The Value of Air

I was writing a blog on a different subject and I came across this little tidbit about the value of the atmosphere and so I parked that post for next week and decided I would rant about the idiocy of the world we live in instead. A writer, (I believe he calls himself a scientist, although given his claim clearly that word is used rather loosely), claims that the value of the atmosphere is 100 times the world economy. We now know the value of air and it seems pretty damn expensive. 

Have we become so morally bankrupt that we are now putting monetary value on air. Surely someone could come up with a monetary value for water too, pretty soon we will have a price tag for the whole planet! This whole notion is absolutely ludicrous, Let me hold your head under water for sixty seconds and then ask you how much you value air. In fact, I think that this 100 times statistic might need some validation so I am going to write a research proposal to the United Nations for several billion dollars so that I can travel the world and hold people’s head under water, when they come up for air, I will ask them if it is worth 100X, 1000X or 1,000,000X the value of the world economy, based on this sample we should have a pretty good idea what the value of air is, and I will be extremely well travelled. 

The other part of my experiment will be to lead a manned mission to Mars where we can see what a world without air looks like and by comparing it to the earth we might be able to demonstrate the value of air. Perhaps when we are there we will meet some Martians who are interested in buying our air, we could probably sell 10% for 10X the value of the world economy, pay off all the US and European debt, buy Greece so everyone could go on a holiday there, and still have enough air left over to breathe. 

Not to be overly critical of said Scientist, he based on the carbon trading system and based on blocks of carbon dioxide that can be sold and the amount of air in the world he  came up with a value. So there was some math there. But my problem is that this type of thinking does a great disservice to the environmental movement. This notion that in order for things to have value we need to put a statistical number behind a price. The idea that without a price something can not have value does not help the environmental cause, because anyone with a brain cell, understands that such a number is pure and utter nonsense. You can not put a price on the planet because without it we are fucked. It’s not a house where we can just downsize to a new planet when we spoil this one. 

Rather than having a dialogue about how we ensure that everyone has clean air to breathe and that we don’t alter our climate so significantly as to make our planet unlivable, we are having a dialogue about the value of air. I don’t know what the real value of air is, but every time I take a deep breath I’m pretty happy it’s there and I’d like things to stay that way. As long as we are having ridiculous conversations like this we are unlikely to get around to the real business of saving the planet. 

More Hobbies than James Franco

It takes more than presence to be a renaissance man. I read an article this week that got me thinking about this, a commentator, can’t remember his name, was talking about James Franco and the fact that he makes movies, act in soap opera’s, hosts the oscars and at the same time works on multiple post-graduate degrees. The commentator first questions the quality of American education, if someone can truly accomplish all of that then there is a fundamental problem with the quality of education, to paraphrase, most people who work on Phd have a hard enough time going to see a movie let alone making one. So we have to accept that James Franco is either a superhero or he’s just “showing up”. 

This trend of “showing up” is something I’ve noticed in the last twenty or so years where we are surrounded by overachievers who seem to be part of every club, play eighteen different sports, do quadruple majors in university, and still have time to write the great american novel and deep poetry on the side. Most of them are just showing up. As long as they sign up, go to a couple of meetings, they claim involvement and build up their resume. 

I even know someone who applied at Google and was asked to list their extra-curricular activities as pre-screening criteria. As if whether or not they played sports, were on the debating club, and made their own wrapping paper would make them a better employee. Not only that you would think that big companies were smart enough to know that people who show up aren’t necessarily the ones who are going to be the most innovative and the most creative. But we have entered this world of competitive over achieving. 

I used to wonder how these people did all of this, I have a lot of things going on in my life outside of work but most of these people put me to shame. I probably did a bit too much this summer, between rowing, becoming a personal trainer, studying my guitar exam, cooking class, writing this blog etc. and I’ve learned my lesson, I need some more down time (see my previous post). I’m most creative when i have time to meander through my days. But it’s also a function of how I do my activities, I can’t just show up, I have to be fully engaged in what I am doing, which when you have multiple things it can be exhausting. I am not a skimmer, and I am rarely satisfied without deep knowledge. It’s why I always had either As or Cs in school, I couldn’t do just enough to get by, i can’t just show up, do the minimum and get by. I seek deep knowledge. 

Now this begs the question, is this just me and a function of my character, or is it a quality of the modern renaissance man. I think perhaps a bit of both, I think a renaissance man must be a consummate learner always looking for deeper knowledge. And while being a polymath is undoubtedly a quality of the renaissance man, it is more than skimming and being present. It is more than being a jack of all trades and master of none. 

The other side of the coin though of this tirade, is that if you don’t show up at all, then it’s even more impossible to accomplish anything, and sometimes starting with mere presence is better than not starting at all. You can’t create, art, social change, political action if you aren’t there. But there is a difference with this kind of showing up. It is showing up with purpose, with the desire to see and learn if there is something more and with a vision to starting something. Presence is an important part of achieving accomplishments, but it must be presence with purpose. 

So why is this important, other than to make me feel better for not concurrently working on four graduate degrees? It might just be one of the fundamental problems with our world where the people who are rising to the top are the skimmers, the ones with cursory knowledge but where is the deep knowledge that will help us solve the problems we are facing, where are the deep thinkers. We value people who show up for things and create lists of accomplishments. But being a renaissance man is about character not accomplishments, and while multiple interests are certainly an aspect of being a renaissance man it is ultimately about moral fortitude, and there is no degree in that no matter how many you take at the same time. 

In Praise of Idleness

I haven’t written in awhile, and since I never really promised that I would write with any frequency I don’t really need to provide any sort of explanation. I’m not one of those bloggers who starts off by promising to post at least once a week, or any other sort of schedule. But at the same time I do want to write to day about what I have been doing this summer and more importantly about what I have been doing for the last couple of weeks.

I lead a busy life. I work hard at my career and frankly I often give far more at the office than I get in return, on top of that I occupy myself with a lot of hobbies, that are all enjoyable but take up a lot of time. This summer, I took on a few too many hobbies and was burning the candle at both ends a bit. By the end of the summer I was ready for a serious bout of idleness. Which brings me to what I wanted to write about today; Idleness. (Now I admit that neither the title nor the concept for this blog is entirely my own, a much more brilliant essay on this topic was written by Bertrand Russell, you can read it here)

In spite of Russell’s entreaties to society to learn to appreciate the value of idleness in 1932, we have become a culture that is more and more obsessed with work, and filling our lives with endless stimulation and activity. This is both in the way we manage our lives and in the way that we evaluate ourselves and our evaluated in the workplace. We often admire the person who never gets up from their desk, and taking multiple coffee breaks in the day is considered a waste of time, but, and I’ve learned to hide this habit, I find I am my most creative, efficient and do my best work either during or after periods when I am idle. And there are enough studies out there demonstrating that most creative thinking is done in periods of unstructured idleness.

3M is a company that instituted something like this, everyone in the company was given one day a week to just play around and come up with free flowing ideas, there was undoubtedly a lot of idleness going around, but in the end one of the inventions that came out of it was post it notes, how many billions did 3M make on those, so for all the “wasted” time, they got a pretty decent return.

But we are uncomfortable with this unproductive time, people are supposed to work 9 to 5 or more likely 8 - 6 and be occupied with work the entire time, when we see people being idle, goofing off, taking too many smoke breaks, we ask what value they bring, why they don’t have more work. We deride people who seem to be able to leave work at five and take vacations regularly and we wear our own fifty hour work weeks like badges of honour. Yet the evidence remains that idleness might actually help to solve our problems, it may be time to give a quick rewrite to the Grasshopper and the Ant and see if there might not be some wisdom in the Grasshopper spending, if not all of his summer, singing at least a part of it.

It is time, as it was in 1932, to re-examine our Calvinist work ethic, there is much ink spilled these days on work life balance, but yet we fear the consequences of not appearing to be overworked and underpaid. The greatest threat to work life balance is generally perception more than it is actual workload, as I talked about in my last post, it is the enormous amount of non-work or busy work that is being done. I remember a woman I worked with who was always working late and complaining about how much work she had, I never knew what she did until she got let go and I had to clean out her desk, and there all, printed, filed and annotated was every email she had received since she started.

I read an article about a company that recently implemented unlimited vacation time. Now most people think about that and say well everyone would just stop working and get paid. But my suspicion is that most people would actually work very hard and when take the time they needed and that most people end up taking between six and eight weeks of vacation. i would also hazard to guess that they are as productive as companies that limit their employees to two to three weeks of vacation. The funny thing about productivity in a creative economy is that is disconnected from hours worked, but we still haven’t really adjusted to that kind of economy and expect that an hour more of work leads to an hour more of productivity. Some enforced idleness might actually be the remedy that our economy is looking for, (don’t tell the neo-cons or the Gig will be up)

Anyway So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks, after a very busy summer both with work and fun, I’ve been idle, I can’t actually tell you what I accomplished most days, not much, I read a Russian Novel, (more on that in the next week) or so, hiked a bit, golfed a bit, sat around in the sun, plucked my guitar strings and generally was bored, and it was for the most part delicious and I am returned both with a new zeal for my occupations but a determination to build more idleness into my life.