an infant child).  The most unexpected thing was that we felt much happier that month.  We both had the experience of feeling spontaneous joy/excitement at random times during the day, for no particular reason.  This was probably incredibly annoying to our friends and family members.

With these results you might wonder why we didn’t continue the experiment indefinitely.  I can tell you — reading by candlelight every night is BORING.  However we do make a point to turn the lights down fairly early in the evening on nights that we’re just chilling at home.

So that’s one point — if you have trouble getting sleepy at night then turn down the lights.

VITAMIN D

The second factor that improved my sleep quality was taking prescription level doses of Vitamin D.  It was after having two colds in a row that I saw this video and immediately started taking 5K IU of Vitamin D3 daily (I’ve since reduced my dose to 2000-4000 a day).  No colds since, and I’ve been experiencing deeper and more restorative sleep than I have since I was in my twenties (I’m forty now).  The clinical research of this science dude supports my personal experience — adequate Vitamin D levels are important for deep sleep (not to mention reducing risk of nearly every type of cancer, improving mood, improving bone health, and positively affecting 36 organs in total).  Get your blood levels checked and if they’re suboptimal (like two-thirds of U.S. residents) then start taking supplemental Vitamin D (at least 2K a day), or get 10 or so minutes of summer sun on large areas of bare skin, with no sunscreen.  Ten minutes a day shouldn’t burn your skin or raise your chance of skin cancer, and adequate Vitamin D levels may be protective against melanoma (the most dangerous form of skin cancer).

Of course, I’m not a doctor and you should consult your doctor before doing anything.  I’m just sayin’ …

BONE-BENDING EXERCISE

Perhaps you’ve experienced sleeping deeply after exercising hard.  But who really has the time or inclination to consistently exercise the recommended thirty minutes (make that at least an hour with the commute to and from the gym) every day?  Only those freakishly disciplined types … and this isn’t directed at them.  The question in my mind was as follows: could I improve the quality of my sleep by exercising approximately 1 minute a day?  The answer, for me, was a definitive yes.

Try this following right now.  Get up, find the nearest open stretch of street, path, or whatever, and sprint at full speed for about one minute.  Unless you’re sitting there reading this in a Puma tracksuit, you can simultaneously exercise your nonconformity muscles at the same time.

So, how do your legs feel?  (No, of course you didn’t do it).  But try it some time, without doing any other exercise that day, and see how it affects the quality of your sleep.  I’ve found that vigorously jumping up and down for one minute also does the trick.  Undignified, yes, but it helps build bone density and release growth hormone.

One thing that happens when you get enough deep sleep is that your sugar and carbohydrate cravings go way down (and the converse is also true; as little as three nights sleep deprivation can reduce insulin sensitivity to a degree that is similar to Type 2 diabetes).  This post is getting way too long so I’ll discuss my experience with drastically reducing my sugar and grain intake in Part III.

EDIT: The Willpower Part III post is going to cover another topic, but I did end up writing about reducing grain products and sugar here.

Willpower as a Commodity, Part I

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On January 15, 2010

In Metaprogramming

Willpower in action

I’m considering two metaphors for the concept of willpower; willpower as a commodity and willpower as a muscle.  I think the second metaphor is closer to the way that most people think about willpower.  Willpower is something that can be exercised and strengthened.  A person can toughen themselves up.  Try hard, and you get better at trying hard.

I think this view is mostly false.  Hard things get easier because you get better at them when you do them.  Skills that have a steep learning curve, that feel difficult when you’re acquiring them, aren’t going to feel hard for that long.  Why not?  You can’t have a steep learning curve without having a short duration.  If you keep at it, the hard feeling part will pass relatively quickly.

So is willpower a commodity?  Is it a raw resource, valuable, scarce, and non-renewable, with multiple potential applications?  I think this metaphor is much closer.  You can renew your willpower by sleeping, and to a lesser extent with breaks, pep-talks, and sugary snacks, but in a given day willpower is basically non-renewable.  Willpower can be drained by any number of innocuous-seeming tasks, anything that requires mental concentration, enduring the unpleasant, complex decision-making, or resisting temptation.  Answering complicated email, having to interact with people you don’t like, searching for the best airline ticket deal, trying to NOT eat that doughnut, making lunch for your kid when there’s no food in the house — all these things can drain your willpower quicker a bullet hole in a gas tank.

Some people seem blessed with an abundance of willpower.  They have incredible powers of concentration, they can stoically endure the most unpleasant conditions, easily stick to the most spartan of diets, effortlessly delay gratification, and regularly complete grueling exercise programs.

Other less fortunate souls struggle with attention-deficit-disorder and are defenseless against all forms of indulgence.  They have to gear themselves up to get the littlest thing done.  If there is cake, they will eat it.  If there is Scotch they will drink it.  If there is the internet, they will waste time on it.

People less naturally endowed with willpower might in fact be the luckier group.  If they want to achieve anything, they will quickly learn that they have to guard their willpower against theft and to conserve against waste.

Those born into the first group might stoically labor their entire lives, getting much done but achieving nothing, because they are never forced to develop good willpower management skills.

Personally I think I started somewhere in the middle (by nature and/or nurture) and I’m trying to better use my available willpower with smart willpower management.  So what do I mean by that?

IMO willpower management has two sides:

  • Stopping the Leaks
  • Doing What’s Important

I’ll cover both in my next post.

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