Polygamy and Economics

"It's hardly surprising that in most polygynous societies, the bride's family gets large payments in exchange for her hand in marriage. If polygyny combined with women's rights, I bet we'd see more promises to wash the dishes. Not everybody would have to share a husband, but I can think of some who might prefer half of Orlando Bloom to all of Tim Harford—including my wife."

From 'The economic case for polygamy'.

Clueless

The Clueless Manifesto Revealed:

"You probably all know the story of Roger Bannister--prior to 1954, experts believed that running a mile in less than four minutes was beyond human capability. People assumed it was an insurmountable human limitation--not possible. Some believed that even if you could, your heart would explode. But in 1954, Bannister broke the four-minute-impossible-barrier and clicked in at 3:59.4.

That was cool, but the remarkable thing is what happened immediately after that. Just over a month later someone else did it, and then before too long a ton of people were doing the 'impossible' sub-four-minute mile. The real barrier was psychological."

Job Musings

I was physically and mentally exhausted after graduating from college. I didn't want to have anything to do with school anymore. I skipped the graduation ceremony and didn't even sign up for the yearbook. I just wanted to stay home and be a bum; do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.

This lasted for around three months, the happiest days of my life. That is until my mother cut my allowance and I ran out of money. So I was forced to go out and look for a job. At the time I thought I was a pretty good programmer, better than most programmers, and that a lot of companies would want to hire me. I was wrong. I wasn't able to get work as a programmer anywhere. I guess they didn't like my academic record or something. I wanted to get in these prestigious companies where pretty ladies wore fancy dresses and where they paid their programmers 8,000 pesos a month, which was a lot in those days. Unfortunately none of those companies would take me so I was forced to settle for work in a small firm that paid half that amount. Still, the 4,000 pesos a month still seemed like a lot because I would now be able to afford to eat at McDonald's everyday.

I remember my initial feeling when I started work. I was thinking, 'what, I have to spend all day in front of a computer monitor, day in and day out?' It wasn't my idea of a good time. In fact it was like torture. Even during college and high school, I would only write code for at most three hours at a time. Spending eight hours a day writing and debugging code didn't appeal to me. I didn't enjoy my first job that much, but getting money in return for the work felt good so I saved as much of it as I could so I can afford a new Pentium PC to play games on at home. Also, I did enjoy the friendships I made in my first company, the people there were funny and cool. So although I hated the work, I liked the money and the people.

The second company I joined paid slightly higher, 5,000 pesos a month. I moved after a little over six months on my first job. I didn't get along as well with the people in my new job, not much friendships. But I did like the work more because it was writing low level C Systems code and some assembler. The work was hard and sometimes impossible but I felt this was an improvement over writing boring database code. Money was ok but I felt that my savings were going at a too slow rate to be able to buy that Pentium PC. After a year, I was getting tired of all the low-level system stuff and the Unix environment in general. Windows 95 was out and so was Visual C++, it was the coolest programming environment I have ever seen. I was very lucky that Max, my college friend called me one day at work asking if I knew how to do bitmapped graphics in C++. I told him it sounded like a cool project and he said the company he just joined is looking for C++ developers. Of course I jumped at the opportunity.

My time in Max's company turned out to be some of the most fun years of my life. I developed many lifelong friendships there, and the work was great. It had the college environment, lots of fun people, interesting situations, lots of overtime, and good pay. I stayed there for four years. The place felt like home and the people were like family. I enjoyed staying in the office more. Sure there were lots of stressful situations and evil managers who made life hell for me, but the whole thing was still like a great adventure with heroes and villains and great stories that unfolded. We had something special there. In retrospect, perhaps I should never have left that company. But life goes on and I wanted to do something new and get out of my comfort zone.

By this time, year 2000, I felt extremely burned out. It was as if I had nothing left to offer technically. I had progressed from voracious programmer to a bumbling project lead who no longer wrote code but instead told other people what code to write. I thought for sure this was the end of me. That's it, throw in the towel, I've had it. Enough with the software industry. My fuel tank was empty. So I decided to join a more laid-back company that sold business application software. I just wanted to coast along, be in less stressful situations, stop spending so much time in the office. And for a short time I got what I wanted. Still, the people in this new company felt like lifeless droids and I couldn't relate to them. I definitely missed my old friends and atmosphere in my previous job. But I was burned out and so this was my fate.

Of course, this laid back situation didn't last long. That small easy-going company was eventually bought by a much larger software company. The situation started to get out of control. I kept fighting with my boss. I didn't feel like I had control over the project or the technology. We were forced into using another team's tools that were buggy as hell, at the same having unrealistic deadlines. I wanted to just get away from it all. Do something more peaceful and more meaningful. I almost resigned a couple of times, but the money, plus the fact that I had nowhere else to go kept me aboard. I thought I was doomed for sure, but for some reason my competitive instincts reawakened and I was able to recover and refocus myself on making a comeback.

And now this is where we come in. In the present time, our small dev group is currently under seige. Internal competition among groups is tight. There are some who believe we don't deserve to be here, that there are more worthy and deserving engineers who should be in our place. There are some who wants to do away with the old and burned out people (like myself) and replace us oldies with younger, more vibrant programmers. We are in competition for our jobs, for our very lives.

There are some days when I think to myself, as Danny Glover would say "I'm too old for this shit." Or perhaps like Rambo in his self-imposed exile telling Colonel Trautman "My war is over." Sometimes I'd like to believe that I'm really old and burned out and settle for the simple and relaxing life. There's no need to continue fighting if you no longer believe in the cause.

However when I look at my pattern of work, I notice a pattern, a cycle of fun, stress, burnout, friendships, comebacks, and resignations. Everytime I felt burned out and washed up, the competitive juices would always return. My fear is that day when I get that feeling of being burned out where I don't recover. Where I finally end up as a has-been. Hopefully that event will still be many, many years from now. In the meantime, they may think I'm down and out but deep inside me there is still that young college guy who still has that pent up hunger for that 4,000 peso salary and Pentium PC.

I've also found many more important things than staying in the office. There is more to life than this daily grind of staring at the monitor and typing in stuff and hitting 'compile'. I've come to appreciate good friendships, good company, and good times more.

And laziness, never underestimate the power of laziness.

Subconscious

"Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with."

from newscientist

Retirement

(courtesy of www.despair.com)

We do not fall in love

We do not fall in love with specific people. We fall in love when the time and conditions are right for falling in love. When we are in the state of being in love. What is first love? Do you remember your first love? The person is immaterial. You were just in the right frame of mind and condition susceptive to being in love at the time. It could have been anyone, the first person who came into your life when you were in the right state of being in love. When the factors are just right, and you fall into that frame of mind of being in love, that's the time you just so happened to meet the unique person you love, although it could have been anyone else.

Success 101

On this same day six years ago, I was in a car with a group of friends talking about random stuff when out of the blue one of the guys asked us the question "What is success?" He had apparently been thinking about his life and career and probably had a bit of an early mid life crisis. Perhaps he had been troubled by something going on in his life and he wanted our opinion on what we thought about this thing called 'success'.

This turned into a long debate with each guy declaring his own definition of success. I remember I didn't even have an answer at that time. I hadn't gave it much thought. But I vaguely remember that each person defined 'success' differently based on their personal values and belief system. The answers varied from money to fame to family.

Today, six years after the event, I can safely say I have my own personal definition of success which I will reveal at the end of this article. Before that I will review each of the common 'success' definitions that exist. Though I believe them to be inaccurate and detached from reality, there's probably nothing wrong with believing in them as long as it makes you happy.

The problem is, most of us go through life having the definition of success dictated to us by our friends, family, and society. We hesitatingly go for the ride thinking that by achieving 'success' we will be happy. Then realize later on that it was a dead end, all along being deceived that its pursuit was a worthwhile activity.

What is success? Here is Definition #1:

Success = Money, Possessions, Power

It follows that the higher the income, the bigger the house, the better the car, the more successful the individual is. If you have money you also ultimately have more power. People treat you better, with more respect. Your self-worth gets tied up in your net worth. Money and possessions becomes an end to itself. You spend all your time acquiring money, building that bigger house, getting that next raise. And people shake your hand and congratulating you for making it, achieving the dream. And of course you spend all your prime time being busy earning money that you're too tired when you get home and just plop down, watch some TV, eat dinner, sleep, get up the following day. The cycle repeats itself until death.


Definition #2 is related to the first one, though slightly different:

Success = Prestige, Accomplishments, Position

Everyone wants to be a somebody. We want to be known as an 'achiever'. A highly motivated individual who has accomplished a lot of things in life. We want to get promoted, climb the ladder of success. Eventually manage and lead other people. Who wants to be a 50-year old office clerk at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder? We want to go to our class reunions and boast to our former classmates about our achievements. We embellish our company titles to make them sound nicer and more prestigious. Our image is important. Without it we are a failure and who wants to be known as a failure?


Definition #3 is one I see often from my married and engaged friends:

Success = Family, Stability, Descendants

I have a confession to make. I am 32 years old and still unmarried. Not even in a relationship. It's very humiliating everytime someone (usually a married person or one who's in a committed relationship) asks me "So are you married yet? No? Why not, how old are you already? Aren't you afraid of running out of time?"

Marriage and family are very important to success it seems. First of all, you need the wife and kids because to grow old alone is synonymous with being a loser and a failure. Worst of all, you could grow old and sick and end up in a retirement home. No one wants that. Many of us are looking for some stability in life. A spouse to grow old with, and kids and grandkids that you can watch grow up. For them, having a family of your own is the biggest success.


Definition #4 is gaining in popularity with today's yuppie generation:

Success = Pleasure, Possessions, Experiences

Forget the rest, we all know that success comes in the form of getting the most pleasure out of life. Enjoy today for we don't know where we will be tomorrow anyway. Plus, we want to have a lot of fun memories to look back to when we get old. We want the latest toys available today. Let's just keep consuming, go to those wild vacations whether we enjoy them or not. He who dies with the most accumulated pleasurable experiences wins. The one with the most toys is judged the most successful.


Definition #5 exists because of the human ego:

Success = Desirability, Popularity, Attractiveness

Also known as 'most popular wins'. Narcissism prevails. The more cliques we belong to, the more organizations that accept us, and the more people that are turned on by our face and body, the better. We spend all our time impressing other people, convincing them to like us, which in turn will make us more successful.


Personally, I've seen them all, all the definitions and illusions of success. I even went through some of them, believing them to be true one time or another in my life. I've had these definitions of success imposed on me by what I see on TV, or in the office, or what friends and acquaintances would tell me. Each object offering its narrow point of view of success. I've seen the anguish on other people's faces when they buy into these false images of success and realize that they don't have them. I too have felt myself I haven't lived up to these success images.


Taking all of these into perspective, there is really only one basic definition of success that supersedes every other definition. And this is the success definition that I believe in today:

Success = Time

Think about it. We only have a finite time to live. Assuming I have fifty more years to live, that gives me 438,000 more hours left in this world. Doesn't sound like much does it? It makes me more concerned with how I plan to use up those hours. I definitely don't want to waste them.

Now I don't want to use up those precious hours trying to accumulate more money that I need to live by. Or waste them climbing up that invisible ladder of prestige and accomplishment. Or spending time on frivolous hedonistic activities that gets tiring fast. And I shudder at the thought of using up the time working extra hours in the office.

I want to use my time wisely, on stuff I actually care about. What is the most important thing for you today? Why are you not spending time on it? Why do you spend so much time and effort being busy with items you don't really care about. That you go to work everyday, get home too tired for anything else and end up watching TV, eat, sleep, repeat until death.

The successful person is the person who has the most time for himself, the one with the most free time. It is that guy who spends the most amount of time doing the things that are most important to him. The guy whose work also happens to be his 'hobby'. The guy who always has time to do what is necessary and is never too tired to do what he enjoys doing. I want to be like that guy.

The Most Important Things

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear."

- Stephen King, 'Stand By Me'