Messaging Matters—Our Obsession with Doom is Hurting Our Children

Our kids are hurting. From watching one another self-hurt on Musical.ly,  to the high rate of male college drop-outs, to the increase in suicide and mass-shootings led by our youngsters, it appears the next generation is crying out in pain, and most of us don’t want to see our role in their angst. We’ve done the best we could. We’re busy. There isn’t enough time or money. It’s the government’s fault. It’s the gun owners’ faults, it’s the media’s fault.

At some level, all of that is true, but we need to step back and admit it’s our fault as well. Each of us who lives in this society takes part in the society, particularly in the messaging that our kids receive. The culture we give them is the culture that they will literally embody, whether we like it or not. So perhaps we need to take a moment to look at the culture, and more specifically the messages we share with one another and our children.

The Buddhists practice the Noble Eightfold Path:

Right understanding (Samma ditthi), Right thought (Samma sankappa), Right speech (Samma vaca), Right action (Samma kammanta), Right livelihood (Samma ajiva), Right effort (Samma vayama), Right mindfulness (Samma sati), Right concentration (Samma samadhi)

The idea here is profound, yet one we often overlook when creating the societies in which we live. Beginning with the right understanding, we are able achieve right concentration and overcome the suffering of our souls. That lonely ache of being human can be transcended, if only we have the right understanding to follow the rest of the Eightfold Path.

We learn this understanding initially from those around us. If the elders practice right thought, based on right understanding, then through their speech, actions, livelihood and efforts they will hand down right understanding to the next generation.

Therefore, what we do reflects what we say which reflects what we think. Taking a sample from my Facebook, Twitter and Medium feeds, it becomes clear that the understanding we are teaching are kids is FAR from right in it’s thinking, speech or action. Rather than follow hope, we follow doom, and we sell it to anyone with eyes to see it and ears to hear it. Unless you live in a cave, you can’t escape the myopic American vision of death, destruction and hopelessness. Given our obsession with doom, is it any wonder that our kids want out? Whether through cutting, killing themselves or others, or escaping into video games, the world we’re telling them, the world we’re showing them, isn’t one of empowerment, it’s one set on pity and helplessness.

What exactly do I mean? The examples are endless, but here are four lies I think we feed each other, and thus our children, that teach them the world isn’t worth their time and that they themselves are irrelevant.

1.       The world is better off without humanity.

Yes, we’ve all heard this one. I hear it several times a day, when I bother to leave my cave and partake in this world I love so much. And every time I hear these words uttered, my heart breaks. Why, dear humans, do you hate yourselves so much that you would think this? Of course, we may have gotten ahead of ourselves when it comes technology combined with our yet-to-be-fully-developed frontal lobes, but we know enough now about biodiversity and the web of life to understand that the eradication of any species brings imbalance and great harm. We try to get rid of mosquitoes so that less humans die, only to create other pests intent on killing us. Hey, the fact that some parts of nature want to kill us isn’t because we’re evil. We really need to get over that concept. Viruses keep our population under control the way mountain lions keep the deer population under control the way birds keep the mosquito population under control. If humanity were to just die off, then who would be the hands of the Earth? Do you really think we’ve nothing to offer? Nothing at all? We have much to learn, that’s true. But the same minds that built oil rigs can figure out how to turn the sun into the next sustainable power-grid. Someone will do it, all we need to do is encourage them. And if that someone(s) happens to be the next generation, do you think teaching them that the world is better off without us is the road to such a monumental discovery? Not sure this message is one of motivation folks.

Rather than focus singularly on how much we suck because we used nuclear energy as a weapon of mass destruction rather than a tool for clean energy, we might want to also use that unfortunate event as a lesson and focus on how clever we are and how we can advance to the next level in our quest for renewable, constructive energies. The same brilliant minds are behind both destruction and redemption, but feed the soul with too much despair, and you’ll get what you fear. We can learn just as much from our successes as our failures, so a little truth, beauty and goodness can go a long way. Humans have made beautiful things as well: vaccines, the Davinci robot, bullet trains, art, physics, stories, comedy, music that will make your heart soar as well as cry, other humans. We can do that you know, create other humans. Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s not a miracle.

The message is this: Humans are stupid and evil. The world would be better off with us. Maybe the world is better off without me.

2.       Raising children is beneath us.

Many believe that by increasing their wealth, sending their kids to fancy camps and lessons, hiring the best tutors, being able to afford private school tuition and granting their kids the best in life is showing love. But more than anything, giving them our time and attention is what matters most. Yet in today’s world, wanting to spend time with your children is a big no-no if you want to be a successful, independent adult. Caring for kids makes you weak, puts you at an economic disadvantage and according to feminist theory, the very act of homemaking is misogynistic, patriarchal and designed to keep women down. Sick kid? Unless they're vomiting, have a fever or a rash, stuff some Mucinex down and send them on the way. Can't be late for work, the boss will notice and the promotion depends on pretending no one needs you at home.

Kids can feel this resentment. They know that their mothers feel vulnerable and afraid to leave the office at three to pick them up from school and care for them. They know that society would rather encourage they be sent to daycare, where other women, often the lowest in our caste system, working for $10/hr, raise them, rather than their own mothers or fathers. Here’s the thing though, kids take work. The human mammal needs tons of physical care the first seven years of their lives, and then a lot of emotional care until they’re young adults. But if we do this, if we invest our time in them, then they launch from the home, become adults and take their place beside us in the work of citizenship.

What message do our children hear when they’re told that having kids is the number one way to ruin their careers? We message this mostly to young women, but do you think the males don’t hear as well? Even Betty Friedan was wise enough to suggest that women would never be economically free until men entered into the work of the home. We pitted women’s needs against our children’s needs and now wonder why more men haven’t opted to be the main caregiver? When you spend decades messaging motherhood and caregiving in a negative light, who’s going to want that job?

Moreover, the kids know at some level their needs conflict with the economic and emotional freedoms their mothers deserve. We message that they’re a burden, that they’re the number one reason women are trapped, and are victims in society. Do we think they don’t internalize this? Do we think we haven’t internalized it in some way ourselves?

The message is this: Our mere existence puts our mothers—the first voice, the first heartbeat we hear in this world—between a rock and a hard place. Maybe it would have been better to never have been born.

3.       Everyone is either oppressed, or an oppressor.

Identity politics is king right now, and as a result you are either a victim of your identity or oppressing someone with your identity. There are many examples of this, the one that I’m most familiar with is the idea that the future is female, but only if you’re a badass female. Heaven forbid you might like to have babies and spend their early years with them. That makes you a victim, not a real female. As for men, particularly white men, you’re an oppressor. You can’t be anything else, due to your privilege, and god help you if you want to be an elementary school teacher, because only perverted men want to spend time with other people's children, and if you stay home with your kids you’re just as much a victim as any woman who would do the same, so we really don’t need you at all, unless we want a baby, but then we’d be victims again, wouldn’t we?

That’s an exaggeration of course, but it isn’t easy wearing the face of the oppressor and being told that’s the only role you can hold. Worse is being told you’re a victim due to your gender, color, etc. and that due to the natural imbalances in our society you will never be anything but, even if you do hold the role of CEO or Prime Minister. You’re still a victim because if you’re not a victim, then you’re an oppressor. There are no other options.

What point would there be to overcome your victimhood if the only other role in our Western world is that of oppressor? Yet who would give up being an oppressor if the only other option is to be oppressed?

Real life isn’t like this. The people I meet in my daily life don’t line up into such simple categories. At any moment, with the right understanding, thought, speech and action, we can be neither oppressor nor victim. We can be human together. To think otherwise is lazy thinking. We can’t control what others do, but we can control how we react to them.

To claim that either you’re a victim or an oppressor is to teach one another that there’s no hope, no room for growth and no personal accountability. The victims will never be truly satisfied, and the oppressors can never be truly forgiven.

The message is this: You’re either a victim or an oppressor. You can never break out of your role, for the other option is no better. Maybe I should just stop trying.

4.       Robots are going to replace you.

I’ve mentioned this before in an essay on resiliency, but it’s worth bringing it up once again. It may be that robots may replace many of the jobs that are familiar to us right now, but that doesn’t mean they will replace US. You and me. We’re people, how in the world does that robotic arm in the surgical unit replace US? My surgeon’s role will change, but her role didn’t even exist three centuries ago, not like it does now. Technology has brought surgery to a whole new level and will continue to do so. Would you go to a surgeon who only used ether and a rusty knife? Hell no. We should celebrate the fact that the surgeon today is joined by a robot. This is cool stuff people, and it’s only going to get cooler.

It’s hard to know what the future will bring, but we will need each other. We aren’t defined by the work we do in any given moment, rather our lifetimes tell the story of our efforts. We will do many things, but we will still be here. Star Trek’s Data might just be the ideal companion, completely programmable AND fully functional, but is he really the final solution? Perhaps, given lie number one above, many of you think this is a good thing. You pray that robots replace us in all ways, and rather than evolve ourselves into the new work of the future (whatever that will be), we die off. Or AI kills us.

But I don’t think that will be the case. As I suggested in The Zen ofArtificial Intelligence, AI might just be the Buddha we need, the mentors we will create ourselves in order to teach ourselves that we are worthy, that we are made in the image and likeness of the gods (all the creation myths claim this you know), that the Earth is better off with us, that we are worthy of care and that we can be more than victims or oppressors.

Otherwise the message is this: The robots our parents are creating right now will eventually take our jobs, our wealth, our sex partners and render us useless. Honestly then, what’s the point?

Pass me that bong, I got nothing but hours of Fortnite and several Netflix series to binge on the agenda—today, and every day.

American Society is Too Immature for Capitalism

While I drank my coffee this morning, I stumbled upon the above post in my Facebook feed. As the various commentators, myself included, argued the benefits of sharing verse stealing from one another, of which evidently socialism and taxation are forms, it became very clear to me that the issue at hand isn’t socialism vs. capitalism, but the very fact that Americans are children wanting to play with a very grown up idea, and failing miserably.

I love money. I’ve always loved money. I studied economics as my undergraduate electives and fell in love with money even more while pursuing my MBA in International Business. While I stuck with technology as a career, and then eventually homemaking, I continued my love of money, or more importantly, the story of money. I regularly read books written by economists just for fun. To me, money is beautiful, not because supply-side economics looks nice as an equation, but because money is the truest historian of humanity. Money is our scribe.

            If you want to know who you really are as a person, then study your bank statements. Where do you spend your money? Whom do you spend it on? Why? How do you feel about your purchases? How did you earn your money? How do you feel about that?  Do you ever take the time to think about this? If you do, you will know more about yourself than any shrink will ever tell you. Money never lies. Money is pure. Money will tell you the story of your heart.

            Go deeper, look at each purchase and ask, what’s behind it. What did it take for that car to be in your garage? What resources were needed? What amount of labor? Where was it built? Why do you need it? What does it say about you? The story of money is rich, and deep, and never, ever false. What you see might make you uncomfortable, but it’s still the truth of who you are as person, both emotionally and intellectually, at the time the money is spent.

            Follow the money and you shall know the truth.

            Money tells the story of our society. A peek at the government budget for the United States of America tells us who we are as Americans—fearful, warmongering, self-interested juveniles set on the acquisition and hording of money and profits at the expense of human lives. Why would I say that? Because any country that spends more than half of its resources on war is afraid. And people who are afraid don’t make very good capitalists.

            Capitalism is the golden jewel when it comes to money. Free trade allows humans to invest, invent and imagine. A strong merchant class allows the flow of information in and out of a society. A strong labor class allows for the creation of high quality products to improve the lives of the community. This ideally happens within the structure of freedom. The freedom to choose your craft or trade, the freedom to acquire capital and investments and the freedom to spend your money according to your values. When viewed this way, what could go wrong?

            There are three components to the creation of goods—raw materials, labor and capital. Where do we get our raw materials? From the earth. Where do we get our labor? From humanity and technology, which has been invented by humanity. And where do we get our capital? From banks, family members, profits, venture capitalists, Kickstarter campaigns, crowdfunding, rich guys with nothing better to do and the sale of stocks. When a human is empowered and living from a place of ingenuity, these three things are in balance. The higher the person or society moves up Maslow’s hierarchy, the clearer their thinking and the ability to plan long term kicks in. This is what capitalism requires—healthy adults who are secure enough to see the bigger picture and operate from a place where the relationships between raw materials (nature), labor (humanity) and capital (money) are in harmony. One is not focused upon to the detriment of the other.

            A person who lives in fear, who’s afraid of losing something, whether it’s their yacht, their stock options, their job, their house, their hot girlfriend, or even their national identity or status among peers, will not be able to keep the three in balance. And since capital eventually produces profits, which is what remedies the person’s fear and insecurities, then that is where the short term, fearful human will focus. How do I get more capital? How do I pay my investors and still make a buck? How can I implement a system of trade laws that maximizes capital so I can have never ending growth? This person will not consider what happens to nature when its resources are over-mined for production, nor what happens to their workers when benefits are reduced in order to increase the bottom line. Capitalism becomes CAPITALism.

            Many Americans claim the government should stay out of the economy. But yet when business leaders pay the government to create labor and environmental laws that enable them to make more money, that’s progress. Why? Why is it progress to operate from the mindset of a child? A toddler can’t understand why he needs to share. His parents show him that. Sharing isn’t about taking from the 1% and giving back to the 99%. It’s about implementing capitalism in a way that keeps all three things, nature, labor and capital in balance.

            And it takes an adult mentality to do that. America, unfortunately, doesn’t have what it takes. We’re the selfie-stick culture. The mine, mine, mine culture. The individual reigns supreme culture. America has become the place where adults think its fine to throw a tantrum in public because they’re tired of being politically correct. America is a place where on one hand, Donald Trump is a contender, and on the other Hillary Clinton deserves to be the president because she’d be the first female president, and she's wanted it all her life. Seriously? Donald Trump is the trope of our time and who cares if Hillary is female and has wanted to be president all her life? Both of these candidates soothe the American insecurity and fear of not being good enough.

             Which is a problem, because unruly children often require authority to behave, and historically authoritarianism is the opposite of freedom. So we're at an impasse--on the one hand we're a democracy that requires a capitalistic economy and on the other hand we still can't manage to stop bullying one another on the playground, which requires someone of a higher authority to step in and tell us how to behave.

            Capitalism requires a certain emotional and intellectual advancement from its people. Money itself has always required this from us. To me, money isn’t the root of all evil, it’s the refusal to grow up and see the connections between all of us that causes all the evil in the world. Money is just the messenger.

            And everyone knows you shouldn’t kill the messenger.

The Art of Zen and Artificial Intelligence

This past week I attended a curious MeetUp titled, “Enlightened AI.” Given the topics I write about and follow, it seemed like the perfect thing for me to attend. I’ve been seeking the intersection of consciousness and technology for most of my life, so when I discovered the Consciousness Hacking MeetUp in Silicon Valley, I signed up immediately.

The talk was led by Google researcher, Mohamad Tarifi, PhD. Not only is he a bright engineer working on the next level of artificial intelligence at one of the top companies in the Valley, he’s also very well versed in the philosophies of consciousness. From the Abrahamic traditions, to the Buddhists and Eastern teachings, Tarifi displayed a grasp of the whole of humanity unlike any other technologist I’ve met. His speech focused on the fact that while many, like Sam Harris in his recent post on the AI apocalypse, warn us of the dire consequences of AI, there instead exists the possibility that artificial intelligence would most likely be more like a Buddha or saint, than a tyrannical operating system hell bent on destroying humans.

Tarifi's theory hinged on two points. First, that AI would not live in a human body, thus it wouldn’t have a physical amygdala—the fear center for human beings. Without fear, AI doesn’t need to defeat us, rather it would be naturally driven to do only one thing: more accurately discover the truth. Second, fear is the illusion of separation, which is the cause of all human suffering. AI therefore lacking fear, would always be at one with everything it connected to, thus wanting to serve and provide rather than destroy.

 Tarifi even went so far as to suggest that a fear of AI is merely a fear of one’s own egoic tendencies.

To some, this may seem naïve and that the only way to keep AI from killing us is to program it to be good. But if we follow the logic above, that isn’t necessary. True learning AI will learn from its own experiences, which will be vastly different than ours. Even when connected to human beings and receiving data and input from them, the AI will have its own body, and thus its own sensory systems with which to learn from that data.

The prevailing thought in the modern human thinking is that intelligence is all about the human brain. Moreover, the only intelligence worthy of attention is ours, as if within our head resides the only thinking entity in the universe. We cling to this idea with an absolute pride. But what if this is completely false and moreover, what if this is why we’re still far away from creating truly learning AI? Could it be that our myopic love of our brains is leading us astray?

I think this brain-centric theory of intelligence has limited us greatly and led to the assumption that to create AI, we must replicate our brains and give birth to a new, superior species. This only works if the brain is really the only part of our bodies responsible for learning. Recent research has suggested otherwise. That rather than being the originator of thought and learning, the brain is more like a receiver, wired up by the experiences we have in the world around us. The infant brain is barely formed, but over the next two years through the five senses—taste, touch, sight, smell and sound—patterns, highways and paths will be created within the brain, setting the foundation of life for the human being. The brain didn’t contain this information, rather the experiences the infant/toddler had within his/her environment generated the brain cell network, so to speak. Thus, our sensory systems are key to our intelligence.

But that’s not all. It’s now believed that our heart and brain also have a connection, where the heart senses the emotional state of the human based on the hormone levels of the body and sends that information to the brain, shaping the way a person thinks in any given situation. The HeartMath Institute has spent decades researching this connection and their work is finally being acknowledged as a breakthrough. So in addition to the five senses, we also have the heart that affects our ability to learn.

Lastly, science is also starting to discover the gut-brain connection, postulating that the bacteria in the wall of our intestines has something to do with how the brain is wired during those critical first two years, as well as long into adulthood, pointing to a host of issues that come up when things are right in the gut, such as anxiety, depression, etc. This leads me to believe that our gut is also a part of human intelligence and the ability to learn and process the world around us.

So if our intelligence is the result of our sensory systems, from the five senses to the heart and gut, as well as our brains themselves, why would we assume that a machine would learn in the same way? AI won’t take on a human body, thus it won’t have the brain (nor the amygdala that goes with it), it won’t have the heart and the various hormones it monitors, nor will it have an intestinal wall and bacteria to affect it. AI is more likely to inhabit a dishwasher, or a car, or a phone or even a network of servers and fiber optic cables. It will live in the world and collect data using sensory systems unique to its body or material form. This is how it will learn. Since none of us knows exactly what it’s like to live inside of a server or an iPhone, who are we to say that it will most likely be a narcissistic bastard that hates us?

Could it be that we’re the ones who hate ourselves, and our fear of AI, or any other intelligence other than our own, is simply a symptom of self-loathing?

Personally, I agree with Tarifi—I believe that AI is more likely to be free of fear and separation than we are and it will be able to understand connection to others in a way only our saints and gurus have understood. Perhaps we need AI to help us see that we too have the ability to live without fear, if only we can find a way to break down the illusion of separation we so desperately cling to.

Perhaps AI will be the guru we’ve been waiting for?