August Recap

A Reflection on Intentional Living After Five Years of Incarceration

Hello All,

I hope that all is well in your worlds and that you are finding regular milestones to celebrate. I passed the five-year mark of my incarceration, and although it was not cause for celebration, there are a few thoughts to share from month 60. Before we get to those, however, I did have a twofold occasion for gratitude this past month.

Sixteen years ago in August, Lisa made me the luckiest dude on the planet by taking me to be her husband in our backyard. Synchronistically, during our anniversary week, I came across this quote from the Stoic philosopher Seneca, delivered by my guy Michel de Montaigne: “Since I cannot bring her to love me more courageously, she brings me to love myself more carefully.” I could write a book longer than Montaigne's about the positive impact Lisa has on my life, but for the moment, I'll simply credit her for being my role model for courage and care. Separation on anniversaries is hard, but it was a blessing to know that come the 17th, our circumstances will be dramatically different.

We started the month here at Shangri-La on full restriction, confined to the building. I found myself thinking back to the poor souls who were stuck on cruise ships that were not permitted to come into port during the early days of Covid. That's how it is for us: a bunch of sick people, stuck together, suffering cabin fever, miserable. Given that Mickey Mouse is a fitting symbol for the operation of this camp, I had a chuckle picturing us as a Disney cruise gone horribly wrong.

Alas, Thomson's saltiness is not to be found in anything so pleasant as sea spray. It flavored the attitudes of my comrades, and I did my best to keep that taste out of my mouth. In my morning quiet times, I asked the Higher Power to help me practice detachment with love, with an emphasis on the love, and then I went about my days acting as if that prayer had been answered. In those situations, I find that I have neither the ability nor the responsibility to solve the problem of reaction to circumstance for others, but at the very least I can refrain from adding to the misery.

The abundance of inside time afforded ample opportunity for reading, and I turned quite a few pages. Through five years I have read 640 books. Favorites for August were To Free the Captives, Crash Landing, Think & Grow Rich, The Anxious Generation, The Center Did Not Hold, The Good Food Revolution, Co-Intelligence, and Open. The subject matter was wide-ranging, but one contrast in particular stood out.

It is no surprise that books on social media, urban farming, and artificial intelligence would provide interesting insights. What I did not expect to find was a connecting thread among them. Perhaps I just have too much time on my hands, causing me to perceive things that aren't there. Allow me to lay it out, and you can decide.

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt seeks to illuminate the root cause of the disturbing trends in mental health manifesting in teenagers and young adults. The evidence pointing to the effects of the combination of mobile devices and social media is damning. To those who make the counterargument that people are suffering because the world is screwed up, Haidt offers this perspective:

"Everything may seem broken, but that was just as true when I was growing up in the 1970s and when my parents were growing up in the 1930s. It's the story of humanity. If world events played a role in the current mental health crisis, it's not because world events suddenly got worse around 2012: it's because world events were suddenly being pumped into adolescents' brains through their phones, not as news stories, but as social media posts in which other young people expressed their emotions about a collapsing world, emotions that are contagious on social media."

It seems to me that the impact he describes reaches far beyond the cohort who came of age between 2010 and 2015, when this radioactive mix of technologies was dropped into our culture like a nuclear bomb. Those of us who lived through the birth of 24/7 cable news and its subsequent fragmentation can count that as our original psychic traumatization. Digital media has played the role of a perpetual re-triggering mechanism for that trauma.

I live in an analog environment compared to those in the outside world, and yet I still witness the dynamic of negative contagion every day. At various times the camp's TVs are turned to one or all three of the major cable news channels. A story will come on, tweaking the viewers into one form of agitation or another, followed by them turning to their neighbors to comment, and thereby transmit the virus. Haidt would likely be fascinated to watch the spread, as am I—except in the moments when I realize that I too have been infected. Being mindful does not equate to being immune, and I am reminded of the necessity of militantly gatekeeping my consciousness. The Anxious Generation showed me that the risk of not doing so is not limited to ineffectiveness in the use of my time and attention. My physical and mental well-being are also on the line.

I'm not a Luddite. Mobile and digital technologies are powerful enablers of connectivity and productivity, in spite of their downsides, and I intend to use them. Haidt's words did stick in my mind, though, including one pointed observation that admonishes me to bring my best self, aligned with my core values, to their use: “From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind. Spiritual practices and virtues, such as forgiveness, grace, and love, are a cure.”

I came back from contemplating cyberspace (old guy word alert!) and got down to earth with The Good Food Revolution. Author, entrepreneur, and activist Will Allen, who was also a professional basketball player in his youth, tells the story of returning to his agricultural roots when he founded an urban farm in a depressed area of Milwaukee. As he developed his oasis in the city's food desert, innovating to bring nutritious food offerings to the community, Allen gradually understood that his mission was about more than vegetables, eggs, and fish. He wrote:

"My father taught me that the fate of a seed can be predicted by the health of the soil where it takes root. This is true of summer crops. It can be true, in another sense, of people. We all need a healthy environment and a community that lets us fulfill our potential."

I have witnessed the truth of that statement in the backgrounds of the men I've met in the camp. Our current environment, which by design degrades our bodies, minds, and souls through limitations on nourishment, is foreign to me. After five years, it is abundantly clear that I come from a different place. A place where I have been blessed with tools for living and overwhelming support from my loved ones that have saved me from ruin. For many of my comrades, those tools and loving support are the equivalent of organic kale. If they even know what it is, it has never been a part of their diet. Their addresses may have changed when they came to Thomson, but the deleterious conditions are just like home.

Haidt's and Allen's narratives share a commentary on modern life: progress does not always result in improvement, and sometimes more leads to less. Digital technology has given us more connectivity, but less genuine connection. Our food system delivers more calories, but fewer nutrients. Now we enter the age of AI and face a familiar potential of promise and pitfall. Will artificial intelligence solve the problems we've created and usher in some form of utopia? Or will it walk us down the road to a dystopian hellscape or our extinction?

In Co-Intelligence, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick does not focus primarily on the big existential questions. Rather, he points out that the least likely scenario is that humanity puts the AI genie back in the bottle. AI is and will continue to be. Further, there are too many players with motives of curiosity, profit, and power to expect anything less than its continued evolution. For his part, Mollick takes the cautiously optimistic view of what the ultimate outcome will be. The main thrust of his message is practical: we have this tool available to us. How best can we use it now? He concludes that, at the very least, we can avoid the disappointment of prior waves of technological advance in our work lives. You know, that period when computers were supposed to make everything more efficient and less stressful, but the opposite happened? Mollick stated his position thusly:

"We don't need to subject vast numbers of humans to machine overlords. Rather, LLMs could help us flourish by making it impossible to ignore the truth any longer: a lot of work is really boring and not particularly meaningful. If we can acknowledge that, we can turn our attention to improving the human experience of work."

The best we can do at present is to learn to effectively use AI in such a manner that it works for us as a supplemental “co-intelligence.” He makes concrete suggestions from his research and experimentation for how to do so, and pitches the ideal mindset as: “Imagine your AI collaborator as an infinitely fast intern, eager to please but prone to bending the truth.” It would seem that the axiom “trust but verify” will continue to be applicable.

Haidt, Allen, and Mollick each got me thinking about the bigger picture of innovation and progress. The effects of human creation through science and technology are inseparable from the strengths, weaknesses, and motives of the humans doing the creating. Inventions and discoveries aggregate into systems that profoundly impact our lives for good and ill, both directly and indirectly, because we exist in an interconnected ecosystem. Every choice in every moment matters.

At the macro level that can feel overwhelming, but all three authors appealed to my pragmatism by sharing what they are doing to be positive change agents within their respective systems, and the ecosystem as a whole. They reminded me that I too am a change agent, and that accountability demands I bring mindfulness and intentionality to my choices on a daily basis so that I don't add to the growing list of negative unintended consequences that are currently plaguing us.

Will Allen summed up my role as an individual by telling the story of a little bird:

"A man comes upon a sparrow along the edge of the road. The sparrow is lying on its back with its feet sticking upward. The man asks the sparrow what it's doing.
'I heard the sky is falling,' the bird replies, 'and I want to hold it up.'
The man laughs at the bird. 'You believe you can hold up the whole sky?'
'No,' the bird says. 'But one does what one can.'”

My final preparations for homecoming are being made. I am constantly refining the picture in my mind of what it looks like to live according to my core values, in service to my family, friends, and community. I'm very much looking forward to being back in the world, but I am aware that there are seductive and destructive forces in it. It is on me to choose what I allow in, and in that regard, the ebb and flow of restrictions during my incarceration have proven to be a valuable experience.

Each time we are sanctioned, I am stripped down to the essentials. When the sanctions are lifted, as they were at the end of August, I get to decide what I put back in. Going for a run, hitting golf balls, fresh air and sunshine—yes. Daytime television, nope. The few healthy snacks available from commissary—roger those. Honey buns and Doritos—that's a negative, ghost rider. Extra phone and email communications with my wonderful people—absolutely. On and on it goes. Even in here, the magic mix of my agency, attention, and time makes the building of a good day possible every day. If I abdicate my responsibility, forces will act upon me to waste my days. I'm keeping this fact front of mind as I get ready to rejoin you. The bigger menu of options and opportunities that awaits does not fundamentally alter my relationship to them.

The bottom line is that I feel the urgency and weight of a debt that I owe. I am coming out of this experience stronger than ever, and that is because of the outpouring of love that I've received over the past five years. I know that those who give me their love aren't looking to be repaid, but it's a debt nonetheless. Therefore, I am committed to paying that love forward with every waking moment. That's my mission, and these words from Helen Keller resonated deeply with me to that end:

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."

I'm like Allen's sparrow, currently in a birdcage, but more than ready to do my part when the door opens. I often feel like if I get any more prepared, I may explode. That is why this verse I found from Rumi in the afterword of Deepak Chopra's novel Muhammad jumped off the page:

"In love that is new—there you must die.
Where the past begins on the other side.
Melt into the sky and break free
From the prison whose walls you must smash.
Greet the hue of day
Out of the fog of darkness.
Now is the time!"

Out of the fog of this dark place, I'll be emerging soon to greet the hue of new days with you. Not much longer now. The best is yet to come.

Much love to you all,
J