Thank Our Ancestors for Our Present Irrationality

I recently read a stupendous article by Nicholas Kristof, a writer for The New York Times and exceptionally respected foreign correspondent. After viewing his surprisingly educational interview on the Colbert Report, Kristof's fervent passion for psychology, economics, and social behavior soon got me asking a single burning question: Why are humans naturally and so punctiliously concerned about short-term threats (like terrorism and swine flu) rather than more important, longer-term apocalyptic possibilities (like global warming and overpopulation)?

The simple answer: current human cognition is still deeply moored to our ancient neurological past. Our ability to consciously defy primal instincts has not surpassed our mind's unconscious romance with "fight or flight" thinking.

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Through hundreds of thousands of years, our evolutionary development has made us inexorably tethered to reactive cognition. Endocrine disruptors -- which first acted as both helpers for hunting big game and defending against neighboring tribes -- are now deterrents for long-term rationality.

So does this mean we're still a bunch of Geico cavemen? Well, sort of.

Today, in the 21st century, we are trying to overcome these bulwarks to planning. We're in a period of transition but it's not a quick process. Because Homo sapiens have changed their surroundings so rapidly in the past thousand years, shedding the old habits that kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years requires the passing of many more evolutionary cycles to alter our brain structures.

This makes complete sense, too. It took us so much time to master and perform our species basic functions with ease. Once we had procreation and survival mostly taken care of, our surroundings changed to make things easier.

Man has waded through four periods in modern day history -- the agricultural, industrial, technological, and information ages -- that have drastically changed his environment. These developments took place under the auspices of old thinking and thus we have yet to throw away any of the vestiges of our insinctual tendencies. All it takes to see this is in action is turning on the TV. You are constantly bombarded by alerts that illustrate just how hard-wired we've become. Many more years of genetic cross-pollination that have favored short-term, instinctual cognition have made humans more adept at reacting to beehives of short-term stimuli and hurt our dexterity for handling long-term problems.

With this in mind, it's no surprise that we oftentimes get ourselves into awful predicaments that could have been avoided. People say hindsight is 20/20, but I call bullshit. The current economic crisis and climate change (that is, if you believe it to be anthropogenically induced) are great examples of our thirst for short-term gain and long-term ignorance. They are odes to the cognitive patterns bred repeatedly during our evolution.

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Chasing myopia might have worked back in the Stone / Ice Age, but it doesn't now. We're no longer surviving on a day-to-day basis. Today we have to look at the road ahead if we want to stay in the driver's seat (recall Volkswagen's old slogan?). If we ever hope for our species to be around for a long geological time, it's time to put precedence toward smarter thinking as a collective. Sure, we've got to pay the bills. But just look where externalizing social costs of our food industry has gotten us: diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Just look at where profiteering has gotten us with regards to marring Earth's landscape. Just look where smokers end up.

Now I'm just as guilty as the next guy. I act immediately when acute pressure pressure is applied. I love to wait until the last minute. I need that "oh shit" moment to get kicked into action. I can't remember how many times I've seen my parents wagging their fingers at me asking, "Now when did we get this assignment?"

The truth is, we don't operate on such a long-term scale yet. We haven't had to until now. Evolution takes practice. Each generation weeds out the inefficacies to make the next ones stronger. But our vision of natural selection and ourselves as a species has to change. We've got to stop thinking about change in such reactive terms. If the only way we change our behavior is when we are confronted with the threat of punishment or visible and tangible repercussions, we will never change our behavior.

Although there exists a peppering of scientific objection to these assertions, there's little debate that we're collectively more frightened by the immediate and unrealistic than the not-so-immediate and realistic. People are afraid of getting hit by lightning more than they are of the possibility of getting cancer. We're skittish in the dark because, hey, there might be someone out to get us or trying to rob our house. But these psychological conclusions are irrational, unfounded, and hurtful in preparing us for the very worst.

So, the moral of the story is: stop charging obscene amounts on your credit card. Save for a rainy day. Otherwise you'll find yourself with at least 30% of your life's income gone (sound familiar?). Ellen Degeneres said it best when she joked, "Procrastinate now, don't put it off."


The concept of irrational cognition is both fascinating, funny, and disturbingly alarming. It explains our ironies, for one, and the small pleasures of life like impulse buying at the checkout counter. But at the same time, don't you think if we jettisoned our idiot brains for a moment, we might devote the majority of our tax expenditures to flexing our educational muscles versus flushing military dollars down the toilet?

We might have to put our minds to it.

Why People Dread Going to Work Like the Plague

A bucket list of anxieties, dreads, annoyances, thoughts, and aversions people experience before heading in and during the work day:

1. Waking up early

2. Going through the same routine

3. The commute

4. Having to sit in a cubicle smaller than an intern's confidence

5. Staring at a computer screen (and pretending that you're actually working)

6. Making the work you've been given appear difficult, when playing Tetris is actually harder

7. Wishing the clock moved faster

8. You look at motivational sites like this one
9. The lunch "hour" turns into 15 minutes of chowing at your desk
10. You start listening to Damien Marley and wishing you were him.

Twitter's Lifespan

Every social media site has the life cycle trajectory of a living organism: birth, moody adolescence, growth (or reproduction), aging, and ultimately, death.

Without a doubt, Twitter's popularity has exploded within the past year. It won prestigious prizes like the SXSW Web Award and has been heralded in widely circulated news outlets. Perhaps most importantly, the Twitter's preeminent seat on the web-throne appears very well-deserved. It offers nothing but perks: free publicity, immediate contact, short yet relevant information, intriguing links, .... yada, yada, yada. (I think you get the picture.)

So the real question: How long will the fame last?

Let's start with a few wise words from technology guru and psychographic prophet, Bill Wasik, who is currently a senior Editor of Harper's magazine, creator of the flash mob, and the author of a new book, "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture".

Regarding the culture of popular social media, Wasik remarked that one "get[s] to the center of things, to the place where everyone else is, to the middle of the mob. But the closer you get, the better you understand that there's nothing at the middle -- the mob is just about itself."

True that, bro. This Bud's for you. 

With this in mind, let's dork out by explaining Twitter's rise and fall in the form of a web algorithms at a 9th grade reading level:

Twitter's Lifespan = log ((mob size + cultural hype) /(time + eFB + #)).
Where e stand for potentially powerful emerging websites;
FB for Facebook; and # for the number of unecessary hashtags that everyone uses simply to gain more followers.

Twitter's life will logarithmically wax and wane. Although I have no clue as to what 'log' would do if punched into a calculator, it's a pretty stellar mathematical metaphor. (For you English aficionados out there, let us say that Twitter is a speck of digital protoplasm, a sapling site that was fortunate enough to have budded among the infinitely sloshing sea of blogs, titillating apps, and social networks.)

Despite the fact that Twitter currently stands as tall as a California cedar, the world wide web is a mighty expansive forest, my friends. And one situated in a place with high risk of lightning strikes, clearcutting (by web-(b)loggers like me), and heavy hitting corporations that could smash it to smithereens. 

Just like the enormous bell curves of its more behemoth stories, Twitter might have to get all meta up-in-here by graphing itself as yet another "trending topic". (Tweet spikes on stories like Iran's electoral snafu or MJ offer a befitting visual). It's only a matter of time before the long-lasting titans like Facebook figure out a way to adopt Twitter's tactics -- and there truly isn't a lot to emulate here -- for their own benefit. Just look at phrases like Facebook's "What's on your mind?" Doesn't that sound an awful lot like Twitter's "What are you doing right now?" 

But until that happens, I've gotta go post my 140 characters.

Check me out @itllhappen

Madoff

I think Madoff is a good first blog post topic, yes?

Here's the rub: Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme; screwed tons of salt-of-the-earth people and rich tycoons alike; then he tried to bamboozle a short prison sentence with a gaggle of fancy pants lawyers.

I won't even attempt to rephrase myself here. Does anybody think this scum bucket deserves a trial? (The hypothetical initial sentence would have been: Does anybody think this guy deserves a fair trial?).

While the legal system could certainly use a good pat on the back nowadays, the Madoff case warranted nothing but mercy for the plaintiffs from the get-go. True, you have to be a little off your financial rocker to put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your portfolio for Chrissakes.

But still, nobody could have predicted a catacylsm of such epic proportions. How could people have known about Bernie's financial tidal wave until it had them under water?

And that's the point of a Ponzi scheme. You get stabbed from behind. Robbed blind.

The good news? Nobody expects Madoff to live until he's 221 years old. That is, unless he's a Galapagos tortoise and we just don't know it.