Focussed On The Future

It often seems as though doing the good thing, the right thing in life, is much more difficult than doing the wrong or bad thing. For example, it's much easier to eat junk food and destroy your health than it is to make healthy meals and eat sensibly.

It occurs to me that there are two reasons for this. The first is based loosely on the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which in this case we can take to mean the amount of disorder in a system.

Consider a wooden ladder. To build the ladder would require getting the right lumber, cutting it with a saw and putting it together properly with a hammer and nails. There are lots of different ways of putting the bits together which will leave you with a useless collection of wood and nails, but only a few combinations which will give you a usable ladder. It takes time and effort to get a good result. It may not be rocket science, but it's not something that animals can do.

Destroying a ladder is much easier. All it takes are a few whacks with a rock. There are lots of different piles of scrap which can result from destroying a ladder and they are all equally acceptable. We don't need to pick through the possible outcomes to find the one which works because they all work. Indeed, destroying a ladder is so easy that it can be achieved by insects (termites) or even a sudden gust of wind.

Building a ladder brings more order to the world, thus a lessening entropy. Destroying a ladder reduces order, thus an increase of entropy. Basic thermodynamics tells us that the universe tends to move toward a state of maximal entropy, maximal disorder. Since we humans generally think of order as good and disorder as bad, that means that the universe has a preference for the bad, making it easier.

The second reason has to do with our perceptions. First, consider that few things are all good or all bad. Taking our ladder example, although it is good to build the ladder, all that hammering and sawing can be noisy, which is bad. And while destroying the ladder is bad, it at least provides a bit of exercise. So bad actions can have some minor benefits while good actions can have some minor drawbacks.

Next, let's say that we live in a world where good and bad actions are perfectly balanced: 25% of the things you might do are mostly good and easy, 25% are mostly good and hard, 25% are mostly bad and easy and 25% are mostly bad and hard.

Now take a look at that last category. If something is both bad and difficult, why would you do it? If it's easy then it might be worth it to get those "minor benefits" we mentioned, but if it's hard, then it's not worth it. When considering what action to take, the "bad and hard" actions aren't even an option. The only bad actions which we even consider are the easy ones, making it seem to us as if all bad actions are easy.

Finally, consider the category of actions which a good and easy. These are no-brainers. If it's good and it's easy then you just go ahead and do it. Because they are so easy, these actions barely register. By comparison, we may struggle with good, hard actions for extended periods of time, and we certainly remember those suckers.

As a result, even if the difficulty of good and bad actions were equal, we would end up perceiving good actions as being hard, because we discount the easy ones, and bad actions as easy, because we don't even bother to consider the hard ones.

Despite all the advantages I've had and continue to have I sometimes get to feeling sorry for myself. These personal pity parties rarely last long as they swiftly come crashing up against hard reality: I live in a beautiful place with someone who cares deeply about me, have a well-paying job that I enjoy, and I get to work from home to boot. What financial problems I may encounter from time to time are due to the expense of paying for the construction of my personal yacht¹. It's hard to imagine a family in Darfur shedding a tear over my horrible plight.

Nonetheless, I do sometimes find myself overwhelmed by life's occasional challenges and end up lying in bed, railing at the injustice of an uncaring world.

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I have too much negativity in my life and most of it is self-inflicted. I'm forever being critical of the actions of those around me and even more so of my own actions (and inactions).

Not all criticism is bad, of course. When a co-worker asks me to review zir code I'd be doing neither of us a favour if I just nodded politely and said how lovely it was. And if it looks like a brain-dead politician is about to get re-elected it's my duty to point out zir brain-deadedness to as many of my fellow citizens as I can.

But there's just too much of it. I criticize the driving habits of those around me on the road. I criticize every delay in a restaurant. I criticize the efforts of our IT staff to keep the company's networks and servers up and running. Etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Last Wednesday I decided to try to go one week without being critical of others. I didn't really expect to avoid it altogether, but I wanted to see how difficult it would be, what effect it might have on my outlook, and to establish some sort of baseline for future action.

I discovered a number of things.

First, it is extremely difficult for me to evaluate my level of success. There were a handful of times when I caught myself starting to get critical and cut it off. There were another handful when I didn't realize until afterward that I'd just been critical. But how many times were there that I didn't catch? There's no way of knowing. What I really needed was someone else watching me and pointing out the times when I started to criticize.

Second, there are a lot of edge conditions. For example, Saturday evening one of the neighbours was having a party in their back yard, complete with music and a disk jockey. The music was so loud that I, three houses away, indoors, with the doors and windows shut, had trouble concentrating. When I said to someone, "That music is far too loud", was I being critical or was I just stating a fact? After all, a lot of criticism is factual in nature.

The edge conditions ultimately led me to conclude that my little experiment was both poorly defined and ill-focused. What I want is to reduce the amount of negativity in my life. Criticism is just one form that negativity can take. I need to look at all forms. Furthermore, negativity is a natural part of life and can serve useful purposes. I need to better distinguish between those areas where being negative matters ("Don't smoke near the gas pump, you'll kill us all!") and those where it doesn't ("How can that idiot walk with the ass of his pants halfway down his legs?").

Finally, I really need to include self-criticism in the evaluation as it contributes more negativity to my life than does my criticism of others. Somehow I have to figure out a way of allowing myself to make mistakes, give myself room to fail. Exactly how I go about doing that, I don't yet know.