The meaning of a really long life

You know the three topics that should never come up in polite conversation: sex, politics, and religion.

Fortunately (or not), a blog is a very one-way sort of conversation. This blog, in particular, is definitely going to do some talking about religion. This entire area is incredibly fraught with peril, since there is so much room for offense... but that's a risk I'll have to take, and that's what the comments section is for. Don't like something here? Say so, please!

Most of the religion posts here will be about the uneasy interaction between religion as we know it and the world as it is becoming. Technology is rapidly changing a lot of fundamental human assumptions, and religion / spirituality is so tightly interwoven with humanity's history that there's a lot of tension between tradition and the coming changes. Yet, optimist that I am, it seems to me there's still room for more harmony than we often see. That's the space that interests me, and the space that I'll be blogging about here. (I'll say more in future posts about why that space interests me so.)

First topic: life extension.

There's no doubt that human life is getting longer. Exactly how much longer is still quite unclear. There are certainly no shortage of radical life extension researchers who are quite convinced that within the next forty or so years, medical science may extend human life by, say, an average of twenty to thirty years. And within the next twenty or thirty years after that, medical science could make even further leaps, extending human life by another twenty to thirty years. And, potentially, so on.

In other words, these researchers believe that if you are of an age to live another forty or so years in reasonably good health, then there's a chance that medical science could keep you living for a very long time indeed -- easily over a hundred years, and possibly quite a bit more.

I don't want to debate whether that possibility is realistic. I want to assume it is realistic, and talk about the consequences. Specifically, the spiritual implications. (Even if you don't think it'll happen that soon, it's certainly plausible given another few centuries of scientific development.)

One classic and frequently cited statement about religion is that it is one means of coming to terms with the inevitability of death. Personally I am a Unitarian Universalist, which means that I'm a member of a religion with no central creed or defining statement of belief. (I'll be blogging more about Unitarian Universalism, and about postmodern religion generally, later.) But even such an open-minded religion as this -- a religion with open-mindedness as practically its defining characteristic -- says straight up front, in The Unitarian Universalist Pocket Guide, that confronting the reality of death is one of the key reasons the religion exists. Death, the statement is, gives meaning to life.

That's the central claim that I question here.

The historical inevitability of death has indeed been the source of many of the world's beliefs about what happens after death. These beliefs about the nature of post-death existence are always religious in nature, since they are necessarily matters of pure faith.

But there is another, and much more relevant to the living, component of religion. Religions are also guides to how we should live now. What is the best way to live? What gives meaning to life? I contend that many of the world's great religions -- those that teach compassion, charity, service, gratitude, and love -- are essentially teaching lessons that are not rooted in the inevitability of death.

Quite the contrary. If a religious perspective, or any perspective, gives meaning to life and helps enrich life, then that religious perspective could -- and should -- become even more meaningful the longer we live.

In other words, I don't see that a deeply meaningful life, one which is based on clear principles and a deep reverence for life, is necessarily rendered any lesser for being longer. I do not see that death gives meaning to life. Life gives meaning to life.

What death can do is force us to consider how we spend our life. If an unconsidered life is not worth living, and if death forces us to look at how we live and consider it, then the prospect of death can make life more worth living. But Lord knows there are countless people who live heedlessly and without consideration now, despite their impending deaths, and who may or may not ever reach a point of deeper harmony and peace with themselves and the world. For those people, death doesn't serve that purpose... or at least not until far too late.

Two other points: First, there are certainly a number of religions, especially fundamentalist ones, that believe that a better world lies beyond death. Suicidal zealots derive much of their motivation from an expectation that their sacrifice will be rewarded in heaven. So in those cases, arguably death makes life less meaningful.

Second, death confronts us with our limitations. But even in a world with hugely extended lifespan, our limitations remain. We will never know all there is to know; there will always (hopefully!) be billions of lives we will not live; we cannot see everything there is in the universe. Humility and awe -- reverence, as our minister named it in a recent sermon -- are emotions that any thoughtful being must feel, regardless of their lifespan.

So it seems to me that a religious foundation for life -- or perhaps I should say a compassionate and grateful foundation for life -- does not have to be grounded in the finitude of life. What gives meaning to life is how we live each day, not just how many days we live.

There are myriad other issues with indefinitely extended life, among them social justice (who gets to live longer? only the rich?), societal sustainability (what does it do to population pressure when people live much longer?), impact on the young (will young people become less common, less powerful, or both, in a world skewed towards the old?), and many more. Those are topics for future posts. I'm not saying that living longer is universally good; I'm just saying that it isn't inherently and intrinsically at odds with having a deeply fulfilling and meaningful life.

Permission

It's interesting that even though a blog is supposed to be a totally personal soapbox, still it's possible to feel like you need permission to post certain things.

I don't mean personal things -- while I do plan to post some personal things on this blog, none of them will be controversial or sensitive enough to offend any of my immediate family or friends, who're the only people I would want to get permission from.

No, I mean other things. Highfalutin' topics. The header of this blog says that this is about spirituality, family, futurism, and "anything else that's worth thinking about." So theoretically if you're reading this, you've bought that ticket and you're game to take that ride.

But still, I'm having a hard time stepping on the gas. A lot of the thoughts I have on futurism and spirituality have been floating around in my mind for years, clamoring for a chance to escape onto a page. But now that the very page they want is right here in front of them, I'm getting cold feet. Somehow.

So I'm writing this post to vent those jitters. And it seems to be working. Because in this case, the only person I need to get permission from is... me.

Permission hereby granted. Post away! Full speed ahead!

First experiences

This morning, as most mornings, I went into my 2.5-year-old daughter's room to get her up. She'd woken up a few minutes before and I had her wake-up milk in a sippy cup. (She's thirsty first thing in the morning.)

The first thing she said to me was, "I want first experiences!"

"What did you say, sweetie?" I asked, not quite believing my ears.

"I want FIRST EXPERIENCES!"

Well, I'm sure you do, I thought to myself. You have your whole life ahead of you. I want you to have LOTS of first experiences! I can hardly imagine how many first experiences you have yet to have! Good for you, sweetie!

But what are you talking about? You're only two and a half, how can you be asking this?

Then I noticed she was looking at the bookshelf, and a colossal light dawned. She was talking about this:



Great book. So we read all about getting a new puppy, and going to the hospital, and going on the airplane. And I was relieved.

My first kid post ever

One of my favorite blogs is Bill Harris' blog Dubious Quality. He writes mainly about sports, family, and computer games. But he does it in a consistently engaging and wry way that makes his posts a pleasure to read. If I can write half as well as he does, I'll be doing fine.

He's got a son, Eli, about whom he posts a lot. He gives Eli a version number -- "Eli 3.5", "Eli 5.11" -- year and month of Eli's age. It's helpful, because if you've been around young kids at all you know that their age is a huge part of who they are; they change so fast that knowing their age is pretty important.

I was considering stealing his idea, but this morning I told my wife Michelle, "You know that blogger who writes about his son Eli? I'm thinking of writing about our kids like that."

"Well, make sure you do it your own way!" she said. How did she know what I was thinking?

Humph, so much for ripping off Bill. So I'll have to do something clunkier, at least for now.

In any case, welcome to my first post about my kids! It won't be the last.....

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My daughter Sophie is two and a half. She's starting to be very clear about what she wants to do and when. She's always been good with language, and now she's saying what's on her mind -- and demanding things -- very, very, very forthrightly. Any parent of two- or three-year-olds knows what I'm talking about.

For instance, this morning I was on wake-up duty. I went into her room in my robe and chatted with her as she was lying in her crib.

"What's Mommy doing?" she asked.

"Mommy's a sleeeeper," I said. (Which was true; Michelle is almost eight months pregnant, and that means Mom gets to sleep in.)

"Want to go SEE her!"

"We're going to let her sleep a bit more, sweetie."

"Want to open the door!" (to her bedroom.)

"What would you do then?"

"Want to POUND on her!"

She really means gently wake her up. Honest.

Then, later, at breakfast, she was in her booster seat, and she pointed into the kitchen. "What's THAT?"

"This?" I held up the tomato juice.

"Yeah!"

"It's tomato juice, sweetie."

"Want to drink some TOMATO juice! WOO-HOO!"

Why don't more people feel like that about tomato juice?

How to be a neurotic, part 1: Earthquakes

[Originally posted on robjsoftware.org before I created robjthoughts.org.]

I've lived in the San Francisco area since 1990. That means I got here just after the last really big (e.g. people-killing big) quake. So I've never lived through a properly large one.

But now I've got a family. And that's naturally making me considerably more concerned about what will happen when a big one hits.

Quakes are one of the kinds of risks that are almost maximally difficult for the human psyche to cope with. We're optimized for managing risks that are very present and very tangible, and that we can take direct action to confront here and now. But earthquakes aren't like that. On any given day a Northern California quake is extremely unlikely to happen. Put together enough days in a row, though, and the probability (eventually, over decades) approaches 1.

So when I worry about quakes, I have to reconcile the fact that one will eventually happen with the fact that it almost certainly won't happen today.

And of course, as an engineer, I have to get quantitative about it. Hence, I'd like to present this engineer's guide to (relatively mild) earthquake neurosis.

Step 1: Quantify

The actual odds of a quake happening are extremely difficult to calculate. The figures are usually something like "50% chance of a big one sometime in the next 20 years." What are you supposed to do with that? There's basically no way to use that number.

But the quantification you can do is around what will happen if a quake does hit while you are:

• at home in bed
• driving around your neighborhood
• commuting to work
• at work in the office
• walking down the city street

All of these have different threat profiles. For me, the most nightmarish scenario is actually if one happens while commuting to work.

You see, my commute involves BART, the local rapid transit train system. I spend about 80 minutes per day on BART. And the real clincher, the real "pucker factor" element (in fighter jock speak), is that the train actually goes through a tube UNDER the San Francisco bay.

That's the A-number-1 neurosis-inducing scenario, right there: that a major quake hits while the train is right in the middle of that tunnel. The tunnel's fairly well built seismically (it had no trouble in the 1989 quake that partly collapsed the Bay Bridge, for instance), but it needs a retrofit, because there is a risk that a really big one could liquefy the soil OVER the tunnel and the tunnel would start to buoyantly float up. Which would rupture it, and flood it. Game over for anyone in the tunnel at that point.

So that's my number one fear. And in order to engineeringly address that fear, I need to quantify how much of my actual life I spend in the tunnel.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that I spend 15 minutes per commute day in the deep tunnel itself under the water. I commute to work 3 days a week (I work at home 2 days a week, to avoid meetings -- we have good productive meetings at work, but still). Overall, the amount of my life I spend in the tunnel is 3/7 (commute days/days-in-week) times 0.25/24 or 1/96 (hours-in-tunnel / hours-in-day). Multiply that out very loosely, and you get something slightly under 0.5%. That's how much of my life I spend in the tunnel. (That's actually an upper bound, given sick days, vacations, et al.)

Therefore the chance that I will be in the tunnel when the Big One hits is really under 1 in 200. And knowing that, I actually rest a lot easier. There's still a major risk that I'll be on a train at 80 miles per hour when it hits, but at least if I survive the crash, I'll be able to climb out of the train without getting drowned!

Step 2: Prepare

Back to the list of scenarios. Neurosis minimization requires thinking through each of those scenarios and knowing what I'll do in each case.

If a quake happens at home or while I'm near home: my wife and I will rendezvous back home as soon as feasible. I have a 15 gallon water storage drum (that I need to change the water in, REMINDER TO SELF, CHANGE WATER) to handle the water going out, and we have a variety of canned and camping food, along with a camp stove. We also have LED flashlights and battery-powered radios, a non-cordless phone (cordless phones are useless bricks without power and the phone often comes back on before the power), and fire extinguishers / gas shutoff wrenches / etc. Oh yes, and we also have earthquake insurance. ($1,000 per year for increased worst-case peace-of-mind? That's a quake neurotic's bargain right there!)

So that's at home. During the commute, I make sure that I'm always wearing sufficiently warm clothing and practical footwear (sneakers, the engineer's all-purpose shoes) that if the train got crashed I'd be able to walk home without freezing or lacerating my feet. I look at all the women wearing open-toe shoes or sandals to work, and I shudder. After a major quake there's going to be broken glass and dangerous objects underfoot EVERYWHERE. Wearing sandals to work is just not a good idea in Northern California.

Also, I always carry a handy-dandy crank-rechargeable flashlight/radio in my backpack. Remember the BART tunnel nightmare scenario? If the power's out and the train is pitch black with people freaking out, I'm damn sure not going to be caught without some kind of light source. If I have to jog a couple of very adrenalin-packed miles through the tube to try to get out before it floods, being able to see where I'm going is Very Important. (REMINDER TO SELF: JOG MORE, STAY IN SHAPE.)

What about at work? There, I've got a basic under-the-desk quake kit that includes a hard hat, work gloves, power bars, a Camelback water pack, a sleeping bag, and a large backpack. Also, I always carry some spare cash in my wallet. If I survive the quake itself, I'll be better set up for the post-quake environment (which will be A Lot Different).

On the street in the city, I've become much more aware of vertical space. Walking by a multi-story old brick building, I'm often glancing up, thinking about the facade and about my escape strategy if a big one hits right then. One real problem about walking down the street is the uncertainty about shelter -- should you dart into a doorway? If you do, and the building comes down, uh-oh. Should you hide under a car? Probably not, because cars can bounce around and you don't wnat to be crushed by a tire. I often am aware of whether there's active traffic going by, in case I want to head for the middle of the street to get as far away from the buildings as possible. In general, sidewalks are one of the worst places to be, especially near tall buildings. Again, seeing women in high heel open-toe shoes on the sidewalk, while aesthetically pleasing (pardon my candor), is neurotically cringe-worthy.

Step 3: Blog

Having done all this, the other remaining step to clear my conscience is to tell other folks about it, so they can decide whether or not to have a similar level of neurosis :-) How much of this is rational, and now much is irrational? That's always subject to debate in any risk mitigation situation, but a lot of this is totally standard quake-preparedness advice. (The "flashlight in the tunnel" part, though, that's all mine :-)

Step 4: Relax

The final engineering response to this kind of neurosis is to chill out. Once you've done this kind of an assessment, and exhausted the reasonably practical responses, know that you've done mostly all you can and let it go! I sometimes tell people about this and they're like, "What the heck is up with you, man? You can't even walk down the sidewalk without freaking out?"

Well, honestly, I don't freak out. I'm just aware. Working all this out was stressful for a while, but now quakes are a background worry. I feel a whole lot better knowing exactly what I'll do when one hits than I would either ignoring the whole possibility or continually panicking about it.

Like I said: we humans aren't well suited for handling these kinds of generally-unlikely-but-ultimately-inevitable risks. We're all built-in neurotics around this stuff. So I've done the best I can. I hope you do, too, in whatever similar situation (hurricanes? fires? floods?) you might be facing yourself.

Next in the How To Be A Neurotic series: House Prices.

Welcome, version 2

Welcome to my second blog.

This blog budded forth from my week-old software blog when I found myself on the horns of a dilemma: should a blog titled "robjsoftware.org" have all kinds of postings about family, daily living, spirituality, and who knows what? I got all kinds of advice from different people (thanks Bob Lee, Bill Harris, Francis Potter, and my dad Norman!), and wound up deciding that no, it shouldn't.

So now robjsoftware.org is just about software -- programming it, researching it, and using it. And this blog is about everything else... daily life, raising a family, worries and joys in my life and others' lives, spirituality and religion, and then some.

I'll occasionally do some limited crossposting if there are posts that I think might be relevant to both audiences. But in general, that's the split.

Thanks to everyone who helped me resolve my dilemma, and I promise, I'm done making new blogs now ;-)