Identifying The Blind Spots

A Study In Pattern Recognition

Just a few weeks ago I made one of the biggest hedges I've made in my entire life. I decided to quit my job as senior manager of a small text mining company in San Diego, move out of my house, leave my friends and relatives, and move all the way up to Seattle where I know hardly anyone and work as a machine learning scientist at Amazon. What I find particularly surprising about the whole experience is how rapidly I've adjusted to my new surroundings.

For example, the whole process of moving one's self, wife, child and belongings thousands of miles north seemed to have gone by in a heartbeat. My new digs with views of the Seattle skyline and overlooking the Puget sound seems to have already lost its sense of newness without diminishing how exhilirating it is to see the barges shipping thousands of tons of goods in and out of the harbor, the ferries taking passengers to and from all of the islands in the sound, and all the other boats leisurely meandering this way and that.

Although it's only been a few weeks, somehow it feels like I've been walking a few blocks to Pike's market for years to pick up some of the spectacular culinary delights offered there whether it be a mouth-watering piroshki and borscht soup for $5 from the Russian bakery, Piroshki Piroshki, or one of Uli's famous sausage sandwiches for $6, or a baguette and cheese from Beecher's Handmade Cheese where you can watch the cheese being made the old fashioned way right there in the store.

Even though I heard about the extremely high percentage of bookstores and coffee shops in Seattle, I never imagined seeing so many pubs, bars, and restaurants with a literary theme. I'm thinking of places like Library Bistro, Bookstore Bar, and the antique bookstore in Pike's market, whose name I cannot recall, with a full bar that is open on weekend evenings. But now that I have, it's all seems like part of the normal fabric of life in Seattle.

And when I take the ten minute bus ride to my office at Union Square in the international district of Seattle and people other than low income workers ride the bus, not only does it feel refreshing that public transportation is not stigmatized the way it is in San Diego, but it feels like this is how I've been commuting for years.

I certainly never thought the time would come that I would have gear for different kinds of rain. But now that I have my thick down jacket, my lightweight Goretex jacket, and all the other gear that I do, nothing seems out of the ordinary. When I walk outside, the cold November wind that streaks against my face and the light drizzle that sometimes beats against my head feels like it's been blowing and beating like that for time eternal.

I think part of the reason I've been able to adapt so quickly to my new surroundings is that all of the experiences that I'm having as a new Seattelite are not really all that new. Between the long stretches of time that I've spent in various cities and countries, with their own climates, cultures, and ways of life, in one way or another I've experienced it all before, perhaps not exactly the same but close enough to it that my brain is able to recall what it was like and thereby lessen the sense of surprise and sometimes shock. This isn't to say that there is nothing new to experience here in Seattle. Quite to the contrary.  Every day feels like a new adventure where my brain is constantly overwhelmed by all of the familiar patterns.

I sometimes joke that Portland is my new TJ, Vancouver is my new LA, and Montana is my new Arizona, part of which is to say you have to like water to live up here.  Actually it's also partly a boast since I'd choose Portland over TJ and Vancouver over LA any day.  I've been in Seattle for just over a few weeks now and despite the rainy weather I think I am happier here than I've ever been since living in Paris in my early twenties or Germany in my middle teens. Part of it's the adventure. But also part of it is that Seattle really is a spectacular city. In fact, I've come to realize that it's Seattle's rain that not only keeps everything a lush green but also acts a sort of gatekeeper keeping those afraid to to get a little wet from being able to enjoy all that Seattle has to offer. And should the secret ever get out, that it doesn't actually rain as much, at least in total rainfall, as most people might imagine, I suspect the barbarians would be at the gates and all the empires, be they culinary, musical, literary, or outdoors, would start to crumble. So when I read a Seattle blog talking how about the supposed real estate bubble in Seattle, specifically how absurd the growth rate has been in real estate here over the last few years rising as high as the low teens, in terms of the year-over-year median sales price , rather than dismiss the outcry, having lived in San Diego where growth in the mid to low twenties was the norm for a good half-decade and housing prices are about 40% more expensive than they are here, I find myself in complete solidarity.

Do It Yourself Donations

Why is it that people always feel the need to give used clothing and uneaten foods to a third party intermediary rather than give it directly to the poor? It's not like they are hard to find.  Perhaps they think they know what would happen. They start unloading food and clothing from their SUV and next thing you know there is a band of thugs hijacking their car, placing them at gunpoint, searching them for anything they can use to buy themselves a bottle of whiskey or a heroin fix. In certain neighborhoods this may very well happen, but not in any of the ones I've lived in.

When I was moving out of my house in San Diego, I walked down to the local Vons one morning with a bag of used clothes and another bag of food where there was a recycling center where the homeless would congregate to receive a small amount of money for collecting trash bags full of crushed cans. I offered them what I had and apart from some collared shirts and shorts which none of them had any use for, about half a dozen men took just about all the clothes I brought. Because some of the men had very few teeth left due to the fact they had gone for so long without healthcare, they couldn't accept some of the food I offered them such as some apples I was giving away. But all the food was taken and they evenly distributed it amongst themselves. They were all extremely thankful and appreciative. Actually later that day, I saw one of the same men I met earlier, wearing the red sweatshirt I gave him.

Compare this experience with what normally happens. You call some non-profit to come and pick up your stuff and that's that. You never hear from them again unless they call to see if you have more stuff to give away. You never find out who received any of the stuff you gave away and whether they liked it or not. As far as you know, all the stuff could just be sitting in a giant storage room.

I'd love to see a day when many more people apply the DIY mindset to helping those less well off than themselves. Especially if it involved acting locally and helping any people they might encounter on a daily basis, such as the guy always rumagging through trash at the supermarket.

It's Not Easy Letting Go

There is a deep rooted human instinct in all of us to not want to make hard choices if they can avoid being made. One trivial example is shopping. We often buy clothes we don't actually wear but think we might some day only to acquire a warddrobe full of a few things that we wear all the time and full of many things we hardly ever wear. It is only when placed in different circumstances that require us to make hard decisions, such as what to pack when traveling abroad, that we acknowledge this reality and learn to our surprise that not only are we capable of getting by on a small subset of what we thought needed, but life is so much simpler and worry free when you have fewer things demanding your attention and cluttering your life.

One of the reasons we choose not to make hard decisions is that as humans, we are terrible predictors of our own future circumstances. With so little control of external events and even our own future moods and whims, it is understandable that we take on as much as we do. "Who knows what good tidings may come our way if instead of narrowing future possibilities we expand them?" the thinking goes. "Never mind the extra burden of taking on responsibilities that in the end will prove needless."

But viewed in terms of the total amount of time and energy that ends up going misspent, the consequences of our unwillingness to make hard choices is staggering. All the easy choices we gave in to at some point or another eventually end up cumulating in our information delivery boxes, whether it be our mailboxes, voicemail, feed readers, email inboxes or cognitive memory, as what is essentially spam, whether or not we can recognize it as such at the time. The way to tell is if it ends up forcing you to incur an opportunity cost, distracting your attention away from something you were doing before that was not only interesting but also oriented towards a worthwhile goal. Because we fail to make the hard choices early on when it counts the most, we end up paying the price of having to contend with a growing stream of unnecessary distractions, each one tearing out a little piece of us.

That's why I'm a big fan of things like the slow email movement, the slow blogging movement, taking time to actually read selected books rather than thumbing through magazines, not watching television unless there is something specific I want to watch, and generally not committing to things unless I'm sure I can follow through on them. I'm all for having fun and seeking out stimulation. But I'm also for keeping things fulfilling and purposeful.