think or thwim

In March of 2001 Bethany McLean wrote an article for Fortune Magazine called Is Enron Overpriced? The title should have been “How the hell does Enron make money?” because she mainly questions Enron’s mysterious accounting:

How exactly does Enron make its money? Details are hard to come by because Enron keeps many of the specifics confidential for what it terms “competitive reasons.” And the numbers that Enron does present are often extremely complicated. Even quantitatively minded Wall Streeters who scrutinize the company for a living think so. “If you figure it out, let me know,” laughs credit analyst Todd Shipman at S&P.

Of course it turns out they weren’t actually making money, but were just really good actors. After Enron imploded, McLean wrote a book about it. The Smartest Guys in the Room was published in 2003, and in 2005 it was turned into this movie.

I paid attention to this stuff as it was happening, but I’m amazed at how much I learned watching this. It’s a different picture than I got watching the news.

Andy Fastow is scheduled to be released from prison in December 2011. Jeff Skilling gets out in 2030.

I suspect I might suffer from minor depression, but I’m not sure. It’s not constant, but I get into a pretty serious funk periodically. There are a couple of things that weigh on me. First, even though I know this is my own problem, it seems to me that the world should be a better place. If you’re not occasionally depressed by the news, you’re not paying attention. I’m also disappointed with how parts of my own life are working out so far. I’ve managed to surround myself with great people, and I know a lot of less fortunate guys would love to trade places. But there are plenty of reasons to be disappointed in any situation if you set your expectations high enough.

To improve my mindset, I figure I have three options:

1. Drugs.
2. Lower my expectations.
3. Change my situation.

Is it wrong to want to be happy?

Po Bronson pointed out that we always talk about high self esteem and low self esteem, but rarely talk about middle self esteem - a realistic self-view. I think something similar may be going on with depression. Most of us would like to be happy, or at least content, all the time. We’re OK with feeling sad temporarily when some unwanted event occurs, but after an appropriate period of grief we’d like to get back to the happy side of neutral asap.

I think that might actually be working against us. It seems like a healthy person should spend an equal amount of time happier than average and sadder than average. The peaks and troughs should be roughly the same magnitude. It would be nice if your average mood was on the happy side, but that seems like an unrealistic expectation that just sets us up for disappointment.

Drugs

Rory Blythe wrote one of his best blog posts last week. In it he confesses to being addicted to morphine for the last few years:

Part of the reason I got into drugs in the first place was that I thought I could control the way I experience life. I wanted to eliminate all anxiety, doubt, fear, sadness, and I succeeded for a while. But life isn’t quite the same when you go around feeling nothing but joy. The whole time, you love it, but you know something’s wrong.

Never thought I’d be happy to be able to be sad about something. Uncertainty has found its way back into my life. I’m no longer trying to steer my feelings with things I snort, inject, and swallow.

Life is much more interesting this way.

One shrink’s experience with depression

Gary Greenberg did an interview on NPR’s Think a couple of weeks ago. He was promoting his cover story in Harper’s Magazine this month (subscription required). I haven’t read the article, but I’ll summarize the interview.

Greenberg is a writer and practicing psychotherapist with plenty of experience diagnosing depression. For his article, he took part in a clinical trial testing the effect of Omega 3 fatty acids on depression. Going into the initial testing he felt a little melancholy, but considered it a normal part of modern life. During the test they asked him a raft of questions: How are you sleeping? Do you take naps? Are you feeling guilty about anything? Greenberg uses similar questions in his own practice, but being on the receiving end he realized that qualifying for a diagnosis of depression is almost unavoidable at some points in normal life.

To his surprise they diagnosed him with chronic depression. Greenberg says he was at the minor end of the scale. In Rory’s blog post he describes not being able to get out of bed and being generally incapacitated. Greenberg was not close to that state. However, he did qualify to take part in the drug trial. He took six pills every day for 8 weeks, and was retested for depression every 2 weeks. He was told the pills were either Omega 3 fatty acids or placebos, but he didn’t know which. He said the pills did make him feel better, but he was uncomfortable with how it all played out. He said the doctors and nurses were intelligent, helpful, and did their best to make him better, but the process was broken.

What’s wrong with the diagnosis of depression

The logic is: if you find a drug that makes you feel better, you must have been depressed due to a chemical imbalance. The drug corrected your imbalance, and you’ll be fine if you keep taking that drug. The only problem with that is - it’s not true. Greenberg says we don’t actually know that you had a chemical imbalance to begin with. Our brains have receptors for these chemicals, and an extra jolt of them feels good. That doesn’t mean we were deficient. It’s circular logic.

You could also use morphine, marijuana or LSD to feel better. They work great, but they aren’t legal. Instead, you’re supposed to see a doctor, explain that you feel rotten, and he’ll prescribe a legal drug. When he finds one that works to improve your state of mind he prescribes it for you, and you take it indefinitely. If it stops working, the doctor switches drugs until you find a better one. He called the whole process medicalizing depression.

The weird thing is, with the legal system you’re still self medicating. You decide that you want to feel better and visit the doctor. The doctor picks a drug for you to try, but you tell him whether you like the way it makes you feel or not. If at any point you decide it has stopped having the desired effect, you return to the doctor and try another one. Then you decide if you like the new one. Reread that paragraph and substitute dealer for doctor. Smoking a joint just cuts out the middle man.

Feeling bad may not be all that bad

This is an excerpt from Rory’s follow up post today:

During my entire course of opioid abuse, I felt only several of the many emotions anybody else might experience throughout the day. Oddly, feeling good all the time eventually becomes horrible. It’s monotonous. Part of being alive is experiencing the unpleasant bits of life as well as the pleasant ones. You don’t feel whole when you’re separated from reality by 200mg of morphine.

I look forward to feeling bad when I should feel bad, rather than feeling bad because my brain is begging for another shot of powder.

It sounds like Rory has his head on straight, and I hope he can keep it that way.

So?

Back to my original question. The real problem is, I can’t figure out whether I’m depressed, I’m correct that my life is crappier than it should be, or I’m just having trouble coping with normal ups and downs of life. I’d like to feel better all the time, but not at the expense of losing touch with reality. I’m not convinced that our medical system has this figured out any better than I do.

I got some drugs (prescription), but I haven’t taken any of them and don’t want to. Lowering my expectations is not that simple because I’m not the one that put most of them in my head to begin with. Most of what we like and expect out of life is determined by our childhoods. If I’d been raised in as Masai tribesman, I’d have a totally different set of expectations. As I see it, realizing that fact, and deciding for yourself is what it means to be born again. I’m working on it, but it I’m not there yet.

Until I get my expectations better aligned with reality, that leaves changing my situation or feeling bad about it. More on that later…

Have I mentioned that Reggie is awesome?

Out of Control:

Reggie Watts with Curt Weiss at the Bumbershoot (Umbrella) Festival in Seattle:

This is a beautiful little film documenting the life cycle of 17 year cicadas. From PBS station WFYI:

After spending 17 years underground as juveniles, they emerge for a brief, cacophonous population explosion aboveground, where they transform into adults, mate, lay eggs and die off after only a few weeks.

Producer Samuel Orr followed the life cycle of Brood X, which made its momentous ascension in the spring of 2004. It accounted for one of the largest insect outbreaks on Earth.

Some fascinating cicada facts from the University of Illinois:

• Cicadas are one the world’s longest living insects.
• There are 15 broods of cicadas in North America. Broods I though X, XIII, and XIV are 17-year broods and Broods XIX, XXII, and XXIII are 13-year broods. Some years no broods emerge.
• Sometimes cicadas emerge a year or two later or earlier than scheduled. This is called “straggling”
• Cicadas are not locusts. Locusts are migratory grasshoppers.
• Cicadas are edible.

:: All Things Cool

Numerous criticisms of New Urbanism accuse the movement of shunning progress and romanticizing a bygone era that was never as good as it’s imagined now. I think that is a misunderstanding of what’s going on.

New Urbanism can be summed up very simply:

• Observe what people like. Where do they go for vacation? Where do they choose to hang out? Which places sell for the most money per square foot?
• Figure out what elements make those places attractive.
• Build more places like those.

The New Urbanists are trying to decipher the hidden code underlying our preferences for one environment over another. The building blocks of that code are the geometries, textures, colors, and sounds - all the sensory inputs experienced by the user. In 1977, Christopher Alexander made a tremendous leap forward when he published A Pattern Language.

Alexander’s team documented 253 elements that are present in places people like. Some of the patterns are observations about entire regions, some deal with individual buildings, and some are about small details. They called the collection of patterns a language because we can group them like words of a sentence to express the hidden code. The New Urbanist movement is a continuation of that work.

A lot of those patterns are present in traditional architecture, but that doesn’t mean we have to go backwards to use them. In fact, there’s no real need to look to history to find examples for New Urbanism to draw on. There are plenty of contemporary examples: San Fransisco, many European cities, the New Orleans French Quarter, and San Antonio’s Riverwalk.

I think some people see New Urbanism as wanting to recreate a simpler time only because the last 50 years of architecture has been an anomaly. In the last post I wrote about five trends that have caused us to ignore common sense design tenants. If we hadn’t experienced the last 50 years of experimentation, the New Urbanist movement wouldn’t have a particular name. It would simply be called good architecture.

If you love the way this looks you can stop reading now.

If, like me, you’re in awe of our propensity to build environments that people dread being in and wonder why we do it, read on. This isn’t a comprehensive list. Everything in our culture affects how we build, but I think these five trends have made significant contributions to the ugly, soul crushing architecture plaguing America for the last 50 years.

1. Fossil Fuels

Cheap energy freed Architects from the constraints that traditionally governed the size and shape of buildings. Electric lights, central heat and air conditioning replaced the use natural daylight, cross ventilation, and the careful placement of mass and shading to control the indoor environment. Without those constraints, architecture turned into a form of modern art with buildings as abstract sculptures.

Architects became more interested in pushing boundaries and impressing each other than making places people like to use.

2. Industrialization

Like almost everything else, buildings changed from being hand built to machine built during the industrial revolution. Surfaces became smoother, edges straighter, and materials modular.

Straight lines are rare in nature. Modern buildings appear more machine-like than natural. While Architects were playing with the shapes of buildings, the construction process became more like an assembly line and the small creative details were lost in the interest of efficiency.

3. Automobiles

The increasing number of progressively larger and faster cars required more and more space until they became a prevalent factor in the design of buildings and the spaces between buildings. At the neighborhood scale, parking became a dominant driver of design. At larger scales, efficiency of traffic flowing through a place overshadowed the needs of it’s residents.

Cars diminish the physical health of people through accidents, pollution and lack of exercise. They also diminish the mental health of people who live in relative isolation. We have given cars too high a priority in design for 50 years. We need to be clear about the costs, and find the right balance. We should be designing to make driving less convenient and walking, biking, and using trains for long trips more convenient.

4. Specialization

A century ago buildings were smaller and there was much less infrastructure in them. One Architect (or Master Builder) designed the entire building and oversaw the construction. Over the past century, while the detailing become simpler, the stuff inside them became more complex. Electrical wiring, indoor plumbing, heating and cooling were added. Telephone and data infrastructure became necessary. Kitchens moved inside. Security and fire protection systems were invented, and so on.

At least half of a modern building’s construction budget is spent on systems that did not exist 100 years ago. One person can no longer have expertise in all of those areas. The traditional Architect’s role has been fragmented into a team of people. On a large building hundreds of people participate in that role. With so many people involved, and so many more factors vying for attention, developing a place with soul has become more difficult.

5. Top Down Control

Finally, and I think the most problematic and unrecognized, has been an attempt at controlling our environment without a thorough understanding of how it works. We’ve zoned each specialized building to distinct areas. Houses, apartments, offices, retail, and manufacturing buildings are clustered in groups of like buildings making automobiles necessary to cover the distances between functions. This is top-down centralized control which is usually overly simple never seems to work as well as organic bottom up growth.

Natural ecosystems consist of a complex tapestry of interdependent species. We plant crops and keep animals in large groups because it’s more efficient. As agriculture has become more and more mechanized those groups became larger. The assembly line approach to farming has made us more productive in the short run.

However, we’ve now learned (at least some of us have) that monolithic row crops and large herds are vulnerable to disease and topsoil destruction. Industrial agriculture uses toxic chemicals to treat the symptoms rather than using nature’s more elegant organic solution of evolving an interlocking system of checks and balances.

When the same simplistic, monolithic thinking is applied to the built environment similar pathologies result. Like ecosystems, the built environment was healthier before we tried to exert control over a system we didn’t fully understand. Before codes and zoning, development was allowed to self organize from the bottom up. It was messy and complicated, but buildings naturally intermixed and places full of life sprouted up between them. Our overly simple rules killed that.

So, what now?

I see the last 50 years as an explosion of architectural experimentation enabled by new technologies. Because technological development is increasing at an exponential rate, I expect the experimentation to continue. That’s fine, but let’s learn from some of our failures and move on.

I’m a fan of Christopher Alexander’s books and the New Urbanist movement (if you haven’t seen it yet, watch this presentation by Andrés Duany). Both are bottom up approaches that try to identify things we’ve done right in our past designs. That, I think, is the right idea.

Andres Duany and his company have developed the idea of transects to document the proportions of streetscapes. First, they divide the world into zones:

From a 2002 article in the APA Journal (PFD):

A transect should be viewed as a way of applying a set of core principles of good form to a range of human habitats. Thus the idea that human environments should be walkable, pedestrian oriented, diverse, and promoting of public space is intrinsic to each type of environment along the transect.

Those core principles are defined for each zone using a set of diagrams and written specifications. Here are a few examples taken from SmartCode v8.0 (large PDF) by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. The Code is a starting point to be customized for specific locations based on climate, topography, traditional styles and building techniques, etc. Note that the tags (T1, T2, T3, etc.) in each diagram match the zones above to show which patterns work in each zone.

Civic Spaces:

Building Types:

Public Building Frontages:

Andrés Duany is one of the leading Architects of the New Urbanism movement. His company, DPZ, has been involved in the design of about 10 communities per year for the last 27 years. This presentation has some similarities to James Howard Kunstler’s TED presentation, but it’s a lot more helpful and optimistic. Duany provides insight into the causes of suburban blight and shows some of the details at the heart of it. More importantly, he also shows examples of things that work and explains how to fix what doesn’t.

This talk is packed with insight into how the built environment affects us. I guarantee you will experience at least one ah ha moment. Please take the time to watch it.

For more information, I can recommend:

• Peter Katz | New Urbanism
• Christopher Alexander | A Pattern Language

I haven’t read Duany’s Suburban Nation yet, but it gets good reviews.

Jim Kunstler is very upset about the state of American architecture, and he’s right.

:: Communist Robot