What Was Your Bottleneck?

There’s a concept in evolutionary biology that applies quite well to the course of your life, and that is the notion of a bottleneck. The concept is simple:

A bottleneck is when the population of a species undergoes a sudden and massive reduction. Taken literally, this only applies to your life when you die. Source: Wikipedia

As the graph shows, a population bottleneck is a disaster for a species. It could lead to the extinction of the entire race. It could forever cripple the species, reducing genetic diversity and dislodging them from their ecological niche.

Or, it could transform the species into something brilliant.

A population bottleneck is a crisis. Regardless of the cause (and the cause can be anything from disease to climate change to a new predator), something has disrupted the normal function of the species. The old rules no longer apply. Variations that were once neutral or even slightly negative can emerge triumphant. Crucially, the actions of each individual organism now have great impact on the destiny of the species as a whole.

A bottleneck might wipe out species, or it might break them. Then again, it might trigger drastic changes that would otherwise have never needed to take place. It is even believed that this happened to us in our evolutionary history, pushing our intelligence into full-blown sentience.

We all have moments like that in our personal histories. Everything was normal, then out of nowhere, catastrophe. Maybe the disaster was sudden. Maybe it was persistent, lasting months or even years. Maybe it broke you, or maybe it transformed you into something better. One thing’s for certain – no one comes through a bottleneck unchanged.

I can think of two examples in my life that I’d describe as drastic, transformational catastrophes. The first was when my kindergarten teacher bullied me. Honestly, I don’t remember the specific incident, but it wouldn’t have been at all out of character for her. You all know the type – the teacher that hates kids. Anyway, I was quite an outgoing, adventurous child. Now I’m an introverted weirdo who blogs using inappropriate analogies from population genetics. I have every reason to believe that this incident was the trigger. Whether you believe that or not, it doesn’t matter – the point is, you have to admit that it could be true. That’s the sort of event in a child’s life that can create a bottleneck.

The second example follows on from the first. During my teen years I was awkward and introverted. Not much has changed in that regard. But during those long, lonely years, the isolation forced me to develop a sense of creativity. Years later, this creativity lead to an exploration of sketching, painting and, yes, writing. Now I’m an introverted weirdo who blogs using inappropriate analogies from population genetics.

Pressure creates diamonds. Disasters inspire change. These aren’t always good things, but the change is always there. Identifying the moments that defined you is critical to proper self-awareness.

The only question that remains is, are bottlenecks more powerful than lollypops?

Eden of the South

Picture your ideal world. Can you do it? Mine’s quite simple. I want to live in a world capable of dealing with any problem it faces. I want agility, with change coming rapidly when needed, but stability in the face of turmoil. I want rationality married to intuition, with each way of thinking knowing its limits, to be applied across the board.

Do you ever get the feeling that our problems, even the most insurmountable, could be solved with a little creativity and common effort? I know I do. But if you don’t… wouldn’t it be brilliant to live in such a world?

Here’s my vision: every country, every generation, faces problems. There isn’t a culture in history that hasn’t been beset by challenges that dwarf comprehension. But what if, what if, we could equip ourselves to handle whatever the universe has to throw at us. Such a culture would be free, strong, enduring but not rigid. Common sense being common. Wisdom being ubiquitous.

Is this even possible? I’m the first to point out any human system is subject to failure. But we don’t have to aim for perfection. We don’t need everyone dedicated towards a single goal. We don’t need to eradicate selfishness, crime, greed, capitalism, government or any other universally human trait.

Think about democracy. If its goal is to allow governance to continue but keep power with the people, it is overwhelmingly successful. Flawed, angry, violent, petty people hold the power. People who would gladly see democracy burn hold the power. People hold the power. And yet it works. My perfect world is closer to us than our democratic world was to the oppressed. It isn’t just that change can happen, but change must happen. So let’s channel change, again.

The Enlightenment happened centuries ago. Rationality, objectivity and the scientific method have proven their worth a thousand times over in the time it’s taken you to read this sentence. And everywhere that democracy has genuinely flourished, real freedoms have followed. In short, the Enlightenment works. The principles of rationality and freedom it stood for are right.

So why does it have to keep convincing the world of this?

What we need is a new way of operating. This is the 21^st Century, maybe it’s time we started acting like it. Governments, companies and morals are functioning under old paradigms, and we won’t be able to cope with the old world, let alone the new, without a change to the system. Enlightenment 2.0. iLightenment. A modern approach to the digital universe.

Ironically, tradition is vital if we want change to succeed. We need the best values from the Enlightenment and religion, coupled to the lessons of history. We need change and progress, but rebuilding society from the ground up would be disastrous. But the values we keep have to be modern. Traditions that strangle us need to be done away with. Charity is essential in the new millennium, yet homophobia is toxic.

So here we are. Change is inevitable, but it can be guided. If we know what we are doing, change can always be for the better, as long as certain immutable values like freedom and sanctity of life remain constant. Don’t fear change. It’s our only way to survive.

Global communications married to mobile computing give us incalculable power. But technology is the least dramatic change the new millennium is offering. We are starting to understand how to deal with human systems. True leaders are starting to emerge, empowered by the new reality we face. True leaders – not managers, not administrators, not politicians, but leaders – are treating people not as assets, not as minions, but as unique, sophisticated resources. And in doing so, they are inspiring change.

People and technology. These are the keys to influence and success in the 21^st Century. Ideas are the most valuable commodity, the most potent weapons, the greatest allies, and only through a deep understanding, appreciation and respect for both people and technology can you hope to have and use any ideas worth a damn. Physical commodities are nothing. The new resource boom is mental.

So here’s what we need from ourselves and each other – we need ideas, we need good ideas and we need action. In that order, for many bad ideas are the breeding grounds of the truly revolutionary concepts. And action, real action, is vital. We need 21^st Century leaders to take these ideas and harness them through 21^st Century technologies to reach and inspire 21^st Century people.

Then we need 21^st Century action, led first by people with an endless appetite for risk, then by everyone. Petitions and pestering your friends and family is an ancient and outdated approach. We need novel techniques if we want to generate social progress. Do we want to change opinion, or behaviour? The approach must reflect the goal.

Ideas, generated by an endless churning of motivated people and inspired use of technology.

Good ideas, filtered through the potent gauzes of rationality, objectivity and, where appropriate, a touch of intuition.

Action, led by people who believe in the idea, who are willing to be the first of many to stand up and shout from the rooftops. Done right, action will feed back into the people and technology.

If we have the above as a process, we can adapt. We can solve any problem. And we are so close to this I can taste it. We have a critical mass of ideas, endlessly refreshed by technology-enabled people. We have the tools and techniques to harvest the best ideas and bring them to the surface. And we have the true leaders capable of making ideas, realities.

All we need is a spark to get this cycle moving. And then, maybe after the world has been saved, the Enlightenment can be called complete.

Unsolicited Health Advice

You didn’t ask for it, and you won’t take it. But here are two simple tips that anyone can adopt that will instantly and dramatically improve your health.

Eat More Veggies

There are few people in Western countries who eat enough vegetables. Hate to break it to you, but you don’t. Those five servings a day you’re not getting is the minimum, not the required amount, and boiled veggies don’t count (well, unless you use the water for soup or something).

Forget meat and three veg – lunch and dinner should both be more vegetable than meat. A salad on the side is better than nothing, but a veggie-heavy stirfry is better still. Fortunately everything from burgers to pasta sauces to soup can easily be modified to accommodate these improvements.

Potatoes don’t count unless you leave the skin on, so don’t go trying to count chips. And tomato paste never counts.

Oh and the usual rules are in play – fresh is better than frozen or tinned; variety is better than monotony; raw is better than cooked; anything is better than nothing.

Drink More Water

Years back people were saying you should be drinking two litres, or eight glasses, of water per day. This was later found to be baseless, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness we don’t have to drink that much!”

A couple of comments, if I may:

One is that two litres really isn’t that much. And eight glasses of water is only two litres if they are tiny – a can of soft drink is 50% bigger than that. I don’t drink two litres every day but I rarely fall short of 1.5 litres, and often I drink much more. This isn’t some attempt to prove anything – this is how much water I find myself needing.

If you think you drink enough water, then let me ask you: do you ever feel tired when you shouldn’t? Is your appetite too high or too low? Do you ever find it hard to concentrate? Do you find yourself feeling sick, or actually falling sick, more often than you’d like? No guarantee that any of this is dehydration, but it’s a pretty cheap fix if it is.

Thirst is different from hunger. If you are thirsty, then you’ve been dehydrated for a while. You need to keep your fluids up, and recognise the signs before thirst sets in.

These are just two things you can do to feel healthier, but these are probably your biggest bang for buck. Important caveat though – both vegetables and water are fatal in large doses, and the fatal dose is probably less than you think.

Red Queen Regicide

It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. – The Red Queen, Alice in Wonderland

It’s easy to fall into a rut. Really, the difficulty is keeping yourself out of them. Not that they are always a bad thing – having a routine is nice. But a routine gives your life rhythm or, perhaps, a foundation, while a rut is a very small room with no doors or windows. It’s a prison, one you design and build yourself, and that’s what makes so powerful.

The analogy might be tacky, but it works. By contrast, there’s nothing more freeing than breaking into new ground, trying something fresh and exciting. Novel horizons aren’t just tantalising, they are invigorating.

Ruts suck. Instability sucks. Somewhere in between there’s a happy medium where you have a decent structure to your life with room and opportunities to grow.

So far, I haven’t said anything that you won’t already find teeming in the bloated, underqualified genre of so-called self-help books and other personal philosophy nonsense. Just to really tap into that market: love yourself, maintain healthy relationships, project confidence, show gratitude, never think another bad thought ever again. You’re welcome.

But enough of that. There’s a particular type of trap you can build for your life, a special flavour of rut, that I call a Red Queen Rut. It’s a horrifying type of prison, not merely one you have allowed yourself to fall in to but one where you can’t get out no matter how hard you try. In fact, the very act of trying becomes a rut in itself. You can’t stop trying to break out of it, but you can’t just surrender either.

This is the type of rut where you have gone on your seventh first date in a row without a second one. Where you spend months applying for a better job without success. Where you diet and exercise without any improvement to your health. Where you can’t stop writing but no one will start reading. These are bad situations to find yourself in. If you are merely perpetually single, you can focus your energy on learning the guitar, playing video games, masturbating, whatever, but dating is an expensive and time-consuming activity. Coupled with the string of rejections, it’s a brutal trap to be in.

I won’t offer any advice as to how to defeat this curse of the mind, but I will spell out your options for you. Make your own choice but don’t blame me.

1) Give Up

Not as bad as it sounds. Giving up means you surrender the pursuit and thus free yourself from the Red Queen Rut, only to slide back into the rut you were trying to escape. If you can’t find a better job, re-examine your existing situation. Maybe it isn’t so bad. Maybe it is, but you’re better off investing your efforts elsewhere, like training. That time and money you spent in interviews could be spent developing your resume or taking time out to relax. Be warned, though – while accepting your current situation could be considered a brave move, pretending you are fine with it when you clearly aren’t is the sort of cowardice that will make you miserable.

2) Persevere

This is the cliché advice all your friends will tell you. Just hang in there. Don’t give up hope. I’m sure it will work out soon. And who knows, they might be right. You could spend three years unsuccessfully dating and then meet your future spouse riding the bus. Then again, maybe you won’t. To keep doing what you’ve been doing when it hasn’t been working is a risky option, but it’s appealing because it’s familiar. Taking this path means making no changes, so make sure if you pick this it’s because it’s the objectively best option, not just the easiest.

3) Change

Your attempts to get you out of the rut haven’t worked, and have just put you in a new one. You can’t go back to the old rut but you can’t keep this up. So, change. Your exercise regime isn’t making you lose weight, but maybe it needs less weightlifting and more cardio. Maybe you need a gym partner. Maybe you are exercising too early in the morning or too late in the evening. Maybe you need to learn some recipes that are quick, tasty and low in calories. If you want to change, really want to change, then this is much better than either of the above. But it will require some thought.

4) Total System Reboot

Completely change everything. Move to a new city, a new country. Get a job in an entirely new industry. Try hobbies unlike anything you’ve considered before. Project and emphasise a different part of your personality. Burn your existing life to the ground and start over. I guarantee you, you’ll get out of your rut.

NB: Don’t take lifestyle advice from a blog with “beer” in the name. I say again, this is your choice and I accept none of the blame.

How to Drink Diet Soft Drinks

Soft drink is bad for you.

Whoa, whoa, I know. Controversial stuff I know. I don’t think I’m being too out of line in saying this, and I don’t feel the particular need to prove it. It’s junk food, we’re all intelligent adults and we all make the decision to drink soft drinks knowing full well the health consequences.

Or do we?

Saying that soft drink is bad for you is one thing, but what if I were to tell you that soft drink is bad for you even by junk food standards? You might think soft drinks are fairly okay – sure, they are high in sugar, but they don’t have complex carbs or fats or much in the way of nasty additives, all of which is true. But soft drink does have one thing that hamburgers don’t – a liquid form.

The fact that soft drinks are, well, drinks, is actually fairly significant. Wikipedia tells me that a can of Coke (355 mL, so not a real can but close enough) has 39 grams of sugar in it, which at 1,576 kJ / 100g is a bit over 600 kJ. To put this in more familiar terms, drinking three cans of Coke gives you about the same energy intake as 100g of Arnott’s Shapes (which is over half of one of those boxes). The thing is, eating all those Shapes will leave you feeling pretty full whereas those cans would do little, if anything, to your appetite. Liquid calories count towards your waistline but not to your rumbling stomach. Heck, there’s nothing to stop you from eating 100g of Shapes after drinking three cans of Coke. Well, apart from shame. Or is it pride?

A side effect of this is that companies are able to up the size of bottles without anyone noticing. Per bottle it costs them little to whack on an extra 30%, which means they can increase the price a modest amount, make a good profit while still delivering better value for money to the consumer. The twist is, you are consuming more calories that your hunger doesn’t register. Increasing the size of a burger has an upper limit where most people won’t be able to eat it, so the value for money is less, but soft drinks don’t suffer from this. A bucket of lemonade goes down about as easily as a bucket of water, despite the massive energy difference.

The above two paragraphs are summed up nicely in a graph published in the International Journal of Obesity:

This applies to more than just lemonade and cola. Cordial, juice, even wine and beer suffer from this. Any beverage with energy content greater than zero is just one more way that nature will mess with you.

Which brings me to diet soft drinks. Surely these are the best of both worlds – sweet flavour, zero calories? Ahh, but you are dealing with human bodies and human brains, shaped by millions of years of evolution, during which they were facing the constant threat of starvation. Tricking them is not quite so easy, as it turns out. Here is a dramatization of what happens when you ingest artificial sweetener:

Your brain: Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, oh boy oh boy oh boy! Sweetness? Yes, definite sweetness! I can’t wait to get some of that sugar! Glucose helps me function and gives a nice tickle to the pleasure centres. Sex, sex, sex, sex, hmm, I wonder what’s taking so long. Normally the sugar has hit the bloodstream by now… come on… sex, sex, SEX I TASTED SWEETNESS WTF, what are you playing at, bloodstream? Sex, sex, sugar, sugar, sugar, sex, sugar, sugar SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR!

What a drama queen. But it has every right to be upset – according to both the genes it inherited from our plain-walking ancestors and a lifetime of experience, sweetness is followed by a sugar rush to the brain. If there is sweetness but not sugar, the brain figures something has gone wrong and demands what it was promised, in the form of you craving food.

Don’t believe me? Take this study as an example. Three groups of people were given water, lemonade and artificially-sweetened lemonade, respectively. The next day there was no difference between those who had water or lemonade, but for those who had the artificial sweetener, there was a distinct increase in the amount of carbohydrates consumed. In fact, those who had tried to trick their brains with false promises of sweetness ended up consuming more calories than if they’d just gone for the real stuff to start with. This effect has been reported with artificial sweeteners used in solid food as well.

Which brings me back to the title of this article: how do you drink diet soft drinks? The answer is, you don’t. A number of artificial sweeteners have proven health consequences, and as it turns out, none of them work – trying to eliminate calories through these chemicals leads you to seek out the energy elsewhere. You can pretend that this doesn’t apply to you, that your willpower is stronger than those studied, but you’re wrong. Cutting back on calories requires more cunning and finesse than a simple substitution; it requires a full rethink to how you approach food. Sorry boys and girls, but I’m afraid that like everything else in life, the quick-fixes don’t work.

The Best Zombie Survival Plan

Everyone (well, everyone who is prepared) has a zombie plan. The more paranoid among us have several, and the true enthusiasts have several for each type of zombie. After all, if your plan involves running away but you are faced with fast, 28-Days-Later-style zombies but you were expecting something that shuffles at you, well… good luck to you.

All zombie plans are essentially the same. First you secure yourself, and then you secure resources like food, shelter and weapons. There are plenty of variations, such as finding something fortifiable with lots of food (the Shopping Centre approach), or to say goodbye to your brainchomping neighbours and hotfoot it to the country (the Rural Gambit). Some of these will work against some strains of zombies, but all rely on a lot of luck to succeed. But that’s okay. Enduring the apocalypse is a function of probability, so wear your rabbit clover or four-leafed horseshoe or whatever.

But that’s where most zombie plans end. After that, it’s a question of riding out the storm and hoping the military saves your statistically unlikely arses. Who knows, maybe you’ll be doubly lucky and find yourself holed up with the one person with a natural immunity to the virus/parasite/annoying yet oddly catchy song that gets stuck in your head for days on end that turns you into a mindless monster, along with someone with enough lab experience to be able to extract and replicate the resistance. Congratulations! You are humanity’s best hope, all because you were in the right place at the right time 50 times in a row.

Fate, save us all. Our best hope is some lucky bastard.

Let’s assume this doesn’t happen, though. Let’s assume you are trapped in the shopping centre with 26… ooh, make that 25, shame about Jimmy… other traumatised weirdos, vainly attempting to grow crops on the roof using mouldy seeds you found in the burger joint in the food court, every now and then dropping morally-justified retribution on the hordes of the dead gathering at your door. Let’s face it – that has to get old. Unless the wifi and phone chargers all managed to outlast the civilisation that spawned them, you are going to find it very hard to distract yourself from the memory of your loved ones trying to nibble at your hypothalamus.

Which brings me to my plan. It is my intention to be the crazy loner the protagonists of every zombie movie somehow manage to find, the one who is ridiculously good at killing zombies with anything and everything in the post-living environment, including other zombies. The Crazy Survivor sleeps and eats less than seems physically possible, and even when seemingly at rest is just waiting for the excuse to lay down some swift, decisive and messy justice.

The Crazy Survivor is capable of superhuman feats of awesomeness and outliving many other characters with speaking roles for a very simple reason – motivation. The Survivor endures despite the lack of hope because he or she has a goal. Normally that goal is something important, like locating a child or significant other. Or maybe your zombie scenario is being played for laughs and the end goal is a snack that tastes worse and is less healthy for you than those delicious-sounding brains those zombies keep going on about. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you commit every fibre of your being to achieving this goal. That will keep you going as you fashion a knife out of the thighbone of a sweet old lady who came after you late in the night.

This plan has a few problems, though. The first is that the very worst thing that can happen to you is you achieve your goal. Once that is done, it’s all over. You can die happy, like a sap. At the time you won’t mind, which is why we have to be aware of the possibility now. Another concern is that if a goal is too difficult, you can lose hope of ever achieving it. So make sure you choose your desperate pursuit wisely – seemingly possible, but never achievable.

Another way to insulate yourself from the horrors of having your last spark of sanity vanish as you find your missing left sock or whatever it is, is to develop hobbies. A series of small victories will go a long way to distracting you from both your main goal and the nightmare world around you, both of which are helpful (if only in small doses). Something that will help you kill zombies in style is recommended, though certainly not essential. Also, it should be easily attempted with readily available materials. Computer programming probably isn’t a good choice, but smoking your own zombie jerky might be feasible.

The best part about my zombie plan is that I don’t have to wait for the apocalypse. In fact, I shouldn’t. It’s already hell out there. Life is a beautiful mess of bliss and misery, and if you ever sit down and stare at your own existence your retinas will burn as if you’d taped your eyeballs to the photosphere. Without an overarching goal and small hobbies, no matter how pointless, your brain will get eaten by the biggest, baddest zombie of them all – the world. Stay safe, stay sane, stay distracted.