Recreational Vehicles (RVs)

A motor home or travel trailer may sound like a good idea for those with a wanderlust, but it ends up making travel much more complicated, not easier. These ungainly houses-on-wheels are promoted as giving you the "freedom of the open road," but in fact they imprison you. If you really care about traveling, you don't need one.

RVs are for bloated Americans who can't bear to leave home without all their useless Stuff. The RV allows them to carry it all with them! Unfortunately, this also forces them to carry a huge, expensive infrastructure with them, too. Like a fixed home, the RV has to be maintained. Instead of spending your time and resources seeing the world, you're spending them on the RV itself.

I've actually owned an RV (a small one), so I know how useless they are. I would have been far more comfortable in a van or car. Most people who buy a RV make only one or two trips before the magic is gone. Thereafter, the vehicle sits in storage and is merely a burden.

The gas mileage is horrible, and there are a lot of places RVs can't go. This leads to the absurdity of people hauling a regular car behind their RV to use for sightseeing and errands. Your range is also limited when you're in an RV: You can't take it on a plane or boat with you, so you're trapped on the well-worn highways of your current continent.

If you want to experience the road, it is much easier to fly somewhere and rent a car. You keep the car only for as long as you need it, and someone else is responsible for maintaining it. Where do you sleep at night? Try a motel! Anywhere you can plug in a RV you can usually find a cheap motel. You can stay at a lot of Motel 6™s for the cost of an average RV and campground hook-ups. And, again, you use the room only for as long as you need it while someone else is responsible for maintenance.

Better yet, try CAMPING! That's real camping close to nature, not pseudo-camping in an artificial bubble. You will experience the environment directly and learn how to adapt to it! Or how about sleeping in your rental car? Once you get used to it, the back seat of a car be as comfortable as any RV bed.

An RV provides bathroom facilities, but in the rural areas where people typically take their RVs, there are plenty of facilities—everywhere! Try the bushes! If you go in the woods or in public restrooms, there is no holding tank to empty or water system to maintain.

Kitchen facilities? Again, you can buy a lot of nice restaurant meals for the price of an RV with a kitchen. If you are traveling in a rental car, you might not be able to "cook" or "refrigerate", but there are plenty of innovative options you can come up with for cheap eating based on local food sources.

There's hardly any Stuff you need to take with you that you can't buy or rent when you arrive. Instead of hauling a bicycle or kayak with you, you can usually rent one at any scenic attraction where such devices are used. Or try walking on your own two feet, which involves no rental charge.

Unlike a fixed home, an RV depreciates quickly. As soon as you buy it, it starts losing value, so as a financial investment, it is a very poor one. It's also a poor travel investment, because it ties you down to the road you're on.

If you like to travel, then just do it! Just get on a plane and go! You don't need all the excess baggage.

Released from San Antonio, Texas.

Real Estate

It is conventional wisdom that once you have the resources or credit to do so, you need to buy a home. This is supposedly better than renting because for about the same money you are "throwing away" every month in rent, you could be "building equity" in a stable place you can call your own.

The recent housing collapse exposes that fallacy. The people who can walk away unscathed are the renters, while the owners are in dire straights indeed.

In reality, you can't own real estate. Real estate owns you. Once you have engaged it, it starts to dictate your life to suit its own needs, while yours are marginalized.

Unless you have enough money to pay cash, real estate is essentially a 20-30 year rental agreement, vs. the typical 1-year agreement of renting from someone else. It takes a lot of self-confidence to enter into a 30-year contract for anything. It implies that you know where you are going to be in 30 years and have your life all worked out. You MAY be able to get out of the contract at an earlier date by selling the real estate, but this is by no means guaranteed. At the end of the 20-30 years you may own your home outright and no longer be required to pay rent, but at that point you're approaching the end of your life, and the value of the home—indeed the value of money itself—may not be the same to you.

You can make a lot of money in real estate, but you can also lose your shirt. Life is too short for that kind of speculation with the bulk of your resources. It's like going into a casino and wagering everything you have (and everything you will have for the next 30 years) on a single roll of the dice. No matter how good the odds look, you don't need that kind of risk.

People will always need places to live, the conventional wisdom goes, so the value of real estate is always going to rebound in the long run. Think again! People need places to sleep, shower, changes clothes and eat, but that don't need the vast spaces they have come to see as their birthright. Especially in the post-internet era when so much of people's lives is virtual, they need very little space to live comfortably or impress others—e.g. 100 square feet and an interesting website, not 2000 square feet plus 5000 square feet of empty lawn.

What happens when people have more living space than they need? They start collecting Things They Don't Need! Whatever space is available, it will soon be filled with junk—dubious art objects, needy pets, appliances that are never used, clothing that is never worn and food that will probably never be eaten. Instead of just being a place to stay, the home become a shrine to its owner, a tastefully decorated personal museum that hardly anyone ever sees and that will eventually be liquidated in a garage sale.

Then the space itself needs maintenance, so you need cleaning supplies and tools. You need a lawnmower for the lawn, vacuum cleaner for the carpet, ladders to paint the house and a security system to protect it all from theft. As soon as it is "owned", a home can quickly mushroom into a vast, unwieldy empire that absorbs all of ones extra time, energy and money.

If you merely rent, you may also collect TYDN, but the tendency is much less, knowing that you may move in a year. Renters are less invested in their home, which may be bad for maintenance of the property but good for every other aspect of their life.

Your highest calling is not necessarily to be a financial investor or a museum curator. Shouldn't you be, above all, a creative entity? Creativity implies and requires the ability to move, to shift gears and change location, to follow the muse and opportunities wherever they lead. Real estate ownership inevitably constrains that.

The choice often comes down to: Do you want to accomplish great things, see the world, solve important problems, explore new creative avenues—or do you want to spend your life paying for and maintaining a piece of real estate?

You can't take it with you. It's cold comfort to eventually live in your home rent-free only to discover that a huge portion of your creative potential has already vanished.

Safety Experts

"You can never be too safe."

That's the proposition peddled by safety experts. There are threats everywhere, and you've got to be constantly vigilant against them. Predators lurk on the internet, rapists at every highway rest stop, germs on every bathroom surface. Identity theft will rob you of everything you have. Impurities lurk in public water supplies and deep within your intestinal system. Carbohydrates should be avoided, or is it fat or sugar? All around you is danger, danger, danger...

Unless you buy the safety expert's product or service.

There is no shortage of people eager to give you advice on how to protect yourself—some of it no doubt wise. Each expert, however, inevitably goes overboard in promoting his own chosen threat. A terrorism expert is going to pump up the threat of terrorism, even though the actual chance of it happening to you is infinitesimally small. Police officers will tell you horror stories about crime. Dentists give you unending lectures on dental hygiene, while home security experts will inevitably recommend home security systems. The experts' livelihood and ego are tied up in making his threat seem bigger than it is and convincing you to attend to it more than you normally would.

The fact is, there is no safety. It's an illusion. If you obsess over one safety issue, you are inevitably creating an opening for another, which tends to sneak up on you unannounced and grab you from behind. For example, if a nation dwells too much on terrorism, problems with its economy might go unattended and ultimately cause far worse suffering than any terrorist attack.

Instead, life is a game of probabilities. You can reduce the chances of a certain calamity happening, but you can never eliminate it, and it is unwise to try because attempting to purge that last sliver of risk can be enormously costly and distract you from much bigger threats.

Life is a dynamic balance of risks and opportunities, and it is this balance that the experts rarely seem to grasp. They always want you to attend to their risk above all the others, but if you do so you'll probably end up less safe overall while your real quality of life deteriorates.

Safety is always a double edged sword. You need it to stay alive, but if you focus too much on any one threat, you're going to pay a price in freedom. Every lock you place on your life to keep the bad things out is also going to trap you inside and make it more difficult for you to move and adapt. A life of perfect security is also known as "prison," and even a prison is never as safe as it seems to be.

Everything you do in life presents risks, and you've got to calculate those risks whenever you choose a course of action. It's okay to listen to an expert's advice (or a friend's) but you have to understand that it is a skewed assessment of risk based on the adviser's own personal investments. Your job is to evaluate all the risks, not just the one the expert is peddling.

After you've calculated the probabilities, you're going to have to accept some risk. There is no safe path through life. You will have to make a safety compromise, take a chance and plunge ahead.

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Also see Kilroy Cafe #20: Kill the Experts!

Mental Clutter

Back in the early days of computers, every second of computing time was considered precious. On mainframes, users were billed for the CPU time their program used. Computing time was horrendously expensive, so people wrote their programs to use as little of it as possible. Each program was run in sequence (or "batched"), and when the computer got to your program (stored on punch cards or paper tape), it performed the task quickly then sent you the bill.

Today, computing is ridiculously cheap. Today's personal computers can do more that a multimillion dollar room-size computers a few decades ago, so no one thinks much about CPU usage. As long as your own computer has sufficient capacity for the task at hand (say, the word processing program I am using now), no one cares how efficient the program is or what empy processes are running in the background.

Unfortunately, the same oversupply of computing power does not apply to the human brain. If you think of the brain as a biological computer, its physical capacity hasn't changed in thousands of years. "CPU time" is still extraordinarily precious. Everything though you think takes time. You have think about things sequentially—first about one problem, then another—and at the end of the day, there are only a limited number of thinking units available to you. The physical machine also has a limited lifespan—longer that a typical PC but certainly not infinite.

In your own universe, your brain is the most expensive and valuable mainframe you have. Why, then, would you want to throw any of its capacity away?

People can be very efficient with their thinking time when they are focused on an important task, like writing a report or bringing an airplane in for a landing, but as soon as you give them the freedom to use their brain time as they wish, they seem intent on wasting it.

It is not a waste of brain to just sit and think, as long as the topics covered are important. Daydreaming is not necessarily a misuse of the brain's CPU time either, because that's often how you solve real-world problems. There is nothing wrong with staring into space and free-associating, because this is the way we process our past experiences and plan our future actions.

What is a waste of mental resources are all those millions of outside products and diversions that do nothing for us except soak up CPU time. Crossword puzzles and video games are prime examples. Vast swathes of brain time are absorbed by these devices with nothing to show for them in the end. Come to think of it, just about everything marketed as entertainment is a mental time waster of some kind. People are always seeking "stimulation" in their entertainment—that is, a high occupation of mental resources—but it isn't usually meaningful stimulation that contributes anything to their lives.

It seems as though most people want to waste their own brain capacity. They drink to avoid using it. They "party." They watch meaningless TV shows for hours every day. They have those iPod thingys stuck in their ears at all times so there's no possibility of any conscious thought intruding.

Perhaps this is the most destructive addiction of all: the addiction to thought avoidance.

This disease manifests itself as "boredom" whenever ones mental time isn't fully programmed. Boredom is like the smoker's craving for a cigarette or an alcoholic's lust for drink. As soon as most people have "nothing to do," they panic and try desperately to fill the mental space with something.

And it isn't just video games that fill the void. A voracious reader can be just as much an addict. Is he reading because of the real benefit he is getting from the content or because of the anxiety he feels whenever he sits alone without anything to process?

Why do people avoid their own thoughts? Perhaps it is because those thoughts keep leading them to unpleasant conclusions. If you feel, deep down, that you are worthless or have made mistakes you can't deal with, your unhindered thoughts are always going to lead you back there. If you keep your brain continuously occupied, then you never have to think those thoughts. When the amusements run out, though, that's when panic strikes and you look for something, anything, to keep the bad thoughts at bay.

If you care about doing something useful with your own mental capacity, you can't be swayed by boredom or panic. Instead, you must only do things with your brain time that make sense. Like CPU time on a mainframe, your "thought space" is something you need to protect and never waste. Like any other precious resource, it has to be carefully managed.

You can never tell your brain exactly what to think, but you can manage the environment in which it operates. If there is too much clutter in that environment, you're not going to get a lot of useful thinking done. If you are constantly being interrupted by outside stimuli, it is going to be difficult to accomplish much complex higher-level creativity. If you turn off the radio, remove the Bluetooth from your ear, turn of the laptop and withdraw temporarily from people, the quality of your thinking processes will probably improve.

Those are exactly the conditions that most people equate with "boredom," but if you are wise, you will learn how to work with boredom and make it your friend. Only by being comfortable with your own thoughts can you make the most of your brain capacity.

Automatic Toilet Flushers

Since the dawn of the technological era, the marketing emphasis has been on "automatic"—automatic toasters, automatic clothes washers, automatic transmissions, etc.—that is, devices designed to reduce human labor and attention by performing routine and repetitive tasks without complaint. In fact, some of this contraptionology is highly USEFUL, allowing you to spend minutes on a mechanical chore that once took hours. There comes a point, however, where automation goes too far, when it starts to become a false substitute for human responsibility.

Take the automatic toilet flusher. It sounds like a good idea: As you approach the bowl or urinal, the device senses your presence, and as you draw away it graciously flushes the waste for you, no touch required. It seems like another brilliant labor-saving and health-preserving device, since the customer no longer has to exert pressure on the handle and contact any potential "germs" that might reside there.

Unfortunately, the net effect of these devices is to train the public not to flush toilets, so when they encounter an old manual device they decline to activate it. The automatic flushing of some well-heeled toilets results in the net unflushing of less heeled ones and probably a reduced rate of courteous flushing overall.

This is due to both trained sloth and overactive health consciousness engendered by the automatic devices. People who are used to automatic toilets may simply forget to flush manual ones, but they may also become squeamish about touching something someone else has touched, given the implied message that touching is bad.

The same problem applies to automatic light switches that turn on when you enter the room and turn off when you leave, thus training people to never turn off a light switch on their own. These devices don't necessarily improve our lives overall because they disengage us from fixing problems that our own actions create. They just add another layer of maintenance and technological complexity to our life with no net improvement to its quality.

The old manual devices were pretty reliable, performing their tasks for years with little complaint. The new products are less stable, require far more maintenance, and are more often found broken. In places where they seem to work flawlessly, like in hotels and airports, there is usually a well-funded maintenance structure in place to keep them that way. In "ordinary" restrooms, homes and public places, these automatic mechanisms are just another thing to go wrong.

And what about the "germs" supposedly contacted by manual use of these devices? Whatever a "germ" may be (since this is a marketing term, not a scientific one), they are everywhere and you can't avoid them. The paper money and coins you touch every day probably carry more potentially disease-causing agents than any toilet handle, but these agents rarely cause disease because the human immune system guards against it. In fact, the immune system needs regular contact with threats to keep it healthy and active.

There is an endless array of such supposedly "labor-saving" devices on the market, from automatic can openers to automatic kitty box strainers. Many of these products requires more effort to set up and maintain than any labor actually saved—plus they cost money and take up space! Sometimes, they are only used once or twice until their uselessness becomes clear then they are set aside in semi-permanent storage.

As useful as it may sometimes be, automation usually has the effect of isolating people from their environment and from the effects of their own actions. For example, when a toilet gets flushed, by any means, where does the waste go? Most people don't have a clue. It just "goes away." Therefore, they feel comfortable flushing anything down the john, knowing that it will somehow be taken care of.

The word "automatic" ought to be a warning sign. It could be a device that saves a trivial amount labor in the short term but invites substantial dysfunction over time.

Addiction Treatment

Once you recognize that you or someone you care about has an addiction—be it to drugs, alcohol, pornography, shopping or any other destructive habit or attitude—what's the treatment for it? In short, there isn't any.

Addiction treatment is a huge industry ranging from smoking cessation patches to expensive residential rehab programs to educational classes designed to teach addicts or potential addicts the dangers of drugs. Nearly all of it is ineffective by any statistical measure. Lots of programs can provide short term relief—if nothing else by separating the addict from his source of drugs—but in the long term, most programs are no more successful than a placebo in preventing relapse. Even when a program can statistically prove success, the results are so marginal that they hardly justify the huge cost.

Addiction treatment, of any kind, is a fraud. It simply doesn't work.

You can wear a Nicoderm™ patch to stop smoking or take methadone to get off heroin, and they seem to work at first, but then how do you get off methadone or Nicoderm? So much of what is called "treatment" is like that: just substituting one addiction for another.

This grim assessment may seem to be at odds with the many ex-addicts who claim that Alcoholics Anonymous or some other treatment system saved their life. They honestly believe this, but that doesn't mean it's true.

You could test the hypothesis by assigning addicts randomly to one of two different groups: Alcoholics Anonymous and some other "placebo" social group, like a hiking club, with no treatment component. In that case, research seems to show that there would be no substantial difference in relapse rates, and some people in the second group would claim that the hiking club saved their life!

The people who praise AA are the ones who succeeded, who already made the commitment to change and who would have latched onto any program available to them. AA may seem to be the cure, but really it came from within.

The only real cure for addiction is the addict getting so beaten up by the bad effects of his behavior that he makes his own decision to change. No outside "program" can do that for him. In fact, the availability of treatment may only serve to give the addict one more excuse not to quit: "I have a disease; someone else has to fix me."

Addiction is a philosophical disease as much as a chemical one. It's the natural consequence of fatalism. The central issue is a self-fulfilling prophesy: If you think you can kick the habit and decide to do it, then you will. If you don't think you can do it and choose not to, then you won't. It seems like a simple little switch in the brain that could go either way, but people become emotionally invested in fatalism, and those investments are the main barrier to change, not the chemistry per se.

If I decide to take control of my life now, then I have to accept that all those stupid things I did in the past were my own damn fault, not someone else's. People aren't comfortable with that kind of regret, so they resist changing their philosophy.

No outside force can make you more responsible for your own actions. Other than the molding of childhood and the hard lessons of experience, self-responsibility is simply unteachable. There are, however, plenty of ways to make people feel less responsible for their own actions, and one of them is offering cures from the outside.

All forms of addiction treatment send a philosophically defective message: "We will rescue you." Given such assurance, the addict has no reason to exert his own control. That's fundamentally why treatment doesn't work.

What does work? As a friend or family member, your options are limited. One route is to completely remove the addict from the environment in which the addiction takes place. If you take a child out of the home of addicts and place him in a home with no culture of drug abuse, you are likely to change his own propensity for addiction. Unfortunately, this really only works with children, since adults tend to carry their addictive philosophy with them and will reconstruct new addictions to replace the old ones. If you move your spouse to a new city to try to get him away from a bad crowd, it means you are treating him as a child and are giving him a free pass to act like one.

The only other thing you can do is withdraw your protection for the addict, so he experiences the effects of his behavior as directly as possible. If he gets falling-down drunk, then he needs to fall down, with no one there to catch him. If painful consequences happen to him enough times, he might change or he might not, but it usually offers better odds than any treatment program.

The barriers you encounter in this second option may be inside you as much him. Are you willing to let your spouse or family member fall? What will happen to your investments together? The key problem may be your own addiction to enabling his addiction. "I must rescue him," you tell yourself. "I have no choice."

As soon as you say, "I have no choice," you're doomed. There are always options, just not pleasant ones. Escaping from addiction always involves pain, but so does not escaping. If you choose less pain overall, then you will take whatever unpleasant actions are necessary now to achieve a better long-term outcome.

If you believe you "have no choice," then you're an addict yourself!

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Also see: addiction, caffeine.

Also see Kilroy Café #22: "Words Don't Work"



Also see my comments on an L.A. Times article: Shaming Johns (another dubious "scared straight" program).

Addiction

We live in a society that actively promotes addiction. It isn't just chemical dependencies that seduce people, but behavioral addictions of all kinds. Obviously, you can be addicted to cocaine, alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, but also to television, fashion, running, travel and mountaineering. Any behavior that is repeated impulsively detracts from one's quality of life, not matter how harmless it may seem on the surface.

Addiction lies at the core of the commercial agenda. It is the mode of human behavior that advertisers are always trying to promote. They want you to get hooked on their product—Diet Coke™, Playstation 2™, Major League Baseball™, etc.—and lust for it just as automatically as a smoker longs for a cigarette.

People may also say, with some pride, that they are addicted to apparently healthy things, like exercise, volunteer work, gardening or listening to National Public Radio. Aren't these good addictions to have?

I say, no, nearly all addictions are bad for you in the long term, even running or NPR. We all engage in addictive behaviors during the course of our lives, but our ultimate goal should be to live without them.

How do we define an addiction? It is a repetitive behavior that serves no functional need (at least compared to the alternatives) and that provides no real satisfaction when repeated. The behavior is engaged in not for its positive effects but mainly because of the anxiety one feels when not doing it.

Why does a smoker have to light up every hour? It is because of the anxiety that overwhelms him when he doesn't smoke. This is due to the reduction of nicotine levels in the blood, but all the smoker knows is that he is starting to feel really bad. The cigarette itself doesn't provide much pleasure, except in the sense of ending pain, but it relieves the smoker's unpleasant feelings by restoring his blood nicotine levels.

Smokers may say that the cigarette gives them "pleasure" or "relaxation," and for years cigarettes were marketed on those terms, but any smoker who is honest with himself (and any spouse of a smoker) knows that isn't true. It's the anxiety of deprivation that drives the activity, not the purported reward.

It's not much different with the addicted runner, traveler or public radio listener. They may talk about the pleasures or practical benefits of the activity, but it's really anxiety that pushes them to repeat it over and over.

All addictions are powered by the primitive parts of the brain that regulate emotion. At the basic neurological level, the runner's anxiety when he is blocked from his activity is similar to the cocaine addict's feelings when deprived of the drug. This brain circuitry exists because it regulates sex and human bonding. The unpleasant feelings of the runner or drug addict are similar to the anxiety of a young child separated from his mother or lovers separated from each other.

The longing for sex can be as powerful and addictive as cocaine, and for good reason: Nature wants to hold a man and woman together long enough for them to raise children. Couples have far more sex than is necessary for procreation because it is a bonding device designed to keep drawing the partners back to each other. In fact, love can be thought of as addiction in its purest form.

Love, sex and bonding are "good" forms of addiction—or at least they are so integral to the human species that they cannot be separated from us. All of those other addictions, however, are parasitic ones, riding on the same circuitry but not doing any useful work.

How do you identify an addiction? You know it because (a) the behavior deviates from functional need, and (b) you are drawn into it by an unnamed anxiety, not by reason.

"Functional need" is what you must do to survive and pursue positive goals. For example, your need for food isn't an addiction. You truly need it to survive, and your body is eventually going to shut down if you don't have it. Cheesecake, however, is not a functional need. You aren't going to die if deprived of it (provided you have other food available). The need for cheesecake is, in a sense, all in your head. It's a neurological problem, not a physical one.

Why do you eat cheesecake? You might say that the pleasurable taste draws you in, but this is true only for a while. True flavor is never sustained when you eat the same food over and over. Any food addict knows that it's really anxiety that drives him to eat: the unpleasant feelings when he thinks about cheesecake but tries to deprive himself of it. After he has broken down and eaten it, he doesn't feel good about himself, and he may acknowledge that the taste wasn't that thrilling, but at least the anxiety is reduced.

As long as you are obeying your anxiety and not what you "know" is good for you, you are going to be hurt by an addiction. The addictive behavior may not cause direct damage, but invariably it will displace more productive activities.

This is true even with seemingly good addictions. If you run for hours every day, you have far exceeded any true health benefit and are instead stealing time from the more important activities of living.

Are you listening to public radio because of all the useful information you are receiving or because of the anxiety you feel when the radio is turned off? Only you can say. The cost of a radio addiction is the opportunity to think your own thoughts and work through the problems of the day.

Even useful activities can be bad if repeated blindly, because you aren't exercising of your experience and wisdom. Just because the activity looks healthy doesn't mean it's the most important thing to do at the time.

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Also see my essay on addiction: Words Don't Work.

Also see: caffeine, soft drinks, addiction treatment.

The illustration above is from a New York Times article: A Small Part of the Brain, and Its Profound Effects (2/6/07)