Like it or Not, It’s US!

sleepng in the Everglades by DJB

Look at the ‘gators, just sleeping in the sun.  It’s difficult for me to speculate about an alligator’s thoughts, because their ability to think is pretty limited.  But anthropomorphically, they look as if they are just relaxing in the sun, affectionately intertwined.  Their hearts are pure their bellies are full.

These ‘gators, and about a dozen of their colleagues, are laying in a muddy patch near a path through the Everglades National Park.  This is different than the park where the commercial tours run; the ones that also feature a guy who wrestles with alligators. The same tourist attraction they have run since 1955.  Looking over at these lizards it’s pretty clear that they have no interest in wrestling with anyone. They are living out their alligator life, in their protected alligator swamp, seemingly unconcerned about anything more than when to get up and find their next meal.

Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple any more, not even for them.  Although I doubt those two realize it, they are lucky to be here. In 1955, due in part to people who captured them and put them in shows, but more because people made them into shoes and pocketbooks, and even more  because people drained  the swamps for farms and housing developments, alligators  almost became extinct.  But the government stepped in and protected them and persevered great swaths of their habitat. By 1987, they were no longer endangered.

But now, we may be seeing a government that doesn’t care as much about spending a lot of money to protect swamps and mud holes.  Also, the water that comes into the swamps and mud holes maybe coming in too quickly and getting too deep, and is changing the composition of what kinds of creatures can live there.  In addition the water now contains a lot of strange, man-made chemicals that are toxic to many of the creatures that live in those swamps.

But really, although I do like alligators, as well as great blue herons, ospreys, and piping plovers, and also the southern toads and pig frogs, and every other fish, animal, bird, plant and bug in the Everglades, I care more about my grandchildren, and the kind of world in which they will be living.  I know that if the Everglades, and many of the other estuaries that provide the basic nourishment for the bottom of the food chain become greatly diminished, then everyone’s ability to to grow and find food, all the way up to the top of the chain becomes diminished.

But, really, this isn’t really about climate change.  What these two sleeping reptiles don’t seem to be thinking about is how much the lives of all of us, every creature on earth, have become so much more intertwined over the last hundred years.  What happens in the Everglades affects the lives of people and polar bears in Alaska.  What happens in Washington and Beijing can be a matter of life and death in Syria and Brazil. The way you treat your neighbor affects how I treat mine.  It has become almost impossible to live a life in isolation.  Everyone is connected, whether you want to be or not.

I realize, having walked out on a starry night deep in the desert in Arizona, or up in the mountains of Idaho, that it can feel as if the rest of the world is far away and that I am alone, independent  and self-dependent. But as soon as I want to eat, find water, or to talk to another human being, I will be affected by, and have an affect on, the rest of the world.  Not just the town, the country or the state that I’m in; the world.

This is true because the people of the world are all now in constant communication with each other.   People in Afghanistan were watching the Super Bowl (great game, wasn’t it). People in India were watching Lady GaGa( I didn’t like those shoulder pads). China holds billions of dollars of America’s debt. On my table in Massachusetts is coffee from Africa or Central America, fruit from South America, on dishes made in Portugal. People in those countries are eating bread made from American wheat, and driving American tractors across their farms. Many people are dependent on life-saving drugs made in America, Switzerland, Germany, Israel or India.

People are moving all across the world, some running from terrible conditions, others going to seek better educations and opportunities.  They are inter-marrying, and often their children are moving to new places. This isn’t going to stop, even if one country decides to build a wall.

Ideas are flowing even more quickly across the world. Some people are trying to finding ways we can all benefit from each other’s knowledge, and improve the lives of everyone, all across the globe.  Others a still pretty primitive, and are spreading ideas about how some people are different and should be driven away, or blown up.

To those who say that if everyone would just take care of themselves, and not hurt anyone else, that’s enough, I have to answer, sadly, that is no longer true.  We now still have to take care of ourselves, but also be aware of how we do it, and how it affects everyone else.  You can’t leave your garbage in the woods.  You can’t burn your garbage in the back yard. You can’t leave the water running all day.  You can’t drive a car that doesn’t run clean. You can’t text while driving that car. Burning down the rain forrest in Brazil affects the air quality in Russia.  Insider trading undermines the trust necessary to financial transactions.  Discriminatory housing practices create tensions and anger that can ruin a city. Not paying taxes undermines the fairness of a society. Corruption and unfairness make doing business much more difficult.  Everyone who feels cheated starts to cheat to protect themselves.

The fact that the rest of the world didn’t care that the Israelis and Palestinians never settled their differences for eighty years has affected almost everyone in the world. It has created the chaos and conflict through-out the region that has now affected almost every country in the world.

If people can’t support their families in Mississippi or Wisconsin it affects me here in Massachusetts, even though my kids have good jobs and my wife and I have just stopped working after forty years.  It affects us if kids in Kansas go to terrible schools and won’t be able to understand the world in which they are living, even if my grandchildren do.  Those Kansas kids will struggle and get angry and who knows who they will blame.

I would love to be able to relax and read a good mystery without feeling that something is going terribly wrong and I need to help fix it.  I would love to just post pictures of my grandchildren playing with ducks, or only spend time telling you how amazing Isiah Thomas has been for the Celtics. — which he has been and I do spend time talking about it. 

To all of you who spend part of the day meditating and being mindful.  And to the others who are reading about how to be wildly successful by focusing on your goals, that’s great, and go for it.  But be aware, that you can’t achieve your goal on your own, and also it’s worthless if the world you are living in is falling apart. If you just take care of yourself you may not notice that the freedoms of other people to just take care of themselves is slipping away. They are not sliding down a slippery slope, they are falling off a cliff, and once they go we all soon will follow.

We all have to be aware of what we are doing and how it affects other people, even, and perhaps especially, the ones who don’t know, who we think of as different from us. We are all in this together.  We will all live together in a better world, or we will all live like the poor people of Somalia, with constant conflict and chaos.  Those are our choices. The choices are becoming clearer each day.

So, as they say at the check-out counter: “Have a great day.”

ReDesigning People -- 1

Hey, where have you been.  I've been working on some new stuff.  It's taken a while but now I'm pretty far along.  Maybe I'll keep posting stuff here.  But I've said that before.

Anyway, here's an

Introduction:

In the Spring of 2012 I was  sitting with Carrie, an attractive, articulate sixteen year-old young woman.  She had come to me because she was having panic attacks.  She said sometimes she thought her head was going to explode, and at times that she couldn’t breathe.  These attacks often came when she was studying for exams at school  Carrie spoke in a very animated fashion about how difficult it was for her to maintain her excellent grades and still keep up with the constant influx from her social connections.  As she spoke her voice cracked a little and her dark hair fell in front of her dark eyes that would fill, but not overflow with tears.  Her parents, Sandra and Carol, were sitting in my waiting room, while her friends, many of them, were wondering where she was and why she was not answering their text messages that were making her phone ping every thirty seconds.

I have been a psychotherapist for over forty years and have been closely involved in thousands of people’s lives, yet that was the moment it became undeniably obvious to me that I was living in a new world; a world that is not only creating changes in how we all live, it is creating changes in who we all are. Changes that will alter the basic make-up of our species,.

The changes are technological, environmental, scientific and societal.  The most powerful changes are the result of how all of those factors interact.  This new world requires  different skills in order to adapt and succeed.  Many of the ways of thinking and acting that were adaptive and helpful two or three generations ago, are no longer useful; others have become counter-productive.

Our grandparents and great grandparents lived in a world that was very different from the one that their great-grandparents lived in.  The early twentieth century was a time of change, especially compared to the early nineteenth century. It was a time of significant industrial and mechanical advances. The pace of that change has continued to increase so that now, in the early twenty-first century, we live with constant change.  We expect it to continue. But as we are changing the world, the world is changing us. 

Until the mid-Twentieth Century our species has been Designing People in basically the same way for a few millennia. There have always been three basic interacting forces that designed who we become.  First there is evolution. The genetic scripts of who we are pass from generation to generation, with occasional mutations, some of which survive. Second, the family grouping, whatever shape that has taken, exerts its influence.  The third powerful designer of our behavior is the community, the subculture in which we find ourselves as we emerge into the world.  Combined, these influences shape what we  believe, and how we think, feel and act.  It has been this way since our ancestors walked upright. 

To me, Carrie is the symbol of how these basic designing influences are changing.  Carrie was conceived in a petri dish.  An egg was taken from one of her mothers and fertilized with sperm from an anonymous man who was selected from a profile in a book.  Her parents were not allowed to be married at the time, but they were living together and as soon as the law was change d they got married. Carrie has a little brother now, and they all live in a happy, caring family.  The community in which Carrie lives accepts her family without question. These are circumstances that her grandparents would not have believed possible.

The visit with Carrie happened in 2012, and since then things have continued to change rapidly in our society. This is mainly due to new technologies, and to the new scientific knowledge that these technologies have helped us acquire.  The aspects of Carrie’s life that seemed unusual then are commonplace and well accepted now. In just the past few years there are even newer methods of creating children, more diverse blending of families, and different variations of societies that are all having a strong influence on everyone’s life. The expectations of how Carrie should behave, the skills she will need to learn, and how she will learn them, are also different.   All of these things are vastly different than what was expected of me, growing up in the middle of the twentieth century.  All of these things are not only changing how people behave, they are changing their bodies and minds.  They are ReDesigning People.

New information about who we are, what we want, how we behave, and how we communicate, comes pouring in in huge waves, every moment of the day. It affects us whether we realize it or not. Many people spend hours a day sitting in front of a screen gathering and dispensing information while things beep and pop up, pictures and videos appear and disappear, quickly replaced by others, with very little time for reflection.

We have devised new ways of mixing stands of DNA in a petri dish to create new people, and now newer, faster, more direct ways of splicing and reconnecting those genes in order to alter who that person will be.  

The evolution of machines  has progressed much faster than the evolution of people.  Many of the daily tasks that for centuries required manual labor are now done by machines, even the task of building those machines.  We also use machines to calculate, and then to find patterns, make predictions, and develop protocols about what we should eat, what medicines we should take, what we will buy, and who we will marry.  These machine generate algorithms which influence many of the decisions we make, mostly without our realizing that it is happening.

The climate we live in, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, all contain chemicals, viruses, bacteria, and proteins that have either been locked away in environments that never had contact with people until recently, or have been created in laboratories to either help us stay healthy or make us buy food that will make us fat.

These are changes that will affect the way Carrie lives her life, and they will have a more profound effect on her children. Her generation will also experience a continued growth in how medicine is developed, designed and delivered.  The hope is that people will be able to live longer and healthier lives. However, it may just be that as diseases are treated, other aspects of our lives fall apart. Will our brains last as long as our healthy bodies?  Will earth be covered with centenarians who need their diapers changed?  Will our air become too warm or too polluted for people to breathe easily?

Societies are changing also. To the horror of some and the delight of others, people from every part of the world are moving to every other part of the world. Marriages are occurring, babies are being born and cultures are mixing in ways that has never happened before.  Many of the old institutions that helped people define their values and guided them towards certain behaviors are being questioned or ignored.  This is a disrupting transition that is creating a great deal of conflict between those who feel the old ways are still the best, and those who feel that old traditions and rituals are antiquated and irrelevant.  While it is presently unclear how those arguments will be settled, it is clear that societies are changing dramatically, and people will think and believe differently than they do now.

The effect of all of these changes is that we are ReDesigning People, in part by design, in part due to unintended consequences.   As a psychotherapist I have spent years helping people to redesign their lives.  In many cases I felt successful, but in many others I felt there were too many factors  over which I had no control that were more powerful than anything I could do in my office. I could do little about the person’s genetic make-up, their economic resources, the extent to which they were subjected to racial prejudice or the toxic environments had shaped their lives. 

In many ways Carrie is a very fortunate young woman.  From her background we can assume that her genetic structure is close to flawless.  The egg and the sperm that were used to create her were specifically selected because they came from people who were strong, healthy, smart and attractive.  While she was in utero her DNA was tested and screened for many possible genetic defects. She is being raised by a happy couple, who have financial resources, in an accepting neighborhood with a good school system and a diverse population. Given all of this her prospects for a good life are high.

Sadly, she is suffering for the overarching malady of this new world, anxiety.  Anxiety often is the result of having feelings of little or no control of what will happen.  The feeling of living with constant change, and the uncertainty of what that change will produce has instilled a feeling of anxiety into almost everyone who has electricity, a computer, a cell phone and wi-fi.  There is too much information, too much traffic, too many demands, too little time, and not enough stability.  It is impossible to name any company, any city, any government , any medicine or any institution that won’t be radically different in fifty years.

This creates anxiety.  Anxiety creates stress on our bodies, brains and minds.  It changes our functioning down at the cellular level.  All of these forces, some of them very favorable, but many of them very unpredictable, are changing the nature of who we are.  We are ReDesigning People.

In this series of essay I will describe this process and some of its possible consequences in greater detail.  I certainly welcome any comments.

Concentric circles 2

We live our lives in concentric circles.

I was talking to John the other day in my office.  He was having anxiety attacks, mostly about money.  He and his wife have four children.  He knew exactly how much was in his bank account.  He knew exactly what he would have to pay in five days when March began.  He knew when his wife got her paycheck and how much overtime she had worked this month.

In addition John knew how well his kids were doing in school.  He and his wife, Kathy, were very familiar with their teachers.  He had even spoken to the principal once or twice.  His three daughters were doing well, his son was charming. He was active with all the kids with their sports.  He and his wife were friends with the parents of the other kids on the teams.  They were all from the neighborhood.

Kathy was very friendly with four of the women on their street.  They knew everyone's children and tried to share carpools and after school supervision.  They also went out, either with or without their husbands, once or twice a month.  It was a good neighborhood.

That really was a far as their time and energy carried them.  John was an engineer and worked with lasers.  He had a couple of friends from work.  His wife worked in the office of a construction company.  She got along with everyone, but didn't socialize with them except at company events.

They also had extended family they were close to.  All of their parents were alive, although  Kathy's were divorced.  She was the only one of three children who kept in touch with her father, and he was not easy to get along with.  John's brother had gotten hurt at work a few years ago.  He was now living with their parents, so John was now visiting more often, but his brother's slow recovery bothered him.

The four kids, the extended family, their jobs, the homework, the sports, the house, that's a little bit more than they could really manage emotionally.  When the money got scarce they would get snippy with each other.  They were able to work most of the out in my office.

If I had asked they probably could have named two or three of the nine city councilors.  They knew who their Congress person was. They knew they would never vote for Donald Trump, or probably any of the Republicans, but that was more from their general outlook on life  and less from any deep knowledge. John knew much more about the Red Sox than any politician.

They also had extended family they were close to.  All of their parents were alive, although  Kathy's were divorced.  She was the only one of three children who kept in touch with her father, and he was not easy to get along with.  John brother had gotten hurt at work a few years ago.  He was now living with their parents, so John was now visiting more often, but his brother's slow recovery bothered him.

Life is full of many things like that.  Most people have to take care of what is closest to them first and work their way out, in concentric circles, into the broader world.  There are some people, mostly men, whose inner circle consists of just themselves.  it allows them stop skip the next one or two circles and just focus on their work, or being a bigger force in the larger world.  These types either have a strong family support system, that fills in all the gaps close to home, a lot of money that pays people to take care of those things, or they skip the family and community part and just take care of themselves.

What is happening in the world today, which causes lots of anxiety and stress, is that  everyone, everywhere  is more interconnected.  That makes all the circles are much more porous.  What happens in China can suddenly have an effect on John's work.  The coal plant in Ohio blows  carbon into the atmosphere and rides all the way to New England.  The price of oil affects so many people in different ways.  Fanatics in the Middle East still affect the price of oil. Shrimp from Thailand  is cheaper that shrimp from Louisiana.

All this makes people more anxious because they know they don't have control of these things.  No one does.  No one really can.

So you go back and try to just focus on your family, and then your community, and you hope that doing good there will spread outward to the other circles.  But now, with all of these constant sources of information, it becomes almost impossible to keep your head in the sand.

It forces people to pay attention.  It should make them think, but many people are just too tired, or too scared to take the time to think it all through ....If I do A, then B happens, and if B, then I can do C or D, and what would be better for me? For my family? community? country? world?

We need to think it through.  We need to talk to other people; people who think differently and find out why.  Then decide.   It's a very difficult task, but it pays off.