Childbirth

In a world of great tragedy and overwhelming need, where millions if not billions of children are inadequately cared for, the most irresponsible and narcissistic thing you can do is bring yet another life into the world.

Now, I am a product of childbirth myself, so I have some sympathy for those who do it. I recognize that children who have already come out of the womb can't be put back in, but if the choice is yours and has not yet been made, the only moral option is to not produce children at all.

It is noble to care for children who are already here but not to create a whole new obligation where none previously existed. It seems the ultimate exercise in vanity, like ordering a luxury full-course meal when all the people around you are starving. It is an insult to the under-served children in your own neighborhood, never mind the millions in needier parts of the world.

Childbirth is also extraordinarily risky, far more so than anything else you can do, like skydiving or driving drunk. The chance that something will go wrong between conception and adulthood is statistically huge. There are genetic defects, birth complications, childhood illnesses, etc. Add it all up and there is a substantial risk that you will be burdened for life with a child who is not fully functional. This is an obligation that would never had existed had you not made the choice to have a child, so it is your responsibility.

You could also raise an Einstein, but the chances of this are statistically low, even if you perceive yourself as being genetically superior. The most likely outcome is that your kid will be, well, ordinary, not disabled but not excelling in any particular way. In other words, you're going to devote a major portion of your own resources—20 years or more—raising one new child, at the expense of all the others already here, and the results will just be one new number added to the already bloated world population.

I don't mean to diminish the role of parents who are now caring for children who are already here (be it by birth, adoption or informal means). Parenting is a noble and necessary duty. But if you created the obligation yourself, there is a certain sense that you are filling in a ditch that you yourself dug. There is no net improvement to the world.

Do you have a "right" to procreate. No! You don't have the right to do anything in this world without considering its real effects and risks. If the human population were dying out or you truly believed that your genes were superior to everyone else's, childbirth could be seen as a service to mankind. Otherwise, it's just a vanity, an invented need. It is something you are doing selfishly because you've hit a wall and have no other direction.

You may think raising "just one little baby" will be no problem at all, but it's going to take almost every discretionary resource you have. There will be very little left to pursue your own goals or for good works elsewhere.

Comedy

You DO NEED humor to survive. Humor is the human way to process and accept the ironies of life. If you see that you have made a mistake and can laugh at your own foolishness, this is humor. It is also humor to be able to accept the weaknesses of others and to recognize the absurdities of the world around you without giving up hope. Nothing in the world is perfect, and you need humor to grease the wheels so it works anyway.

That doesn't mean you need comedy, however. Comedy is a consumer product (entertainment) designed to entertain a passive audience. Comedy can contain humor, but they are not the same thing. More often comedy is masked aggression. It will cynically do whatever is necessary to get a laugh.

Just because something makes you laugh doesn't mean it is good for you, just like something sweet and sugary isn't necessarily good for your health. There must also be substance behind the comedy for it to be USEFUL.

A sitcom is comedy, but it may contain almost no real humor. A stand-up routine is comedy, but your life is rarely improved by sitting through it. Humor is natural, while comedy is usually forced, because the comedian is desperately trying to make people laugh. Comedy knows that it has to make you laugh or it won't be paid, and this corrupts the humor within it. Humor, on the other hand, happens naturally and arises out of the current situation.

Comedy can be useful when it's truly fresh, new and insightful, but that rarely lasts for long in any commercial venue. Comedy can also be a crutch and an addiction, and people who happen to be funny may come to rely on it rather than fixing problems and taking action. Humor shared with others can help smooth social interactions and release people's tensions when they are trapped, but the best thing to work toward is not being trapped at all. The more comfortable and self-actualized you are, the less need you have for overt comedy.

I draw a distinction between "honest" humor and commercial laugh-driven comedy, which is fundamentally dishonest. Honest humor doesn't necessarily involve open laughter; it is simply a grasp of an absurdity, perhaps only within oneself. Commercial comedy, however, requires an audience and has to produce laughs. Once someone sets out to make you laugh, his honesty has already been compromised, and you probably don't need his product. If, on the other hand, someone sets out to say something meaningful and it turns out to be funny, that is true humor.

Comedians are a sad bunch. Once they set out to be funny, their innocence and honesty is lost. If their goals are realized and someone buys their product, they will be enslaved forever serving the "beast"—the dumb audience that expects to laugh and is paying for it. This applies to big-name comedians as well as your local class clown. Comedy is a prison, and although it may harmless to visit, you don't want to be trapped there.

Humor is certainly part of ones arsenal in any art form, but it can't be an end itself. You don't want to consume a product just because it makes you laugh any more than you would buy cocaine just to feel good. You want to be doing real things and pursuing meaningful goals, and if humor happens along the way, so be it.

Hot Meals

People often equate a "hot meal" with a nutritious one, but the temperature a food is served at has no bearing on its nutritional value. After it is eaten, it is all going to be processed as mush in the stomach at body temperature.

Some foods DO NEED to be cooked, but cooking is different than the temperature of consumption. Cooking changes the chemical composition of some foods, like meat, vegetables and potatoes, and makes them more easily processed by the digestive system. Cooking also sanitizes the food, reducing the chance of some viral and bacterial infections. Because it has been purged of live bacteria, cooked food tends to keep longer than raw food.

But there is no reason the food has to still be hot at the time you eat it. The preference for hot food (and food we expect to be served cold) is strictly one of culture and habit. Cold chicken is no different than hot chicken as far as the body is concerned. Some foods may seem unpalatable when they are not heated—e.g. fringed with congealed fat—but this may be a sign that the food isn't good for you anyway.

I propose that any food that is really good for you is probably going to taste good whether it is served hot or cold. (The same applies to ice cream or soft drinks: If it isn't palatable at room temperature, why would you eat it cold?)

Frozen food obviously needs to be thawed, because it is difficult to consume otherwise. Heating may also improve the taste of some foods, but taste itself is not something you need for good nutrition. This may be significant when you have access to quality food but no kitchen facilities. As long as the food has been previously cooked, immediate access to a stove or microwave oven may be unnecessary.

Because cooked food keeps longer, you can probably eat yesterday's chicken cold even if it has been left at room temperature. Cooked meat lasts even longer if you dry it—in a food dryer or an oven left on at low temperature—and can be safely consumed weeks or even months after drying. Therefore, even refrigeration can often be unnecessary as long as you consume or process raw foods shortly after purchase. As long as you have a facility to initially cook raw food—be it a microwave, hot plate or campfire—the whole rest of the kitchen may be unnecessary.

To our ancestors, who got their food from local farms and had few options for long-term storage, hot food indicated wholesomeness because it implied both cooking and sanitation. Today, however, we get much of our food from cans, cellophane packages and frozen boxes, where cooking has already taken place and sanitation is reasonably assured. Our ancestors would envy our year-round access to safe food, but we often complicate things when we insist on re-cooking our food to adhere to their ancient standards.

You may have a gag response when you try to eat cold a food that you are used to having hot, but you'll get over it. It's not going to kill you, and it will keep you alive just as well as the hot stuff.

Taste

"Taste is Everything!" says an advertisement for a certain soft drink. That's not true. Our sense of taste is merely a tool. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Humans developed a sense of taste to guide their eating behavior, and it is USEFUL today only to the extent that it leads us in a healthy direction.

Just because something tastes good doesn't mean it is good for you. For example, in the environment in which our species evolved, sugar, fat and salt were rare and valuable nutrients, so we developed a preference for them. Today, we are surrounded by sugar, fat and salt—far more than we need—but our tastes haven't changed. If this leads us to obesity or high blood pressure, then we have to accept that taste can be wrong and learn to overrule it when appropriate.

Wherever humans have developed biological attractions—be it for certain tastes, sounds, images or sensations (like sex)—people will be tempted to devote themselves exclusively to these stimuli while neglecting the underlying need. In the case of food, you have connoisseurs who indeed insist that taste is everything. They neglect both the actual nutritional value of the food and the better things they could do with their resources. If you eat a lot of great food in your life, have you really accomplished anything or just wasted time and money?

The most misunderstood thing about taste is that it isn't constant. Your tastes are going to change based on your body's needs and your own satiation. Even the most fantastic tasting chocolate cake is going to turn bland if you are surrounded by the stuff. Taste can't be nailed down, and if you try, you're going find yourself trapped in your old preferences even after your taste has moved on.

If you stumble upon something that tastes good, by all means enjoy it. Have a second helping! It is a mistake, however, to order a truckload of the stuff or significantly alter your future behavior to get more of it. Just enjoy it for the moment: "Wow, that was really great chocolate cake!"

Because taste is so fleeting, you can't expect that the moment will ever be repeated.

Snow

Water has no right to take this form, and if it does, you need to get away from it if you can.

Snow is solidified water vapor that is nothing but a pain in the butt. If you have to live in it, it makes life much more difficult. It may not be in your power to escape from it, but don't be deluded into thinking it's pleasant or good for you. There's nothing romantic about snow, although people who are trapped in it insist there is. It's just a hindrance.

Snow wouldn't be so bad if it chose to stay in solid form, but in most places it doesn't. It melts, then freezes, then turns to slush. If it gets in your shoes or clothes, it turns to water again and gets in the way of most outdoor activities. (The ideal fluffy snow of the ski slope is rarely encountered in the city.)

Where there is snow—that is, where the temperature stays well below freezing in the winter—life becomes much more complicated. Construction becomes more expensive; heating costs become higher, and homes have to be heated continuously to prevent pipes from freezing. Snow removal can become a significant burden for both municipalities and homeowners. Then there is the problem of transportation in the snow: It's dangerous and difficult. Apart from shoveling snow and expensive ski trips (a vain and useless entertainment), exercising outdoors is difficult, so snow is ultimately bad for your health.

In the snow, you can't live close to the environment. Instead, you have to be bundled up in many layers against it. People who claim to enjoy snow aren't really experiencing it. They're just looking at it through their picture windows and taking occasional forays into it with high-tech equipment. Snow is for the wealthy and well-heated. A few hours trapped in it without shelter would cure them. In its raw form, snow is a killer and has no practical benefit in its favor.

You could say that snow encourages intellectual activities by forcing people indoors, but any form of prison can do this. That doesn't mean that you should choose prison if you have the option to go elsewhere. If you live without the burden of snow, you just have to use your freedom wisely.

You would think that life in warmer places would be more expensive, since there ought to be a premium for comfort, but that's not necessarily true. Life in warm places is usually cheaper! Not only is living in snow uncomfortable, but people have to pay extra for the privilege!

There may be reasons to live north of the snow line, but they have to be good ones—like making a LOT more money. What really counts, however, is ones quality of life, and in the snow, it sucks, regardless of how much money you have.

Don't let water do this to you! If the opportunity arises to escape, do it!


Also see: The Scourge of Humidity (Homeless by Choice, July 2009).

Entertainment

In modern society, entertainment can take a dizzying array of forms, from video games to movies to amusement parks to crossword puzzles to skydiving.

You don’t need any of it and would be better off without it.

You DO NEED exploration, play and enlightenment—that is, an opportunity to expand your experience of the world. Many art forms labeled as “entertainment” can occasionally give this to you. For example, you may see a movie that changes your view of the world and gives you a new set of tools for dealing with your own problems. You may hear a song that sticks with you because it has something meaningful to say relevant to your own life. This isn’t entertainment, I contend, but something more akin to education.

Entertainment is a product. It is usually produced by someone trying to make money and consumed by someone with little self-direction who is seeking stimulation. Because there is money to be made, a big marketing machine is usually pushing entertainment as a worthy use of your resources. Few people question what the machine tells them.

Ride our roller coaster! See our show! The marketing machine wants you to believe your life will be changed by consuming their product. Some entertainment, like a magic or acrobatic show, can be amazingly skilled. You may marvel at the “talent” displayed there, but that doesn’t mean your life is expanded by consuming it.

Entertainment is a passive product. You sit there, and the experience is dispensed to you. It is a lot different when you go out and seek an experience—say, by visiting a country you have never been to before. That is exploration, and although it may be “entertaining”, entertainment isn’t really the purpose of the journey. A cruise, on the other hand, is passive entertainment. The experience is prepared for you, and you have only to consume it.

Everyone ought ride a roller coaster, see a magic show, try a crossword puzzle and take a boat ride—once! However, after the experience is processed and understood, further repetitions of the same thing are a drain on your resources that gains you nothing. Entertainment, like caffeine, is an addiction, not a need.

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Also see: Comedy

Also see: Kilroy Café #16: Mindless Entertainment Wasting Our Planet

Automatic Dishwashers

Automatic home dishwashers are a sure sign of too many dishes in the kitchen. In perfect world, a dishwasher might might make life easier, but in the real world it only defers responsibility and makes home life more complicated.

In the simplest kitchen scenario, when you use a dish, you wash it. The automatic dishwasher adds a whole new layer of bureaucracy—and more opportunities for family members to slough off. Someone has to LOAD the dishwasher, then someone has to RUN it, then someone has to UNLOAD it. Household members are no more inclined to perform these tasks than they would actually washing the dishes, but now they are detached from the tasks by minutes or hours. No longer is cleaning the dish directly attached to dirtying it.

And there's always the political problem of knowing whether the dishes in the dishwasher are clean or dirty. Marketers claim to have solved this problem by selling you reversible signs to paste on the dishwasher saying "Clean" and "Dirty"—but of course nobody ever sets them!

I propose that the kitchen with a dishwasher is no more efficient or "labor-saving" than one without, except that now you've added a complicated piece of unnecessary equipment, requiring capital, energy and maintenance.

It is debatable whether a dishwasher wastes more or less water than hand-washing. (It depends on your water efficiency when hand-washing.) Certainly dishwasher soap is more expensive than standard dish soap. Is a dishwasher more hygienic? Probably, because it uses hotter water, but I contend that our lives are too hygienic to begin with. We NEED a few germs to keep our immune system healthy, and they are all around us anyway.

If you want a simple life and the simplest of all possible cleanup procedures, stock as few dishes and pans as possible and ditch the dishwasher. Then simply wash the dishes as you use them.

Parents: If you can't get your kids to wash the dishes, you're probably not going to get them to clean out the dishwasher either!

More corporate propaganda.