The Last Word On Nothing

This post first ran on June 16, 2011. It’s on my mind, because this week I’m at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is also at the Aspen Institute and is similar in form to the Environment Forum I discuss in the post.

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I’m not a big fan of conferences. I loathe spending vast stretches of time indoors, especially if it requires planting my butt in uncomfortable chairs and wearing clothes with buttons and shoes that aren’t flip flops. Yet I continue to attend meetings, because they offer opportunities to interact with smart people who are thinking about interesting things.

Earlier this month, I attended two conferences in a single week, and the stark contrast between them got me thinking about why conferences so often suck and how to make them better.

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This post originally appeared March 17, 2016

The first time I played the Oregon Trail computer game – a parody of American westward expansion inflicted on countless school kids – was this winter. I was snug in bed, as befits a prospective pioneer facing one of history’s largest human migrations. Up to 500,000 settlers set out along the Oregon and California Trails in the mid-19^th century. For my own treacherous 2,000-mile trip, I chose to be a banker from Boston, because I had just seen The Big Short and longed to inflict virtual revenge on the financial sector. I named this banker Beverly, since the game gave me no option to be a woman. Beverly’s sundry family members would be Pot Roast, Potato, Death, and – improbably in this bunch at least – Steven.

Predictably, Death was first to die. She drowned along with two oxen not long after we embarked from Missouri, when I tried to ford a river instead of paying the toll for a ferry. Steven, meanwhile, was plagued by misfortunes that will be familiar to all who’ve played this game. First he was exhausted, then broken-armed, then grappling with dysentery, then lost, then down with cholera. I finally ended his misery by crashing the raft bearing our covered wagon into a rock on the Columbia River, drowning us both near the end of the line in Oregon.

The game is a culty 1970s simplification of a complex historical event that contributed to the violent displacement of indigenous people and laid the foundations for today’s urban Northwest. But Americans have been preoccupied with valorizing and simulating the pioneer experience almost since the United States began colonizing the West Coast. More…

I didn’t even read your horoscope today, but I can promise you will obtain more swag soon. It is written in the stars, and in your company’s annual earnings report. You will go to a conference, a baseball game, a meeting about an annual report, a meeting about a master plan, a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a school fundraiser for your kids, a school fundraiser for your alma mater — SOMETHING. And you will come home with more swag. You know what I mean. 

Water bottles! Lanyards! Branded fleece vests you’ll never wear because they are so dorky! Branded fleece hoodies that you’ll wear even though they are dorky because wow, they’re really soft! And worst of all, most of all, the totes. THE TOTES. Don’t even get me started on the totes.

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On the moon, as on Earth, it’s about location, location, location. This year – the 50th anniversary of the first human steps on the moon – a lot of serious projects are underway to go back, and this time they want to stick around. In the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that the best place to put a crewed base is the lunar south pole. Its mountain peaks spend so much of their time dazzled by blinding sunshine that they are infomally called the Peaks of Eternal Light. Their location is not only crucial for generating solar power, but they sit next to craters in permanent shade, where water is stashed away in ice. This is prime real estate.

So it came as no surprise when in April, China announced plans to snaffle that spot. That could raise some interesting property disputes: China surely won’t be the last or only nation to build a lunar base. And neither will nation states be the only ones looking to plant flags – Jeff Bezos recently joked (?) that he wouldn’t be opposed to building an Amazon fulfillment center on the moon. [side note I saw that coming here]

As big and empty as the moon is, there won’t be a huge amount of space for all these interests to spread out. Thanks to the moon’s desolate geography and 14-day night, the usable area for settlements is actually pretty sparse – the solar peaks aren’t just the best spots, they’re pretty much the only spots.

However, in his recent book Red Moon, science fiction god author Kim Stanley Robinson offers another, much more intriguing option, which could significantly expand the moon’s real estate market. And it is not necessarily science fiction.

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When I was a teenager, I started writing letters to myself, sealing them, and promising not to open them until a few weeks later. This is how I trained myself not to act on the suicidal thoughts I started having around 11 – the same year I got my period, and around the same age a pediatrician wrote me a prescription for Prozac. If I could wait until it was time to open the letter, something worth waiting for almost always happened.

I’ve always felt embarrassed about those letters, and ashamed of being such an angsty teenager. There were extenuating circumstances –specifically, a non-cancerous brain tumor that messed with my moods and made me lactate (fun!) — but it was nothing worse than what many teens deal with. Why couldn’t I have channeled my emotions into a vigorous sport like soccer (I could barely run the mile) or made friends (too tired and sad) or for God’s sake learned some math?

As I’ve researched a story I’m writing on suicide, however, my feelings toward my younger self have softened. For one thing, it turns out my suicidal thoughts arrived on schedule. In American teenagers, 11 years old — the onset of puberty in many girls these days– is a pretty standard age for suicidal ideation to begin. Researchers estimate that about around 20 percent of teenagers think about suicide, although only a small fraction of teens make an attempt.

Also, it turns out letter writing was a pretty clever trick. Expressing feelings in words engages the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in cognitive reappraisal. Cognitive reappraisal is reinterpreting a negative event in a more positive light. It’s the mental transition from “he dumped me, my life is over,” to “he dumped me, but there’s good reason to believe I will survive.” It’s the difference between “I feel awful – I will feel like this forever” and “I feel awful – let’s get a good night’s sleep and see how tomorrow goes.”

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