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This Middle Class American Life

Posted on July 19, 2010
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I’m still catching up with all the things that I’ve been meaning to blog, but have not been able to.

Back in May, NYT carried an article about a new UCLA study that attempted to capture every waking moment of 32 dual income, multiple child, middle class American families. The 32 families chosen cut across racial, sexual and nationality lines including black families, Japanese and Latino families and families with same sex couples. Totaling over 1540 hours of video, the study prompted a professor not associated with the study to exclaim, “This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world.”

From the article: “After more than $9 million and untold thousands of hours of video watching, they have found that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like: a fire shower of stress, multitasking and mutual nitpicking. And the researchers found plenty to nitpick themselves. ”

Some interesting observations and conclusions from the study:

  • Mothers still did most of the housework (27% compared to 18% by fathers).
  • Husband and wife were alone together in the house only about 10% of the time and the entire family was together only 14% of the time.
  • Flexible, on the spur division of work amongst the parents added to the stress. Couples with rigid divisions of labor had the least stress, even when the division was unequal.
  • Mothers had half as much leisure as the fathers (11% compared to 23%).
  • Mothers spent 35% of their time alone with kids compared to 25% by fathers.
  • The backyard is almost never used.

One aspect of the study that I can take heart in is the stress levels caused by flexible division of labor. Shanthala was raised in a house where everyone pitched in and from what she says, did whatever was required. There wasn’t much of a rigid division of labor when it came to doing household chores. I was raised in a house where my mom did practically everything with some ample help from servants. Shanthala and I have had several disagreements over the division of work in our house. I’ve told her several times that I prefer a fixed schedule and job as opposed to picking up whatever happens to be available. That way, I’m not scanning the horizon constantly for what needs to be done. Untrained in all my formative years, my eyes unconsciously glaze over what needs doing.

UCLA’s own publication of the study, put out way back in 2005, when the study concluded, has some other interesting tidbits:

  • “When they are together, today’s families tend to stay in motion with lessons, classes and games. Or, they go shopping.”
  • Researchers say parents effectively have relinquished the steering wheel to their children. That’s because most family decisions and purchases are geared toward the kids’ activities.
  • Elinor Ochs, a principal researcher says: “We’ve scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships. … And we’re moving from a child-centered society to a child-dominated society. Parents don’t have a life after the children go to bed.”
  • For Ochs, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at the day’s end. “People just don’t come together very frequently in our society,” Ochs said. “They might say they want community, but they don’t seek it.”

What kind of society, what kind of life are we bequeathing to our children ?

… O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. … – The Continuous Life by Mark Strand

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Neurological and Cultural Underpinnings of Being Plugged

Posted on September 8, 2009
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First, an apology to my readers. I’ve let trivia overwhelm me. That combined with a few other things have prevented me from updating my blog more promptly. I hope to rectify the situation this week.

Part 1: The Hardware (or Biology)

A day or two after I posted my article on the madness of speed in the modern culture, I read an entry on Frontal Cortex that shed some more neurological light on our pathological condition. I wrote a little about this in my earlier article, but this hopefully provides a more complete picture. I was indulging in speculation then, but it looks like I wasn’t that far off.

Back in 1954, a psychologist at McGill University in Canada, James Olds, and his team accidentally discovered that if a probe is inserted into the lateral hypothalamus of a rat and the rat was allowed to stimulate its own probe, the rat would stimulate itself till it collapsed. This was hailed as the discovery of the brain’s pleasure center. But neuroscientists were unhappy with this term. They found that far from producing pleasure, people who were stimulated in this area were more crazed than happy. Two researchers, Jaak Panskepp and Kent Berridge, independently concluded that this area was more concerned with seeking or searching than pleasure. Berridge concludes that mammals have two separate systems, one for seeking and the other for liking, which is the brain’s real pleasure center. Emily Yoffe, the author of the Slate article that inspired the entry on Frontal Cortex, writes:

“But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. “The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,” Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.”

Dopamine, the well known neurotransmitter associated with the euphoric feeling and consistently tagged as being the reward drug, apparently has more effect in motivating us than in satisfying us. Rats that had their dopamine producing neurons destroyed, starved to death even when the food was right in front of them because they had lost the desire to reach for it. Berridge says that dopamine does not have satiety built into it. Rats who had dopamine flood their brains were quicker in navigating a maze to reach food than ordinary rats, but they were not any more satisfied than the ordinary rats once they found the food. Dopamine is also thought to be responsible for maintaining an internal sense of time. So, when an hour has gone by whilst surfing the web, you have dopamine to thank again. The neurotransmitter not only drives the seeking system in our brains, it also makes us lose time as we constantly stimulate ourselves following one hyperlink after the next. Novelty fuels dopamine and the next email has all the potential of being novel (it just might be the response from that gorgeous girl from the cafe agreeing to meet for dinner). Berridge says that like Pavlov’s dogs, we salivate at the ding announcing new mail.

Jonah Lehrer adds an interesting twist to this. This endless desire for curiosity doesn’t make us want to read Feynman’s Lectures on Physics or learn a new language or a skill. He says: “..we don’t treat all information equally. My salient fact is your irrelevant bit; your necessary detail is my triviality. Here’s the paradox of curiosity: I only want to know more about that which I already know about.” So, there we have it, a neurological explanation for why we develop a tic if we’re unplugged even for an instant.

Part 2: Software (or Culture)

Driving back from the library yesterday, I heard a brief segment from a program called “The Cambridge Forum” on NPR. The speaker was Carl Honore, a leading evangelist of the so called “Slow Movement”. He said something that I thought provided the cultural impetus for our behavior. Western culture (and thereby much of modern culture just about everywhere) has always thought of time as linear, of a line moving towards progress and betterment. Economics is a fundamental bedrock of modern culture. Everything we do, the way we want to be, who we want to be, is driven in part by a model of wanting more, of the philosophy that as homo economicus ‘more is better, greed is good’ (as quoted memorably by Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in the movie Wall Street). With time being also a scarce quantity (limited by our lifetime), and the desire to make progress, we squeeze more and more into a given unit of time.

Carl Honore writes in his blog:
“…is unplugging now the ultimate luxury?

Of course, being online can be wonderful. We are hardwired to be curious and to connect and communicate. The problem is that in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people, we often don’t know when to stop.

Being “always on” is exhausting and superficial. It erodes our producitivity. It locks us into what one Microsoft research called a state of “continuous partial attention.”

Continuous partial attention. I found that a very apt description of how I find my state of mind, many times. The days I throw caution to the wind and just be completely with Maya, I feel invigorated. Her sense of wonder, her endless fascination with what we dismiss as ordinary, her complete lack of urgency (except when she’s hungry) and purposelessness make it much more refreshing if I don’t let trivia (sometimes work is trivia too) put me in a constant state of partial attention.

I ran into the slow movement via a book about Slow Food, the activity that unleashed the slow movement. I had nodded off reading the book (or so I remember) and didn’t pay any further attention to it. By visiting Carl Honore’s site and other sites associated with the Slow Movement, I see interesting insights and practices that maybe of benefit in helping fix this drug, the accelerating, unyielding desire for more.

“There is more to life than merely increasing its speed” – Mahatma Gandhi

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Maya’s Musical Demands As a Riff on Modern Life

Posted on August 19, 2009
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I suppose it all began when I started getting tired of constantly changing CDs. Maya’s love of music has only matured as she’s aged. As an infant, she’d push off against me when she didn’t like a track, and she’d hold me tight when she liked one. This expression of preference changed to a more verbal grunt when we were in India, around the time she turned one. And now, it is a series of “no, no, no” (pronounced cutely as “nyo, nyo, nyo” without emphasising the “y” much). If I don’t heed to her displeasure, she begins to struggle and gesture emphatically at the CD player, commanding me to change the track. I suppose I helped the monster grow by heeding her request quite early on.

The whole thing reached a crescendo where I was constantly ejecting and inserting CDs. To top that, I’ve packed the CDs so tightly together in the CD rack – to prevent her from removing them and using the CDs to wipe the floor among other things – that I cannot pull out a CD without employing both hands, which means I have to put her down and pick her up (listening to music nestled in my arms seems to be her preference) each time I change CDs. I turned to playing the songs off my laptop where I can satisfy her musical tastes without feeling like a disc changer. However, we recently moved my laptop to a less accessed room to reduce the amount of time I spent sitting in front of it, and Maya doesn’t like to listen to music in this new room. She also prefers to listen to the music through my hifi system.

I gave up the fight and decided to buy a Roku Soundbridge. Two years ago, a good friend of mine had purchased one of the first units to come out and has been very satisfied. The Soundbridge is a device which channels music streamed over a wireless network (or a wired one) to a music system. Many applications such as the popular music player, iTunes, can stream music to a Soundbridge. About 40-50% of my music collection is ripped and on my laptop. I can now stream all this music, including playlists, via a Soundbridge to my hifi. The Soundbridge comes with a remote using which I can browse the music collection and select what I want to play. I constructed playlists of songs Maya enjoys listening to, grouped by mood, style and time of day (morning, afternoon and night) and voila ! No more frustrations, no more interruptions for me or Maya in listening to music.

If it all stopped here, this would be a simple story instead of a riff on the modern life, a tale of how the acquisition of one gadget led to a whole new set of wishes and desires, setting off a chain reaction of consumption.

Living The Well Connected Modern Life

Maya and I were happy, enjoying our new found freedom, listening to music uninterrupted. The Soundbridge seems a neutral sound source, transmitting the streamed music to my music system without distortions. Then, the phone rang. The music stopped. Maya and I opened our eyes, annoyed at what had caused the music to stop. The display on the Soundbridge said “Rebuffering….”. The phone stopped ringing and the music resumed. We were still resettling down when the phone rang again. The music stopped again. What was going on ?

Was it some interference from the phone and the DSL line, I wondered. We had the DSL filter on the phone jack already and so, that shouldn’t be the cause of any interference. Moreover, the Internet connection never seemed to suffer so far. Was the problem with the Soundbridge then ? Back to the net, scouring for information.

Disconnected from much of the hooks of the modern connected life so far, I had dozed past the problems in the coexistence of cordless phones and wireless LANs. I had a cordless phone which used the same frequency as the wireless network and so interfered with the network when the phone was in use. Now, Shanthala couldn’t make any calls if Maya and I were listening to music. If somebody called, I was snappy. I took to using the cell phone more. But the cell phone is paid for by the company and I didn’t want to use it for my personal calls during the peak hours.

We have to buy a new phone, I announced to Shanthala. And so we kicked out (we gave it somebody else who needed one) a perfectly good phone just because we had acquired a new gadget. All modern cordless phones apparently come designed to coexist with a wireless network.

The next problem came as I was listening to the music, a few nights ago. The music collection on my laptop has been built up over many years. Consequently, many of the older tracks were ripped with a poor sound quality (they made for smaller mp3 files, a big benefit for the older laptops with rather small hard disks). Now that I was listening to the music on a hi-fidelity system , I wanted to rerip those tracks with the higher sound quality. But what format to use that provided this higher quality ? mp3 is known as a lossy encoder which means that some information is lost when the track is encoded from a CD. And a CD is already somewhat lossy compared to an analog signal. Soundbridge doesn’t support FLAC, the lossless audio encoding format that is free. So, I decided to stick with mp3. After some searching, I found that a bit rate of anything over 128Kbps was pretty good and anything like 192Kbps or 256Kbps was more than sufficient even for a hifi.

A decent portion of my CD collection remains unripped because of the limited space on my laptop, space that is ever thinning given that I’m downloading videos and photos of Maya. The external hard disk that I use for backup, purchased over 5 years ago, is filling up too. Time to upgrade that too. Hard disk prices today are low enough that a 1TB disk costs about $149. But is that the right choice ? Ah! All the distracting choices we have now.

The same friend who bought the Roku Soundbridge a few years back also had just acquired a NAS (network-attached storage) box. A NAS box makes it’s storage available to all computers in a network. A NAS box would ease Shanthala’s problems in taking regular backups, I thought. The cheapest NAS box was only a few tens of dollars costlier than the external hard disk. But as I started researching, I found that many of the new NAS devices can also serve as a music server to Soundbridge, act as a print server and a photo/video server. This meant Shanthala and I wouldn’t have trudge up to connect our laptops to the printer to take a printout. Further, all our pictures today reside on my laptop, and a selected few on the website. Shanthala’s only access to the pictures, if I’m not around, is what is on the website. Lately, I’ve been tardy in updating the pictures on the website and she has no access to the pictures and movies that I’ve taken recently. The NAS as a photo server would allow her to view all the pictures as soon as I uploaded them from the camera. No sooner than I explained this to Shanthala, she approved purchasing a NAS box.

But the NAS boxes that do all this cost a little more, but still within striking distance of a simple external hard disk. By now the demon had possessed me. I started checking what protection the solution offered in the face of a hard disk failure, what additional features the different boxes provided, the performance, the quality of the build, what upteen different reviewers had to say about each box. On and on and on I went. I eventually settled on a mirrored 2TB DS209 Synology NAS box.

The next problem came when I realized that the most common NAS boxes came only with a wired ethernet port, no wireless. This meant that I’d have to place the device where I have the wireless router. A bad choice of a place for something like a NAS box because Maya has easy access to the device. The lack of support for wireless network also meant that for the NAS box to be a print server, the printer had to be moved close to the wireless router. So, I now had to buy a device that acts as a bridge between the wired and wireless world.

Searching all this information, figuring out which NAS box to buy, which store to buy it from, troubleshooting all the problems in setting up the Soundbridge took an inordinate amount of time, time I had not planned at all. But here I was, analysing all the information, shopping for the lowest price, making sure it all worked with the equipment we have etc. etc. It took a good part of last week to finalize all this. And then when the equipment arrives, more work to set that up and then ripping the music. Sigh. All this consumption will hopefully make us a happier family ?

Many years ago, I read a book on time management that said a fundamental axiom of time management is that no stuff comes without requiring some time devoted to it. Not planning for that time is a surefire way to miss a whole bunch of deadlines.

This then is the price of modern life. Choices galore, many useless, and even the useful in such vast quantities that “analysis paralysis” seems a natural state. Barry Schwartz wrote a brilliant book called the “Paradox of Choice”, a book I’ve mentioned in my column before. He mentions how a fundamental tenet of American culture is that more choices implies more freedom is false. Many tests conducted by psychologists and cognitive scientists have shown that people are paralyzed and forego decision making when faced with too many choices. Schwartz suggests that there are two kinds of people (aren’t there always): people who want the most optimum solution (called optimizers) and those who’re satisfied with what’s good enough (called satisficers). He says that modern America is a stress inducer for the optimizers because what’s optimal is changing every second. Think you got a great deal on an iPod ? A week later Apple announces a higher capacity iPod at a lower price than what you paid, and this one comes with a cool touch screen and can run iPhone apps! All the advertising is hell on optimizers, So many new products, to solve illusory problems, though the problems seem real enough to an optimizer. (Here is a link to a TED talk by Barry Schwartz on the subject, if you don’t have time for the book).

As I sit here writing all this, I feel almost frivolous and petty. A billion or more people are hungry, a hundred million or so children die each year for lack of food and proper health care, a significant portion of the world is engulfed by war and on and on. And here I am, consumed by my consumption.

The Hassles of Running A Non-Mainstream OS

For those of you who’re uninterested in computers, this section maybe boring.

I run the GNU/Linux operating system as my main OS on my laptop. This means no iTunes, but tons of free, alternative applications. I had already verified that the Soundbridge would work well with a Linux box (the Soundbridge itself runs Linux). The first problem turned out to be that none of those applications interacted well with the Soundbridge. The Soundbridge let me browse the tracks, but wouldn’t play them. A quick look yielded a pointer to another application called Firefly media server that did an excellent job. It was a trivial download and setup. Alas! The Soundbridge couldn’t even see the tracks now. Another search yielded the necessary fixes to overcome this hurdle. Et voila! Not only could I browse the tracks now, I could also play them. I was thrilled.

My not-so-20/20 eyes then spotted that my music player counted my library having about 1800 tracks, but Firefly counted only about 1600. I tracked the difference down to incorrect file permissions and fixed them. The numbers were now right, but some of the recently ripped tracks didn’t show up under the specific artists or albums. The files seemed to be present correctly on my laptop and my music player had no problems accessing them, but not the Soundbridge. A check of one of the files showed the problem. The ripped music tracks contain information about each track such as the artist, the song title, the album it is from, the year of release etc. This information is called metadata. For some strange reason, the music player that I used had an option to not write this metadata into the ripped track. So, now I had about 100 or so songs that did not have the relevant information about them. How would I go about fixing this ?

One option was to rerip the affected tracks and make sure that the metadata got written this time. I thought that this was tedious (don’t ask me why, but maybe I was just bored about doing the simple, obvious thing) and started searching for an alternate solution. A bunch of volunteers had created a voluminous database called musicbrainz that used the acoustic signature of a music track to associate a bunch of information about the track including the metadata of the track. A freeware program called Picard consulted this database to analyze a track and generate the correct metadata. What’s more, Picard also moved the tracks such that I had a coherent folder structure and naming. For example, I had Mark Knopfler under three different directories: mark_knopfler, Mark Knopfler and mark knopfler. I wanted them all under the single Mark Knopfler. Happy, I set about cleaning up my music database with Picard. The program was fast and accurate.

Now I had a cleaner music database, no more tracks not visible to the Soundbridge. But, now the playlists were all messed up because they were based on the tracks’ old location, not the new cleaned up location. So, I recreated the playlists. Finally, all was well in Soundbridge land.

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Cellphone Ripoffs

Posted on August 1, 2009
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Multi-tasking in the Silicon Valley is as unusual as breathing. Texting and driving, emailing and chatting on the phone, multiple chats, reading email during a meeting, the list goes on and on. As a denizen of the valley, I’ve a moderate case of this illness. I started my day remembering that I had not provided the answer to a question that I was asked last Wednesday. A part of my brain realized that if the person had not pinged me again for an answer, the answer was probably not that important. But, as I have written before, a part of me starts reacting even as another part cooly meditates on my reactions.

A few phone calls later, the problem was discovered to not be a problem after all. I wanted to be done with this issue before I forgot about it. I started the last phone call of the matter as I walked to my first meeting. The call went to the answering machine by the time I got to the conference room. I had a simple message: “Ian, it’s not a problem”. But I had to wait for about 30 seconds or so while I heard the insanely long “If you wish to leave a message….” instruction that I’ve heard several times before. I wondered, with the entire room staring at me, if there was a way to bypass the message. I also wondered if this was a way for the cellphone providers to make easy money.

And tonight I ran into this article by David Pogue on NYT, State of the Art – Cellphone Gripes Worthy of Congress’s Time – NYTimes.com. And in it I found that the author had a similar gripe about those insanely long instructions to leave a voicemail and access voicemail. He also answered my question of the benefit of these instructions to cellphone carriers. Here is what he had to say:

“Is this really so evil? Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.And that’s just Verizon. Where’s the outrage, people?”

850 million dollars a year ! And just one carrier !

The rest of the gripes listed in the article are worth a read. And now with all my pent-up rage over the evil cellphone corporations, I can’t sleep. Sigh.

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Frenetic Existence

Posted on July 20, 2009
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Wednesday, July 15.

Went to bed early last night, woke up early this morning, had a half hour of solitude before Maya woke up. fed her and put a new diaper when she woke up and she fell asleep immediately, had an undisturbed shower and shave, checked email and got the first meeting canceled as the agenda was not clear. Maya woke up for good. She was in great spirits as she was not hungry and had a good full 10 hours of sleep. This is going to be a beautiful day, I thought to myself. And then the wheels started coming off.

When we had moved to our friend’s house in Palo Alto, I offered Ginez a choice: to either come at 8:30 so that I could catch a bus to the train station or to come at 8:45 so that she could drop me at the station. She preferred to drop me off at the station as it gave her fifteen more minutes of sleep.

8:38. Ginez called to say that she was stuck in traffic. A car was on fire on the freeway and after getting off the highway, the internal expressway was also a giant parking lot. She was at least 15 minutes away. This set off a domino in my head. 15 minutes late meant that I’d probably not get to the train station on time which meant that I’d miss the company shuttle to work which meant taking the light rail. Taking the light rail meant changing trains to reach my office, which meant that I maybe at work only by 10:15 or so instead of 9:30. Was I glad that I had canceled my meeting at 9:30 ? Nay. I was a little anxious that I’d be late.

8:42: I called Ginez to ask her where she was. She had come up to Middlefield Road and said she’d take that exit to come home. I asked her to hurry.

8:47 I was getting a little nervous. I had no meeting till at least 11. Why was I in a tizzy ? I diapered Maya, picked up my backpack and went outside to wait for Ginez.

8:50. I called Ginez again. She was at Alma and Churchill. She said even these residential roads were choked. She asked if I could come to the corner of El Camino and Park Ave to make up for the lost time. I said yes and started hurriedly walking with Maya in my arms.

8:55 Got to the corner of El Camino and Park. No Ginez. Called her again. She said that she was getting onto El Camino and that she’d be there in a minute or so.

8:57 Ginez is at the light, waiting for the U turn. With no traffic on my side of the road, I hurry across the road, strap Maya in and get inside. Ginez is apologetic, saying that she starts early enough to avoid traffic delays, but that today was really bad. I tell her not to worry, that if I miss the train, I miss it, that it is not the end of the world.

8:58 The light changes and we hurry to Palo Alto Caltrain station. I’m quite confident now that I’ll miss the train. We’ve only 3 minutes left. I imagine jumping into the waiting train just as the door are about to close, without validating my ticket. What will I tell the conductor if they ask for tickets, I wonder.

9:02 As we pull into the station, I see the train on the platform with the doors shut. I think, OK, I’ve missed it. As I get out, I realize that it’s the northbound train. I leap for joy. I can still catch my train. I see the southbound train pulling in. I leap out, wish Ginez a good day, don’t even kiss Maya goodbye and start running. Time enough to validate the ticket, I think.

9:03 I get into the train along with a horde of others. I hear an announcement that the train will not stop till Santa Clara. I’m surprised, then relieved that maybe this is the earlier train. I get out along with others, some looking confused as they check their watches. I hurry up to the conductor, who doesn’t even look at me as he says “The Mountain View train is right behind”. I guess a lot of folks have already asked him the question.

9:05 I call Ginez and tell her that the trains are all delayed, that the commute is messed up everywhere today. I wonder if the company shuttle will wait for me as I pace the platform. I call a friend in India to say hello. They’re watching a thriller. I hang up. I notice that the northbound train hasn’t yet moved. I look down the tracks and see another train, up ahead, stopped. Stuck due to engine trouble, I think. I pity the northbound commuters.

9:10 No sign of the train that is “right behind”. People start pulling out their cell phones and start rescheduling their day.

9:20 A southbound train pulls in. I get in and seat myself. I hear an announcement that this train will stop at all stations between here and San Jose. I’m surprised. What train is this, I wonder. I hope that the company shuttle is still waiting for me. That the driver would’ve noticed the previous train zip by without stopping and realized that he had to wait some more. I hope their policy is to wait for the train, and not give up within a few minutes or so and depart.

9:30 I arrive at Mountain View station, am glad to see the company shuttle still waiting. Rush to it, get in, greet the driver and settle down, happy that I’ll be at work before 10.

Why did I have to rush about like a headless chicken, when I knew that I had no meeting till 11 ? Habit ? Just the pace of modern life ? My own personality ? As I was doing this mindless jiggle, a part of me was observing me doing it and telling me, rather gently, that I had no reason to act this way. But the part that seemed in control, went about anyway.

A growing chorus of voice say that modern psychology is looking for the problem in the wrong place or in the wrong person. They evince that psychology asks people to learn to cope with the existing system rather than realizing that the existing system is broken and that is the reason so many people need psychological help. It is a continuation of the Western philosophy that elevates the individual and free will above that of the society that the individual is a part of.

The modern world is in a sense, a world gone mad. When the founding fathers of the US spoke of everyone’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, I think they emphasized happiness, not the pursuit. But pursuit is what we’ve decided we’re after, happiness be damned. Why do we indulge in such behavior ? It is as cliche as cliche can be that many on their deathbed say, “I wish I had spent more time with my family”. We watch movies such as the brilliant American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, but never succeed to apply the lessons to our life. The Revolutionary Road is as good a movie about the madness of the American Dream as any I’ve seen. Despite a chance to get out of the humdrum of existence, an existence so boring that it kills all joy, the male protagonist allows himself to be sucked back into the rat race with devastating consequences. As I watched the movie, I recognized that given the right circumstances, I could be that character played so well by Leonardo di Caprio (and Kate Winslet deserved an Oscar for her performance in this movie, not The Reader). Yes, we’ve somewhat out of the rat race today, having opted to work part time, for less money and to stay at home caring for Maya. But still in experiences like the one that started off this entry, I betray the deeply ingrained habit.

As I was sitting in the train, my mind also went back to a book that I had recently read, Alan Lightman’s “The Diagnosis”. Not highly recommended, but the initial chapter was a riveting description of the madness that is modern life. A man on his way to work on a beautiful summer morning loses his memory. His memory returns a few days later, but his entire body starts to go numb. He is sucked into the medical establishment with its plethora of tests to determine the cause of his numbness. A scene in the waiting room at his doctor’s room, I also consider brilliant. Almost the entire first chapter is available online at Random House’s website.

Why do we do this ? The reasons are probably many and complex. But one factor that I had not considered occurred to me when I ran across an interesting article over at Mind Hacks, another neuroscience blog that I track every now and then. The article talks about a recent experiment concerning the reward circuit in our brains. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly associated with pleasure, and with reward. We’re animals seeking rewarding activities. Unlike the popular myth however, researchers are finding that as much dopamine is released on the expectation of a reward as on a real reward. The article described an experiment conducted on people involved in a gambling game. The study found that near misses (you almost hit jackpot) released about as much dopamine as real wins, but the overall experience was awful. In other words, dopamine was released even when the outcome was not pleasurable.

All this is fine, you say. What has this got to do with why we pursue modern life despite knowledge of its ills ? Let me quote directly from the article:

Interestingly, although near-misses were experienced as aversive they increased the desire to play the game but only when the person had some perception of control, by choosing what the ‘lucky’ picture would be.

Of course, like choosing ‘heads or tails’, it’s only an illusion of control because the outcome is random anyway.

But because of reward expectancy the dopamine system is most active when we think we can control the outcome and modify our strategy next time, even if that sense of control is completely false.

In other words, we run the treadmill because we think we can change the outcome. Something special, something unique about us, our situation, our spouses, our children, our work that will change the typical outcome .

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day. – W.H Auden

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