Hidden Shitty Things at Jobs

There's a tiny party whenever there's darkness at a time when there's not supposed to be darkness. If you go into any room with people in it and half the lights are off, everyone loves it. Then some moron walks in and flips all the lights on and ruins it. We know that bright blue screens cause depression and ruin sleep, yet millions of people stare at a bright blue screen all day with bright fluorescent lights bouncing off white walls.

My job makes me hate healthy food. I know I'm going to be in an environment with vending machines, free donuts, and gas station food. No one ever brings a healthy homemade lunch or even an unhealthy homemade one. No homemade food ever, no one cooks. What planet is this? So as a reaction I bring a big glass (no BPA!) thing of vegetables and a vegan protein shake and pb&j on high fiber bread with peanut butter that's made of just peanuts and jelly made of just fruit, every day. And the routine makes me hate healthy food and I treat garbage food on the weekends like it's a reward.

Uncomfortable chairs are a big deal considering what bad posture does to your life. And 100% of office chairs I've ever sat in are uncomfortable and I don't know anyone in my 400 person building that likes the chair they're in, and they're in it all day. You have to whine a little bit about the chairs because it's an office ritual, but it's ridiculous how much power an uncomfortable chair can have over your life.

In the middle of some important task, I'll suddenly notice a thick layer of caked-on grease all over my entire face. What the heck? Why does that happen when I'm not doing anything active, the room isn't that hot, I took a shower this morning. How do I get absolutely filthy sitting still in a temperature controlled environment? I suspect that a lot of other people get spontaneous face residue for no reason at their jobs... if not then I guess this post is embarrassing but I don't care.

If a bunch of important issues come up, it makes sense to occasionally have a meeting about it. What a lot of bosses do instead, is have regular recurring meetings and then invent issues so there's stuff to talk about at the meeting. I have never been to a meeting at work that was held because of a need to address some important issue. They have always been recurring time wasters where management comes up with fake issues right before the meeting, or improvises them during the meeting.

Why aren't there nap areas in office buildings? Literally every office worker wishes there was a nap area at their job and yet they don't exist. I discovered an unoccupied suite at a job once and used to sleep on the floor in there. Someone found out and then the empty suite was locked from then on and I couldn't get in anymore. There is nowhere in an office building to lie down and that is ridiculous. Lying down is comfortable and it would instantly improve everyone's job at minimal cost.

Break rooms are always sad and awkward, so smart people walk around outside on breaks. But then they get all sweaty since they have to dress up for work (for some reason) and then have to sit through the rest of their workday all sweaty. It's a brutal combination to have a lack of a nice break area, and a dress code together. Male business attire is engineered specifically for maximum discomfort, fabric covers the entire body and seals with buttons at the cuffs, tucked in shirt at the waist, thick socks, and tie at the neck, to choke off all entry points for fresh air.

It's nice that people like to socialize at work, it probably makes their jobs easier. Socializing is not a good thing for the few people that care about getting work done. It's impossible when coworkers are constantly bothering you. I've historically been great at stopping people from bothering me at my desk, but there has been constant loud socialization at every job I've ever had. I can only avoid distraction by listening to gnarly metal on headphones all the time. This can put you in the difficult position of either being looked down on for being unproductive, or being the office pariah for not socializing as much as others.

Good night, everybody. Have a great day of sweaty awkward meetings under blinding lights tomorrow!

Activity as a Cure for Pain

I was told my swollen, purple ankle would in heal 6 months if I rested it. I walked normally on it instead, which hurt like hell, and it was fixed in one month without medication.

It was the worst I've ever sprained anything. I got it by drunkenly stomping into a pothole on some jacked up San Francisco street, it hurt so bad I immediately froze and went silent. I hid it all night because I was afraid that acknowledging it would make it hurt more. The next morning it was on fire and I knew I wasn't walking anywhere. I Googled it to see if there was some way to get walking faster. Everyone said aspirin, rest, go to the doctor, get a splint, don't put weight on it.

Some marathon runner said he ran 50 miles a week and has had many sprains and some breaks. He said to walk on it normally, and don't limp or be visually obvious about the injury. I went to the doctor, she prescribed some high-dosage Ibuprofen that requires a prescription, and said to rest it for 6 months. The sprain was so swollen that it looked the same as a broken bone on the x-ray. She said "a bad sprain can be more painful than a broken bone".

I followed the marathon runner's advice instead it was all over in one month, no pills.

I've had back pain since an injury at age 17, but it hurts less now than ever before even though I work out like 8 times a week. Over the years I've read a ton about back pain, much of which is the same old advice. But a few people have pointed out the same principle as the marathon guy, basically "resting a stiff body part tells it to prepare for rest, moving a stiff body part tells it to prepare for moving". If movement is better for you than sitting around, why would that be any different (within reason) for an injury?

A piece of accepted wisdom in the bodybuilding community: "a sore muscle means you have to train it more frequently". Not an injured muscle, a sore one. If you look at random fitness sites they all say the same thing. Do your pecs hurt? Do pushups three times a week instead of one. Sore back? Do deadlifts twice a week instead of once. With correct form. It's somewhat counterintuitive, that using a sore muscle more would lead to less pain. Imagine if anything else in life was like that. Are your brakes squeaking? Drive more aggressively and slam on the brakes. Are your jeans frayed and faded? Wear them more and put them through the laundry more often.

More people are getting wise to the reality that a sedentary lifestyle is up there with smoking, diet, or booze in terms of how fast it will kill you. It can also lead to cancer, stroke, heart disease. It's incredible to think that most of the things we consider unhealthy are almost preferable to simply sitting too much. Movement is the best maintenance for me when I'm healthy, but it's also the best medicine for me when I'm unhealthy.

When I was a little kid I would run around like a maniac until every bone hurt. If something entertaining was going on, it was irrelevant how much things hurt because I was going to keep flailing until the other kids had to go home or the sun went down or my parents made me go home. I remember feeling completely worn out at the limit of tiredness... and then something good would happen and I'd keep flailing and nothing hurt anymore. Is there really even a limit when you're an excited little kid?

I can't do that anymore though, if I flailed around for hours every day I'd have horrible joint pain all the time or some other bad side effects. Wait a second, when I was a kid I used to do it for hours every day and the only side effect was excellent sleep every night for years. Huh.

Most Jobs Shouldn't Have 8-Hour Shifts

My regular coffee place in college would close for no reason whenever the managers felt like it. It was between my parking spot and my morning class, which was perfect. I'd be running late and have no time to pack food and it made me crazy when I'd try to grab something right before class but they were closed with no explanation.

The hours listed were something like "7ish to whenever", that was what the sign said on the front door. Or it might have said "closed whenever we feel like it", there was some funny sign like that. What a horrible business model, right? Who can expect to build a customer base with that attitude?

No, it made people want to go there more. Every successful trip to this place was a rare event and made you feel lucky. The frustrating closings made people more determined to get in, like they had to settle unfinished business. Their hours became this shared joke around campus, but only for people that went to that school, weren't brand new students, and had to go to the super early classes. They got constant free publicity out of it and students were always talking about them.

I had no idea why they were closed. It's possible they strategically closed during peak business hours so that the greatest number of people would see their sarcastic signs, but I don't think it was anything calculated like that. I think the manager would just run errands or go eat somewhere or whatever and close the place whenever he felt like it.

My favorite neighborhood bar right now has this weird ass bartender that will start singing or dancing for no reason. But he knows a ton about beer and gets right to business whenever you have questions or if you look ready to order. He said they have no set closing time, if things are busy they stay open til last call (4am around here), if things are slow they could shut down at 11pm. A four hour difference! He said "sometimes I'll stay here until 3am even if it's slow, if I'm having a good time."

At my current job, which if you work in an office is probably a lot like your current job, you stay for eight hours no matter how busy things are. You can sit there doing nothing for five hours on the off chance a customer walks in the door and spends $5, while the business owner spends thousands on operating costs. I have a finite amount of work to do every day, and if I'm done in three hours, I have to find five hours worth of whatever to fill the time. This is not only accepted, but encouraged. Just find something to do, get a head start on tomorrow's stuff, learn a new skill for the company.

It makes no sense for a company to pay for electricity, heating and cooling, security, janitorial crew, overtime, and a million other things because someone decided the job takes 8 hours no matter how much work there is to do. If a cubicle job announced that employees can leave for the day whenever they've finished their work, two things would happen: they would never ever be short on applicants, and their workers would increase their pace to superhuman speed to jam through everything and leave by 11:30am.

Workers would become ultra efficient. No one would want to quit. They would be the most loyal employees ever. If the company dumped extra work on them, they would work even harder in order to get all that done and still leave early. They would learn whatever they had to, and get as good as possible, to get everything done early and error-free (they could be fired for too many mistakes). They'd be less stressed and more excited to go to work. They'd drive less.

But jobs with hourly pay don't work that way. You're here for 8 hours even if you have one hour of work to do. Let's say you were hired at a $15 hourly wage to do customer service. If you're the superstar of your department, you get $15 for that hour. If you're the very worst customer service person in the building, you still get $15 for that hour. Every workplace has this person. By definition someone has to be the worst in the office.

Since you're getting paid the same no matter the quality of your work, why not reward the more efficient people by letting them leave? No one wants to be there, that's why it's called a job. And it's basic math that you won't be paid totally fairly, because the entire premise of employees is that you have to pay them less than the value they generate, otherwise there are no profits for the business. So it only makes sense to let people leave if they've done the amount of work that management has decided needs to be done. Real tasks don't follow a 24hr clock. They start at the beginning, and they end when you're done.

There are plenty of articles showing an inverse relationship between GDP of a country and the length of their workweek. Google it yourself, I've only got a few hours of weekend left before the next 8 hour shift.

Personal Experience Isn't Enough

I like being fed up with political articles and the news, because it covers up the fear that I'm horribly under-informed. It's easy to score coolness points by acting like current events are noise distracting me from some important life wisdom. It's easy to say "it's futile to try to keep up with current events".

That's better than admitting I'm being lazy by staying ignorant of what's going on. Or even worse, that maybe even if I did have the stamina to stay up on a lot of things, admitting maybe I don't have the intellect to make sense of what's happening in the huge space outside my routine. That space, by the way, is most of the world.

It's easy to distrust something that's hard to understand, or to discount things that have little to do with your daily life. I feel like I have so much to concentrate on every day, that I can get fooled into thinking that the long list of concerns has some kind of global relevance. It doesn't really. Think about the fact that there are societies separated from you by an ocean, speaking a language you don't speak.

I've been in plenty of arguments where the other person speaks mostly or only from experience. It's true that there are certain things we can learn only by doing, but it's a giant mistake to think we can only learn by doing. Other people have done, and have learned by doing. Some of those people wrote books, some of their doing has been included in statistics. No matter how strongly I feel a connection to something, I have to remind myself that there may be literal billions of people that do not relate to that.

And the longer I live, and the more attachments I develop, the harder it can be to care about events across the street. Which is why I always try harder to read more, try more things, listen more, observe more, look for patterns. And do my best (which is usually not very good) to remember I represent a very small amount of humanity.

There are over 7 billion people on Earth. Any personal opinion represents a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of human experience. More people are on Earth every day, which means your views represent a smaller and smaller percentage of people every day, and every year. That means every year an individual opinion represents less and less of humanity. Which means as a person ages, any argument from personal experience is going to be less representative of humanity overall. So the older we get, the less relevant our personal opinions get.

Another issue is when arguments from personal experience ignore the experiences of people that are better in some way. Finding your own way in a craft, or to physical fitness, or to your life philosophy, is all well and good. But if you think personal experience is the ultimate authority, then what about someone whose personal experience led them to be better than you at your craft? Healthier? What if they have a cooler life philosophy than you?

Science, books, facts, statistics, it's easy to dismiss these as not being useful if you feel some intuitive truth that conflicts with what you're hearing. Other people also discovered amazing things on their own, off the beaten path, and maybe better than what you discovered. Will you dismiss those discoveries because they didn't come from your own brain?

There's not much difference between that reality and science, books, statistics. It's one of the major advantages of being a human being instead of a fish or a giraffe. You don't have to (and shouldn't) rely only on what happened to you, because smart people have already figured out lots of things and all you have to do is read them.

There Are No Extra Hours

One of the smartest people I've ever heard of recently said one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. I was listening to a podcast with Sam Harris, who has a PhD in neuroscience and is a world-famous bestselling author, media personality, philosopher, and makes me reconsider my life philosophy almost every time I listen to him.

As a person concerned about the evolution, thriving, and well-being of the human race, he was answering the question from a listener "What will we look back on in 20 years with disbelief at how ignorant we were?". Harris said he thought the eating of animals would be a top contender. He said that he tried to address this by switching to a vegan diet for six months, but went to a doctor and had blood work done and a lot of measurements were out of whack due to his over-consumption of carbs. So he had to switch back for his own health.

If anyone wants to start some productive habit, such as reading more, working out more, they might start with the idea to spend 30-60 mins a day practicing this new habit. Obviously there's only 24 hours in a day, and the concept of opportunity cost tells us that there's no such thing as pure addition to one's day. You can't just add an hour of working out to your day. You are working out an hour a day instead of doing something else. In order to start this new habit, you also have to decide "What activity am I cutting by an hour to make room for this? Video games? Work? Sleep?"

From a financial standpoint, I find that opportunity cost is sadly often overlooked by young college students. You're not just paying tens of thousands of dollars to go to school, you're also sacrificing thousands of dollars that you would have earned working during the time spent at school. And of course countless hours of time spent in class and doing homework, that could've been spent at work or doing anything else.

On the flip side (way less obvious!), there's no such thing as pure subtraction from your day either. If you're going to cut something out, it must be replaced by something because 24 hours are still going to go by no matter how many activities you cut. Want to spend less time eating donuts? Hanging out with people you don't like? Practicing a hobby that no longer brings you any joy? Guess what, something else is going to fill that time whether you like it or not.

This is what bothers me  about Harris's comment, and what is such a shame about many people I've known that have attempted and failed to keep a vegan diet. To be clear, I'm not advocating a vegan diet to anyone. I'm pointing out that if you cut something from your life, it has to be replaced by something, and if you don't consciously choose what that something is, life might pick something that works against your main objective.

Cutting animal products from your life won't help you at all unless you replace those items with something else that contains the B12 complex, fats, calcium, iron etc that you need to thrive. If you cut yogurt and chicken from your life and don't choose a replacement, life will choose potato chips and gummy bears. The same goes for any other "quit in the name of health" quest. If you want to cut your TV watching by one hour a day, you have to increase your reading time, workout time, or beer-making time by an hour, or else you'll just increase some other unhealthy habit by an hour to fill the void. Doesn't make sense to cut TV time by an hour just to increase video game time by an hour.

Decision making got harder once I realized this and that's probably never going to change. I've spent a lot of time doing things without weighing it out. Which is fun. But now every time I want to do something, I have to think about what activity I'm giving up in order to do x. Which can still be fun. Make the decision to do x, knowing that you're giving up y, and then make sure that sacrifice was worth it.

Earth Food vs. My Alien Biology

I made excellent German potato salad for a potluck once and nobody ate it. It was an extra large batch because a million people we're going to be there, and I didn't know a lot of them so I did an extra good job to impress everyone. I wound up taking 90% of it home and the consensus around the potluck was that it was too spicy. Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

It was vegan but still tasted good. It's supposed to be vegan, German potato salad is just incidentally vegan, normally, in Germany. It tasted totally correct. And yet these Earth people told me it was too spicy. Ingredients: potatoes, mustard, vinegar, sugar, etc. Not spicy.

Did you know that some people prefer coffee that you can see through? Milk chocolate? Yellow beer? White bread? Provolone cheese? White turkey meat? White turkey meat!!! These are shared preferences among many people. I've heard explanations from otherwise great people about why these foods are good.

The entire concept of light food versus dark food makes no sense to me. In life, are we not supposed to want good things? If you learn about something better than what you had before, do you not want it? If somebody offers you a choice between one of two free options, do you not take the better one? And yet, there's a trap there.

I've picked the better one every time and it's only made my life worse. I let beer experts turn me on to pitch black 10% abv stout beers, now everything else tastes like apple juice. I let some Santa Cruz hippie talk me into trying 85% cacao chocolate and now milk chocolate is basically cotton candy. It works with music too. I've followed a trail of progressively weirder and more complicated metal music to the point that classical music bores the shit out of me and I have a Masters in it.

It's usually more nutritious too. Black plums are one of the most nutritious foods in the world. Know why chai tea is delicious and green tea tastes like a lawn? Chai is made with black tea. Black rice is better for you than white rice. Black beans have more fiber than pinto. Love blueberry pancakes? Try blackberry pancakes, friendo. Purple potatoes, purple carrots, red onions, all better than their light counterparts. But people don't eat them even if you prepare them well and give it to them for free.

There's always someone around me saying they can't get into the best foods in the world. I come from a planet where people have bodies that respond well to spicy foods and dark foods. Here on Earth people leave transparent coffee in hotel rooms, break rooms, Starbucks, all the worst places where you're most in need of color and flavor. Recently some Earth woman saw me getting coffee and said "Oh, I can't drink that stuff in the morning." I felt awkward so I said "Aw yeah, I like my coffee so dark that it absorbs all the light around it. When I make coffee at home the sky gets overcast. That's how I like beer too haha." She replied "oh... I'm a fan of Bud Light."

This isn't just blogging, that was verbatim how that exchange went. What do you even say to that. I'm ready to go home now, take me back. I miss the coffee from my home planet, it's nothing personal, people of Earth. Your Sumatrans and Ethiopians have done all they can.

I forgot to mention someone at the potluck brought homemade guacamole. It didn't have any cilantro or jalapeños in it.

It's Idiotic that Presidential Debates have a Live Audience

Most people I know get 0% of their election information from researching the candidates. It's usually from Facebook articles making statements that have been re/mis/de-contextualized so many times that they have nothing to do with the original claims. Those articles don't address real issues, they just take a stance on something and then pad it out with other stuff that's logistically unrelated. But you're supposed to care since members of your club all take the same stances on that set of unrelated issues.

Don't read a book on economics, reflect on it, then vote for a candidate that aligns with those views. Just click an article by someone who also didn't do that. Oh and it isn't actually about economic policy, Trump just said something idiotic so you're voting against whatever economic policy he wants.

It's become a cliche that social media is shortening everyone's attention spans, so I'm not gonna talk about that even though it's 100% true. But instant access to a million pandering pieces of media have turned legitimately world-changing issues into entertainment. And we take that philosophy with us to the debates when we watch them. It doesn't matter what happens at tonight's debate, which I won't watch. I'm just excited at all the memes that will be on my wall tomorrow.

The live studio audience is absolute idiocy. A debate is supposed to be a series of arguments between two people, with the winner decided by panel based on the strength of their argument alone. In real debates, people get thrown out for making noise. At the presidential debates, people can boo and cheer and make faces on camera, all of which sways public opinion and none of which has anything to do with the strength of the arguments. My favorite moment in all non-fictional TV this year was when Bernie Sanders made some comment that caused a raucous cheer, and Anderson Cooper said "I know that plays well with this crowd, but you didn't answer the question."

There are real articles in the world that say a given candidate "won" a debate, and base part of that opinion on how the crowd cheered for them. Then that gets passed around the internet until it eventually reaches you, helping to add to the vague mush in your mind that tells you the candidate is superior. They won the debate because they are better, which I know because it's all over the internet, in articles written in response to something other than the candidate's argument.

The only reason Trump has gotten this far is that he's been practicing this longer than Hillary and has way more experience. Oh no no no... not in politics, no. In entertainment. He's been practicing every day for years, so he's great at entertainment now and no one cares that he will literally contradict his stance on major issues mid-paragraph. And hey, whether you're talking about Gwyneth Paltrow or Kim Kardashian or Trump or Rush Limbaugh or whatever, there is no law of man or of nature saying that only good, skilled, competent people are allowed to succeed.

Much like Trump himself, these articles (and the people posting them) can make any moronic claims they want to with zero fear of repercussion, and people pay attention. And if those claims get soundly debunked and revealed as being moronic, does the author write a retraction? Does the FB poster do any clean up? No. They don't post a status saying "Hey I apologize, I've recently learned the status I posted on 10/23/2016 was based on a lie and I retract the whole thing, I highly suggest anyone influenced by that status reconsider their position, as I have done." That will never happen.

Not in a world where a debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has a live audience. Where the studio invited (non-debating) women allegedly harassed by Bill Clinton (also not in the debate), and gave them closeups, purposely to influence public perception (not a deciding factor in declaring a winner) of the debate.

Anyways my wife and I are gonna go run a 5k and then do homework and drink beer. My personal favorite beer, Xocoveza (made by Stone) has come back on the market after previously being declared a seasonal one-off and retired. It's an imperial stout that tastes like Mexican hot chocolate.