Back to the Past
Apropos of nothing, here’s a six-years-old post from a defunct version of my blog — apropos of nothing except that today happens to be a special day for Back to the Future fans and this post improbably references Back to the Future.
Note: I’m pretty sure I was taking a required Catholic theology course at the religious school where I studied nursing at the time that I originally wrote this.
So yesterday I posted about depression and it got me thinking about all these Catholic rationalist types, these Summa Everythingus Thomas Aquinas types, folks that erect these enormous systematic edifices and elaborate schemata which (rather like that ridiculous clanking barn-sized contraption from Back to the Future Part Three that Doc Brown builds, the one that whirs and hums all day just to produce PLINK one tiny ice cube) whir and clank and manage only to produce POP obvious no-brainers like “Don’t kill” or “It’s okay to oppose unjust laws.” Who the hell didn’t already know that?! Why waste your time and mine by adding unnecessary supplemental certainty? Instead, why don’t we see more people put their analytic powers to work solving life’s real conundrums, like, say, is foolish consistency curable? Or how is it that picky eaters ever manage to try new foods and can it happen more often? Basically, how is it that people change and is it possible for me in particular to change for the better? Analytic skills are only appropriate for practical issues. When analysis goes hounding after the infinite and the hidden and the elusive mysteries of life, it only ends up finding itself. But don’t try telling that to such a person. He won’t hear you. Such are his clunky powers of analysis.
Thoreau on Self-Driving Cars
To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all at length will ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”
I often wonder what he would have thought of the Internet. Walden is basically a Xanga in paperback.
Mistakes
A master is one who has made all the mistakes that one can make within a given field.
Niels Bohr.
Are You Rich?
Back when I was a registered nurse I had an opportunity to volunteer at a field hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It was a year after the terrible earthquake in 2010, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and left hundreds of thousands more homeless. Survivors were still living in conditions more appalling then you can imagine — fields covered with tents as far as my eyes could see, strung up between rivers of mud and filth.
The hospital I volunteered at was operating out of a couple of massive tents, like you might see at a state fair in the US. Despite their humble infrastructure, Project Medishare was running a full-service general hospital, providing care for all kinds of patients and conditions. They even had a small ICU, which is where I was assigned.1
One of the volunteers at the hospital was a Haitian young man named Samuel who had been a medical student at a local university. The earthquake had destroyed his school. The closest he could get to his dream of becoming a doctor was to volunteer at Project Medishare. Samuel and I spent a lot of time together and became fast friends.
One night while our patients were sleeping, Samuel and I were chatting about life in the States versus Haiti. In the course of conversation I thoughtlessly mentioned something about my iPad back home. Samuel got quiet, cocked his head at me.
“Jared…are you rich?”
This was 2011. The iPad was still a novelty in the US, let alone in Haiti. I was an iOS nerd who had to have the latest gadget, and as a nurse I had the means to afford it. If memory serves I earned $2200 a month after income taxes. An iPad wasn’t cheap, but I had enough wiggle room in my budget to buy one. By American standards, an iPad was an expensive toy. But in Haiti, $500 USD was an outrageous sum.
I don’t remember how I answered Samuel’s question. I was dumbstruck. Was I rich? Of course not, right? I punched a time clock at work. I drove a Hyundai with only the basic features. My one-bedroom apartment had sparse thrift store furniture. I paid only the monthly minimums on mountains of college debt.
After a week of working in swaying tents and sleeping under mosquito nets and shitting in a hole in the earth, coming home to my one bedroom apartment, where I lived alone with floor-to-ceiling windows and walls that didn’t buckle in the wind, was overwhelming. Everything was sickeningly nice, nauseatingly pleasant. Even my thrift store furniture seemed opulent by comparison.
In the quiet moment after Samuel’s question, I realized more acutely than ever that the truth about my privileged circumstances isn’t in my perception of myself, but in how others perceive me. Relatively, from my friend Samuel’s perspective, I was rich. However much it contradicted my own ideas about myself, Samuel’s perception was the only perception that mattered.
Please consider donating or volunteering with Project Medishare. They do a lot of good for a lot of hurting people.
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By the way, in case you harbored any doubts about him, Sean Penn (the actor) is the real deal in his commitment to helping people in Haiti. I heard stories about him appearing in front of the Project Medishare hospital in a pickup truck, ferrying sick children and their mothers from remote villages — “Take care of this baby!” he’d bark — and heading back out to do it again. ↩
New Job
Later in October I’ll be starting a new job as a staff engineer at Black Pixel. I’m looking forward to a new set of challenges and cool new projects.
I’ll be leaving behind good friends and colleagues at Bloglovin’. I’ll also be leaving behind a spot for an engineer on the iOS team. If you live near NYC or Stockholm and are looking for an iOS position, shoot me an email and I’ll put you in touch with the right people.