The Modern Condition

1. Guilt Reduction, Purchased.  The Gym.

It’s been a busy month for me.  Travelling to Europe, projects at work, and the Presidential Inauguration have filled up a lot of my time.  Consequently the frequency of my trips to the gym has diminished.  The other day I was thinking, “I haven’t used the gym enough this past month to warrant the money I spent on it.”  Immediately after that I thought, “But at least I have a gym membership.”

There’s probably some economic term for this sort of justification which I should know.  There is, of course, the classic “sunk cost”—the month’s membership is paid for and therefore my decision to go or not go to the gym should not take the money into account.  But I’m referring more to the “Hey, I’m a good person because I even bought a membership” sort of feeling.

That feeling is, of course, nonsense.  Yet it’s a common fallacy that we fall into, theologically as well as economically.  The idea that we can in some way “purchase” what in reality we have to discipline ourselves to obtain is as tempting as it is wrong.  How much more could we achieve if we had a proper understanding of working?

2. Attention, Conditioned.  The Article.

Reading an article in The New Yorker, I noticed an interesting behavior of my mind when scanning a page.  Observe the picture of an article (click for larger version).  The article has two illustrations: a mother holding her child and an old advertisement for a breast pump.

When reading the article I didn’t notice for a long time that the illustration to the right was actually part of the article.  The picture has all the pieces of an advertisement, which figures—it is one.  Large lines of bold black font, black and white photograph, small text, thin black border surrounding the entire thing.  My mind is conditioned to entirely ignore such objects on a page.

It raises a question about how many of our actions are based on conditioning.  We skip over ads automatically.  We tune out commercials on television.  We walk straight by homeless people on the streets.  How much more would we observe if we weren’t conditioned not to observe it?

3. Tools, Ignored.  The Software.

It is fairly common in an IT workers life to be asked what he or she considers to be a ridiculously easy question about a piece of software.  Two illustrations come to mind for me.  First, archiving in GMail.  I have had more than one person who has used GMail for a long time ask me what archiving is when I mention it.  It’s GMail’s flagship feature, along with labels.  It never occured to me that people might have no idea what it does.

Two, I was asked recently to resend an email that was deleted.  When I suggested that the user look in the trash I was met with a sort of blank look and vague wave of the hand.  I resent the email.  The first copy is almost undoubtedly still in the trash.

As an IT person, these seem amusingly simple problems; people who fail to understand the most basic features about the tool that they are using.  Yet I’m sure there are things about the tools I use, from cars to bikes to books, that I fail to understand.  How much more could we accomplish with the tools we use if we took the time to understand them properly?

Tags: attention, condition, guilt, tools