Every morning on a work day, I’m greeted with an orange school bus through the window of my home office. A line of teenage schoolchildren get on the bus as if they are about to hit the road for an adventurous school trip. As the bus pulls out, the crowd of adults that had just accomplished their five-day-a-week ceremonial duty of guardianship dissipates. The temporary separation of the day between the adults and their young reminds me of the penguin migration in the Antarctica.
I recall what I saw in the documentary film about the emperor penguin. In their world, parenting is a shared duty. The mother penguin is the food hunter while the father stays behind to keep the eggs warm. After the mother penguin returns to the breeding site with a belly full of food for her chicks, the father penguin leaves for the sea in search of food. I’m seeing the flowers of tomorrow—as the Chinese metaphor refers to the young generation—every morning from my new home. I’m also touched by the simplicity of human love by the ordinary life around me.
As long as you are observant and have a dose of curiosity, you won’t miss ordinary life around you. As a sustainability professional, I’m aware of ordinary life of both humans and non-humans, of both beautiful ones and those not so beautiful—although “ugly” is one of the antonyms of “beautiful,” I prefer not to use it to reinforce today’s dichotomous discourse that overlooks the immense ocean of what we called the “gray area.”
The digital computers use 1’s and 0’s to distinguish and analyze the information that human beings feed them. Algorithmically speaking, for example, if 1 is yes, 0 is no, should the answer for “neither yes nor no” be placed in between 1 and 0? There are an infinite number of numbers in between 1 and 0. Can I infer that the gray area is infinite (∞)?
If you are beautiful or you deem yourself beautiful, you may thank those who are not so beautiful make you stand out. I’m skeptical of some adjectives that reflect the speaker’s subjectivity to highlight distinction rather than relationships. We’re in an interconnected world. In English grammar, there are comparative and superlative adjectives. Without comparison, how could you tell you’re more beautiful or the most beautiful? But the not-so beautiful one is not necessarily an ugly one. Similar thought helps me understand some word choices in email subject lines, rejection letters, invitations, speeches, official sites and our attention-seeking promotional literature. For instance, busy people only read the subject lines and the one-line news. So the word “urgent,” “need your attention” etc. in the email subject lines often make my heart race. The task is urgent. It must be urgent to the speaker. It might be urgent to the situation that we are both involved in. But if I compare the task with what I consider is urgent, perhaps the task is not that urgent to me, because a dog just barks for my attention, my phone is ringing or the kettle on the stove is whistling now. I learn to calm myself to respond to our multitasking-demanding world. A sustainable retreat indeed.
Beauty is in the eyes of beholder. There is truth in it. Don’t we have a well-known English saying, the lesser of two evils? Without comparison, we won’t know the difference. Without knowing the reference basis, an adjective means more to the speaker than to the listener. An ideal condition or an ideal candidate means to me is only a reference basis that the speaker identifies. It’s solely subjective. That’s the beauty of humanities, the gray area that STEM careers might overlook. In my pursuit of a sustainable retreat, I’m an engineer to design and define gray area. The gray area is a buffering zone, a middle ground for so many possibilities.
I’m parting ways from our overly analyzed, digital life that is programed for certain answers. May I ask you what do you see when snow is melted? If you say you see water, you’ll make chemistry teachers smile. If you see spring, Percy Shelley will spring to life in virtual reality to kiss you. The Covid pandemic is a catalyst of our integrated digital life, both for business and for private use. The more we depend on a tool that provides convenience, the harder we can quit using it.
“If we can tell the difference of an apple from a pear, that’s only because an apple looks and tastes very differently from a pear. Recognizing differences allows us to cherish diversity and appreciate our individual uniqueness. And our fear-based thinking will likely to be reduced and our emotions and memory are happier because of our acceptance of kindness, gratitude and love.“
—Karen Zhang, author of “Golden Orchid“
Researchers recently have published a paper in Nature, the science journal, that the human brain deteriorates after infection from the Covid virus. Hong Kong researchers also shared views on post-Covid complications that more than 40 percent of Covid-19 survivors who participated in the research suffer from fatigue syndrome after one year.
I remember almost twenty years ago when SARS hit Guangdong, China, some patients revealed that they had long-term complications after recovery from SARS. Warmer temperature on the Earth could affect the spread of diseases as well as human behavior and personalities. A pandemic is like extreme weather patterns that approach us unannounced. I’m curious about how my personalities will be changing while I’m adapting to a condo lifestyle. I can’t change other’s lifestyle but I certainly can change mine by living simply and circularly. This is also climate adaptation that the school children I see from my window will learn in their lifetime.
Warmer temperatures do bring us many variables. If you’re uncertain about your mood at ten o’clock tomorrow, would you be curious about it and pay more attention to your mood swings, or would you immediately consult your powerful search engine? How much can humans rely on the smarter-than-us computers to predict a future filled with uncertainty? How should we define the gray area of possibilities with the algorithmic language comprising of 1’s and 0’s?
The best scientists in the world ask good questions. The best poets and artists give meaning to their abstract ideas. The ideal humanity-centered design is good for human beings as well as do little pollution to the environment and other non-human species. It also requires fewer to no more extraction of natural resources. Yes, this ideal is my ideal. I own it. I believe many like-minded people are striving for the same ideal as mine.
How can I change myself to lead a more sustainable life for myself without doing more harm to the environment? I can’t agree more with James Lovelock’s view on “a sustainable retreat.” In Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the Earth is a self-regulating and complex system. This system maintains and perpetuates the conditions for life on the planet. But humanity has done harm to this system “too much too late for sustainable development” as Lovelock wrote. “What we need is a sustainable retreat.”
This year, I’ve retreated by downsizing from a townhouse to a condo. I ride a bike and walk more often. I give myself more unplugged hours from the internet of things. Keeping a diary is no different from having a mobile device to record everything you do. If you say your phone makes your life easier, I won’t argue. But if I trust my phone more than my memory, I must think twice when I hit a speed dial. Don’t put all the eggs in one basket. That one basket is what I dubbed a smarter-than-me phone. Use it or lose it. The basic principle of language learning helps me to take control of my non-digital life. I find joy in writing long hand in the Chinese language again.
Come to think of it, from the invention of word processing in computers to the speed dial in our mobile phones, it’s common for us to apologize for having typos and misspelt words or having short memory of small things such as your spouse’s phone number and your aunt’s birthday. What do you think is the cause of the problem? Humans make errors. A computer also makes errors. A computer’s errors are humans’ errors. A computer improves accuracy and precision. But a computer also corrects my invention of words. No wonder some writers turn off spell check in Word when they’re crafting their works. In the meantime, the vulnerability of humanity is exposed and misused by clever humans who design and modify languages that our computers understand. Sci-fi engineers are thrilled on this subject.
Some Chinese characters evolved from pictures. They are pictographs such as the sun (日), the moon (月), mountain (山) and water (水), to name a few. These characters are related to the environment and nature. Our ancestors created a language starting from drawing, dancing and singing. The more I learn a new language, the more I find my sustainable retreat is a progressive self-development that has no limits. Is it possible that my smarter-than-me phone will make me dumber?
The invention and improvement of camera and photography further increased humans’ dependence on image communication. A picture is worth a thousand words. But I’d argue that a picture also deprives of my imagination. I notice when I read a novel I can let my imagination soar more freely than when I watch a movie. However, our eyes are drawn to images. Color images have an advantage. If only people of color have an advantage, too.
An old saying goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” This adage is not true in the information age. You may not remember a picture taken by someone else. You won’t forget someone who writes something about you or to you, especially those descriptive words like beautiful, ugly, urgent and alike. My sustainable retreat is fun and innovative. Writing Chinese characters sharpens my imagination. Practicing my handwriting is an artistic endeavor.
Active listening is also the fun part in my sustainable retreat. Not all languages have sounds but meaningful sounds can become a language. Radio is a unique medium that invokes a listener’s imagination to fill in mental images around the broadcast sounds. That explains partly why podcasts have mushroomed in the last few years, becoming like a customized radio station in our electronic devices. If you can reuse an old radio, why do you give it to the landfill?
A radio doesn’t need Wi-Fi signal. Nor does it consume your data on the phone. Most importantly, you give a second life to a radio that works. By doing so, you’ll reduce the e-waste on this planet. The more intelligent and efficient our devices are, the more primitive are the skills humans can only do. We no longer write with a pen. We let the machine transcribe or translate our speeches. We forget more often. Thanks to our cloud computing technology that stores everything for us. The technology thrives but we, humans, are enslaved digitally. Are we now living backward?
“(. . . ) our freedom of choice is limited in many ways. Our fundamental finitude means that our insight and knowledge are always historically and culturally limited and we can only choose from a limited number of alternatives, the consequences of which, moreover, can never be completely calculated.”
—Jos de Mul, author of “Cyberspace Odyssey”
I told my family that mankind has an endless desire to claim with superlatives the ownership of everything. If the Flintstone’s two-legged car is not fast enough, humans invent a more powerful mode of transportation. The telecommunication industry is the super star. Remember I said earlier, the more we depend on a tool that provides convenience, the harder we can quit using it. We may quit driving for a few days or a month, but can we quit surfing the web more than once for months or even years? Is the fastest everything the best? Instant messaging helps us send a message from point A to point B with a blink of eyes. I doubt 99.9% of people would like be disturbed constantly during off-hours. And yet, work-related instant messages from your supervisor and colleagues at the wrong hours are some of the familiar prompts for storytelling. How fun my sustainable retreat is!
When you’re big, you can’t escape criticism and scrutiny. Big countries are the same. I’ll save that subject for next time. If you look at Verizon’s commercials, all the big words won’t disappoint you. I’m a lifelong English learner who loves making fun of language. In the past months, I stood in line more than once at a Verizon’s retail store. During my waiting period, I had an ample opportunity to read everything English on the walls in the store and the promotional brochures. Now we’re in the “ultra-affix” 5G glossary as if the word “unlimited” is not enough. We can upgrade to “ultra-fast, ultra-powerful, ultra-wideband. . .” What about the speed of in-person customer service? Can we get 5G-speed human-to-human connectivity to resolve personal conflicts at work and at home?
I came across this image last year during my research on e-waste management. I’m not going to explain the three laws in digital technology here. A powerful search engine will do a better job than I do. I don’t want to waste your time and mine. I’m fascinated by how fast technology has advanced and how the fast-paced change of digital technology has aggravated today’s imbalance of demand and supply of goods and services. If you see empty shelves in the grocery stores or experience long wait time for ride-hailing services, and perhaps it will take a few more days for your online purchase to arrive, supply chain and logistics are adjusting to the higher demand of some goods and services from the internet. It takes time to manufacture, package, ship and deliver. The overall supply chain is a system much more complex than a touch on your electronic device to place an order. If we can’t shop wisely and patiently, we consume more fuels and materials in supply chain and logistics. Reduce, reuse and recycle is key to a sustainable retreat. When demand and supply are not in sync, if demand is higher than supply, prices of goods and services will go up. Vice versa. Customers bear the cost all the time.
Now, to monitor the flows and ebbs of online shopping traffic, data analysts may give you a full rundown about what time of the day and what day of the week, what items have the most clicks online. That’s why there’s a hot debate about traceable online footprint and “you’re invisible online” make-beliefs. Remember what I wrote earlier about our smarter-than-us devices overlook the immense ocean of what we called the “gray area.” Are you sure an untraceable online presence is good for data governance? Do you really think browsing websites, asking the search engine questions and writing tweets do not leave digital footprints that are comprising of many 1’s and 0’s?
If we look at our economic life as a contract, as a consumer, we’re always Party B in this contract. In the merchant-consumer relationship, the contract is drafted by Part A, the goods and services provider. Enlighten me if you have seen a consumer-friendly contract on behalf of the consumer. How do you expect Part A will give up its interest in order to protect Part B’s interest? Instead, the contract is written in a language that ordinary people without legal training are doomed to be victims. This is how I pick up the phrase “lawyer up” in my language quest. The U.S. is a litigious nation like no other. Doesn’t that make some proud Americans happy that I just used a superlative sentence?
This is my disclaimer. I’m not a legal professional. I try to make my judgment as an impartial third-party observer. I’m not a data scientist. I can’t give you any quantitative evidence and proofs. But I’m interested in truth seeking and an open-minded debate about our fascinating world.
(To be continued)