everything’s perspective

A little over a year ago, my life seemed terribly important. I had important things to do at work, at school, at volunteer gigs and organizations I was a part of. These were Very Important Activities that only I could do, and they required all my time and attention. And heaven forbid I didn’t get things done on time - the whole world hung in the balance.

Four international trips and a couple life-changing books later, and I have a different outlook. Nothing is so important that I have to kill myself over it. It’s not as if someone’s life is at risk. And there are a lot of things I take for granted that make my life soooo much easier than I used to think it was. A year ago, everything was just so hard. Now, I’m more grateful than anything else.

So - a brief rundown of things that have changed my perspective in the past year:

1. My trip to Nicaragua. A year ago, I worked on a public health project in Nicaragua. We were in the mountains near the border with Honduras, where some of the best coffee in the world can be found. I had a chance to visit a coffee plantation, in addition to the work we were doing (a survey assessing community knowledge of dengue fever). Coffee pickers make pennies a day, while carrying bags weighing up to 70 kilos. Coffee growers make about $2 a pound, for coffee that you will likely pay $10 a pound.

Three days a week, we had no running water in the house we stayed in. In the developing world, average water use is under 50 liters a day. In the US, it’s about 150 liters (12% of which goes to watering grass).

2. What is the What? If you haven’t read this book, go to your nearest bookstore and pick it up right now. This is the story of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. After trekking across East Africa before the age of 10 to flee terrorists, Valentino arrives in Atlanta to experience a different, but no less exhausting, set of problems. I am an immigrant, but it was my parents who bore the brunt of the problems that immigrants face. And at least none of us were ever chased by lions.

The Lost Boys left their homes and families in Sudan to flee to Ethiopia, where they lived in refugee camps before they were kicked out. They trekked again to Kenya, where many of them still live in refugee camps. Some of them have been relocated to the US, to cities such as Syracuse and Pittsburgh.

3. My trip to India. I went on pilgrimmage last year, and the first day of my trip it took us 8 hours to go less than 300 kms. Patience was the most important thing I packed for that trip. At one point, my brother got sick, and we had to hire a man with a basket to carry him. My brother is 5′10″ and weighs about 175 lbs. The man was maybe 150 lbs (on a fat day). He carried my brother 3kms on his back… and charged about $12. My dad tipped him extra, but still far less than what I’d want to be paid to undertake such labor.

4. An earthquake in Peru. A week before we were due to leave for Peru, a major earthquake struck in the south. Ultimately, we had to change our itinerary, but that’s a minor inconvenience compared to the fates of the people living in the slums of Pisco and Ica. An entire city disappeared overnight, and so many were left homeless.

5. Collapse. The concepts Jared Diamond talks about in Collapse are not unfamiliar to most of us. But his detailed analysis of failed civilizations makes me pause and take a good hard look at where our current civilizations are heading. We seem to be making the same mistakes those others made, which led to disaster for them. Will it also lead to disaster for us? I’m really starting to think so.

6. My recent trip to Cambodia. This warrants its own post, later this week. I was in Cambodia for the first time 8 years ago, and a second time last week. A lot has changed in 8 years… and a lot hasn’t changed at all. Cambodia was an unfortunate victim of our incursion into Vietnam 30 years ago, and it still bears the scars. Major parts of the countryside still contain the landmines planted then and since.

My good friend has been working there for the past three years. She’s a friend from primary school, and it’s amazing to see how different our lives are now. She leads a simpler life, but the things that are Very Important to her really are important.

Looking back at myself a year ago, it’s amazing how convinced I was that all the stress was so necessary. But starting with my trip to Nicaragua, I’ve begun simplifying things in my life. I’ve also stopped worrying about all the little unimportant things (which is more of my life than I used to think). I’ve started stripping my life of the unessentials, to the best of my abilities. And I find I’m less stressed, my debt is decreasing, I’m getting more sleep, and I’m enjoying life more. It’s amazing how nothing significant has to happen to enact a real change in your life. You just have to change your perspective.

medicine for the soul

I run a book club, and we read one book a month. Most of our books are non-fiction, and tend to have a social or environmental bent to them. Many of them have been eye-opening for me, and I thought I’d review a few of them here.

The Tipping Point. Most people know the concept behind Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller. The tipping point is like critical mass - it’s the point at which an idea gains enough momentum to catapult into the mainstream. In describing this process, Gladwell undertakes some fascinating psychological analysis of humankind. Many of his examples are counterintutitive and provide some excellent insight into why certain things work and certain things don’t. I learned a few things about myself in reading this, and definitely some things about other people.

Three Cups of Tea. I will be the first to admit that this book is not particularly well-written. But if you can get past the occasionally cheesy prose, the underlying story is one of immense inspiration. Greg Mortensen is a man on a mission, and single-mindedly so. He succeeds under circumstances where most of us would have given up so long ago. He started his mission - to build schools for girls in underserved areas - without thinking about the bigger picture, and somewhere along the way, realized the massive import of what he was doing. Educating girls is one of the single best ways to bring communities out of poverty, increase women’s rights, and reduce a number of mortality indicators. I’ve never undertaken such a daunting task, but every time I’m faced with a seemingly unsurmountable obstacle, I think about this book.

Stumbling on Happiness. I’ve blogged about this one before. I don’t tend to like to make statements such as “this changed my life”, but Gilbert really did open my eyes to some intriguing ideas about ourselves and our search for happiness.

Fast Food Nation. This is absolutely a must-read for every American. We live in a society where we have zero transparency about what our food undergoes to reach our plate, and Schlosser wanted to change that. He dug deep into the backstory of the fast food industry, taking a few detours to visit the major beef and potato companies too. What emerges is an incredible history of how our seemingly capitalism-loving country is hostage to the beef trust, the fast food trust, the potato trust, and various other entities (and lots of social injustice to boot). This book is our generation’s “The Jungle”.

stumbling on happiness

I finished the book, Stumbling on Happiness. I came into it with one foot already in the choir, so maybe it’s not much of a feat that Gilbert convinced me to solidly plant both feet in his camp. He makes a compelling argument, using tools to which I’m susceptible - mostly statistics and really cool psych studies.

But he made some really interesting points, some of which I had mentioned in an earlier post. What’s interesting is that, despite so much evidence, we are in so much denial about how our brains work and what it takes to be happy. Part of that is a defense mechanism created by our brains - if we started to doubt ourselves at every turn, we’d lose that evolutionary drive to self-protect. But a lot of what he points out could go a long way towards easing some of our stress, if we were only ready to let go of preconceived notions. Some thoughts:

1. Our brains are tricking us. I discussed this before, but it’s true. We really only experience a fraction of what we are experiencing, and our brains fill in the result. It’s a survival mechanism, but one that has some faults in our more civilized life. For example, inattentional blindness often makes us unable to see things that are right in front of us.

2. We can’t know what it’s like not to know. Once you have insight into a situation, you are unable to know what it is like to not have that insight. Thus, you can’t say you’d rather have limbs than not have limbs, even if you’ve experienced both. We are, basically, prone to observer bias, or the idea that observing something changes it.

3. However you think you’ll feel in the future, you’re wrong. You cannot, with any high degree of accuracy, predict how you will feel about something in the future because you cannot remove the effect of your present experience. Thus, if you were full and someone asked you how happy you’d be eating ice cream tomorrow, you’d rank your happiness lower than someone who hadn’t eaten anything all day. But tomorrow, when both of you eat the ice cream, you’ll rank your happiness similarly in the moment. The present and future are hopelessly conflated, and that explains why so many people fail to accurately measure how happy they’d be doing (or not doing) something in the future.

4. Your memory is failing you. At the same time, you can’t separate the present from the past either. You think you remember a certain event just so, but actually, it didn’t really happen like that. How you feel in the present moment colors your remembrance, partly because your brain didn’t actually record that experience - just a summary of it. When you access that summary, your brain fills in the pieces in the moment.

5. There is a solution. And according to Gilbert, it’s really quite simple: just ask someone who is experiencing your future right now how they feel right now. That will give you an indication of what you’ll really think.

6. You aren’t as unique as you think. The previous solution won’t work because no one is just like you? Wrong. We’re all much more similar than we think we are, and other people’s experiences really are just like ours. Of course, people are clearly different than you might have a different experience, but you’d be surprised by how little it actually varies.

And the last ultimately, is why we can only stumble on happiness, instead of charting a clear path. We fail to use the appropriate tools, and seem hell-bent on relying on our own imperfect perceptions of what we think will be.