I just remembered today that the Parliament was prorogued and that a budget was due around now which might cause the fall of the federal government, because of a cryptic (or so it seemed) comment here about Budget 2009. (Why was he reading Budget 2009, I thought? Is this a provincial budget? And so on.)

Such is the state of things due to my 1 year media fast, now at one month. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that the things I used to care about a lot in international news I have less and less interest in, because they don’t seem that relevant anymore. Instead, they have been replaced by things that are usually more immediate and useful (for me). It’s as if the whole world has disappeared, and a new one has started to slowly open up instead. (See here for more on news.) I’m finding that I tend to have less spare time now than before, even though I would spend 1 or 2 hours reading news items in a given day. Hmmm … interestin’, mon’, as my Math 12 teacher used to say.

I’ve come to think that alarm clocks are usually a bad idea. There are a few exceptions to this (in particular, using them once in a while to catch a flight, for example).

Over the past few days, I’ve been using an alarm clock (due to temporary circumstances that involved me getting up earlier than usual). On day 3 of this, I felt sluggish and tired all morning. Sleep cycles are natural rhythms that, when disturbed, cause problems for the organism. Sleep involves important natural functions that play out during these cycles. If you need to use an alarm clock, it probably means one of two things:

1. You are not getting enough sleep, i.e., are going to bed too late.

or

2. You are getting poor sleeps - due to external stimuli, stress, worry, or what have you.

Either case is unhealthy. When you wake up, naturally you will feel good, excited, and so on. This is how you’re supposed to feel when you wake up. I say this as someone who used to have problems getting up in the morning (it turned out that my sleep cycle was distorted due to excessive worry). Alarm clocks simply cause or perpetuate an unhealthy system.

Daniel Larison here discusses resisting the “Facebook menace”. (For another view see here.)

I have people ask me “Are you on Facebook?” My answer is no, but I’ve now come to regard the question as something like “Do you have e-mail?” - i.e., a request for contact information. I now respond by giving them my e-mail address. If I really want to contact this person or do something with them, I can by exchanging e-mail … but the repeated questions about whether I’m on Facebook have left me seriously pondering this question:

What are the costs of not being on Facebook?

People who don’t like Facebook are quick to point out the costs of being on Facebook. To answer the posed question, however, it doesn’t really matter that I have an instinctual dislike for it, or that it reminds me of high-school, or that I have legitimate privacy concerns about it. These things simply make it more difficult for me to honestly appraise the costs of not being on Facebook, because they bias me against it.

That is, I think I can conceptualize the costs of using Facebook fairly easily because they jump up at me when I look at a Facebook page, but it seems more difficult to conceptualize the potentialities I am missing by not being on it.

Presumably, there are several gains to being on Facebook. One is getting in contact with people you used to know. My response, though, is if you used to know them, why did you stop contacting them? Presumably because your interests or commonalities diminished, in which case why do you think that you would want a relationship with them now? It seems like nostalgia and novelty more than anything else …

The second big gain presumably is cultivating a social network through sharing experiences, online conversation, and coordinating actions. I suppose if everyone I knew were coordinating their lives through Facebook, it would be difficult not to be there. Many people I know do coordinate through e-mail, for example, and it’s a convenient way to do lots of things. This is the big unknown - what undiscovered world is waiting for our Facebook holdouts? To find that out, however, you can’t talk to people who aren’t or haven’t been on Facebook.

On a recent trip, I was debating the following question with a surfer dude after stopping at a Mormon Cathedral.

Imagine that you have met your dream marriage partner. For the purposes of our debate, this was a female who was what you were looking for in almost all respects (smart, good sense of humour, highly compatible values, beautiful, common interests, and so on). Again, this is your dream marriage partner. Except for one thing. She is Mormon (which in itself doesn’t bother you), but in order for her to marry you, you must convert. (Say, for example, that her familial relationships will be damaged significantly if she doesn’t marry a Mormon, and she values them highly. For the purposes of the thought experiment, imagine that this won’t involve lots of Mormon religious activities after marriage - say a couple of hours a week.)

Would you convert? I said after half a second of hesitation, yes. He said no. My reasoning was that well-being is only partly about truth, and so converting to a religion where you might not agree with everything (or have to interpret things figuratively a lot of the time) shouldn’t trump your well-being in central areas like to whom you will be married. I accompanied this with my idea of how integrity matters - in personal relationships, you want integrity, so you would of course tell her exactly what you thought about various Mormon doctrines and practices, and tell her family members if they asked, but as far as making an institutional pledge it wouldn’t matter. His reasoning was that one girl wasn’t important enough for him to convert.

Having had some time to think about it, I still would say yes to converting. I don’t think that religion should make your life worse off - and that would include interfering with marrying the right person. (To put it in perspective, a bigger problem I would have is the Mormon tithing, where the church asks for 10% of your income.)

In Tim Ferriss’s book The Four Hour Workweek he talks about a ‘low information diet’ (p.86):

“Go on an immediate one-week media fast.

The world doesn’t even hiccup, much less end, when you cut the information umbilical cord. To realize this, it’s best to use the Band-Aid approach and do it quickly: a one-week media fast. Information is too much like ice cream to do otherwise. “Oh, I’ll just have a half a spoonful” is about as realistic as “I just want to jump online for a minute.” Go cold turkey.

If you want to go back to the 15,000-calorie potato chip information diet afterward, fine, but beginning tomorrow and for at least five full days, here are the rules:

No newspapers, magazines, audiobooks, or nonmusic radio. Music is permitted at all times.

No news websites whatsoever (cnn.com, drudgereport.com, msn.com, etc.).

No television at all, except for one hour of pleasure viewing each evening.

No reading books, except for this book and one hour of fiction pleasure reading prior to bed.

No Web surfing at the desk unless it is necessary to complete a work task for that day. Necessary means necessary, not nice to have.”

My New Year’s resolution is to do this, not for one week, but for one year. Then I’ll see how things are going and decide whether it makes sense to continue.

If you start thinking of your time as having inherent value (and translating that into dollar terms, say $50 per hour, or $30 per hour, or whatever, based on the amount of money you could make if working during that time), then suddenly information consumption becomes very expensive, even if “free” on the internet.

(Consider a movie. It might be $10 for a ticket, but if it takes 2 hours of your time the implicit cost is $50 x 2 + $10 = $110 dollars. Suddenly, walking out of a movie that isn’t adding significant value to your life starts to make a lot more sense, as the further costs of staying are much, more more than the explicit cost of the ticket - and you can usually get a refund on the ticket if you leave, although it actually doesn’t matter much. If the emotional cost of requesting a refund is greater than $10 to you, forget about the ticket.)

For me, the 1 year media fast will have a few tweaks.

• I can read newspapers, magazines, and so on, if the information contained is pertinent to action I will be taking immediately (i.e., that day), since there will be areas where they will have relevant information (for example, a trip magazine for booking a tour company).
• Since I’ve already read 4HWW, I can read one other non-fiction book at any given time.
• I don’t watch television, so I’ll reduce that to 0 hours per day.
• Finally, to keep up on events in the world, I’ll allow a handful of blogs I read regularly, and any articles linked to by them.

Oh, and I started this on January 1st, so it lasts until December 31st, 2009.

I have recently done a fair amount of snow-shoveling. It can actually be fairly fun. Here is why:

1. There is constant feedback on your progress.
2. Progress is usually forward-moving. (That is, you don’t have to worry about losing progress, until it starts snowing again.)
3. You can be creative in how you clear the snow and get better in your snow-clearing skill.
4. It is good exercise.
5. When you complete it, you have done something useful.

Some ways to make it more fun:

1. If you have a large amount of snow, doing it in multiple sweeps, so you can progress more quickly up the drive-way, for example. Since each sweep progresses faster than shoveling all the snow at once, this gives a greater sense of progress.
2. In addition to sweeps, don’t think you have to do all the area at once. You can often do Phase I (the first third of the drive way), then Phase II (the second third) some time later, then Phase III (the final part). (Games almost never have just one level or phase.)
3. Try to arrange things so you get social praise for it. (Most games use some form of social praise as rewards. For example, “You are the greatest ruler!” “Citizens have Praise the President Day!” and so on.)
4. Reward yourself in some other way after you have finished (or finished significant parts if there is a lot), such as having something you like to eat or drink, a bath, or what have you.