Rattling Around my Brain Box Part 2

 Well I'm starting this with the intention of this being only a two part rant, but, hey, who knows.

Last time I was discussing attention, and how our attention spans are ridiculously low now.  I mentioned in passing that the same podcast was also about respect.  The premise of the podcast was essentially that we don't pay enough attention to people, so we cannot possibly respect them.  Think about it: how much can you really get to know someone if every three minutes you're interrupted, or you're interrupting yourself?  If every time you start a conversation one of you inevitably pulls out a phone?

If you never actually get to know someone, can you understand what it takes to respect them?  And how can we possibly show respect for other human beings on the internet when out attention spans are so low that the other people we interact with are little more than human avatars with stereotypical personalities.  How many times in the past week have I jumped to a conclusion that someone on the internet was a jerk, or stupid, or completely out of their mind?  More than I'd like to admit.  If the people we deal with on the internet aren't real people in our minds, then we won't treat them with respect. The time it takes to understand another person's point of view is time we just aren't willing/able to spend these days.

I mentioned in the last post that I had just finished a book.  It was a book called A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller, Jr.  I had purchased the book years before in a 25 cent bin at a used book store in California.  It is one of a half dozen or so mid-century sci-fi books I picked up from that bin that I never really thought much of.  I started reading it earlier this year with the expectation that it would be a fun, light book that I could finish quickly as I greatly needed a quick read to get back on track with reading.  It was actually a fairly complex book, but it was very good and I did end up finishing it in about two weeks.

I won't run through the entire book, but I enjoyed it.  The book is a post apocalyptic sci-fi centered around a Catholic monastery that becomes the one place in the world that is preserving knowledge when the rest of the world is destroying it.  The book takes place over multiple centuries, and ends on a somewhat surprising but also seemingly inevitable note.

Near the end of the book, one of the monks has a quote that I want to reproduce here because it really knocked the themes of my brain box ramblings into a more cohesive thought pattern:

"The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well.  They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty..."

Life right now for most of the people in the world is better than it's ever been in terms of material standard of living.  Yet, people everywhere, myself included, feel utterly disconnected and often hopeless.  We are seemingly purposeless, all while being busier than we've ever been.  Why?  And what does this do to our society?

I think the why is becoming more and more obvious the more time we all spend on the internet.  The internet, our devices, social media, and just technology in general, are stealing our attention.  Without that attention, we're adrift.  We cannot respect one another as equal human beings.  We cannot foster the deep, meaningful relationships that give lives meaning.  We have a multitude of acquaintances, but few to no true friends.

Then we get online and pour out our pain, our frustrations, our anger, the only way we know how.  We scream into the void, and get back nothing but white noise, or worse, anger, fear, hate.  People don't want to know us online.  They want to interact with our avatars long enough to agree with us and give us a thumbs up, or disagree with us and leave an angry diatribe about why we're wrong, or stupid.

Maybe the way to control my own sphere of influence is to remove myself from things like social media.  Reduce my internet presence.  Try to be more present in meat space.

That's what I've been doing, and why I'm not apologetic about this second part taking so long to finish.  I hope you'll consider it, too.

Rattling around in my Brain Box Part 1

 I get the feeling this is going to take me a long time to write.  This topic has been bouncing around in my brain box since before my last post, and that was six or seven months ago.  It came to head in the last two weeks and I can't ignore my desire to put words on the digital page anymore.

Two weeks ago I was listening to a string of different podcasts that all seemed interconnected.  I should have taken better notes, but one was from the Chris Spangle Show and at least one I'm pretty sure was a Jordan Harbinger Show.  There were more.  I can't remember them all and I didn't note them.

Last time I talked about spheres of influence and how I've been trying to only work within my own sphere and stop giving excess time and attention to what's outside that sphere.  That topic came up again on Chris's show as he talked about how he's stepping back from politics and working on himself.  He's recognized that change is personal and that he has no expectation of changing national politics anytime soon.  I mentioned in my last post that this kind of thing was reaching a saturation point.  It's heartwarming, but coupled with the other shows I listened to it led me down some other paths.

There was a show about reality.  I'm pretty sure it was Jordan Harbinger.  Anyhow, the point is that reality is a lot more subjective than most of us understand.  To the point that in a lot of instances, one's expectation of reality is reality.  You can literally think specific realities into existence.  So this got me down a rabbit hole, and maybe the whole sphere of influence saturation point thing is just that I'm focusing on it, so I'm seeing it more, and all the platforms I interact with serve me up what I want to see based on the algorithms they run on so if I keep clicking those things I get more and more of them.

I'll be honest by the end I was less warm of heart.

Then there was another show about attention and respect, which I listened to because I'm always trying to improve as a father, husband, and manager.  Man, this show was not really about any of that.  This was another Harbinger I think, and the point of the show is that we've completely screwed our attention spans.  The average person has an attention span of like 3 minutes now.  We have been so trained by our jobs and devices to expect interruption that if we don't get interrupted, we'll interrupt ourselves.  Like, it's been three minutes and even though my phone didn't go off I feel the urge to stop what I'm doing and check my email or pop over to some social media site and see if I have any notifications.

This hit me deep.  I've done a lot to try to mitigate this.  I've removed all social apps from my phone.  I set up a difficult two factor authentication that makes it a pain to log into those social apps on the web and thus discourages me from doing so.  I turned off notifications from basically everything except text messages.  Even my work phone is locked down so the only notifications I get are instant messages and texts.  Yet I still find myself pulling out one of those phones when my computer is taking longer than 5 seconds to load something, or when I'm standing in line at the grocery store for more than 30 seconds, or for no reason because I just remembered it was in my pocket.

I have trouble reading.  Last year I finished two books.  I can't even watch a TV show without pulling out my phone.  I've had to set boundaries at home where I set my phone in my bedroom and close the door when I'm spending time with my kids because I found myself pulling out my phone when I was supposed to be paying attention to my kids.  It's nuts and I hate myself a little because of it.

I'm not going to be able to say everything I wanted on this post; it's getting pretty long.  I'll try to come back soon as I still have more to get out.  I'll finish with this: I've been taking "phone free days" on the weekends when I have the luxury, and boy howdy has that been nice.  The last few Saturdays I didn't go anywhere and I was able to lock my phones in my room and just enjoy my time without them.  I finished a book (which I so badly want to talk about but I think that's going to be a whole post unto itself), and I play so much better with the boys when the phone is locked away.  It's insane to think about the fact that I have to be so deliberate about locking down the phones, but I guess it's come to this.  Even now, I've only been able to spend this time writing because the phones are upstairs somewhere.

Well, I hope this was an enjoyable insight into my brain box.  Like I said, with luck more to come in the not too distant future.

Positive Head Space

 Well, it hasn't been six months since my last post, but I haven't really been consistent since my whining session, have I?

Things haven't really improved.  I'm sure everyone is aware of all the terrible things going on in the world, and I spent a great deal of time rehashing the terrible things going on in my life in the last post, so I won't go over it all again here.

I've been in my head a lot lately.  I'm still feeling burnt out, and I haven't really had a ton of energy to do a whole lot other than put in my time at work, then come home, do what chores are absolutely essential, play with the kids, and fall asleep.  I've spent a lot of time staring at a phone screen or a TV screen and zoning out, and, after a while, thoughts started accumulating.

This has been by no means a fun or easy process, and I've been trying to put things together coherently for a while now.  I finally decided to just start writing and hope that I can figure out the coherence thing as I go along.

I listen to a lot of podcasts.  I know I write about them a lot on here.  One of the things that bothers me so much is the talk on the news and current event podcasts about how divided everyone is right now.  It's all "polarization" this and "there hasn't been such division in the US since the Civil War" and all sorts of other stuff like that.  I find it difficult to reconcile because, well, I don't see it in the real world.  We're back to the post I made a few years ago about what's real.  I've been thinking for a long time that reality and "the news" are completely disconnected.

A few days ago I heard something on a podcast about how we're at a breaking point as a country and we need to find a way to come together and "heal our nation" before we descend into war.  But here's the thing: I think we already are.  I think we have been for a long time.  If we ignore the absurd edges of the political debate (which seem like the only portions of the political debate that get any air time), what I see in the real world are a bunch of people who generally get along pretty well.  Better yet, even when people have wildly different political views, I see them coming together in common causes to make their lives and the lives of people around them better.

Last April I wrote about spending more time trying to work on what things I have some amount of control or influence on, and I know I wasn't the only person thinking about that kind of shift in the last year.  I've seen numerous podcasts come out about that very idea, and plenty of articles online.  It's reached a saturation point, at least when it comes to the people in my life.  I don't hear people at work talking about national politics anymore, even though there's a midterm election in a couple of months.  I expected a lot more outrage on my Facebook about the supreme court decision on abortion; there was almost none.

What I see and hear instead of all that noise is people talking to and about each other.  People are going out again and doing things.  People are taking vacations, going to movies, and hanging with their friends and families.  I talk to my coworkers about their workloads and how we can help alleviate them when they get overwhelming, then we talk about vacations and kids and what we'll be grilling on the weekend.  I see people in my neighborhood out walking and talking about what's going on in each other's lives.  I see posts on Facebook about people in need, or lost dogs, or babies.  Lots of babies.

Maybe I'm overreaching.  Maybe I'm using anecdotal evidence to support a claim.  Either way, I think people, by and large, are good and want to be good.  Thus, instead of tuning in to the hatred and anger that the daily news puts out, they're tuning out and spending more time on the good they can achieve in their lives.  You know what, I hope I'm right.

I Have Been Avoiding This

 I've had the desire to write more lately.  I've written post after post in my head, but I have been blatantly avoiding logging on and actually putting the words out there.

I'm sure there's some deep psychological reason why, but I'm not a psychologist so I don't know why.  I just know that every time I think about doing it I end up not.  Even this morning when I turned on the computer to write here, the first thing I did was get on social media for half an hour to avoid it.

Maybe it's because I'm tired.  The baby (who has been born since the last post I made on here and is now coming up on six months old) has an irregular sleep schedule to say the least.  Some nights he makes it 7-9 hours.  Other nights, like last night, he wakes every 2-4.  That's tough for sure.  To make things worse, the toddler has been going through sleep regression as well.  The other night I awoke to him walking beside the foot of my bed with a blanket over my head after I heard the door bump the wall and I just about chucked a pillow at him before I realized it was him and not a monster or something.  Most of the time, though, he just whines from his room about how he wants more milk.

Maybe it's because I'm burnt out.  Work's been...well, tough lately to say the least.  Despite our supply chain team working as hard as we can to source and expedite parts, we've been dealing with a lot of shortages.  We've been able to get enough to meet our sales goals every month this year, but not enough to deal with the major backlog we grew in 2020 and 2021 because of staffing issues and other shortages.  Production has ramped up hiring and really worked on efficiency, so even though we're producing a lot when we have parts in stock, we're running out of parts more quickly than we had in the past, and there's been a lot of down time on the production lines.  It's tough and it's leading to a lot of animosity and stress in the facility.  Everyone is feeling the pressure and it's starting to hurt the way people interact with each other.  I've had to break up a couple of fights.  I had a woman scream at me for five minutes.  It's not been fun.

On top of the tension, I've been putting in way more hours than I'm used to.  I would previously come in to work 5-10 minutes before the shift started to get my computer booted up and get a coffee so I could be ready for the shift.  Now I'm coming in 15-20 minutes prior to shift so I can catch up on all the emails I refuse to check at home.  Every morning I'm coming in to 30-40 emails from people working on second shift or just from people who don't know when to stop working and think it's OK to send emails at 7, 8, 10 at night.  Plus now that I've got the "manager" title, more people think they need to copy me on emails that have literally nothing to do with me.  I probably delete or file without responding to about 50-60% of the emails I receive.  I proceed to spend 7-9 hours of every day in some kind of meeting.  I have to find time to still do some actual work.  I have 23 people that report to me so I have to spend time working with each of them.  Some days I don't get to see all of them and that feels wrong to me.  I leave an hour or more after the shift ends every day because that's when I've had enough time to catch up on the days' emails and get all my after shift reporting done, and also because very often there are meetings scheduled after the shift ends.  I barely have time to even eat lunch anymore.  Most of the time I eat at my desk.  Minimum I work a week is 48 hours, and man that sounds like an easy week.  Most weeks it's more like 55-60.

Between the lack of sleep and the extra work, I've been home less and irritable more, and it's put a strain on my marriage.  She's not working anymore, so she's in a difficult head space as well, and between my burn out and her, idk depression/anxiety, we're arguing a lot more.

The good news is, things are going wonderfully otherwise...right?  I mean, it's not like COVID is still a thing over two years later and also now there's a war in Ukraine.  Oh crap.  Well, at least there hasn't been 7-8% inflation every month since my son was born and my wife stopped working so the budget we made last year isn't completely useless.  Oops.  My employer said this inflationary period is going to be "transitory", so they're not going to make long term adjustments to their pay structure and the best I can hope for is a 3.5% raise.  Thanks employer.

So long story short, I'm busted right now and I don't know really what to do about it.  I'm sure plenty of other people are feeling this way, too.  I'm feeling pretty powerless and because of that I don't want to log onto my blog and talk about things anymore.  I'd rather just lurk on social media and look at memes.  My goal here today was to get this out of the way so that I can hopefully come back soon and write about something else.  Hopefully it's not six more months before I post again.

Yesterday, My Dog Died

 OK, so it wasn't exactly yesterday.  It was probably more like two or three weeks ago.  I'm not completely sure as there have been a lot of other things going on in my life right now.  It does feel like yesterday, though, for a number of reasons.

Yesterday I picked up his bowl.  The other animals in the house used his bowl most for water because it was always the freshest water.  Since it was constantly being drank, it was constantly being filled, so it was always fresh.  I have to remember to refresh the other water dishes around the house a bit more frequently now that I finally decided to pick his up.  It's packed away with the bin that used to contain his food.

A week ago I took his last bag of food and donated it.  We had just purchased him a new bag of food before he got sick, but before we opened it he stopped eating.  None of the other animals in the house eat senior dog food, and I didn't want to return it, so I donated it.

Two days ago my brother-in-law gave us a memorial blanket.  I can't even open it.  I had to fold it with the photo on the inside so I can't see it.

Every time I walk in the kitchen I look to see if the water bowl is empty.  It's difficult today to look and not see the bowl there anymore.

Every time I see a white flicker in the corner of my eye I think it's the little white fluff at the end of his wagging tail.

Under every pile of blankets I expect to find his happy face.

I can't bring myself to pack up or get rid of his bed.  Our other pup has been using it since he died, so, she doesn't want me to get rid of it, either.

Almost nine years we had with Boswell.  He was the chillest pup I've ever met.  He just hung out, got pets, sniffed around, and wagged his tail.  The only issue he ever had with other dogs was how much they liked to hump him.

We traveled across the country with that pup.  He's travelled more than some of the people I know.  I don't know where he's originally from, as we adopted him from the pound when he was three or four years old, but I do know in the nine years we had him he spent time in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Idaho, California, Utah, Nevada, Oregon, and various rest stops along the way between all those places.  He flew in a plane.  He road tripped cross country and back.  He saw the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Ocean, and the Snake River Gorge.  He drove through Vegas a few times.  He lived in the high desert of southern California, the arid Inland Empire, and a number of places in western Pennsylvania.

I hope we were able to make him as happy as he made me.  I wish there was something more I could have done for him.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.  I really just needed to spend some time processing this pain.

COVID Concerns Ruining Medical Experiences

 A few months back I posted a "quick tangent" in the middle of one of my posts about how I hated the COVID restrictions I had to deal with when I took my son to the hospital.  Recently I have had a lot more interactions with medical providers in general, and, honestly I wanted to write an entire post about how awful these restrictions have made the user experience for anyone interacting with medical providers.

First and foremost, a lot of the people in my family, myself included, deal with some level of mental illness.  Depression is very common in my family, as well as anxiety, and other pathologies.  This means that a number of people in my family interact on the regular with psychiatrists, therapists, and the like.  Last year during the initial COVID reaction, most all (as far as I can tell) of these services went digital.  People can now call, text, video chat, and the like.  It's probably great for some people as it's super convenient or because they have other fears they're dealing with, but it really erases a human element to what I can only describe as one of the most human-centric forms of medicine.

Now, as I've said before, I understand that COVID is real and, while I might be able to look back now and say that the reaction last spring was too strong, I don't believe anyone in the moment would have said that, and I completely understand why services like these decided to go digital.  They're important enough to keep up, even if seeing people in meat space is potentially super dangerous.  The problem I'm having, though, is that was almost a year and a half ago now, and we have (or at least should have) a much different perspective of the virus now than we did then.

Most, if not all, medical professionals are likely vaccinated at this point, and if they're not, then that's entirely their choice and they better than anyone should understand the risks involved.  Many individuals outside the medical field are also vaccinated, and again, if they're not, it's not because they don't have access to get the vaccine.  Thus, I believe we're at a point (and probably have been for 2-3 months now) that anyone who wants to be vaccinated, has been, and we all just need to move on with our lives.

Here's the problem: medical professionals aren't.  I have not met a single psychiatrist who is seeing patients in person that isn't working for an in-patient clinic.  I see very few therapists seeing clients in person to this day.  It's a major issue because, like me, many people find talking to a therapist over a video chat to be dehumanizing, demoralizing, or at the very least abjectly worse than seeing one in person.  Like I said, you're missing a human element when you're talking to someone remotely.  At the most basic, you can't even make eye contact with the person you're talking to.  It's just absurd to think that, even now despite all that we know about COVID and despite the fact that 70+% of the population is vaccinated (especially including the therapist) that we can't see a therapist in person.

I can only speak anecdotally, but I'm curious how many people have stopped utilizing these very important tools right now because they're only able to see the resource digitally.  We're in the middle of what's been described as the largest mental health crisis of our lifetimes, and the people at the front lines are too afraid to step up and actually meet with the people that need help the most.

Here's the most absurd example I can think of: a member of my family was being evaluated at a hospital for whether an in-patient clinic stay was necessary.  The psychiatrist doing the evaluation refused to come into the room and would only speak via Zoom from his office.  The nurse in the room had to hold up a tablet so the doctor could evaluate the patient from another room in the same building.  I don't even know how to describe how infuriated I was by this.

This paranoia goes beyond mental health professionals, though.  My brother-in-law's baby was born today.  It's his first.  I have been at the hospital for the birth of almost every one of my nieces and nephews, and those that I wasn't on-site for the birth I was able to see within hours after.  I will not be able to see my new nephew today.  The waiting rooms at the hospital are all closed.  Visitors are restricted to incredibly small windows of time.  Only one person is allowed in at once, and no one else is allowed in the building while that one person is in the room.  So, if I want to visit, I have to wait in my car until the person currently visiting comes out to their car, then I can enter, be screened by the person at the door to make sure I don't have a fever (which, I really want to go off on another tangent about but I'll stop with this tiny rant), then walk all the way to the maternity ward.  Given the distance from the visitor parking lot to the maternity ward and the really small visitor window, there's enough time for maybe 2-3 people to see the baby if everyone spends 15 minutes or so in the room with the parents.  Thus, I won't be able to see my nephew today as we've all agreed that the grandparents should be given the ability to see the new baby first.  I might get to see him tomorrow if I'm lucky.

This waiting room paranoia goes beyond just maternity wards.  When I went to see my own doctor last month I was forced to wait in my car and allow them to call me when the room was ready.  When my wife goes to see her OBGYN for her routine prenatal visits, she has to wait in the car.  I wasn't even allowed in to those visits with her until late last month after the governor of our state reduced the COVID restrictions finally.  I didn't miss a single appointment with my first son, but I only just got to hear the heartbeat for the first time at the new baby's 20 week ultrasound.  When we took my family member to the hospital for evaluation, no one was allowed in the waiting room, and the ER waiting area was literally empty.  I sat in the car and watched a woman in her own car bleeding into a rag that she was holding up to her forehead for 20 minutes before she went in to get stitches.

Only an industry that people literally rely on for their health and wellbeing could be as callous and heartless as most medical facilities are being right now in the name of safety from COVID, a virus that more than 70% of the population is vaccinated against.  I doubt I'm alone in saying that I've avoided seeing a doctor in over a year because of how poorly offices are treating patients.  I don't know what to do about it, though, because, as I said, we all rely on doctors and hospitals for treatment every now and then, but it's infuriating to be treated so poorly by the staff of these facilities simply for existing and coming in to the facility in person.

When can we move on with our lives?

When you're older, absolutely everything makes sense!

 So I've been reading this book about self-esteem, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, and I just finished a portion about emotional maturity.  In one particular passage, the author, Nathaniel Branden, essentially says that kids believe that there are things that are unknowable until they're adults.  The exact passage is: "To a child, the world around him is - necessarily - an immense unknown.  He is aware that adults possess knowledge far in excess of his own and that there are many things his is not yet able to understand."

This book has been all about reason, conceptualization, and, most importantly, integration, and so I find it perfectly appropriate that my immediate response to that line was to start singing in Olaf's voice, "When you're older, absolutely everything makes sense!"

Questionably funny anecdote aside, this actually bring me back to something I've been thinking about a lot lately.  I've been spending some time on Reddit lately, and a few of the subs I interact with regularly are about parenting, as I have a small child.  It's finally helped me to realize a few really important things that just clicked really in my head this week.

You ever hear the saying, "Kill your heroes"?  I've heard it before, and I had a vague notion of what it meant, but never fully understood until yesterday.  You see, as a kid, I had an expectation of my parents that I now understand was outside the realm of reality.  I thought they knew everything, could do anything, and, most importantly, would always be there for me.  As a teenager, I was disabused of those notions, but not in a way that made any sense.  My parents didn't act the way I expected them to, but they were always just extensions of my own consciousness and when they "misbehaved" it was upsetting.

No, "kill your heroes" means that those heroes you're worshipping are human, too, and should be treated as such.  We shouldn't worship another human being.  They're just as flawed as we are.

Just this week I understood for the first time (fully understood, conceptualized, and integrated), that my parents are their own people whose actions are of their own volition and who have their own ideas, opinions, and flaws.

Parents aren't super heroes.  They're not perfect, and they have motivations beyond the grasp of their children.  I can't believe it took me till I was 31 to fully realize this, but I guess it took having a child to fully understand.

I guess Olaf was right.  This all makes sense now that I'm older.