I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back on it in my memory… and I didn’t have a good time.

- Max, Kicking and Screaming

I think what is appealing about nostalgia is that we know how things turned out and they turned out OK. When I’m nostalgic about snowstorms, it’s not really because I love the snow. I think what I like is that I know the snowstorm turned out to be a small inconvenience, so when I look back on it I remember it without the worries I felt at the time. A snowstorm in my memory isn’t about feeling wet and cold, or being concerned that I didn’t get to the supermarket again before the roads were undriveable, or anything like that. I know those bad things passed and without any lasting bad effect. A snowstorm in my memory is about watching lots of TV with my family, eating what food we did have left, and a general sense that the world is taking a break. Because I’m looking back on it, I know the worries can all be ignored because it all works out in the end. My nostalgia is about remembering the old days without the uncertainty. Whatever happened back then worked out OK, because it all ended up with me as I am today.

Where things get really interesting is when I realized that one day in the future I will almost certainly be nostalgic for right now. Day to day I might worry about how hot it is in Austin in the summer, or how much traffic our website gets, or how hard it is to switch from being a passable web programmer to being a passable iPhone developer. Years from now, when all those things I worry about work themselves out one way or another, I’ll remember these days as the days when I learned all about Tex-Mex, web analytics, and C programming. And it will seem like a time of lost simplicity. All these problems I have today will seem like non-issues, certainly not as serious as whatever will bug me in the future. The problems of the past never seem too serious. We did solve them, after all.

I’m now inclined to not take my current problems too seriously. Sure, they still need to be solved. But these problems aren’t what will stay with me. What I’ve learned from nostalgia is that problems loom large in the present but they also stay there. So, I think I’m going to start treating them as they guests they are. I’ll give them the respect they deserve while they’re here, but I know that soon enough they’ll be on their way. I think that by applying a little bit of the lessons of nostalgia to my life, I can keep my focus on what’s important.

In the case of egoism, the arguments against it typically try to imagine some sort of scenario where failing to follow non-egoist principles results in some sort of morally disgusting result. This type of argument is fairly common in ethical reasoning, as well as any other field where you’re prefer to not reason from first principles. But it’s a type of arguments that, by its design, fails to even notice that there may be some positive argument for the principle in question. In fact, the argument type I mention really just results in begging the question, as the “morally disgusting result” is typically evaluable as morally disgusting from non-egoist principles. One rarely comes across an anti-egoism argument that actually engages the egoist argument on egoist terms. Anti-egoists, like anti-Darwinian, prefer to stay within their own premises and then show that, by golly, you can’t be both a creationist and a Darwinian, so Darwinism must go (you can’t be both an anti-egoist and an egoist, so egoism must go).

As it turns out, there isn’t a coherent alternative to either neo-darwinism or ethical egoism. Additionally, neither evolution or ethical egoism result in morally disgusting situations. Evolution, so far, results in humanity, among other things. Ethical egoism, as I live it, is full of creativity, co-operation, compassion, and love.

I suppose that if it were true that ethical egoism required me to violently subjugate every person I encountered and that I could only feel true happiness when sunbathing by the side of a river of human blood…well, I would probably reconsider ethical egoism. In this vein, if everyone shit ice cream, then restrooms would be restaurants. But, as things actually stand, ethical egoism has made me a decent person and nobody is eating out of their toilet.

First, I actually read more now. The Kindle is really fun to read, compared to the average book. The text is clear (and can be adjusted to be larger or smaller), the book selection is ok, and I can let it sit on my lap without having to hold it open.

Second, it obviously saves an awful lot of space. I must have bought at least a shelf’s worth of books for the device, but it remains tiny. I haven’t had to think about where to put a single one of the books I bought, because they are all stored either on my Kindle or in the cloud by Amazon.

Those two things combined actually made a difference in how we approached buying our next house. We didn’t need to be overly concerned with having tons of room for bookshelves, as we default to buying books on the Kindles when they’re available. An unexpected change was that we’re considering going without a TV altogether, as we spend so much more time reading that the cost of a TV, and the space it would require, are on the edge of not being worth it. As a result, we could shop for a smaller house, relative to what we would have wanted if we were going to fill the house with books and a TV.

The Kindle is fairly expensive, but it may have saved my wife and I hundreds of thousands of dollars in a house.

I do have one criticism of the Kindle, which they are already addressing. The book selection is still nowhere near what I would need for a complete replacement for paper books. Lots of old books are missing, and even some recently released books don’t go on the Kindle (such as Nixonland, which I bought in hardcover recently). When I got my Kindle I think Amazon was advertising that they had over 90K books on the Kindle and it is now over 120K, which is great progress. But I don’t think I’ll be really happy with it until it hits several multiples of where it is now.

It turns out, if you own enough books, you have to figure them into your future housing plans. As in, if you buy enough books, you’re buying a bigger house than you otherwise would. Luckily, we were able to notice that TVs, excess electronics, and even excess books were warping our plans before we bought a house. As a result, we were able to decide to get rid of an awful lot of our stuff, and now we’re moving into a much better neighborhood and smaller house than we expected to at the beginning.

Also, we will now have a few additional benefits. For one, we will live in an urban enough area that we can walk to the grocery, several restaurants, and possibly even downtown if we were ambitious. If we continued our devotion to our stuff, we would be looking at lots and lots of driving.

For another, when we move to our next house we won’t start life there already buried under our possessions. We can take our time and get new stuff and that stuff will be much better suited to the people we are now. In this case, it seems like there’s not enough room for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our stuff was yesterday and now we have room for today and tomorrow. That sounds like a nice start.

Robot, Ubuntero

Originally uploaded by enkrates.

Another day, another snowstorm.

In other news, Robot has become quite a dapper dog lately, with his fancy Ubuntu shirt.

None of those have a whole lot to do with animal welfare, so they’re not relevant here. But two subcultures, Objectivists and American Conservatives, are both proudly anti-animal welfare, at least in some sense. Neither embraces animal cruelty as most people would understand that phrase, but both could consider eating a steak to be a political act against hippies who think animals should have rights.

I don’t believe in animal rights. Animals are not political. I won’t go into this too deeply, but I will just say that Ayn Rand’s derivation of rights is the one I find most convincing, and it doesn’t apply to non-conceptual beings. And that’s where I’ve stood for a long time in relation to animal welfare.

But I am not much for politics in general and I certainly don’t care to use political ideas to make personal decisions. Rights are useful for constructing societies, but when I’m choosing among possible actions rights are under-determinative or irrelevant.

Simply, I have an animal in my family. We have a dog named Robot and I am unable to feel the way I do about him without also caring about the welfare of animals like him. That means when I eat, it matters to me that the cow that gave the milk in my food did not suffer in so giving. It matters that the meat I eat did not come from a sick animal, rotting in what is effectively a cell.
Further, it matters to me that I not eat meat or drink milk at all. But that isn’t the only thing that matters to me. I try to live a happy life and suddenly changing almost every dish in my diet is not likely to make me happy. I’ve spent the last 28 or so years learning the foods I like to eat and I doubt I could find vegan meals to replace all those dishes very quickly. Living a vegan life is a factor in my eating decisions, but it is not the only factor. These days I try to eat new vegan meals pretty regularly, but I almost never have only vegan meals for a whole day. I’m walking, not running, to veganism. I expect to get there, but I’m not in a rush. It’s hard for me to rush and be happy at the same time.

I’m an egoist, so animal suffering doesn’t count for everything. In fact, human suffering doesn’t count for everything, either. But they both count for something, at least to me.

Kari is Handy

Originally uploaded by enkrates.
Kari’s office door has a latch to keep Robot out when we’re out of the house. Unfortunately, it broke and she tried to fix it by herself. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work as well as it used to.