Winning doesn't stand a chance against change
The only things that are permanent are dead.
Since I was a young man, I became aware of a concept called “winning”. I’ve seen a lot of people try to “win”, too. The problem with winning is that for every win, there seems to be a loser.
And the loser can’t really complain. He just has to stuff it while the winners drink 200 year old wine, eat rare fish eggs, and go to sleep happy. The problem inherent in winning is that it’s not permanent, and never will be.
Winning doesn’t really make sense in the scheme of things. What things?
Let’s look at where are and where we’re going. We live on a planet, literally a ball of molten rock, covered by solid rock, with a large contingent of water, and a thin layer of gases that was at one time, very, very hostile to life. But somehow, life took hold.
The earth’s orbit is very stable. The moon makes the axis of the earths rotation very stable. We live in a fairly remote solar system as the nearest star beyond the sun is about 4.3 light years away. That’s trillions of miles away. And our star is in the main stage of life, where it will happily convert 400 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second for what to us is forever.
To us, everything looks rather permanent. We’re just a tiny blip on the history of earth. Homo Sapiens has been around for about 2.3 million years. The earth has been in existence for 4.5 billion years. And the universe, as far as we can tell is 16 billion years old. On the scale of time, we’re really only very small, but we think that we’re so important.
It is estimated that the main stage of the sun’s life will last another 5 billion years. Peak star formation in the universe ended about 10 billion years ago. We missed it.
Now we may think that we have a relatively stable orbit around the sun, but the sun converts 0.7% of that 400 million tons of hydrogen into energy every second. That’s 2.8 million tons of matter converted into pure energy every second. Ten times that energy is converted into neutrinos, but let them go for now.
At that rate the sun’s gravitational pull on the earth is decreasing faster than the earth is falling into the sun. In fact, the earth is drifting farther away from the sun at the rate of a few centimeters every year.
The same thing is happening with the moon. The moon is moving away from the earth about 2.5 centimeters every year. In about a billion years the moon will be gone.
To us, the sun, the earth and the moon look the same in a relative way every day. They appear to be permanent. What I’m saying to you now is that what we have here is a very temporary gift of life on this planet.
There is nothing to win. And every time we win, the planet tends to lose. At least it looks that way, doesn’t it?
There’s an ant colony that extends from North America to South America. They know how to take care of the earth in a way that we cannot imagine. Ants have been around far longer than humans. They have evolved a way of life that tends to support their existence. Ants live in harmony with the earth.
Most of the other animals do this too, all the way up and down the food chain. Except for us. We need shoes with rubber soles. When we go hiking on the trails, we’re grinding bits of plastic and rubber into the soil, against the rocks, against nature. Even when we try to enjoy nature, we’re inadvertently working against nature.
Yeah, I feel really guilty about that when I’m on a trail.
When we drive our cars, we send rubber and plastic into the air, then into the water cycle, then into the ocean. When we get our plastic packages of food from the big box store, that plastic goes into a landfill if it’s lucky enough to make it there.
The fossil fuels we burn send particulate matter into the air. We breathe that air.
The electronics we make all include very toxic compounds and elements that are not made for nature. They are made from nature.
And the Amazon is not the earth’s lungs. We are. All of life leaves a little bit of oxygen behind when it dies. The processes that put oxygen into the atmosphere are fool proof against humans.
For most of my life, “winning” was about winning wars, winning economic struggles, winning an election, winning money, winning at sports, winning at chess, winning against the commies and the tankies. Winning for the individual, not the collective. And for most of my life, I’ve never seen anyone really talk about doing something that allows everyone to win.
Carl Sagan was a famous scientist in the 70s and 80s. He had a television series called Cosmos. If you have not seen it, it’s worth the time to see it. It is by far one of the most peaceful television series I’ve ever seen. I saw it first when I was a kid. Then I found myself in the stressed out body of an adult, so I watched it again. I recommended it to a friend so that he could relax, too.
Cosmos allowed me to see life at scale in the context of time. Cosmos set me at peace with myself. Cosmos showed me that although humans are very good at fucking things up, nature is still smarter than humans. Nature has had 3.5 billion years of practice in the art of molecular replication.
We live to replicate DNA. Everything else is a bonus. Here is the difference between winning and losing that bonus.
I work in IT. In the course of my work, I can make a choice to help someone or not help someone. I have always found a residual feeling I get when I help someone, even when it might feel, “inconvenient”. My job pays me to be inconvenienced. That’s why they call it “work”.
That feeling I get when I help someone is a good one. I can’t explain everything about it. I only know that I get the juice when I help someone, and by juice, I mean, I feel a little high when I help someone. We have never made any drug that is capable of replicating that feeling, that juice. It only comes from helping someone else.
I get the same feeling when I help someone change a tire on the side of the road. I get the same feeling when I see a broken sprinkler head and I report it to my HOA group on Facebook. I get the same feeling when I teach my kids something new. I get that same feeling when I say something funny, even when I’m having a challenging day.
I used to have good and bad days. Then I figured out that identifying a day as a good day or bad day makes it personal. Then the day is about me. Then the world is against me. Then I deserve to have a bad day. Then I deserve bad things to happen to me. Then I deserve to lose.
Then I saw a problem with winning.
So I changed the terms of my conversation with myself. I established a continuum of days that are challenging to not so challenging. Some days are easy, some days are challenging. Then my days are not about winning, they are about solving problems that challenge me. And every day, we must solve problems. There is no getting around that.
As a side note, this is one thing that kind of freaks me out about artificial intelligence. When we use AI to solve problems, we reduce the amount of challenges that our brains must solve. AI can be very good, very useful, but only for augmentation, not for replacement of our brains.
Brains are very sensitive to inputs. In a biological sense, brains are very expensive to build and maintain. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Therefore, it is entirely possible that we could eventually use AI to the extent that we lose the capacity to determine if what AI tells us, is…accurate.
This is one of the problems with winning. When we win against someone else, what did we get? A permanent solution that gives us peace from the adversary? We don’t have to think about the adversary. We don’t have to cooperate with the people in the group we have identified as an adversary. We don’t have to worry that they face the same challenges we face because they’re dead.
We often define winning as a separation of our fates. “They get a worse fate than we do, and that makes me happy.” Does it? How does making someone else lose make us happier?
If we win a struggle against someone else, we lose their assistance for any problem we can’t solve on our own. If we win against someone else, we lose their perspective, and potentially, any solution that they might have to offer for our common problems. I have yet to see any problems that are not common to us all. Maybe I missed them.
“And in this ever changing world in which we live in, makes you give in and cry. Live and let die.” — Paul McCartney
That lyric is from a song called, Live and Let Die. Paul McCartney wrote it for a James Bond movie. If you’ve ever seen a Bond movie, you know that the plot has a winner and a loser. Bond is almost always the winner, and mostly the loser.
He’s lonely, he doesn’t get any breaks. He’s always on duty. He get’s the girl, but only until the next one comes along. Nothing lasts for Bond.
That to me is the biggest problem with winning, it’s making the win permanent. But everything that’s permanent is dead. Notice the marble in the mausoleum. Dead. Notice the tombstone. Dead.
Nothing created by man is permanent against the scale of time. Yes, the pyramids of Giza are still there, but eventually, they will succumb to the adversary, time.
So while the fighting rages on around the world, particularly in the Middle East, I wonder what exactly, are they fighting for. What is the win? The other people die? They get the boot? They can’t have their land? Someone gets the oil and gas at a discount while absconding with an obnoxious profit? You don’t think about these things when you’re dead.
Even if you win, and you get all the toys and all your kids, their kids, and their kids go to the best schools, have fantastic lives, vacations every year, fast cars, a second house on the coast of Spain, with two good eyes and two really good ears, you still die. You still die. You still die.
That’s not winning. That’s making everyone else lose to win. That’s what America does. That’s what the wealthy in America do. Wealth transfers without informed consent is not winning.
But when we help someone, that feeling we get…that’s a gem. You can’t get it with money, sex, drugs, or power. That feeling we get when we help someone evolved with us. That feeling we get when we helped someone is favored by natural selection.
People who get the juice when they help someone have that feeling because the history recorded in our genes tells us that our odds of survival improve when we help each other. Our odds of survival improve when we help someone else. Our odds of survival improve when we teach someone else how to survive. That feeling we get when we help someone else is joy.
We have evolved to feel joy when we help someone else, in even the slightest way, because that feeling reinforces our tendency to help each other instead of not help each other. We need that feeling as a reminder that helping someone is more profitable than hold someone else’s head under water until they’re dead.
If we want to live, we must err on the side of helping other people. That’s how we win. The alternative is pretty grim.
Write on.