The Not Doing List

Here, I list some things that I do not do. The purpose is to think about why it is that I have never given them a chance, or in some cases, knowingly rejected them.

Watching sports
I used to watch sports until about the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I see it as a time- and attention sink. Many sports are probably under-sampled, meaning that the competition is not long enough to determine a statistically significant winner.

Video games
This includes games on console, desktop, and mobile. I played computer games up until high school. The last game I played was Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri from 1997. That game has a great story. Video games are definitely time sinks, which affect a lot of men in my generation. Additionally, I get nauseous from most graphics. Social board games can be fun.

Gambling
Not interested in acquiring money that way. Feels like an unnecessary way to loose money (in expectation).

Religion
Was religious (Christian Baptist) until about age 15. Cannot justify it intellectually now, the cognitive dissonance would be too great. I did like the social aspect of it. Most Christians are nicer people than average.

Politics
I was active in a political youth party in high school (liberal party, and later the liberal-conservative party). Did meet some nice people and learned interesting things, but did not understand the political game at that age. In recent years, my interest in politics has increased, with a more practical and less ideological perspective. Mainly, I'm interested in how institutions are organized, and in how cities are designed. The role that I would like to have is that of an adviser and researcher. Would probably prefer to work non-politically. However, public sector in general is not attractive when I have such good options in the private sector in the current economy.

Play an instrument
This feels like a missed opportunity. I understand that it can be very relaxing to improvise on one's instrument. But I never received any training, and now I definitely have "clumsy hands".

Follow the news
I followed the news until April 2015. Before that, I was pretty interested. Did I grow out of it, or did journalism actually decline? I used to think both, until I used the Wayback Machine to go through the web pages of news papers and TV stations from the mid 00's. The quality was about the same; the link titles were just as shitty and click-baity. I have also gone through some old printed news papers of my parents', and cannot for certain say that quality used to be better. So I suppose that it's me who has changed.

Drugs
It's just too unseemly when I see others do it. Unseemly and decadent.

Frats
During university, my identity was strongly defined by not participating in the student club culture. This was indeed a widespread identity, so I had plenty of friends with me.

Sunbathing
I suppose it is only in Northern Europe and North America for the last 100 years, that sunbathing has been an actual activity. The historical default must be to avoid exposing oneself to the sun. So this trend can safely be ignored.

The almost-never do list

Social media

I use it to look up old friends about once per month. The trick is to unfollow everyone, and use only chat groups. That is the option that increases meaningful person-to-person contact. The best thing is that it is ridiculously light-weight, so one doesn't have to worry about vendor lock-ins in the long run.

Stand in queues / crowds

I walk somewhere else if there is more than 3 people in line, or if one of them seems like a time-waster. It's not always an option, obviously. When boarding a train, I stand way behind the crowd the door and wait for everyone else to go on first. Off-duty train personnel (still in uniform) seem to do the same, so I suppose it's not so insane. I'd rather take a long detour than go through a street / district / stairs which is full of people. I'm always in good time for trains and flights, so I take my time to look at the surroundings and people. 

Fight

Most of the time, just walk away. If someone is behaving badly in public and it would be too morally outrageous to let them keep at it, then one can point that out calmly without rudeness. The most important thing is to appear level-headed and dignified (but unafraid) so that onlookers will sympathize. A confrontation, like a debate, is more about convincing spectators than about convincing the opponent. 

The same goes for online situations. Obviously, most opinions are not worth reading or replying to online. I follow Paul Graham's advice on this. My rule is that I am allowed to say One thing, i.e. either one direct comment or one reply to a comment. I am not allowed to reply to a reply. I barely read the replies, to avoid toxicity. It is up to the onlookers to decide who was right. I always make short points, and only on things that I feel certain about. I comment very rarely. 

Flirt

Despite my introvert ways and uneventful lifestyle, I consider myself to have been plenty lucky with women. I have been with beautiful women, and with intelligent women, and some who were both. This is without ever making much of an effort to pursue any woman in particular. It is often obvious after a while if she's interested, anyway. This is also without having anything to impress girls on social events with such as dancing, or a fashionable style (these should perhaps be on the list above). Still, there are ways to meet women, if one is careful to observe behaviors and language to see who is interesting to try to talk to.

My preferred way of getting to know a woman is tête-á-tête, i.e. private conversation. It is also my preferred way of getting to know a man, and for most of the time I don't think I make much difference. One can have an agreeable time with an interesting person, no matter if there is the potential for a romantic relationship or not. At 17, I was very frustrated about never having had a girlfriend, but I got lucky and found a nice girl whom I went out with for half a year. After that first boon, I never felt that I had been dealt a "bad hand", and I relaxed. So luck also played a role. 

Fandom

I follow things in a very introverted way. When I first watched Breaking Bad, I thought about it much more than my university studies at the time. Still, I don't think I would ever dare to call myself a fan of the show. The risk of being called out for not knowing enough is too great. The other side of this coin is of course that I have a high bar for what I believe people are allowed to label themselves as. This may be the result of growing up in a small town with the self-attitude "nothing extraordinary happens here". Since I've moved to the city and gotten some perspective, I have realized that some of the people from my home town were indeed extraordinary in some way. It was not the people who I thought it would be, either. 

Blame Allocation

The life cycle of a material item has many side effects. The good side effects include wages, sense of purpose in one's labor, and added cultural value. We have a ubiquitous system for allocating the good side effects of material items to people: it's called the market economy. Whatever one thinks of this system, one can't deny that we do pay a lot of attention to whether it's being fair or not. The question of how to allocate the negative side effects of items, however, seems to be largely overlooked. That is why we can hear things such as:

"I bought the ticket last minute and the plane was going to take off either way, so that shouldn't count towards my emissions."

"Hitchhiking doesn't contribute to emissions."

"Our paper mill uses 10% twigs and other wooden debris which is neglected by the rest of the industry, so that is very environmentally friendly."

Consumption-side blame
Now, let's try to be more quantitative about statements like these. First, let's bundle all negative side effects together, whether it be carbon emissions, waste water, agricultural runoff, or industrial pollutants, and just call it all emissions. What we want to do is to look at the economic incentive behind emissions. An airline doesn't run daily flights from Copenhagen to London for the laughs. The idea for allocating blame for emissions from e.g. a flight is to assign it proportionally to whoever paid for it. That does mean that first class is blamed more than economy class. Not everyone in economy class is blamed equally either: frugal people who found cheap tickets take less blame. Those that paid shipping for cargo on the plane also get some. This makes sense in this case because we know that there is a causation between the income of an airline on a certain route, and how frequently they choose to schedule it. And since airlines have small margins, this is also quite elastic.

However, as I do know a bit about airlines, I know that they would never ever release the information about how much they sell all their tickets for. So our chances of actually measuring this in reality are small.

Why even measure the blame in the first place?
We can think of blame for environmental badness as any moral resource. Humans do have a preference for minimizing harm to others and their surroundings. In general, people are willing to trade off other preferences for things that have a higher moral value. One place we can see this is in the labor market. Occupations that are perceived as having a high moral value are often underpaid, in relation to their required effort and responsibility. I am thinking of nurses, teachers, and police officers [1]. This is evidence that people are willing to trade off money for moral value, and in no small degree, either [2]. So, I believe that if we do a good job of properly assigning moral value to different activities, in a way that is perceived as proportionate and correctly targeted, then people will indeed make palpable sacrifices and efforts in response.

The problems with consumption-side blame
Testing the payment=blame model on the examples above, we see that the hitchhiker actually gets off scot free! At least as long as he doesn't pay the driver anything. And even if he did, we can probably assume that the driver's preference for driving over other modes of transport is not affected much by the off chance of picking up a hitchhiker. So that doesn't seem to be a big problem for our model.

One obvious problem is that not all markets are free and elastic. Suppose we have a monopoly market, where the supplier uses unnecessarily wasteful methods. In the payment=blame model, the consumers would get the blame for the monopolist's bad practices. Another problem is that the consumption-side blame by definition ignores the supply side. Supposing that willing pilots were very hard to find, prices would increase and air travel would decrease. So those who spend considerable effort to become good pilots do indeed have some effect on the amount of flight emissions, and that is not covered by this model.

This will have to be continued.

[1] These jobs are also notably in the public sector (in Sweden). How much of the underpaidness can be attributed to that?

[2] One effect of this is that when something happens that reduces the moral value of a profession, then that social thing may have very severe economic consequences. This could be for example a scandal, or the spread of the idea that the teacher's job is not to instruct students directly.

The Rules of Efemeralism

If you ask a dictionary, ephemeral means something that lasts for only a short time. I would like to extend this definition to include things that can be done away with in a short time. Originally, I wanted to call this blog Dematerialism. However, some research told me that this concept has become coupled with leftist opinions about getting rid of status, competition, and perhaps even ownership altogether. Materialism, in that sense, apparently includes things which are stored in the hard drives of computers and in the brains of people. I wish that it had been more literal. To me, being materialist should refer to a person who likes to posses things which are made of atoms. Things that have weight. Someone who spends their life amassing likes on social media, or increasing the money in their bank account, should not be referred to as a materialist. It is vain, but not materialist.

With this great word (dematerialism) having been spoiled by politics, I instead use the term Efemeralism. It is fitting to my idea because there is a well known term, Ephemeralization, coined by Buckminster Fuller. Ephemeralization refers to technological progress that compresses more and more features, to less and less hardware. In the same spirit, I use the word Efemeralism to mean a lifestyle that aims to compress more and more meaningful activity, to fewer and fewer possessions.

Some rules about acquiring possessions:

4) Second hand is better than buying new
3) Repairing is better than second hand
2) Virtual goods are better than physical goods
1) Abstaining is better than owning at all

Is the goal to reach level 1) on all one's possessions? That would be a very poor and boring life.

In this blog, I want to explore the challenges of living with mainly ephemeral possessions.
I want to break down where material things come in to our lives, and which ones are redundant.
I am cleaning house.