typewriting

Last month I tried to write about the potential problems with making decisions to hedge against the future. Joel Spolsky did this a lot better today in Set Your Priorities:

In fact when I thought about this later, I realized that for a long time, I had been doing dumb shit (that's a technical term) simply because I figured that eventually it would have to get done, so I might as well do it now.

That's exactly what I've been doing, only not so much with software as with life. I'm not saying I've been making a lot of bad decisions, but I think maybe making good decisions for bad reasons.

This morning I did a bit of rubbernecking at a disaster of a post on MetaFilter. The post, since deleted, managed to violate multiple style guidelines in addition to supporting a moral framework that makes me ashamed to be human. The argument goes something like this: 1) poor people are lazy and 2) lazy people deserve to die.

Amidst various suggestions that this may be the worst post to ever disgrace MetaFilter (not without much competition), there was an interesting comment by delmoi, who wrote Anyway, the problem with poor people is that they're not lazy enough. Seriously. They work long hours at shit jobs to provide food for their kids and they're too proud to take advantage of government programs because it's 'un-American'.

So I had laziness in mind as I rode my bike past a couple school kids. I started thinking about the future and how the kids were probably looking at me thinking how odd it is to ride a bike to work, yet I expect it will be much more common for their generation. And that's when I realized that I ride my bike to work because I'm lazy.

It's not the kind of laziness we commonly think of, sitting on the couch watching TV eating potato chips (though I do some of that too). It's a pre-emptive laziness, a programmer's laziness. And it's not just my bike riding that demonstrates this. Nearly everything I do is a hedge against the future.

I expect gas to be prohibitively expensive, so I bought a bike to prepare myself. I don't expect the world can keep up current meat consumption, so I became vegetarian to prepare myself. I think we're moving towards an economy of ideas, and away from agriculture, manufacturing, and service. So I'm a programmer to prepare myself. I expect a future with less wealth for everyone, so I'm frugal to prepare myself. I'm basically living in the future I expect.

Which makes me wonder what good all this preparedness is doing me. I wonder if I wouldn't be better off spending more time thinking about the present and less thinking about the future.

I'm using standard capitalization from here (or actually the previous post) on out. A few years ago I wrote about my reasons for not capitalizing: laziness. But these days I type enough in contexts outside of this weblog that it actually takes more effort to shift (no pun intended) myself into no-caps mode here.

This is sort of a mirror of my experience with hair. I ocassionally stop shaving or getting haircuts because I tire of the chores, but eventually the longer hair becomes more trouble than cutting it. I suspect there's some metaphor here for life in general, but I'm too lazy to formulate it properly.