Jon Cogburn's Blog

Things to do if you want to live longer

Nice Daily Beast article HERE. They didn't mention anything about driving, which as the number one killer of people in their teens and twenties, has one of the biggest impact on death rates. Anyhow, here are the things they do list, with the percentage effect on your chance of being dead within 20 years.

There's some interesting philosophy here. Given how literally toxic getting laid off is (you are 15-20% more likely to die within twenty years if you are laid off), shouldn't this be reflected in criminal proceedings against people whose criminal behavior results in lots of other people losing jobs?

Also, lots of these things effect men and women differently. For example, being Mormon is much better for male mortality rates than for women. Should this inform feminist critiques of Mormonism? More strikingly is the effect of marrying a spouse more than 7 years younger than you (which decreases mortality for men and increases it for women).

Also, it is really important not to confuse correlations with causation. For example, a lot of the sleep data is probably the result of the fact that people who sleep too much are likely to be sleeping off hangovers. So there is a common cause for sleeping too much and increased mortality, rather than sleeping too much causing increased mortality. I strongly suspect the optimist/pessimist thing is the same thing. If a large enough percentage of the pessimists and optimists are being rational, then whatever is causing the pessimism and optimism is whatever is causing decreased and increased mortality rates. This being said, I'm going to express all of the following as if they were causal, because it's more fun that way.

1. Don't get laid off: +15-20%.
2. Get and stay married: +20%.
3. If you are a married woman, not marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +20%; if you are a married man, marrying someone over seven years younger than you: +11%.
4. Do not  more than 8.5 hours a night: +15% (but sleeping less than 4 hours is horrible too).
5. If you are a woman, have a waste less than 35 inches; if you are a man have one less than 40 inches: +25%.
6. Be an optimist: +55%.
7. Sit less than 8 hours a day: +18%.
8. Go to church regularly and do the social stuff involved: +25%.
9. Be a Mormon- men: +6.7%, women: +3.2%.
10. Be rich: +15%.
11. Drink two glasses of red wine a day (and no more): +25%.
12. Don't watch television: -8% for every hour a day consumed.
13. Live in Hawaii (life expectancy 81.3 versus Louisiana with 74.2).
14. Be a woman (outlive men by 5.1 years)
15. Be literate: +50%.

another vision in yoga class

So my shoulder is healed enough to start doing yoga again. I went to the really easy classes yesterday and today and felt a bit ridiculous. I was just so incredibly crappy at everything. This being said, I did have a weird vision during the closing ten minutes of corpse pose today.

I saw this huge volcano spewing what I thought was greasy black smoke across the sky. But when I got closer it turned out that the smoke consisted entirely of alphabet letters rendered in a spidery, Charles Addams type font. It was really repulsive and frightening.

I guess too much of anything is always sublimely repulsive. . . But there is something special about too many letters befouling the atmosphere, the medium in which we reason destroying the medium in which we breath. I mean, I don't want to choke on an existential quantifier or even a zed for that matter.

James Lileks is an underappreciated national resource

James Lileks, brilliant writer of some of my favorite books (i.e. The Gallery of Regrettable Food, Gastroanomolies: Questionable Culinary Inventions from the Golden Age of American Cookery, Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice, and Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible 70's) and host of one of my favorite blogs (The Bleat, linked to in the Daily Read section at the right), has posted a set of vignettes from a cruise he just took with his family. As usual, they are insightful and hilarious.

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V

There ought to be a category for the kind of popular anthropology at which Lileks excels. He's a national treasure. His website is one of the best things on the interwebs, containing:

	Matchbook Museum. Lovely examples of commercial art in its smallest, most portable form.
	Comic Covers. Unusual or risable examples of old comic book cover art. Part of Comic Sins.
	100 Mysteries. Chewing through a big box of public-domain Hollywood mystery movies, one at a time.
	StarTribune. Column on Friday and Sunday.
	Black & White World An ongoing look at movies that decided color was just so obvious.
	The 30s. Devoted to the detritus of a misunderstood decade.
	Comic Ads. Delightful examples of comic book ads. Part of Comic Sins.
	Miscellany. For those things that go nowhere else.

ode to fragility

One of the things about growing up with actual long playing albums and 45 rpm singles (as opposed to CDs and then now ipods) is how the fragility of the medium itself affected our attitudes about music. It was very easy to break or scratch an actual record, and a big privilege when your older brother entrusted you with putting the record on and lining up the needle. There were all sorts of rituals that had to be mastered, for example involving cleaning the dust off the record while it was spinning around.

I don't know why this is, but fragility is one of the things that helps to inspire reverence in human beings, not just with records but with everything else too.

Of course if you wallow too much in how easy it is for everything to break, you become paralyzed, but I don't think you can properly revere that which deserves reverence without some appreciation of breakability, without learning well the rituals necessitated because of this (if the Tibetian Buddhists are anywhere near right, then a great deal of life is about learning to die properly and helping others do the same).

Again, I'm not sure why fragility and reverence are so intertwined, but it seems obvious that they are.

musings on Queen

I just discovered my colleague James Rocha's fantastic interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody (possibly the best rock song, and hence possibly the best song, ever) that he posted last year on his blog. It's HERE. And here's the original video for the song.

My older brother Chris turned me on to Queen and the Beatles when we were kids in the early seventies. He had the red and blue Apple greatest hits Beatles albums and a whole mess of Queen 45s. He, my sister, and me used to have long discussions about whether Strawberry Fields Forever or Penny Lane was a better song (Strawberry Fields was ultimately proclaimed better by a unanimous vote; and I'm pretty sure we'd all vote the same today). Bohemian Rhapsody sort of hovered over everything though.

Most of my friends' older brothers ended up in the Kiss Army. We stuck with Queen and the Beatles, and expanded into Elton John and Cat Stevens (both the influence of our Dad). And though I'm jealous of my friend Neal Hebert's good standing in said Army, I still think we ultimately got the better deal. Here's another 45 we wore out with repeated playing.

I remember being incredibly impressed by the fact that Freddy Mercury had the cajones to admit to not liking Jaws or Star Wars. It was scandalous, but also my first intimation of real freedom.

what twelve step programs get disastrously wrong (i.e. the importance of rocking out)

From the age of 17 to 27 I smoked around a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. Strangely, I never smoked around my parents or when I was visiting. So every Christmas and once or twice a summer (during this time I spent around seven summers living with them too) I would have to go through nicotine withdrawal, and then stay off of cigarettes from one to three months.

Though that was difficult, it gave me a better understanding of the process of withdrawal, making it much easier to ultimately quit for good ten years ago and to transition recently to a lifestyle more consistent both with fatherhood and being a serious student of yoga (not just as an excercise routine, but also a philosophy). And my personal experience strongly supports the claim that twelve step programs are radically incomplete in some ways. So here's some advice for anybody trying to kick anything that plays a destructive role in their lives.

(1) When you kick anything that has a destructive role in your life, you are in for four days of feeling physically crappy. This is true for tobacco, caffeine, boy/girlfriends, alcohol, refined sugar, too many carbohydrates, etc.as well as illegal drugs. So it really helps to treat the four days like a physical illness. Lay around in bed and read books in which you can easily lose yourself. Take lots of baths. Get people to cook for you.

(2) On the fourth night you will have the best night of sleep you've had in God knows how long and from the fifth day onward you will feel on average physically better than you did with the monkey on your back. However, now you will have intense psychological cravings that are triggered by certain events. Do not avoid these events! Instead confront them and figure out ways to replace the bad stimulus with something else. If you've kicked coffee, drink herbal tea when you used to drink coffee. If you really miss a glass of wine with a gourmet meal, treat your mineral water with some of the same ritual you treated the wine. If you are quitting pot then do something else during the times you used to smoke up.

(3) For every person there are joys you have to pay back with interest and joys that keep on giving. The secret to being healthy is replacing the former with the latter. For example, if you are an alcoholic, all that means is that alcohol is the former for you rather than the latter. The signature failure of 12 step inspired programs is that they don't get this, and as a result even many members of the groups continue to be deformed in the same ways that led them to become addicts. The thirteenth and fourteenth steps are this. (13) Find things that you enjoy learning, and dedicate a portion of your day to reading about them. Take classes at the community college if you can. It doesn't matter what these things are, there is a universe out there waiting to be known about (examples- history of ancient Rome, Buddhism, baseball, computer aided design, foreign languages, math, anthropology). Go to the public library and walk through the non-fiction section until you find a book that looks cool. Read it and if you enjoy then read several more books on the same topic, What matters is that you get joy out of learning more and more about them. (14) Get hobbies that involve creative work in which lose yourself and pursue with passion. This used to be the norm! Before the division of labor, the division between hobbies and work did not exist and people built stuff as a matter of fact. Before passive entertainment people filled their time making things and making art. So play music, paint paintings, design software, cultivate a garden, learn to sew. Again, it doesn't matter what it is.

The point of both 13 and 14 is to replace joys that charge interest with joys that pay dividends. The fundamental problems that addicts face are a lack of meaning and a lack of joyful affect. The only way to kick an addiction without becoming a walking cripple or dry drunk is to replace the medicine with things that actually bring real meaning and joy.

(4) The learning and creativity of  the above must be done every single day, especially at times in which the bad habits were engaged. For example, I've had to cult my caloric intake pretty dramatically due to GI problems. Before each meal I do yoga, after lunch I go for a brief walk and write a paragraph or two of bad fiction, after dinner I play music with my wife.

(5) Part of what make addictions so difficult is that they are related to stuff that humans have to do. Humans need to recapture the warmth they felt when being held by their mother as babies. Humans must eat. Humans need to be excited and expectant. Most harmful addictions exploit these basic needs. The only way to break out of this subtle form of exploitation is by practicing what the Buddhists call "mindfulness." When I first turned over control of food portions to my wife, I found myself getting irritated because I'd finish the food before she did. But then I realized that if I made sure to put half as much on my fork or spoon as I used to, and payed close attention to each bite of food, I didn't finish before her. I also found that I didn't want more. Since then I've discovered that there is a movement for "mindful eating." Check out the recent stories in the wall street journal and on parents.com as well as the web page devoted to the topic.

In this regard, I've found yoga to be invaluable as well.

(6) You couldn't handle the thing you are trying to quit. This is your weakness, not a sign of moral superiority. I can no longer put Tabasco sauce on my food. That doesn't make Tabasco sauce bad or the people who are strong enough to handle it bad people. For nearly any drug or kind of food there are societies where most people that use that drug or kind of food do so responsibly. Individuals should not be judgmental jerks about people with different lifestyles than themselves, and social policy should: (1) at most limit itself to promoting responsible and balanced use of drugs and potentially unhealthy foodstuffs (as opposed to prohibition), and (2) respect people's ability to formulate conceptions of the good life for themselves (e.g it is not automatically irrational to the point of non-autonomy if someone decides to drink, smoke cigarettes, or eat more food than the government people dictate; life is a series of trade-offs and people have to decide for themselves how to negotiate them).