Additciton, and the urge to 'finish it'

I've been reading Stephen King "On Writing" and I've come across an idea which is sticking with me. Here's the extract.

"A friend of mine... went to a counsellor and said his wife was worried that he was drinking too much. 
'How much do you drink?" the counselor asked.
My friend looked at the counsellor with disbelief. "All of it," he said, as if that should have been self-evident. 
I know how he felt. It's been almost twelve years since I took a drink, and I'm still stuck with disbelief when I see someone in a restaurant with a half-finished glass of wine near at hand. I want to get up, go over, and yell "Finish that! Why don't you finish that?" into his or her face...."

Reading this chapter has coincided with my eldest asking all sorts of difficult-to-answer questions about what is alcohol for, and why do people smoke if it's bad for them, and why don't you ever buy us lollies at the checkout anyway, mum?

And I've been watching and fretting a bit about some of those I know and love, and their habits? / addictions?

SO my first, somewhat rhetorical, question is: how do you know if it's an addiction - in yourself or another? Am I addicted to knitting? Can someone be addicted to working late? to massage appointments? to running downhill fast? to the high moral ground?
Addiction seems to have 2 parts:
1) Persistence of a behaviour or substance use despite deleterious consequences, and
2) A neurochemical/physiological response to withdrawl of that behaviour or substance.

It is accepted that addiction exists on a specturm and there's a lot of grey in the middle. I guess you can be hooked on lots of things but we (family, community, society) just don't worry about it if it's not totally messing up someone's life.


What struck me about the description of "Finish that! Why don't you finish that?",
is that my grandmother, who survived a 3-year Soviet-sponsored holiday in Siberia in 1946-1949, used to say that to me about the food on my plate. "Finish your broccoli." "You can leave the table once you've finished your plate." "Why don't you finish the potato cakes?" "Who is going to finish the last lamb chop?"
These days I am congenitally incapable of leaving food on my plate. I am barely able to stop myself from eating the 'good bits' left on my kids' plates. I have started serving myself smaller portions, knowing I'm going to eat part of theirs anyway. But I am happy to leave a pile of chips, a half piece of cake, or the last third or a glass of wine unconsumed.

I think the urge to 'finish it' is related to the perceived quality of 'it'. "Don't waste the good stuff", my starving refugee ancestors cry out to me from their hiding spot in my epigenetic code. "Don't waste anything which would have kept the infants alive in that gulag". they cry. Cake and chips aren't real food, not like lamb chops and broccoli. Cake and chips can be left uneaten without psychic consequences.

I also have the urge to finish a row, a pattern repeat, a section of knitting before I go to sleep. Often I set myself a knitting target at the start of an evening as I sit in front of the TV, and I get grouchy if I don't get to that point before bedtime. I fully acknowledge that I may well be on the addiction spectrum with my knitting at the moment. But it's cheaper and has relatively minor deleterious side effects.

My second, less rhetorical, question to you, my reader, is:
Do you ever have the compulsion to "finish it"?
And what is "it"?  Food? Drink? Work tasks? Craft? Not to leave the TV in the middle of an episode or wait until an ad break? Not to stop fishing until you've caught dinner?

Does that mean you might be on the spectrum of addiction?

Scrutiny: the effect of the gaze of others.

For almost all people, scrutiny changes our personality. 

Modern neuropsych (like my new favourite Daniel Kanemann) holds the view that a personality is a cumulative picture of how a human being acts in context, rather than something core to a psychological being. Change your context and your personality changes. You may not like this idea, that the 'you' reading this is as ephemeral as the things that come and go around you. But I bet you've asked yourself, and been unable to answer, questions about how you would be in a radically different context. How would you deal with being a prisoner of war in Changi in 1948, or do you think you would be one of the 80% of people who would have turned the dial up to 'fatal' if you were participating in a Milgram experiment?

Being watched changes how a human being acts. 
Human beings in aggregate also moderate our behaviour under scrutiny in statistically measurable ways. For example, crime is more effectively deterred by whether or not you are likely to be caught than the severity of the punishment (you can Google Scholar it yourself cos I'm not enthusiastic enough to link it.)

Not changing under scrutiny is considered a failure of empathy. The DSM IV (don't have a V around) also contains a selection of psychological disorders (autism spectrum etc) and personality disorders (narcissism, psychopathy etc) which include this as a feature. Also, one of the key features of paranoid schitzophrenia is the opposite; you feel like you are always watched, always under scrutiny. The 'watchers' and the 'followers' and 'everyone knows all my bad secrets'.

How good is your calibration? 
How much do you think you are under scrutiny, compared to how much you are actually under scrutiny? Most of us assume a much higher level of scrutiny than is real, especially for social contexts that you care about.("Oh god, everyone saw me trip on the way into the formal!"). We also assume scrutiny from above, not from below (people in senior management are statistically more likely to be corrupt - and psychopathic too - than those in middle management. Ought to find the link to reference it but I do want to get to sleep.)

The nature of the watcher also has an effect. 
Consider these:
Would you speak the same way in a meeting if the CEO - or equivalent person with a very big hat in your context - strolled in and sat quietly in the corner? Or if the cleaner was dusting around you?
Would you change the way you rebuke your kids if another parent came to the playground? Or a policeman? Or perhaps you wouldn't if you noticed a homeless lady with a shopping trolley on a park bench within earshot. Assume scrutiny and change behaviour from those socially above, not from below?

How much do you watch others? 
Do you watch and judge other parents at a playground? Do you think it's amusing when juniors squirm and stutter when you walk in and sit quietly in the corner? Do you care whether your partner's clothes are neat and stylish or scruffy?



I've been thinking in particular about the effect of scrutiny in my own context and thoughts have been swimming a bit. Specifically the following:

• How will the 'right to privacy' will work in the internet age, given the ease and availability of data mining and individual profiling for targeted marketing (Thanks, Google) among other things.
• What would have happened with greater transparency in banking (w.r.t. the GFC), big business (I reckon my CEO is a bit corrupt and I don't think that's unusual), politics (federal election pork barreling coming up) and specificl lobby groups (US senate, petrochemical industry, guns lobby, secret service etc) 
• What's the mental/emotional impact of both greater and lesser scrutiny, combined with the fragmentation of social structures w.r.t. previous generations (which used to provide nice easy rules about who to watch, who to be watched by, how much to care etc). 
• How easy it is to live well in isolation and in a ! Social media allows us to blurt every last 150-char thought on Twitter to a squillion other motes in the prokaryotic swamp of electrons and web pages, and how many people's time and life energy is wasted scrutinising others. How do you tell who is worth your scrutiny in the swamp? How do you tell if you are worth scrutiny? How do you shut out the scrutiny and comment of a troll - can you even shut it out of your brain the way you would shut out an obnoxious 7 year old in the shopping centre who yells at you "Hey lady, you're a smelly poo!"
• The constant relentless mind-crushing cross-referencing and cross-scrutiny of my new favourite lab rats, the school pick up parents! God they dress up and put makeup on for the pickup. They check and cross check each other. Who's in gym clothes? what brand? how new the shoes? does her body show evidence of actually going to the gym? Who is in which designer clothes? which shop did she get them? can she match jewellery to an outfit?
• How do I feel about WikiLeaks running for the Australian Senate with the philosophy that universal scrutiny of everyone important, and thus almost total transperancy of almost every powerful organisation is: (and all of these are contentious)
• inevitable in the information age
• ultimately a good thing
• a good reason and purpose for a widespread political & social campaign.

Increased scrutiny can do wonderful things.
It is one of the easy ways to improve the quality of a company's output (you will write better doccos if you know that person X is going to read them, you will manufacture better thingums if you know there is a quality control).
It is one of the easy ways to reduce corruption and misbehaviour (that's what journalists are for
It is one of the easy ways to connect with people (he noticed that she was watching him across a crowded room..... ) but not just romantically (Mum, did you see me jump?)

On the other hand, scrutiny can be a weapon.
 Do you remember Year 8? Specific kids were always the target for scrutiny and ridicule. There's a particular tone that girls use on the sacrificial scrutinee, regardless of the substance of the taunt: "You've got your socks up!" "Can you believe it, she's pulled her socks right up!" "Socks-up socks-up Josie's got her socks-up"
Boys - as is often the case - use very direct language, making scrutiny a clear threat. "I've got my eye on you, Smith. You put one foot out of line, and ..." or "Look at him. How pathetic."
Also crushing is invisibility. You do your best: change your clothes, take up the right sport, modify your language, and the cool people don't see you, don't look at you, and apparently effortlessly exclude you from everything. The message is, you're going to be a bag lady in a park when you grow up and I refuse to direct my gaze at you.
Here's a paradox - year 8 was awful for just about everyone. Super cool kids ended up targets for ridicule. The nasty teasers and threatening kids were struggling to fight their own invisibility - either in the yard or in their out-of-school context. Your own calibration was poorly tuned. But you learned a lot about scrutiny as a weapon and it probably gave you a healthy cautiousness about excess transparency.

Scrutiny can get to the point where paranoid schitzophrenics are accurate and well calibrated. For many celebrities, no amount of paranoia is too small. The British Royal Family are under outrageous scrutiny - cameras from adjacent mountains photographing the royal breasts; radio 'personalities' prank-calling a hospital and triggering the suicide of a nurse. I am sure they have a secret service division devoted to being paranoid on their behalf. Are they sacrifical? What about the Hollywood celebrity set? Do we make them go spectacularly crazy for our aggregated need to scrutinise? Do we focus on them, easy clear targets, in order to not have to work out who to scrutinise and under what circumstances in our disconnected but cacophanous lives?


I certainly don't want all my deepest darkest secrets or less-than-perfect actions blasted open to everyone whose opinion I care about. Especially where I don't think they were my fault, or I don't think I could have done better without structural change to the system at the time. For example, I don't want my wonderful husband to have seen what happened when I raised my voice at our kids at 7PM last week after too many days on shift. I wasn't at my finest and I am embarrassed. Nobody is going to catch me and sanction me for getting a little upset. I will try not to, but I think I will probably end up doing it again.
I also think we all need space for secrets in order to keep a sense of ourselves, our identities, independent from the context imposed by the others that watch us. That tiny voice that says "my secret is my own and nobody can see it" might be the thread in a mind that stops it from becoming paranoid.

Finally, the watchers need to be paying attention to watch. Anonymity and hiding in large numbers has always been - and will continue to be - a very effective individual protection, for people in a population and for pilchards in a school.

And so I hope, for the sake of your brains, that there are enough times in each of your lives that nobody is paying attention. Campaign for scrutiny and transparency and accountability, but keep your secrets - choose carefully, go for small ones, ideally legally and morally clean ones - but keep them and treasure them! Plus I strongly recommend that you keep them off electronic media.
If you are one of the few under constant scrutiny, good luck. Your mind is being bent out of shape by it, but it is probably a sacrifice for the common good.

How to actually reduce your carbon footprint 10: Put your money where your carbon reduction is!

Many of my friends feel like there's no point in even trying to reduce their personal carbon output in the Western world (as I mentioned last month) What can one person change in the face of all of those kilo mega giga tons? 

Consider that even if you only have the same number of arms and legs as any of the other 7 ish billion people in the world, you have a massively disproportionate amount of financial resources and the flexibility to put it where you see fit - if you choose to use that power.

Consider the following ideas.

Carbon neutral/renewable superannuation. 

Clever thing I heard on the radio (which was in the SMH first) which I am going to enact this weekend.
The Australian Youth Climate Coalition website has an article (good lookin' mob they are, too!)
I'm going to ring my super provider and pester them to see if they can send me some better info, otherwise I'm moving.

Fund Renewable Energy in Developing Places

Another one that went past my inbox and sparked my attention led me here, to the old EWB
They seem to have pulled back on camping trips to East Timor to install water filters (which was good but not particularly strategic)
and they've aligned themselves with Nicholas Stern (Stern Report/ Blueprint for a Safer Planet)
who says that the most important way to pull back global greenhouse emissions is for the developing world's demand for energy to come from something that's not carbon based.
This is a good Google search if you want to find your own NGO or project to support.

Support Local Renewables

The easy option is green power - but the list of providers is short and few are bigger than 100mW.

but I like walking up my street looking at all the happy solar panels pointing at the sun and will get some on my roof next renovation.

Talk your mum into it. Sign up your brother in law's company. If you're going to set up a big marquee on the lawn and have a massive party, stitch up event green power.


Anyway them's my thoughts for the night. More next time.

Cheers,
Lexskigator

A week in a foreign city - part 1

 A 3-day conference in a foreign city - Crown Casino.

 Food in the restaurants was consistently amazing, and frequently unethical (especially threatened species of seafood). On the day I couldn't take the kids to dinner, we ended up at the food court, with the following choices: Maccas, Subway or KFC.

 Ambient temperature is 24 degrees. I tried very hard to stop thinking about the energy cost of heating the whole place (evidenced by the enormous fans & pipes & heat exchangers, visible from the glass wall in the hotel room, and running between presumably very exclusive architectural gardens on the roof)  It was very hard to get ourselves together to leave the toasty warm t-shirt building to go into the cold wind outside, and there was no temperature variation to give you a sense of the day passing. I expect they make a lot of money on that.

I am told the whole complex is riddled with secret passageways and hidden panels. If the CCTV watchers see anyone, for example, have a stroke and fall off their pokies stool, or collapse in a nightclub, a panel can slide out and the staff can whisk them away in a moment, nobody else has to look at the corpse. The staff came and went like ghosts, silent, fast, always friendly, all below-average height and caramel skinned and good looking but not too good looking, and all dressed in dark grey. We never saw them except when you needed something (a glass of water, madam?) and then they were at our elbow. And then gone.

A nice shiny brochure in the room tells me that Crown is one of the largest private employers of Aboriginal Australians, with something close to 1/5 of their 10,000 employees Aboriginal. I thought they were evil until I read that. Now I am thinking hard about good and evil.


I am left with the sense that Crown sells exclusivity. If someone comes in off the street, they eat KFC and only get into a few small areas - and a view of the shiny gold tiles in the Members Lounge. Coming in with a hotel booking, a holiday package or a conference, your key opens a few luxury pools, gets you a discount at a flame-seared-tuna-on-wasabi-guacamole-with-watercress-garnish type restaurant, and lets you see the exclusive rooftop garden. As a pro golfer with an entourage, you can get whisked from one spot to another never even knowing about the food court and feeling like you are the king of the universe as those bloody gas firework things puff a ton of carbon into the atmosphere every hour, on the hour, outside your own suite's toilet window.

Still thinking about good and evil. Mostly about evil - the evil already in the hearts of the profligate rich.