Sean Voisen

The girlfriend is nearly 5 years older than me, but most people think that she is about the same age or younger. I think that this is a good thing. She disagrees. But certainly there are distinct advantages to being mistaken for a younger individual once you’ve hit your late twenties and thirties … excessive “carding” notwithstanding. As valid anecdotal proof of this, I thought it prudent to republish the following parable, something I wrote about 3 years ago:

The doorbell at my house is old, but constructed with astonishing precision so that every time it rings it does so with such fervor and resonance it’s little wonder that the adjacent windows don’t shatter instantly. A few days ago I was in the kitchen staring, mouth agape, at the assortment of goods in the pantry, trying to find something to eat, when the doorbell rang. As I wasn’t expecting anyone at the time, I couldn’t shout my usual “It’s open!” but instead had to amble over to the entryway to see who happened to be the perpetrator of the racket. Sometimes I just want to crack the door open, poke my head out, and yell “Who rang that bell?” like the doorman of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, but one never knows how safe that kind of maneuver is. You can crush your head or your nose or smash a finger doing something stupid like that. Instead, neglecting the peephole, I just swung the door wide open.

I was greeted by a short, scruffy looking-man in a plain white T-shirt and jeans. As he was unaccompanied and dressed rather sloppily, I quickly realized that he was neither a Jehovah’s Witness nor a follower of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. My whole “Sorry, but I’m Jewish” bit would have to wait another day. No, this man was either at my door to rob me at gunpoint or sell me magazine subscriptions, but at first glance I couldn’t tell which. A good friend of mine, who is somewhat irrationally afraid of what she calls “bad guys” – you know, those nameless specters that lurk around every corner – probably would have opted for the former. But I, in my ever-present optimism, chose the latter.

Anticipating how best to turn down this man’s offers, even in the face of sob-stories about drug abuse, starving children in Ethiopia or outright pleading, I quickly scanned my brain for viable excuses. But I was saved by the salesman himself.

“Are your parents home?” he asked.

Since I no longer live with my parents, I really had no idea if they were home or not. Perhaps they were. It was 2:00 in the afternoon on a Saturday, so there was a good chance that they were home. But they were not in my home, and realizing that this is what the man before me had implied, a grin spread across my face as I discovered that the excuse I’d been searching for had been delivered to me on a silver platter.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“OK, I’ll try back later.” He slowly turned around and walked away.

I guess there are advantages to looking younger than you are.

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Taken from Professor Simon Penny’s collection of sundry words of wisdom. Somehow it feels appropriate:

During the renovation of buildings for the ACE program, a man was sent to fix a problem with a door. When I encountered him he was enlarging a hole in a the door with a grinder so the lock would latch. I looked at the door and noted that that door was not latching because the screws holding the hinges to the door-frame had corroded and the door had dropped. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that he replace the screws in the hinges. He looked at me with pathetic incomprehension and said “I’m a lock guy, I’m not a door guy.” There is an appalling profundity in this response. It succinctly captures the kind of narrow thinking which ACE works against. In institutions of higher learning, emphasis is commonly placed on ‘problem solving’ as if problems were self-evidently lying about just waiting to be picked up. But in order to be solved, a problem must first be identified and framed. In the real world, problems seldom observe disciplinary borders. ‘Problem framing’ requires a kind of intellectual process which is diametrically opposed to ‘problem solving.’ It requires the ability to grapple with incongruities and incompatibilities and discontinuities. In my opinion, we are good at teaching the deductive processes of problem solving, but this only permits students to solve already framed ‘textbook’ problems. Self evidently, it is more important to ask the right question than to get the right answer. Except in isolated and informal pockets, we seem to be bad at teaching the process of asking the right question.

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2 facts: 1) Serendipity is the engine that powers the wonder of life and 2) when you read, life is often measured in periods demarcated by the dates before and the dates after the reading of a life-altering book.

A life-altering book does not necessarily need to be a good book. It does not necessarily need to be a classic. In fact, informal surveys have shown me that it rarely is. Instead, the book simply needs to have the right message in the right format and arrive in the reader’s hands at exactly the right time. Hence, serendipity.

The books I have read that have had a profound impact on my life — either emotionally, intellectually or spiritually — have never been chosen by me. They fell into my hands as random gifts or chance recommendations by friends, family members and even perfect strangers. Choosing your own books, either at the bookstore or at the library, even when the choosing is done in a purely whimsical manner, too often results in a closed feedback loop. You will always choose books on subjects that you know already appeal to you, written by authors with a style you know you will like. This echo-chamber intellectual silo is unavoidable without third-party support, and Amazon.com’s recommendation engine does not count as third-party support. It knows what you like and will just continue showing you books that fall within your core sphere of preference.

What is needed is a serendipity engine. An engine for the engine, if you will. There are relatively low-tech versions of this. Bookcrossing being one example. And a good one at that. The best solutions will, of course, be completely unpredictable, both in content and timing. A program that knows your personal zeitgeist and then, at entirely random intervals, hands you something entirely outside the realm of said zeitgeist. In this sense, a monthly book club recommendation does not work. The book should fall into your hands when you least expect it at a time when you probably don’t want to read it. But then you read it anyway.

The Razor’s Edge was like this. So was Ishmael, Fahrenheit 451, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. In hindsight, it is obvious that there is certainly a common thread among all these books. Finding that thread is left as an exercise to the reader.

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What would an Internet without language feel like?

In 1996 Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that temporarily eradicated nearly all of the mental functions that were controlled by the left hemisphere of her brain — deductive reasoning, language, pattern and symbol recognition, recognition of self, &c. Living for several weeks in a world without language, in a world without the ability to name or label things or judge things or give a damn about the details of life, she describes here experience as a Buddhist might describe a perpetual state of samadhi — pure and effortless bliss. Apparently — or one might jump to the conclusion — the key to Nirvana lies in the right-half of the brain.

Dan Pink thinks we live in a left-brain dominated world. He’s probably right. Or left. Never in its relatively brief history has the human species been so inundated language. From the Internet, to radio, to television, to iPods, to roadside billboards, to telephones, to text messages, to ads plastered on the sides of city buses, it is impossible to escape words. Nobody in the civilized world enjoys even the briefest luxury of linguistic silence. Rising stress levels and a complete lack of ability to focus (continuous partial attention, per chance) are just a few of the more prevalent results.

The Internet is perhaps one of the biggest culprits of the crime of language overload. But what if it could be amended with some type of linguistic filter? A silent web devoid of words, both written and spoken alike. An Internet of images, photos, video and instrumental music only. Google searches made possible only by uploading an image or photograph and finding similar results. How would the experience be different? How would the left hemisphere revolt? What would the whole thing feel like?

Gorging ourselves on a never-ending smörgåsbord of words, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the world is made of more than just mental constructions, and that a great deal of communication takes place outside the narrow bandwidth of language alone.

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