Category: life

the movement of content

 

One of the problems I have with writing here at brip blap tends to be the question of “what to write?” I’ve never made this a blog that covers the subjects that many personal finance blogs cover: what credit card should I get? Should I invest in an IRA or a Roth IRA? I don’t think anyone who reads this blog is looking for the answer to this type of question. You’ve probably already formed your own opinions on that and there’s no need for me to add to that internal discussion. There are many other, better blogs looking at the details of picking the best high yield savings account. I wish I was one of them - those are lucrative subjects - but it’s not to my interest and I don’t really want to write about those topics. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing on those subjects - there’s a place in this world for writing for money, just like there is a place for working for money. People who can write well AND write for money are blessed (I’m looking at you, Stephen King and John Grisham).

So when I think of what to write, I think “what should I write that (a) entertains me and (b) entertains others and (c) might be profitable.” C is a distant consideration. I leave C to guest writers and sponsored posts. B is much more important. I do like it when people enjoy my writing and comment on it. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t, I think. So I do write to that. But I’ve realized over the last year that A is the most important by far, especially in combination with B. Why? Because of Facebook and various other social media.

Many bloggers like the “sense of community” and “feedback” they get while writing, but I felt this sense and this feed much more back in 2007 before Facebook and Twitter took hold. I don’t feel it much today. Today real conversation doesn’t take place on blogs, or on websites - it takes place on Facebook or Twitter or a few other key social media sites. I used to share links heavily on this blog, but whereas a few years ago this was the first place I’d share them, now I’m more likely to share those links on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or other networks. I’m more likely to engage with commentators on Facebook than I am even on my own site, because of course I spend time on Facebook, not here on brip blap. I participate in forums rather than on individual blogs. I’d argue that even the huge blogs - the Lifehackers, the Consumerists, etc. - aren’t really able to hold onto “regulars” anymore. I read many blogs, but I seldom comment on them. I might share links from them, and comment on them - but it’s going to be on a social network.

So the movement of content has created a question: where should content live? I like having brip blap as its own independent website. But is that the future of sites like mine? Or will they eventually move to Facebook, or some other social platform, where most of the readers and “likers” are already engaged and focused? I think they will. My blog exists in Facebook already, for example. You can read it in Facebook, comment on it in Facebook and never leave Facebook. That’s fine. If I integrate my personal account with my brip blap page at some point, you’ll see a wild flood of extra content - my “brain dump,” so to speak - appear. A lot of my content has moved to social networking. I’m posting my thoughts bit by bit rather than in long drawn-out posts like this one. It’s probably the future. There will be long-form writers forever, of course, but many people are transitioning to a short-form style of reading that won’t want to read 700+ word articles.

I’ve shifted my reading over the past 5 years. I still read books - but on a Kindle, that promotes “disposable reading” (I give up on books rapidly if I don’t like them). I don’t read blogs as much as I used to (my RSS reader accumulates them for search if necessary). I don’t write as much here because I spend a lot of time writing elsewhere - emails, Facebook, Twitter, forums, etc. Content is constantly being produced by people like me and you, but it’s shifting and changing. After a brief “golden age” of people scattering across the web looking for content we’re again reconsolidating. It’s neither good nor bad - it just is. Content is moving to where the readers are.

Photo Some rights reserved by MR photography.

How Much Does It Cost to Die?

tomb tombstone grave graveyard crosses

When I first started looking at this, it cost anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 to die in New Jersey (note that I said “to die”, not “to kill someone” - we weren’t all captains in crime families in the Garden State where I used to live, although we did have our fair share and even some favorite sons). I haven’t done the same calculation for Florida, but I work on the (possibly naive) assumption that Florida should be cheaper.

Nobody wants to confront their own mortality, of course. My guess is that it’s probably right down there with cleaning septic tanks and reading children’s toy assembly guides on everyone’s list of least favorite things to do. But you have to stop and think about it for a second if you have a family - and even if you don’t.

If you are single, you may not have life insurance. If you are married, you may not even have started working on this yet. If you are married with children and don’t have life insurance, you need to go talk to an agent rather than reading this post. But life insurance may not always cover all of the costs, and you may leave behind a huge financial hit to your loved ones if you haven’t prepared properly. There is nothing more grim than planning your own funeral down to the last detail… except leaving your loved ones to do it for you. Think about a few of these things:

1. Burial? Cremation? A flaming ship pushed out to sea, Viking-style? You have to make your wishes known. You may assume that you’ll be buried in the family plot or have your ashes scattered to the winds, but have you told anyone about that? Can you imagine leaving that decision up to someone else, particularly in a moment of grief?

2. Taking care of the costs should not be a concern for your survivors. Can you imagine being a spouse or a parent or a child and trying to talk to a funeral director while doubled over in grief? Is that going to be a time that they need to be making decisions about money? Make sure that you take care of picking out a casket, or a mausoleum, or an urn or whatever it is you will need - but don’t leave that decision to your survivors.

3. Have money set aside as “go to hell” money. Make sure that you have an emergency fund well-funded or a separate account altogether (a “disaster fund” maybe) so that nobody has to worry about going to work or taking care of flying relatives into town - those details should be taken care of without worrying about the cost.

A confession - I haven’t been as diligent about doing these as I should have. I know I should, since I have a good example in the family. My grandfather had taken care of every single detail of his funeral 30 years before he died, to ensure that when he did absolutely no pressure to determine anything would fall on my grandmother. It was a brave thing to confront his mortality at such a young age (in his 40s) and certainly made a world of difference for all of us when he passed. He had expressed all of his preferences, leaving almost nothing to the imagination.

So just remember “worrying about death expenses” as item #675 on your list of a thousand things you need to plan for but haven’t yet.

(photo credit: robin.elaine )

your stuff or your life

Years ago, on a weekend visit, I spoke to a friend of mine from a Middle Eastern country while our family was visiting with his family. We spoke over a huge pile of Legos and the Bert-n-Ernie Garage and a full set of Thomas the Tank Engine trains (although, in all fairness, most were gifts). He was reminiscing about how he grew up with practically no toys: he and his brothers made toys out of wire and twine and cans and sticks. I spoke about my childhood - less simple, but still free for the most part of electronic gadgets. We watched a Euro 2008 match on satellite TV while we spoke, drank German beer and checked other sports score on my high-speed Internet laptop. Then my friend lamented the fact that while his mother had managed to support his whole family and grandparents on one salary, it just wasn’t possible anymore.

It is. Take out the imported beer, the satellite TV, the piles of children’s toys, the second car, the computers, the high-speed internet, and so on and it is. It’s amazing how within the span of one generation we’ve added so many “extras” - but at the same time Americans are now working harder than any other industrialized nation, even more than the infamously hard-working Japanese. I may exempt the Internet from this equation, simply because what I pay for access - a $600 Toshiba laptop and a high-speed cable connection - are worth it in terms of information and learning and entertainment. Other than that, though, we have added so much to our lives that we’ve lost sight of the fact that we don’t need most of it.

Yet at the same time America is unbearably wealthy by global standards. We have calories (not good ones, but calories nonetheless) available in almost unlimited supply for almost no real cost - Americans spend less of their salary on food than any other nation in the world. You can buy enough Cinnamon Toast Crunch to feed a family of four for a day for $10. Even the poorest people in America can afford television; and despite the recent increase in gas prices, we still have some of the cheapest gas in the world and almost no-one is too poor to afford a car.

I don’t automatically assume that “having things” makes anyone unhappy, any more than I assume having things DOES make someone happy. Americans are uniquely blessed with a regulatory environment that is still wide-open by global standards, and the remnants of an entrepreneurial spirit that lives on despite 50 years of creep in governmental control. Yet at the same time a gap has opened up that shows that the materialistic society has limits. I have made no statistical studies, but I have so many acquaintances who are loaded down with material goods who are desperately unhappy and apprehensive about the future that it seems to be a trend. I’m not exaggerating, either - these people have possessions that would have convinced me, in my youth, that they were multimillionaires. So progress has been made in the material world, but something - somewhere - was lost.

I don’t know what the answer is, because the Internet and cable/satellite TV and clever toys and gadgets like MP3 players have not seemed (and that’s the key word) to be EVIL. I enjoy my Blackberry, a lot. Could I live without it? Of course. Does it enrich my life? It sure did yesterday, when I listened to a fascinating interview on it, showed my kids a music video they loved and found an address I needed. But is it part of a slow trickle of gadgets-for-money-for-time that have robbed me of the deliberate life? That’s something each of us, in the wee hours, have to decide for ourselves.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

the scrambled egg theory of productivity

scrambled eggs

Physics tell us that one of the laws of the universe is this:

You can’t unscramble an egg.

Think about it. It can’t be done. You can freeze liquid water, then heat it and turn it to gas and back to water, but you can’t unscramble an egg. It just won’t unscramble. Hit it with gamma rays, do whatever you want and it won’t unscramble.

scrambled eggs

The same principle applies to finance. If you spend an hour of your life earning $20, then you spend that $20 on a CD, it’s gone. Your life is gone. If you spend two hours getting a listing ready on eBay and you make a profit of $1.34 selling a CD, that time is gone, too. Was it worth that $1.34? Was the initial purchase of the CD worth $20? That time is gone, and that egg can’t be unscrambled. The money out - unless you spent it on something that will return to you like education, or an investment - is money gone. In the cosmic sense, it has been scrambled.

Your time works the same way, too. Every time you watch TV, for example, you lose a piece of your life. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to you. I’ve seen many movies that inspired me, or made me laugh. That might have been a good use of my time. Everyone needs to relax and be entertained from time to time, but you do have to choose how to spend your life. I know it may sound like an obsessive focus on money, but that is time you could have been working on your education, or coming up with money-saving ideas, or studying investments. Watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island for the third time is not what Benjamin Franklin would have done.

Tony Robbins has a good bit about watching reruns of programs: he says we have two driving forces in our life, the desire for surprise and the desire for consistency, which are constantly at war. We want to watch a funny TV show for the second time because we know it’s funny; but we also hope something new will happen or we’ll see something we missed before. The chances of both of those desires being met decreases each time you see the same show in reruns. As he says, if you ever watch any TV show or movie more than once - get a life. And trust me, I do this all the time. I have seen The Matrix and The Russia House so many times I can practically recite them - but I do know it’s time wasted. This tendency to watch movies multiple times is one of the main reasons my family cut the cord.

So the next time you think about buying that CD or wasting time “making money” on eBay or seeing “that great episode where Gilligan breaks the Professor’s coconut-powered radio” just ask yourself if you really want to scramble that egg. Time is short, and it always - always - moves forward.

Creative Commons License photo credit: swanksalot

how I became Russian

Patrick, of Cash Money Life fame long ago tagged me to give my best financial move in college. I posted this long ago, but it’s worth reposting. How I came to become a Russophile is an interesting story - I think.

Steve at the Hermitage in St Petersburg

(me, in St. Petersburg, circa 1997)

Learning an “exotic” foreign language, and how it changed my life.

If you read this blog, you probably know that I’m a Russophile. I lived in Moscow for several years, I can read/write/speak Russian fairly comfortably and my wife is Russian. Even more: I have been interested in Russian long before I “knew” Russian or Russia. Key the computer geek theme music: I mentioned that I was a finalist in the International Science Fair: I wrote, in Basic on a Tandy Color Computer with a cassette-tape drive, a very primitive artificial intelligence program that reliably translated English into Russian, grammatically correct. I even had to develop the Cyrillic font. I did all of this after buying a Russian grammar book at a public library for $.10 and using it to set it up - I didn’t know Russian at all. Pat, pat, pat on the back, Steve. Score one for geeky computer boy. The US Army liked my program, gave me a commendation and took the code. What happened with it after that, I dunno.

Anyway, after the ISF my interest in Russian waned. I always joke that my ancestry is German with a little German mixed in. Even though the Original Blap Ancestor ventured to the new world in the 16th century, my paternal ancestors clung to German ways and traditions and language. And I mean they clung. To the best of my knowledge, my dad was probably part of the first generation of Blaps to speak English at home rather than German. So in high school and college I had a strong motivation to take German, and I did. I loved it. I had a great teacher, and I spent a summer semester in Germany as an exchange student. To this day I speak, read and understand German quite well.

But I always liked foreign languages in general. I took French and Latin as well and decided in my sophomore year that Japanese would be a good challenge. Keep in mind that this was the mid-80s: Japan appeared to be well on its way to becoming the dominant economic power of the 21st century. We know now, in retrospect, that Japan’s economy tripped and stumbled and has never really recovered, and China and India are now careening past it, but at the time it seemed that Japan might become an economic superpower at a minimum and THE economic superpower if everything fell right.

I decided to take Japanese. It was a new course at the University of Mississippi, where I went to school (yes, we had Japanese courses in Mississippi) - only one class was offered. So on registration day I woke up and strolled over to the registrar only to find that it had filled up in minutes and no slots were available. I was disappointed, but I still wanted to take a language. I thought Spanish might be useful, but boring (I didn’t care for French when I learned it - romance languages don’t appeal to me). I skipped through the catalog until I saw Russian and remembered my little project at the ISF four years earlier. And best of all, it was at 10 am so I could sleep late - back in college I had yet to discover the benefits of waking up early.

Russian was fantastic. The teacher was a guy straight out of PhD school, passionate about the subject and the culture. He invited his students to his home, showed us Russian movies, introduced us to actual Russians (quite the novelty in the Deep South in the 80s, let me tell you - we were in the midst of the cold war and that was amazing) and managed to get Russian food. I loved the intellectual challenge of the language - a different alphabet but more importantly a language completely removed from the European languages’ interrelationships.

So why was this a good financial move? I’ve already mentioned it in 8 steps to a six figure career, but here it is in a nutshell: it gives you instant credibility as a smart person (deserved or not). Employers and contacts and almost everyone I meet expresses shock that I can speak Russian, read it and write it. I don’t think it demonstrates much intelligence, personally. Language acquisition is more of an inborn skill, I think. But I do think that learning Russian demonstrated some intellectual curiosity and the fact that I stuck with it indicates some intellectual discipline. I have benefited hugely in my career from knowing Russian. It meant that I was plucked out of obscurity as a junior staff member of a Big 6 (now 4) accounting firm and hurled into the middle of the mid-90s Russian economic explosion. It opened up opportunities I would never have had as just another staff person.

But that’s not the biggest part of it. Without developing my Russian skills I wouldn’t have met, pursued and married my wife. Maybe if I had taken Japanese I would have lived in Japan, developed a fondness for all things Japanese. Hard to say. But I do know that the decision to learn Russian set in motion the life process that brought me to where I am today: with a wife who is focused on the same things I am, personally and financially. So that’s actually the single biggest reason why that was a great financial move.

So what was your best move?

aluminum boats

Here’s a quick and simple game for kids. Give them some aluminum foil – an equal amount for each kid. Tell them to design a boat, and then take the boats outside and float them in tubs of water. Start adding pennies to each boat, and see which boat can hold the most pennies before sinking.

The lesson which the kids will learn is that large, flat and wide boats float better with pennies in them than small, narrow and steep boats. I read about this game in my mom’s blog – she’s a gifted teacher for young kids and presents them with these challenges that are appropriate for young kids. I’d argue most older people would struggle with this challenge, too.

When I was substitute teaching as a gifted teacher back in college*, I executed a plan laid out by the teacher (who, coincidentally, was my mom): here’s an egg, here’s a lot of paper, let’s go to the second story and construct a device that will get the egg to the ground without breaking. It’s a tough challenge! But kids managed to do it every year.

You can give anyone a challenge. As a kid, it’s easy to rise to it – everything is new and you WANT, desperately, to overcome. You’re going to apply yourself and overcome it, because you’re excited to learn, to challenge, to overcome. I think most of lose that feeling over the years. A challenge becomes an irritant, not a possibility. You just want things to go away instead of wanting to beat them. I know I do from time to time.

But life is full of challenges, and to live life fully you have to attack those challenges with the assumption they are solvable. Otherwise, you’re just going to take the path of least resistance and end up disappointed and frustrated. Build a great aluminum boat, and watch it float.

*I was a substitute junior high teacher throughout college and a college instructor for 3 years – I fully intended to be a teacher, and I’ve taught hundreds of hours of classroom time. So I say I was “a teacher” although I was simply an itinerant member of the profession.

always embrace life

I posted this before, because from time to time I like to put a video up that’s unrelated to finance, etc. This one is touching and relates to health, if nothing else. Call me a sucker for sentimental safety reminders, but I imagine that the number one health tip - in terms of extending your life - is probably “always wear a seat belt.” I remember my friend - my family’s doctor, who was almost my age - who always told my family that the two surefire ways to extend our lives were to wear seatbelts and to quit/never start smoking. He was right - those two small things are huge determinants in living longer - and given my recent interest in The Singularity, I ought to pay attention to that type of information. As should you. I’ve know several people who died in car crashes (with or without seatbelts) and had one friend who broke his neck because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt: so put on a seat belt on, always. Please.

rapid early acquisition of tech adaptability

What is “rapid early acquisition of tech adaptability”? It’s a term I made up. I haven’t yet Googled it to see if I’m ripping something else off, so for the time being I’ll keep it as my own term. I’ll call it REATA because I’m not going to type that unwieldy phrase more than once.

Here’s how I’ll define it. All of us know the guy who claims to be Mr. Nontechy-guy. “I just can’t manage a computer,” he guffaws. “My kids have to turn it on for me! I don’t know how to text, so forget these smartphones!” This guy is proud to be tech-illiterate.

And we all know the woman who just gets flustered when dealing with all the buttons and sites and likes, oh my. She could figure it out but she gets overwhelmed in a minute or two. She doesn’t like dealing with all the emails! the Facebooks!

Finally, we all also know the outlier. The great-grandmother who’s active on Facebook. The business exec who is a master of Excel. The mom who runs multiple blogs.

What’s the difference? I think people who experienced significant life changes at an early age become far more adept at embracing new technologies – and new ways of thinking in general – than people who locked into a lifestyle early in life. Think of immigrants. According to “The Millionaire Next Door ” I learned an astonishing statistic – the ethnic group with the highest likelihood of becoming first-generation immigrant millionaires was ex-Soviet Russians. Think about that. People from a non-capitalist society with no cultural commonalities with America are the ethnic group most likely to become millionaires in America. Why? I’ll make my nonscientific claim that it’s because of REATA.

If you’re expected at an early age to keep up with rapid changes in technology (and with life in general) I think you’re more likely to learn the skill of acquiring new tech skills than someone who slowly acquires those skills. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Think of a child who learns how to program at an early age. I did. I got a Tandy computer at age 10. There were no games. I learned BASIC and coded my own games: my favorite was a game where you headed up a rock band and made strategic decisions to tour or record an album – making the right choice gained fans, the wrong choice lost them. Now think of a child who wasn’t exposed to computers early, but got a job as an accountant circa 1994 when computers started infiltrating the workplace, and the groundwork for Skynet was laid down. That person might work just as intensely with computer, but never would have been forced to engage in the steep learning curve of a child desperate to make a fun game out of nothing.

I see it as an adult: executives or ex-execs claim not to know Excel and chuckle about their lack of tech skills. Would you chuckle along with someone who never learned to drive? Cook? Manage their finances? No. People who have to learn early on to self-educate and self-manage are going to have far greater success later in life. I bet that great-grandmother who’s on Facebook probably had to take care of her two little sisters while mom worked the farm and dad was fighting in World War I. I bet the business exec who mastered Excel had a bad setback early in his career when he couldn’t get something done and gritted his teeth and learned how to do what needed to be done. I bet the mom who mastered blogging felt like she had to get a story out and learned what to do. The people who didn’t were the people who early on learned to adapt only when pushed to the brink. Or maybe they never learned.

As we age, the temptation to rest on our mental laurels increases. I am well-read, so I ease off on reading challenging new works. I am tech-savvy, but for years I resisted learning to text, because it’s fine to get by on “calling” (that’s the thing you do with your phone and your voice, kids). I know how to work with Excel, so there’s no need to learn how to work with XML. It can go on and on.

But I think once you’ve learned to adapt to new systems – and if you learn this skill early on – you’re going to have an advantage over others in life, and this advantage will be massive. It’s fine to be an expert in one area, and hammer away at it. Then again, there’s a trite old saying – no less true for being trite – which says that “the only constant is change.” People who don’t learn early in their lives to adapt to change are eventually going to hit that brick wall. Would you hire someone who doesn’t know how to do something a 20-year old can do effortlessly? By that, I mean, would you hire an accountant who scoffs at Excel or QuickBooks and says “hey, ledger paper’s worked well for me, kiddo!” No, I don’t think you would. I think adaptability – regardless of what you’re adapting TO – is a skill in an of itself, and the lack of adaptability is a major problem. How do you avoid that? Learn something new – and just start today.

photo Some rights reserved by MiromiTintas

go out and brip it

I have to admit that I’m puzzled by the internet from time to time. I’m no novice - I’ve been online since the headset-inserted-into-the-modem-receiver-with-the-screechy-noise days, but sometimes the craziness of it all amazes me. I started getting some hits for ‘brip’ and found out that brip is a reference to a snowboard move:

brip

1. brip

Shredding a turn on a snowboard or skies. Also accomplishing anything in general, but usually only exuberant things.
I bripped that mountain.
You sure bripped that RBV.
Cherish the Brip.

2. brip
To bong rip, or rip the bong.

To inhale smoked marijuana from a water pipe.

brip!

The third definition was pretty negative, so I’ll leave it out for self-serving purposes (it was #3: to lie, but it was overwhelming voted down, so I’ll dismiss it as a hater).

I liked that first definition. I know the urban dictionary has nothing to do with my writing, but I have to say I’m fairly pleased to see ‘brip’ - as in brip blap - associated with such a positive term as laid out in #1. And hey, #2 is not all bad, either.

So go out and brip it! 🙂 I love the idea that a word that I associate so closely with myself now could be a positive term. Go brip it! I think I’ll work it into my daily speech now, and you should too - not just for my sake or my site’s, but because that’s a great definition for a great word: “accomplishing anything in general, but usually only exuberant things.” That’s great- accomplish exuberant things: brip them!

Photo Some rights reserved by alexindigo

 

just start

thinking

thinking

I don’t often blog about the business of blogging, but a conversation with a friend of mine and the reading of a blog post covering the same topic prompted me to share my opinion on building a successful blog. More specifically, the first step that is universal to all successful blogs: the author chose to start blogging.

It may seem like a trivial step, but it’s not. I know that many people have asked me for advice on writing (as it relates to blogging, mostly) and I’ve seen three different results: (a) they never start writing themselves; (b) they start writing but quickly give up when they realize how difficult it is to create content; or (c) they start writing, develop the habit of writing and succeed.

Now, the level of success may be quite different. I feel brip blap is moderately successful. I have a decent amount of traffic, subscribers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans. I am certainly no Get Rich Slowly or Zen Habits. But fine. But I did start, and because of that I have a certain level of “cred” according to Google and the other “gods of search”.

This principle applies to much of life. Just start. If you want to learn guitar, the one unavoidable step is to start learning - buy a guitar or get lessons or at least watch videos of people playing. Just wishing for the skill won’t make it happen.

I’m guilty of doing this. I’ve aspired to many skills and simply failed to take a first step to achieve them. On the other hand, I’ve made good stabs at starting some projects and simply decided after that initial go that I didn’t care, after all. But that’s an important distinction. I always suspected I’d be good at consulting, and I tried it, and I was. I’ve always suspected I’d be good at writing, and I (flatter myself that I) am. On the other hand, I love appearing on radio and podcasts as a guest, but I’ve never tried doing my own.

Try everything. As the parent of two young kids I repeat this mantra in terms of food all the time, but it’s easy to forget to apply it to yourself as you grow older. Make time to try new things and not to assume that you’ve reached the limits of your growth. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and I don’t think anyone has to fall into that trap, because the opportunities for learning are so limitless. Expand your life.

photo Some rights reserved by @boetter

9.11.11

As we near 9-11’s 10th anniversary…

After you read this post (or before, it’s up to you) read the first article I wrote about 9-11 here… dark day.

The two most recent articles I’ve written:

Last year I didn’t even write anything. The 9th anniversary didn’t seem that special, I guess, or I was busy with life and after a few years it’s easier to forget than remember. But now it’s 10 years. It’s funny how humans have such an attachment to dates, anniversaries and numbers. Some numbers are very well-known for their significance – 13 is unlucky, 3.1415926536 is pi. But the number 2.1 means something very specific to me that I don’t share with anyone. Some anniversaries are personal – weddings, birthdays … and some are universal like 9-11. Everyone knows what you are referring to when you mention 9-11.

Or do they? I wonder if we’ll remember what that meant to the world, to America, to New York, to Manhattan, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania in 100 years. Do we remember today? Have 10 years of the war on terror avenged that day? Maybe, in a small way. Have 10 years of the war on terror hurt our standing in the world? Are the people behind the attacks better off? Are we? Is anyone?

I am a student of history. I’ve read histories of the Russian Revolution over and over and I’ve been obsessed at times with (American) Civil War history, the Founding Fathers and the military history of the Battle of Stalingrad. History is big, though. Events that were earth-shattering when they took place become footnotes in the history of the world. Remember Archduke Ferdinand? No checking Google. Do you know what Beslan was? Or Agincourt? Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

But I’ve said this before on this blog and elsewhere, 9-11 was the great tragic event of MY life so far. Maybe the two Space Shuttle disasters come close in emotional impact, but probably not. This was the tragedy of my life, and although I understand in the scope of human history - for example, the tsunami of 2004 or the Holocaust or any number of tragedies - it was a small thing, it was the one I felt most intensely. I left New York two plus years ago, but I think a small part of me died and stayed behind there 10 years ago. It was the naïve part of me. It was the part of me that was excited to come to the most interesting city on Earth, found out I loved it and then had a group of animals masquerading as humans (and they were – no doubt about it) attack it.

I saw the city and the world come together in love and then wrench apart in hate and never recover. I don’t know what this event will look like in 100 years or 1000. I won’t know, I’ll be gone. Barring some increase in the average lifespan my children won’t, either. I only know that 10 years after 9-11, I remember this: I watched out the window of office on the 34th floor of a Manhattan highrise as the first and then the second tower fell with my own eyes. I called my parents and said everything would be OK, while in my mind I was really saying goodbye, because I didn’t know. I promised whatever else happened to find my little brother who lived in downtown Manhattan. I walked out on the street to sirens and jet fighters. That night the air was full of dust and fear of the unknown. I doubt I’ll forget, even if history does.

Picture by me.

PS And as I’ve mentioned before, volunteering to help load Salvation Army relief trucks in downtown Manhattan in the following days was the only thing that kept me from curling up into a fetal position. Support the Salvation Army, those men and women were working until they were passing out on their feet (literally). They did good work without any intent of recognition or reward.

was it easier to be simple in the past?

70s bike

70s bike

Minimalism and frugality* have been hot topics since the financial crisis of 2008 dropped the US into a deep recession, a shallow recovery and now apparently the beginnings of a second recession. As I’ve read about the minimalist, frugal lifestyle and thought about my own childhood, I’ve wondered about whether the ability to achieve a simpler lifestyle is more influenced by the times in which you live versus your own desires, regardless of the times? In medieval Europe, people lived a simple lifestyle, for example. In the future, I am sure in 2085 there will still be people living in cabins in Montana without Smellovision or AI robots whose lives will still be far less simple than ours because of the advances in technology. And just by the accident of my birth in America, my life was inevitably less simple than someone born in a remote part of Indonesia.

My childhood in the 70s USA was fairly simple. There were no answering machines/iPads/cable TV/DVRs/Starbucks/organic foods/etc. etc. to waste money on even if you had the desire. So all of the posts from people like myself who cut cable television only bring us back to the status of, well, everyone in the world, pre-1980. When Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel and Gordon Bowker sold their coffee shops to Howard Schultz and he created what we now know as Starbucks, he didn’t create a new product, but he did create a new way to make people pay for something that used to be, for all intents, almost free (the same thing happened with bottled water). So these types of products - which are now frequently used as examples of things you can quit consuming in order to save money/become more environmentally responsible/etc. - just weren’t on the table 30 years ago. Nobody was making a smart choice in avoiding these items; they just weren’t available. People didn’t use credit cards widely or get deeply in consumer debt because credit cards weren’t easy to obtain and once you did, few stores accepted them. The only ones that did so widely were gas stations.

My dad was in graduate school until I was 10, and my mom didn’t work. They had limited money and therefore did many frugal things: lots of vegetable gardening, only one car, simple clothes and so on. Some of that was rooted in my parents’ moderately hippie-ish lifestyle choices, and some of it was based on lessons passed down to them from their Depression-era parents, but part of it was simply the way things were – you couldn’t buy a bottle of spring water or diet Coke. You couldn’t waste money on cell phones. You didn’t need to buy organic meats because feeding animals with corn, which then requires they be pumped full of antibiotics, was not a widespread practice.

So I’ve argued with my parents and other people from earlier generations that their simplicity, frugality and more natural/organic lifestyles were often the product of the era in which they lived. Our choices are both more complex and more difficult, particularly concerning food and debt. I am glad we have some of these choices, of course - I love the internet and technology and some (but not all) of the food choices we have today that were either prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable 50 years ago. But the challenge to be simple or to live a natural lifestyle is much greater today, and finding the balance requires more knowledge and a more critical attitude (maybe even paranoia) than it did in the past.

*I know minimalism and frugality and simplicity are not all the same thing, and I often use the terms interchangeably, but let’s assume for the sake of this post that we’re talking about some vauge point in the overlapping part of a Venn diagram of the three. I’ll use the term “simple” or “simplicity” to cover all three.

Photo Some rights reserved by NJ..
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