Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

Can Stories Make Us Better?

In writing this column, I often put ideas on the shelf for a while. Sometimes, world events conspire to make one of these shelved ideas suddenly relevant. This happened this past weekend.

The idea that caught my eye some months ago was an article that explored whether robots could learn morality by reading stories. On the face of it, it was mildly intriguing. But early Sunday morning as the heartbreaking news filtered to me from Orlando, a deeper connection emerged.

When we speak of unintended consequence, which we have before, the media amplification of acts of terror are one of them. The staggeringly sad fact is that shocking casualty numbers have their own media value. And that, said one analyst who was commenting on ways to deal with terrorism, is a new reality we have to come to terms with. When we in the media business make stories news worthy we assign worth not just for news consumers but also to newsmakers – those troubled individuals who have the motivation and the means to blow apart the daily news cycle.

This same analyst, when asked how we deal with terrorism, made the point you can’t prevent lone acts of terrorism. The only answer is to use that same network of cultural connections we use to amplify catastrophic events to create an environment that dampens rather than intensifies violent impulse. We in the media and advertising industries have to use our considerable skills in setting cultural contexts to create an environment that reduces the odds of a violent outcome. And sadly, this is a game of odds. There are no absolute answers here – there is just a statistical lowering of the curve. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the unimaginable still happens.

But how do you use the tools at our disposal to amplify morality? Here, perhaps the story I shelved some months ago can provide some clues.

In the study from Georgia Tech, Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison used stories as models of acceptable morality. For most of human history, popular culture included at least an element of moral code. We encoded the values we held most dear into our stories. It provided a base for acceptable behavior, either through positive reinforcement of commonly understood virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity) or warnings about universal vices (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride). Sometimes these stories had religious foundations, sometimes they were secular morality fables but they all served the same purpose. They taught us what was acceptable behavior.

Stories were never originally intended to entertain. They were created to pass along knowledge and cultural wisdom. Entertainment came after when we discovered the more entertaining the story, the more effective it was at its primary purpose: education. And this is how the researchers used stories. Robots can’t be entertained, but they can be educated.

At some point in the last century, we focused on the entertainment value of stories over education and, in doing so, rotated our moral compass 180 degrees. If you look at what is most likely to titillate, sin almost always trumps sainthood. Review that list of virtues and vices and you’ll see that the stories of our current popular culture focus on vice – that list could be the programming handbook for any Hollywood producer. I don’t intend this a sermon – I enjoy Game of Thrones as much as the next person. I simply state it as a fact. Our popular culture – and the amplification that comes from it – is focused almost exclusively on the worst aspects of human nature. If robots were receiving their behavioral instruction through these stories, they would be programmed to be psychopathic moral degenerates.

For most of us, we can absorb this continual stream of anti-social programming and not be affected by it. We still know what is right and what is wrong. But in a world where it’s the “black swan” outliers that grab the news headlines, we have to think about the consequences that reach beyond the mainstream. When we abandon the moral purpose of stories and focus on their entertainment aspect, are we also abandoning a commonly understood value landscape?

If you’re looking for absolute answers here, you won’t find them. That’s just not the world we live in. And am I naïve when I say the stories we chose to tell may have an influence on isolated violent events such as happened in Orlando? Perhaps. Despite all our best intentions, Omar Mateen might still have gone horribly offside.

But all things and all people are, to some extent, products of their environment. And because we in media and advertising are storytellers, we set that cultural environment. That’s our job. Because of this, I belief we have a moral obligation. We have to start paying more attention to the stories we tell.

 

 

 

 

Why I Love New York

I love people watching. I find the passing tableau of human drama endlessly fascinating. Trust me – it’s worth putting the smartphone away and paying attention to what’s happening around you. This past weekend, I hit the trifecta of snooping: subways, airports and shops in New York City.

Scene 1: We’re on a subway and an elderly Polish lady, dressed all in pink (for Mother’s Day, perhaps), going to Penn Station randomly asks a hulking young man of decidedly intimidating appearance for help getting her bag out of the car and onto the platform. You could not have picked a more unlikely duo for this particular dialogue.

He was engrossed in a conversation with his friend and didn’t hear her at first. When she asked again, he wasn’t sure what she said because of her thick accent. Finally, a young pregnant girl beside them offers to help. The Polish lady refuses and starts pointing at the man and scolding vigorously. The young man shrugs, the Polish intonations still coming a little too thick and fast for him to understand. The young girl translates, “She wants you to help because you’re big.”

He grins sheepishly and picks up the suitcase. The Polish grandmother toddles off happily.

Scene 2: We’re walking through an airport and a young man is coming home from college (again, perhaps for Mother’s Day.) He’s meandering his way from the gate, weaving back and forth across the concourse and trying to carry on a somewhat agitated conversation with said mother. My first instinct is to pass him but then I decide to hold back and eavesdrop a little bit. The son obviously has no patience for his mother:

“Mom, I told you, I never asked you to come and get me. It was your idea…”

“Why are you picking me up in departures? I’m arriving. You should be in arrivals…”

“I can’t help it if you have to go all the way around again to get there. You should have thought of that before you pulled into the airport.”

I can only imagine how the rest of this Mother’s Day visit went. Next time, let him catch a cab.

Scene 3: We’re in one of those tacky souvenir shops off Times Square (no, it wasn’t my idea). Two elderly ladies come in and ask to see a T shirt that says “Help Donald Drumpf make America Great Again”

“Why is it spelled ‘Drumpf’?”

The shop owner (in another thick accent – Middle Eastern this time), “It’s wacky spelling.”

“Why?”

“It’s a joke. It’s a jokey T-shirt”

“Do you have one spelled correctly?”

“You want real t-shirt?”

“Yes”

“No, we only have the jokey ones.”

Meanwhile, outside a sidewalk prophet is yelling that Jesus is the only true way and that we are headed straight to hell while standing under a 60-foot high electronic screen advertising “The Book of Mormon.”

New York – you crack me up.

The World in Bite Sized Pieces

It’s hard to see the big picture when your perspective is limited to 160 characters.

Or when we keep getting distracted from said big picture by that other picture that always seems to be lurking over there on the right side of our screen – the one of Kate Upton tilting forward wearing a wet bikini.

Two things are at work here obscuring our view of the whole: Our preoccupation with the attention economy and a frantic scrambling for a new revenue model. The net result is that we’re being spoon-fed stuff that’s way too easy to digest. We’re being pandered to in the worst possible way. The world is becoming a staircase of really small steps, each of which has a bright shiny object on it urging us to scale just a little bit higher. And we, like idiots, stumble our way up the stairs.

This cannot be good for us. We become better people when we have to chew through some gristle. Or when we’re forced to eat our broccoli. The world should not be the cognitive equivalent of Captain Crunch cereal.

It’s here where human nature gets the best of us. We’re wired to prefer scintillation to substance. Our intellectual laziness and willingness to follow whatever herd seems to be heading in our direction have conspired to create a world where Donald Trump can be a viable candidate for president of the United States – where our attention span is measured in fractions of a second – where the content we consume is dictated by a popularity contest.

Our news is increasingly coming to us in smaller and smaller chunks. The exploding complexity of our world, which begs to be understood in depth, is increasingly parceled out to us in pre-digested little tidbits, pushed to our smartphone. We spend scant seconds scanning headlines to stay “up to date.” And an algorithm that is trying to understand where our interests lie usually determines the stories we see.

This algorithmic curation creates both “Filter” and “Agreement” Bubbles. The homogeneity of our social network leads to a homogeneity of content. But if we spend our entire time with others that think like us, we end up with an intellectually polarized society in which the factions that sit at opposite ends of any given spectrum are openly hostile to each other. The gaps between our respective ideas of what is right are simply too big and no one has any interest in building a bridge across them. We’re losing our ideological interface areas, those opportunities to encounter ideas that force us to rethink and reframe, broadening our worldview in the process. We sacrifice empathy and we look for news that “sounds right” to us, not matter what “right” might be.

This is a crying shame, because there is more thought provoking, intellectually rich content than ever before being produced. But there is also more sugar coated crap who’s sole purpose is to get us to click.

I’ve often talked about the elimination of friction. Usually, I think this is a good thing. Bob Garfield, in a column a few months ago, called for a whoop-ass can of WD 40 to remove all transactional friction. But if we make things too easy to access, will we also remove those cognitive barriers that force us to slow down and think, giving our rationality a change to catch up with impulse? And it’s not just on the consumption side where a little bit of friction might bring benefits. The upside of production friction was that it did slow down streams of content just long enough to introduce an editorial voice. Someone somewhere had to give some thought as to what might actually be good for us.

In other words, it was someone’s job to make sure we ate our vegetables.

The Face of Disruption

If you ask publishing giant Elsevier, Alexandra Elbakyan is a criminal – a pernicious pirate.

If you ask the Lifeboat Foundation, or blogger P.Z Myers, or millions of students around the world, Alexandra Elbakyan is a hero.

Labels can be tricky things, especially in a world of disruption.

ElboykanMs. Elbakyan certainly doesn’t look like a criminal. You would walk right past her on a campus quad and think nothing of it. She looks pretty much what you would expect a post-grad neuroscience student from Kazakhstan to look like.

But her face is the face of disruption. And she’s at the receiving end of a lawsuit launched by Elsevier that, if you were to take it seriously, would be worth several billion dollars.

Just over a year ago, I wrote a column about the academic journal racket. The work of thousands of researchers is published by Elsevier and others and remains locked behind hugely expensive pay walls. Elbakyan, as a post-grad research student at a university that couldn’t afford to pay the licensing fees to gain access to these journals, got frustrated. In a letter she wrote in response to the lawsuit, she elaborated on this frustration:

“When I was a student in Kazakhstan University, I did not have access to any research papers. These papers I needed for my research project. Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them.”

Elbaykan was not alone in this piracy.

“Later I found there are lots and lots of researchers (not even students, but university researchers) just like me, especially in developing countries. They created online communities (forums) to solve this problem.”

“…to solve this problem.” There, in a nutshell, is the source of disruption. Elbakyan thought there had to be a more efficient way to facilitate this communal piracy and turned to technology, launching the Sci-Hub search portal in 2011. Depending on the donation of access keys from academics at institutions that had subscriptions to research publishers, Sci-Hub bypasses the paywall and locates the paper a researcher is looking for. It then delivers the paper and saves a copy for LibGen, a library of “pirated” papers that will continue to be freely available to future researchers. The LibGen database now has over 48 million papers available.

Is Elbaykan guilty of piracy? Absolutely – as it’s defined by the law. She makes no bones about the fact. She uses the term repeatedly in her own letter of defense.

But, in that letter, Alexandra Elbaykan also appeals to a higher law – the law of fairness. She is not stealing from the authors of that research, who receive no compensation for their work from the publisher. When Elsevier claims “irreparable harm” the only harm that can be identified is to their own business model. There is no harm to academics, who are becoming increasingly hostile to the business practices of publishers like Elsevier. There is certainly no harm to fellow researchers, who now have open access to knowledge, helping them in their own work. And there is no harm to the public, who can only benefit from the more open sharing of knowledge amongst academics. The only one hurt here is Elsevier.

According to RELX’s (the parent company of Elsevier) 2014 annual report, the company raked in £ 2,944 M ($4.23 billion US) from it’s various subscription businesses. The Scientific, Technical and Medical division (the same division that Elbaykan “irreparably harmed”) had revenues of £ 2,048 M ($2.94 B US) and a tidy little operating profit of £787 M ($ 1.13 B US).

Poor Elsevier.

The question that should be asked here is not whether Elsevier’s business model has been harmed, but rather, does it deserve to live? According to that same annual report, they “help scientists make new discoveries, lawyers win cases, doctors save lives and executives forge commercial relationships with their clients.”

Actually, no.

Elsevier does none of those things. The information they deal in does those things. And that same information is finding a way to be free, thanks to people like Alexandra Elbaykan. Elsevier is just the middleman who is being cut out of the supply chain through technology.

The American legal system will undoubtedly side with Elsevier. The law, as it is currently written, defends the right of a corporation to do business, whether or not people like you and me deem that business ethical. But ultimately, we rely on our laws to be fair, and what is fair depends on the context of our society. That context can be changed through the forces of disruption.

Sometimes, disruption comes in the guise of a young post grad student from Kazakhstan.

The “Get It” Gap

Netflix and Chill…

It sounds innocent enough – a night of curling up on the couch in a Snuggie with no plan other than some Orange is the New Black and Häagen Dazs binging. And that’s how it started out. Innocent. Then those damned kids got hold of it, and its present meaning ended up in a place quite removed from its origin.

Unfortunately, my wife didn’t know that when she used the phrase in a Facebook post for her gift basket company. That is, until one of our daughters walked in the door and before her bags hit the floor yelled from the entryway, “Mom, you have to change your post – right now!”

“What post?”

“The Netflix and Chill one…”

“Why?”

“Unless your basket contains lubricants and condoms, I don’t think your post means what you think it means”

But how is a middle-aged parent to know? The subversion of this particular phrase has just happened in the last year. It takes me the better part of a year to remember that it’s no longer 2015 when I sign a check. There’s no way a middle-aged brain could possibly keep up with the ongoing bastardization of the English language. The threshold for “getting it” keeps getting higher, driven by the acceleration of memes through social media.

getitgapParents were never intended to “get it.” That’s the whole point. Kids want to speak their own language and have their own cultural reference points. We were no different when we were kids. Neither were our parents.

And kids always “get it.” It’s like a rite of passage. Memes propagate through social networks and when you’re 18, your social network is the most important thing in your life. New memes spread like wildfire and part of belonging to this culture depends on “getting it.” The faster things spread, the more likely it is that you can increase the “Get It” gap between you and your parents. It’s a control thing. If the parents call all the shots about everything in your life, at least you can have this one thing to call your own.

As you start to gain control, the Gap becomes less important. Our daughters are now becoming adults, so they now act as “Get It” translators and, in cases like the one above, Urban Slang enforcement officers. When we transgress, they attempt to bridge the gap.

As you get older, the “stuff” of life gets in the way of continuing to “get it.” Buying a house, getting a job and changing diapers leaves little time left over to Snapchat about Scumbag Steve or tweet “Hell yea finna get crunk!” to your Hommie gee funk-a-nator on a Friday night.

The danger comes when parents unilaterally try to cross over the gap and attempt to tap into the zeitgeist of urban slang. This is always doomed to failure. There are no exceptions. It’s like tiptoeing through a minefield with snowshoes on.

At the very least, run it past your kids before you post anything. Better yet – look it up in Urban Dictionary. Kids can’t be trusted.

“Hotchkiss – Ouuuttt!” (Mic drop here)

Luddites Unite…

Throw off the shackles of technology. Rediscover the true zen of analog pleasures!

The Hotchkisses had a tech-free Christmas holiday – mostly. The most popular activity around our home this year was adult coloring. Whodathunkit?

There were no electronic gadgets, wired home entertainment devices or addictive apps exchanged. No personal tech, no connected platforms, no internet of things (with one exception). There were small appliances, real books printed on real paper, various articles of clothing – including designer socks – and board games.

As I mentioned, I did give one techie gift, but with a totally practical intention. I gave everyone Tiles to keep track of the crap we keep losing with irritating regularity. Other than that, we were surprisingly low tech this year.

Look, I’m the last person in the world that could be considered a digital counter-revolutionary. I love tech. I eat, breathe and revel in stuff that causes my wife’s eyes to repeatedly roll. But this year – nada. Not once did I sit down with a Chinglish manual that told me “When the unit not work, press “C” and hold on until you hear (you should loose your hands after you hear each sound) “

This wasn’t part of any pre-ordained plan. We didn’t get together and decide to boycott tech this holiday. We were just technology fatigued.

Maybe it’s because technology is ceasing to be fun. Sometimes, it’s a real pain in the ass. It nags us. It causes us to fixate on stupid things. It beeps and blinks and points out our shortcomings. It can lull us into catatonic states for hours on end. And this year, we just said “Enough!” If I’m going to be catatonic, it’s going to be at the working end of a pencil crayon, trying to stay within the lines.

Even our holiday movie choice was anti-tech, in a weird kind of way. We, along with the rest of the world, went to see Star Wars, the Force Awakens. Yes, it’s a sci-fi movive, but no one is going to see this movie for its special effects or CGI gimcrackery. Like the best space opera entries, we want to get reacquainted with people in the story. The Force’s appeal is that it is a long-awaited (32 years!) family reunion. We want to see if Luke Skywalker got bald and fat, despite the force stirring within him.

I doubt that this is part of any sustained move away from tech. We are tech-dependent. But maybe that’s the point. It used to be that tech gadgets separated us from the herd. It made us look coolly nerdish and cutting edge. But when the whole world is wearing an iWatch, the way to assert your independence is to use a pocket watch. Or maybe a sundial.

And you know what else we discovered? Turning away from tech usually means you turn towards people. We played board games together – actual board games, with cards and dice and boards that were made of pasteboard, not integrated circuits. We were in the same room together. We actually talked to each other. It was a form of communication that – for once – didn’t involve keyboards, emojis or hashtags.

I know this was a fleeting anomaly. We’re already back to our regular tech-dependent habits, our hands nervously seeking the nearest connected device whenever we have a millisecond to spare.

But for a brief, disconnected moment, it was nice.

Why I’m (Cautiously) Optimistic About 2016

This will be my last column before the Christmas break. As such, I thought it was appropriate to end on a positive note.

It’s easy to believe the world is a stupid, cold and cruel place. We’ve been told as much by our leaders. On many days in our very recent memory, it’s hard to argue that the world isn’t going to hell in a hand basket.

But all things are relative. And if we look at statistics alone, there’s a very good case to be made that, despite all the false steps we make, we’re actually heading in the right direction.

Take myself, for example. I was born in 1961. For some reason, here in North America, we tend to think of the 60’s as some sort of Golden Age. We wax nostalgic for a simpler, gentler, more virtuous time. There’s even a psychological name for it. It’s called rosy retrospection.

But the empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

For example, the average global life expectancy in 1961 was 55 years. Today, it’s 71 years. In North America, we’ve added 10 years to our life expectancy (from 68 to 78) in the last 5 decades. The biggest gains have been made in India, China, Brazil and South Korea.

Not only are we living longer. We’re living better. The Human Development Index is a measure of quality of life compiled by the United Nations. In 1961, the HDI for the countries of the OECD (the most developed countries in the world) was 0.48. In the poorest part of the world, Sub-Saharan Africa, it was 0.11. Today, the HDI for developed countries is 0.88. It’s 0.51 in Sub Saharan Africa. The empirical quality of life for the average Somalian is higher today than it would have been if you had lived in some of the richest countries in the world in 1961.

Almost everyone has more rights now than they did in 1961. This is certainly true for women, ethnic minorities and those of alternative sexual orientations. When I was born, only one third of the world’s population lived under some form of democracy. Today, that number is close to 50%. We have a long way to go, but we’ve also come a long way.

We have violence, but fewer people die of violent confrontations now than in any time in human history. Casualties due to warfare are way down, dropping from 250 deaths per million people in the 50’s to less than 10 per million in 2012. And while homicide rates per capita are a little higher than in 1961 (when they were at the lowest point in 40 years), they’ve been in decline since 1991 and getting close to where they were then.

The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo.

We have hunger, but we’re winning. In the 60’s, for every 100,000 people on the planet, 500 died of famine. In the last decade, that dropped to 3 deaths in 100,000.

And our standard of living, along with our level of productivity, measured in normalized dollars, is over three times what it was 54 years ago.

Even the environment is trending in the right direction. Our air quality is better in major North American cities than it was in the 60’s. The EPA estimates there’s been a 63% decline in aggregate emissions of six common pollutants in the last three decades.

The world is a volatile place now. It was also a volatile place in 1961. The US sponsored the Bay of Pigs invasion. East Germany put up the Berlin Wall. Millions died in China during the Great Leap forward. And the USSR test detonated a 50-megaton bomb – the largest explosion in human history. We were one year away from the Cuban Missile crisis. And two years away from JFK’s assassination.

My point, if it still seems to be vague, is that as flawed as we are, there is a strong statistical case to be made that we live in a better world than our parents and grandparents did. There is also reason to believe that our children will be smarter, kinder and more ethical than we are.

Humans fail forward. That’s our nature.  We screw things up, but we eventually fix them. We tear things apart so we can build them better the next time. If we look forward, we see that the world will never be perfect, but if we look behind us, we see we’re in a much better place than where we came from.

Step One. React.

We’re learning what it means to be forced to be reactive. Sometimes, as on Friday, november 13 at 9:20 pm CET in Paris, France, we react with horror. But that’s the new reality. Plan as we might, we can’t predict everything. Sometimes we can’t predict anything. We just have to make ourselves – in the words of Nassim Taleb – antifragile.

Why is the world less predictable? One reason could be that it’s more connected. Things happen faster. Actions and reactions are connected by wired milliseconds. The world has become one huge Rube Goldberg machine and anyone can put it in motion at any time.

I suspect the world is also more organic. The temporary stasis of human effort that used to hold nature at bay for a bit is giving way to a more natural ebb and flow. Artificial barriers and constraints, like national borders, have little meaning any more. We flow back and forth across geography. Hierarchies have become networks. Centralized planning yields to spontaneous emerging events. We are afloat in an ocean of unpredictability. It’s hard to steer a straight path in such an environment.

Because of these two things, the world is definitely more amplified. Small things become big things much faster. Implications can grow thunderous in mere seconds. Ripple effects become tsunamis.

We want predictability. We want control. We hate that our world can be thrown into a tailspin by 8 people who hate us and what we stand for. We want intelligence to be fool proof. We want detection to be flawless. But while we wish for these things with all our hearts, the reality is that we will be forced to react. This is the world we have built. The technology that makes it wonderful is the same technology that, in a span of 40 minutes (the time it took for all the attacks in Paris), can make it heart-achingly painful.

In a world where structures give way to flow – where straight lines blur into oscillating waves – what can we do?

First of all, we can continually improve our ability to react. We have to make sense of new events as quickly as possible. We have to adapt more rapidly. Our world has to be more sensitive, more flexible, more nimble. Again, with a head nod to Nassim Taleb, we have to know how to minimize the downside and maximize the upside.

Secondly, we have to rethink how our institutions work. They have to evolve for a new world. And this evolution will happen faster in the areas of greatest unpredictability. For an enlightening read, try Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal. As leader of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was at the eye of the storm of unpredictability. His lessons have gained a terrifying new relevance after the events of last Friday.

Finally, we have to hold fast to our values. They are the things that cannot – must not – change. They are the one constant that helps us set our bearings when we react and adapt. While plans are a constant “work in progress,” values must be rock solid.

For most of our recorded history, we have tried to understand the world and gain some sense of control over it. We have tried to push back chaos with order – replace jagged or fluid curves of nature with artificially straight lines. Ironically, the more we have imposed our rational will, the more our environment has become dynamic, networked, organic, reactive and complex – all the things the world has always been. The harder we try to set our own beat, the more we find ourselves moving to the timeless rhythm of nature.

And in that world, adaptation is the whole ball of wax.

 

The Man Who Mistook His RV for a Hat

I think I’m missing part of my brain.

You know how I know this? Because I winterized my RV. Correction. I tried to winterize my RV. If not for the help of my friend Ted, I’m pretty sure said RV would have been a non-functioning hulk of fiberglass and metal come next spring. There would be fluids oozing from places not intended by the manufacturer.

I don’t get RVs. Ted tried to talk me through it. He was endlessly patient. But he might as well have been speaking Bosnian. Like I said – whatever part of the brain is responsible for knowing how RV’s work – I’m pretty sure I’m missing it.

“You drained the low level line, right?”

Blank stare.

“We should check your batteries. Are they connected in a series or parallel?”

Blanker stare.

“Are they deep cycle 6 volts?”

Eyelid starts to twitch.

“I think the solenoid might be gone in your hot water heater. You didn’t turn it on when it was empty, did you?”

I swear, at this point, all I heard was, “Sviđa mi se tvoja plava rukavice”

If you’re not an RVer, bless you. Supposedly, the “R” in “RV” stands for “recreational”. You know, “recreational” as in “having fun”. This is not the case. RVs are the work of the devil.

“Do you have a Phillips No. 3?”

Sheer panic,

“Is that the pointy one, with the little cross?”

To give Ted full credit, I swear that his eyes didn’t roll. He just looked away and appeared to be choking on something. I went to get the butter knife. It’s what I always use when I need a screwdriver.

There are parts of my life in which I’m actually pretty competent. There are even areas where I would call myself an expert. I started a successful business and managed to sell it for a tidy profit. My house hasn’t been repossessed. I’ve mostly succeeded in raising two lovely daughters (okay, some – most – of the credit for that goes to my wife).

My point is, I’m not a total idiot. At least, not most of the time. But here, in this particular case, I was squarely in the “stupid” category. And this wasn’t run of the mill stupid. This was a special kind of stupid. To put it in terms even I’d understand, this was akin to trying to go to a website without turning your computer on, or using a potato for a mouse.

And it’s not just things related to RVs. It’s pretty much anything involving tools, or sports, or automobile parts, or home repair. Whatever part of the brain controls such things, I’m missing it. You want to walk through an online user experience? I’m your guy. You want to replace that blinking porch light or talk Monday Night Football? Look elsewhere, my friend. Life will be easier for both of us.

My theory is that the brain is a bucket. It can only hold so much. My brain happens to hold things like lyrics to Broadway musicals, arcane facts about World War II, Canadiana trivia and past winners of Academy Awards. There’s no room left for things like solenoids and 6-volt batteries.

But here’s the thing about those things. At some point in your life, at least as a male living in a traditional Western society, you have to know that stuff. You’ll be called on it. And when you are, you will shed the skin of the 54 year old moderately successful human you are and will once again become the mewling pimply-faced 13 year old man-child that looked at your dad helplessly when he asked you to go get the torque wrench.

“The what?”

“Never mind, I’ll get the damned thing myself!”

P.S. The title of this week’s column is for Oliver Sacks, who left us late this summer. So long Oliver. I’ll miss your brilliance.

Conversations Overheard at the Family Y

My stepdad came last week for a visit for his 80th birthday. Dad likes to go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Not Tuesdays. Tuesdays are when he has grapefruit for breakfast. I’m not sure what the connection is between the two, but it’s important to him. Poached eggs are on Saturday, which is also not a gym day.

Dad is a creature of habit. We respect that. He’s had enough to deal with this year. His wife (my mom) of 49 years passed away earlier this year. So when he came to visit we quickly rejuggled our calendars so he didn’t have to.

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I took him to the gym on the aforementioned “gym” days. My daughter, who’s a personal trainer and works at the gym, quickly showed him around. He gravitated towards a circuit that’s popular with both seniors and women. That suited him fine. When I went over to check on him, I always found him chatting with at least one – often two – people who were also doing the circuit. I noted that the people were usually women.

Dad loves to chat. Through his life, he has raised chatting to a fine art. At various times he’s been a door-to-door salesperson, a bartender and a chimney sweep. All of these careers involve chatting. I, on the other hand, am a terrible chatter. I suck at small talk. But Dad can chat all day. The women he cornered for a chat session were – without exception – very gracious. They patiently listened while Dad went on about the importance of exercise, his desire to buy an adult tricycle to ride to the grocery store, his intricate recycling regime or the small town he’s called home for most of his life.

Dad’s a bit of a charmer.

He also understands the ground rules of chatting. He didn’t bring up his recent heartache or complain about his situation. That’s not Dad’s style. He is unflinchingly positive. Besides, you don’t “chat” about deep stuff. Chatting skips lightly across the surface of interpersonal conversation. Chatting lays the groundwork for more permanent social connections.

To be honest, if Dad were a stranger to me, I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as gracious as the women in that gym. I work out with earphones. I block out the other people in the gym. I am also not very patient with unscheduled social interruptions. I’m there to get shit done, not partake in small talk.

But I learned a lesson this past week. As I watched from across the gym, my eyes teared up as I saw Dad grinning and chatting away with his new friends. I saw him engaging with other people. That’s a very big deal for Dad. He lives alone in a small apartment in a very small town. He can go days without a conversation that lasts longer than a few seconds. While Dad loves to chat, he’s also quite content to read a book or do a word search puzzle sitting in his favorite chair. He’s in the midst of readjusting to a life that has just had a heart-sized hole ripped out of it. His social circle was based on an orbit of two and he hasn’t quite got around to rebalancing it based on flying solo.

So, thank you women of the local Y. Not only did you make an 80-year-old man very happy by taking a few precious moments to listen to him. You also made me realize something vitally important: we need chatting. We need to bump into people, face-to-face, and make the mutual agreement to free up a few minutes from our rigid agendas to partake in shooting the breeze. More and more of our social connections are becoming digital. It’s more efficient, true, but it doesn’t recharge our emotional and spiritual batteries the same way a real, live conversation does.

If you’ve ever doubted the value of chatting, you should spend some time watching a recent widower connect with total strangers he bumps into – talking about nothing at all and not being productive in any measurable way. You need to watch how his hands gesture as he talks, how he leans forward into the interaction and how his eyes start to sparkle again. Dad comes alive when he chats. And a few moments of my time spent being on the other side of that interaction seems a very small price to pay.

More and more of our lives are being spent in navigating solitary straight lines from Point A to Point B. We need to meander more. We need to leave time for serendipity. We need to delay our workout long enough to hear how a random man we met at the gym is reading a book he just got for his 80th birthday about how the Scots helped to settle Canada.

Why is that important? I don’t know. Probably for the same reason you don’t eat grapefruit and go to the gym on the same day.