Would we be better off with fewer humans?

By The New York Times | Source: United States Census Bureau

It seems the US population is not actually shrinking, but it is not growing very fast. That makes me happy. Would that the entire world's human population grow so slowly - or even begin to shrink.

When I moved to Mankato MN in 1989, the population was around 30,000 people. Today it is around 44,000. The surrounding area has grown as well. The business community and city government see that as a huge win. Personally, I liked the smaller size. I could visit with the mayor. I knew all the administrators in the school district. I did not have to book a dinner reservation months in advance at popular restaurants. The bike trails were never terribly busy. There was no rush hour. But the chamber of commerce and others always promoted growth and celebrated when a new business moved into town or a new housing subdivision was planned. I suspect Mankato’s philosophy is the rule, not the exception - celebrate "growth."

I suppose if I were a business person, I too would celebrate having more people move into the area. More people wanting to buy my bicycles. Longer lines at my Dairy Queen. Greater sales at Target and Best Buy (which might also lead to better return on my shares of stock in these companies). There would also be a greater supply of labor. And if I remember correctly, the greater the supply (or lower the demand), the cheaper the cost. This surely applies to workers as well as motorcycles.

I started thinking about the benefits of a smaller population from a very selfish perspective - shorter lines, less crowded parks, easier access to DisneyWorld, cheaper used cars. Going to National Parks with my children 20 years ago was a much more enjoyable experience than going with my grandchildren to today’s parks - no fault of the grandsons. As an environmentalist, it is tempting to look at the world's resources as a zero-sum situation - the world only has so much potable water, arable land, rare minerals. Are we as individuals better off dividing them among 3 billion or 10 billion of us? What population makes it more likely more of the world's natural lands stay natural?

At some point, people will start thinking of population in terms of quality instead of quantity. On a personal basis, it seems to make sense in today’s world to have two college-educated children than a half dozen unskilled sons and daughters. We just don’t need all those kids to help bring in the crops any more or to replace those that die in infancy.

I hope families, towns, and countries as themselves do we always need more people- or should we be striving for happier, healthier people? Bigger is not always better.

There is a role for old people in technology (From Machines Are the Easy Part)

From Machines Are the Easy Part; People Are the Hard Part.
Illustrations by Brady Johnson

Final post!

70. Everyone suffers from IDS. 

My relationship to technology is encapsulated in my garage door opener. 

It has three buttons of which only one seems to have any purpose that I can determine. I believe the opener was designed to purposely aggravate my symptoms of IDS – Intelligence Deficit Syndrome. I am just not smart enough to use technology well. 

Who knows what wonders and pleasures could come from learning to use the functions of those other two buttons? Is self-actualization just one combination of button pushes away? Someday I may just need to find and read the manual. 

But for now I will use the one big button this weak mind does understand, open and close the garage door, and remain firmly, if mistakenly committed to the idea that I can be a fully-functional, happy person despite how intelligence-deficit technology makes me feel.         

71. Take your job seriously, but not yourself. 

Gil Carlson, from St. Peter, Minnesota, gave me the advice above when I was working for him. I liked the fact he followed it himself. 

I like to ask myself at the end of the day if I did anything that might make a good story one day: one I can tell at the supper table, to my grandkids, to the guys around the campfire, or to the nurse who changes my drool bucket at the nursing home. 

Story-less people are folks who take themselves way too seriously, fearful of looking foolish, appearing ignorant, or being wrong. It’s the challenges we’ve faced, the problems we’ve solved, the good we’ve tried to do, and especially the bumps and detours we’ve encountered along the way, that are the basis of interesting tales. 

Do something today that will make your story more interesting. 

72. There is a role for old people in technology. 

John Lubbock, a 19th century astronomer, once wrote: 

There are three great questions which in life we have to ask over and over again to answer: 

Is it right or wrong? 

Is it true or false? 

Is it beautiful or ugly? 

Our education ought to help us to answer these questions. 

I think of those words often when I hear educators worry about kids being more adept and comfortable with technology than those of us who were growing up when the earth was still cooling. 

No matter how sophisticated the N-Geners are technologically, in matters of ethics, aesthetics, veracity, and other important judgments, they are, after all, still green. By virtue of our training and life experiences, we can apply the standards of older technologies (the pencil, the podium, the book) to those which are now technology enhanced. And we’d better. Given the choice of having Socrates or Bill Gates as a teacher, I know whom I would choose. 

74. Upstream cost, downstream savings. 

Now and again, it seems a picture in my house hangs crooked and each time I pass one, I take a few seconds to straighten it. 

Conceptually I know that if took five minutes, got a hammer, a nail, a pencil, and a level, I could put in a second nail and never have to straighten the damn picture again. 

But like most people, I never seem to have the upstream time it takes to realize downstream time savings. Human nature, I suppose. 

That probably the major reason technology is so difficult to get busy educators to use. Convincing someone that learning to create a ,pdf file of an often-requested document, load it to a website, and create a link to it - thereby saving all the time it takes to locate, print, and send the document manually - is a tough sell. 

About as tough as it is to convince me to go get the hammer. 

75. Advice to children and singles. 

Tom Weller has a delightful little book called Minims, now out of print but that can be found (as of Spring 2003) at <users.rcn.com/kbruhns/minims/>. This is how he defines a minim: 

minim ['mInIm] n: a statement expressed in proverbial or sentential form but having no general application or practical use whatever — compare MAXIM.  

I have only come up with one minum: Marry for money; repent in leisure. 

If you follow that single piece of advice, you can completely stop worrying about lots of other rules, including ones in this book. 

Going bass ackwards

Those of us who walk regularly have favorite, oft repeated routes. When I was working and walked over my lunch hour, I had four routine paths of about three miles each and I took each one every week. While I now have much more time and fewer restrictions on how long and where I can walk, I still have my favorites.

One of these is in a county park about a 15 minute drive from my house. Lebanon Hills is a large park with multiple entrances and many miles of trails. While I do hike nearly all of them now and then, the trail around Jensen Lake plus a couple extra miles to the east, is my favorite. 

The lake, of course, is always interesting. Ducks, geese, herons, and egrets grace its shores in nearly every season. The vegetation changes throughout the year. The paths have enough challenge and elevation change to keep things interesting. Buckthorn clearing has opened the vistas up a bit over the past couple years. While often quite busy on the weekends, the trail is only lightly used during the week itself. Over my three and a half mile ramble, I meet fewer than half a dozen other walkers - and their dogs. The area is well-maintained with very little, if any, litter or dropped doggie-poop bags.

Yesterday for a change of pace, I decided to do my regular walk, but circle the lake clockwise instead of counter clockwise as is my habit. During the pandemic, the county posted signs (see above), that indicated the trail was to be walked in one direction only. Somehow the likelihood  of people passing the virus while passing others always seemed pretty remote. The rule was often ignored and, as far as I know, never really enforced. So despite the still posted one-way signs, I hiked my well-loved path bass ackwards. 

It was like hiking a whole different park. Seen from an alternative perspective, the paths were new and the sights were novel. I actually had to look at the posted maps at trail intersections to double-check the right path. Some things stayed the same: the root which once tripped me when my attention was on an approaching hiker’s cleavage rather than the path, the “crooked” bridge from which many a fowl can always be seen, and wooden board walks on which the thump of one’s hiking poles can sound like a drum beat. But the walk felt surprisingly new.

The pandemic has kept all of us closer to home, less able to go new places, try new experiences. But it doesn’t take much to change up the old and familiar and make it feel at least a bit exhilarating. 

Try going bass ackwards on your next walk.