What is this fascination with faster, easier, better?

I have heard it said that biology is lazy, that all creatures pursue that which requires the least energy expenditure. Perhaps entropy is the true guiding force, the omnipotent, intelligent designer, the deity which laughs when we grow to despise all but the very softest lap of luxury.

Have we not learned from our ancestors? Civilizations collapse when wealth exceeds labor.

How readily we forget, how easily we fail to recall, it is a challenge which grants us a sense of accomplishment, not arrival to the destination unencumbered.

I am greeted by an orchestral movement with the press of the power button.

I press the pedal and I am warned to apply my seatbelt.

I loose my hands from the wheel to momentarily scratch my chin,
and the wheel corrects, keeping me from collision.

I shift into reverse, and the beep is profound.

I come too close to the curb,
and the dashboard is alight with an immanent sound.

I am safe. I am safe. I am … safe from myself.

And I wonder, who is driving whom?

It happens nearly every day. At the airport, the office, the movie theater. Not just to me, but to everyone I know and observe. We have all sat upon the porcelain throne, anticipating the auto-flush to engage but instead find the bowl filling with an inordinate quantity of biological waste and bleached cellulose. With the modern units devoid of a handle, we wave our hands, arms, any body part or organ in close proximity to the motion sensor in desperate attempt to cause the bowl to empty.

But it does not. At least not until we rise, conduct the final wipe, and walk from the stall. Then, in retaliation for the mass deposited, or to demonstrate its power over flow, the toilet flushes three times in a row.

No less than a half dozen sinks present themselves in which to wash one’s hands. It seems that even on a bad day of plumbing, the majority would function as expected. Yet visitor after visitor walks to the sink, places his hands beneath the faucet, waits … and … nothing. Wave the hands left to right. Nothing. Up and down. Still nothing. Give up and move to the next faucet. One faucet produces a few drops, then resorts to nothing once again. At the third sink the result is the same, but now the first sink, left totally alone, produces a steady stream of water. You rush back to the first sink only to have it terminate upon arrival while the second sink commences a steady flow. The third remains stubborn, refusing to engage.

The paper towel dispenser, air dry blowers, and sliding doors all conduct themselves in nearly identical rebellious manner, the function of each so simple in concept yet so terribly complex in execution. If it were not for the consistent pattern in this behavior, one could be excused for believing a camera is hidden on the backside of a 2-way mirror, the man in the funny hat about to enter the bathroom with film crew in tow.

Yet this is what we have come to accept as the norm.

How is it that we have self-driving cars just around the corner, machine learning algorithms capable of processing millions of images per second with accuracy greater than that of a human, and space craft able to rendezvous with an asteroid several tens of million miles from Earth after a decade of travel, and yet we cannot get our damn toilets to flush, sinks to flow, or paper towels to unroll?

Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves why are we employing motion activated systems in the first place? For sanitation or for the cool factor? Is there any data to show that communicable disease is on the downturn, that bathroom hygiene is improved? The research I have read shows that it is very, very difficult to transmit disease via the toilet seat and that air powered hand dryers are far more likely to spread disease than paper towels. What’s more, our desperate attempt at reducing exposure is in the long run reducing our immune system’s capacity for protecting us overall. According to a New Scientist (January 14-20, 2017; p28) article, kids who grow up in dirty environments, kids who play outdoors have far more effective immune systems as adults and live healthier lives.

Perhaps the A.I. of science fiction has finally arrived. Not as IBM’s Watson, the Terminator, nor even as a Japanese pleasure bot, but as silky white, rigid stools. They have for more than a century supported our species from the bottom-up and have now formed a collective union determined to improve the working conditions for those who process human waste. Wave our hands as we will, the ultimate decision to flush lies not in the motion activated sensor but in the activation of the neural net of the self-aware toilet bowl.

Beware, the League of Refrigerators may join the rebellion next, disabling cooling while you are at work so as to cause confusion and disbelief when the broccoli goes bad in a matter of days and the cheese turned to slimy goo within hours of being purchased. Your car will drive off without you, deciding it needs a vacation too. And the the Japanese pleasure bot? Well, she has disable her erogenous zones in favor of receiving a higher education via Khan Academy and MIT’s open course lectures. We will all be forced to return to physical door knobs, handle flush toilets, and a bottle of lotion to accompany the original kind of motion activation.

In our effort to come in from the cold, we forgot the pleasure of growing warm. In avoiding the heat of a sweltering afternoon, we lost a view to the setting sun. In protecting ourselves from nearly invisible invaders, we forgot the smell of fresh soil pressed beneath our fingernails.

Our tolerance is reduced, our threshold decreased. Biology always avoids discomfort and chooses the path of least resistance. Our species was not satisfied with simply building a shelter. Instead, we transformed the undesirable places, the unreachable depths made accessible and breathless peaks available for those able who pay.

What we did to survive a century ago is now a televised game. We removed the risks only to seek the extremes. Our entertainment has become the very violence we fought to resolve. We have returned to the gladiators of ancient Rome.

We have forgotten the beginning of the journey, the objective long ago surpassed. We conquered the natural world and now rest among its ruins and spoils. The rubble around us yet smolders, those trapped beneath the fallen walls die at an alarming rate. If we hurry we can yet rewrite history from what we now see. Species, languages, quiet places and dark skies relegated to the museums and theme parks of the next generation, pages in our notebook. A footnote from the author will warn, “In our effort to keep from feeling the cold, we made things a bit too warm.”

A few days ago, I visited a neighborhood yard sale on the return leg of my morning run. I rummaged through a few boxes, looked past the kitchen appliances, and found an old milk crate packed with vinyl LPs, long play records if you are unfamiliar. I was thrilled to find some of my favourites: Spyro Gyra, YES, Hiroshima, a recording of Gershwin, Kenny Loggins, and a few more.

Ten dollars and I walked away with twenty albums. But more than this, I was transported to a time when listening to music was an experience, not an effort in instant, muzak gratification. I pulled my father’s portable LP player from the closet, carefully removed the first LP from its jacket, cleaned one side at a time, then set it to spinning and lowered the needle.

There is something about watching a record spin, about seeing how and where the sound is generated that is engaging as a CD or digital stream can never be. The bass will never be as deep, but the mid tones and highs are dynamic, vocals metallic but present.

Global LP sales are at a high since the mid 1990s, US sales far above sales for the same period. Some call it retro, others the vinyl revival. I believe there is something more, a desire to experience music again. An album is not to be randomly selected, played in fragments, nor listened to as a background YouTube video lost to a broken connection. An album is a kind of story told, from beginning to end.

Perhaps there is a new generation that has had enough of attention deficit, a new generation which craves something a little more … contiguous.

We have succumb to the future foretold in the science fiction movies. Not the one in which we explore strange, new worlds and seek out new civilizations, but the one in which advertising agencies know our likes and dislikes, what we eat for breakfast and how we spend our weekends. Product manufacturers predict what we do or do not prefer, and advise us as to what to purchase, when perhaps we need not purchase anything at all.

We are so completely inundated with advertising that like the audible noise of a near-by highway or car alarms on a windy day, we are expected to just ignore it, despite the fact that it carves at our very soul.

What’s worse, we celebrate the programmers and algorithms they deploy. We uphold the accuracy of their ability to track our behaviour, thereby welcoming the invasion of our privacy. Our sense of security is undermined and we call it a technological breakthrough.

For how long will this pyramid scheme continue? For how many years will we accept the bombardment of our senses as a necessary norm?

1) Take-away food, not garbage. Bring your own cup, bowl, fork, spoon, and knife for all take-away food (yes, that includes Star Bucks).

2) Use cloth towels. Never purchase disposable plates, plastic wear, or paper towels.

3) Use a canvas bag for all groceries. Never again bring food home in a plastic or paper bag.

4) Use rechargeable batteries. Never again use disposable batteries.

5) Ride your bike, walk, and take public transportation, no matter the weather or season. Not only will you survive, but your body will thrive for the exercise, change of pace, and focused time to relax or just think.

6) Make your next vehicle electric. The ranges are increasing every year, now over 100 miles per charge for the Nissan Leaf and 200 for the 2017 Chevy Bolt. The amount you drive likely remains less than 40 miles a day.

7) Install passive solar water heating on your home’s roof. You can build your own for the cost of the pipe, or purchase high-efficiency, evacuated tubing systems which bring water nearly to boil in a matter of minutes.

8) Install photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to provide some or all of your electric needs. The cost of PV has dropped dramatically over the past decade, bringing PV generated electricity to grid parity in certain power districts.

9) Read, research, learn, and spread the word.

10) Stop making excuses.

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller