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Obesity, free trade and the US primaries

The world is getting fatter and it appears like one big culprit (I’m not saying it’s the only one) is artificial sugar and the products it enables with low nutrient to high calorie content. (research for: 1,2,3,4 research against: 1)

The interesting thing is how this came to be a global problem. High fructose corn syrup came out from a want in the 70s-80s in the US of lowering food costs. Since corn is such a great crop in terms of how many calories it can feed for the amount of room it takes, the US started subsidizing growing corn crops. (1,2)

Now the problem is that since the US subsidizes cheap corn. That corn gets exported, not just to Canada but around the world with the help of free trade agreements.

A really good takedown of how this all happens is explained by Hasan Minhaj here:

One thing that doesn’t seem to be mentioned is how US politics plays into this. Even the most left leaning candidates in the US presidency race won’t touch this topic. Why?

One reason is explained by Al Gore (1,2,3). Basically, Iowa is the first primary. Every electoral cycle, Iowa and New Hampshire are the first to vote and having a sense of momentum is very important in the primaries. The first votes determine if you are a “real” candidate or not. There have been attempts to change this, most recently in 2012 (1).

I don’t have any real evidence to support it, but I’ve always wondered if something so seemingly unrelated such as when each state in the US votes for their presidential candidate could have an impact of global obesity. Maybe one day someone with the resources to research this will look into it.

Proxy metrics aren’t always bad

One thing I’ve realized is that if I want my goal to be to get in shape or to lose weight, I’ve done some good and bad incentives. And interestingly enough, the bad ones were the outcome based ones.

In almost all situations, proxy metrics become a problem. They are often abused and we tweak things for those metrics instead of the real outcome we want.

But with humans, especially myself, it seems the proxy metrics are easier to follow.

My current example is with weight management. At first I had a goal of staying within a target range until date X. That didn’t work. But what does work is rewarding myself for everyday that I stick to what will help me achieve my goal (in this case I’m rewarding myself every day that I don’t mindlessly eat after 8 pm).

It’s interesting how the focus on outcomes works so well in some contexts and so poorly in others.

It’s going to be okay

With my recent post on anxiety many people have reached out and expressed support and, in a sense their concerns. While I really appreciate the support, I think people are used to folks talking publicly about mental health only when everything is on fire.

What people assume when you talk about mental health publicly

Part of the goal of that blog post was to really normalize that ya, things aren’t great and that’s why I’m doing something to make it better.

I think of it as I’m going to the physio. Ya, my shoulder is kinda sore. I’m not sure why, maybe I’m doing some exercises wrong or I can improve my form, or even more likely I need to work on my core strength.

My shoulder isn’t dislocated, it’s nor torn off or anything, but I’m still going to go see someone for help. I shouldn’t wait until I shoulder falls off before getting help for it and I see it as the same for mental health.

All that to say, I appreciate the concerns and the support, but you don’t have to be worried :). Rather let’s just all talk about when we need to go to the physio for our mental health.

(Seriously, I’m going to the physio for my shoulder… Not sure what I’m doing, but it’s not feeling great… I’d of made a blog post about it, but I don’t think people would be that interested)

On Generalized Anxiety

I often talk about my struggles with Generalized Anxiety Disorder as a thing of the past. Something I struggled with, something I developed coping mechanisms and that I now just kinda pass as a normal person.

Recently it’s come back, I’m not sure what’s triggered it, perhaps the combination of a new job and a new relationship. Either way it’s interesting to be reminded how debilitating and kinda ridiculous it can get.

I think I’m still starting from a better spot since I’ve been able to keep things to a day and not spiral into multi-day or multi-week affairs. And even then, compared to some of my past events, these are not as acute.

It doesn’t change the fact that I had a day where I somehow changed my thoughts via a few hours of brooding and negative thought patterns on a topic I was earlier pretty convinced. It kind of threw people for a loop and while talking about it later, Nicole made me realize it was part of a pattern of recent events where I let my anxiety take over and make decisions that I feel help me become in control of the situation.

The work ones are interesting because, it doesn’t seem to have much in terms of evidence to support my anxiety. Everything seems to be going well, I haven’t had any negative feedback and, au contraire, I’ve had many positive feedback. Yet, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’ll be exposed as a mediocre programmer.

I’m going to go see a counselor shortly, something I haven’t done in many years. Recently I just see my psychiatrist once a year since things have been pretty steady. I decided not to go see her first since I feel like this is something I can tackle by changing my thought patterns.

As they say (okay, maybe I’m the only one who says it), perception is everything.

Who are you?

I can’t even tell you if this is a real memory or not, but many years ago when I was somewhere around 18 I made some glib comment about “finding myself”. My aunt replied with a quote:

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

And yes, it’s a bit cliché and something your neighbor would have on a coffee cup or something, but, like most quotes, I think it hides a deep truth.

A short article in the Guardian, “Are you really yourself” reminded me of the lesson. Life is not about digging under some veeneer or removing layers of vinyl flooring until you find the original hardwood. It’s about accepting that our inner narative may be limiting us.

In the past I’ve often shied away from my rural past. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t like all the other rural folks who drove ski-doos and went hunting. I was a computer nerd. There was no place for both or for something else. I was in essence playing an archetype.

Perhaps the challenge in changing our minds about who we really are is not to rationally persuade ourselves into a new story about who we are, but to learn to live for periods of our life without one.

“Are you really yourself“- Guardian

What preconceived notions about myself do I have left to ignore?
What about you? What are the ones you ignored and grew from? How did they happen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_3ks7-OjGc

We Need A National Pharmacare plan

I started a new job and was reminded of the costs of my medication. My medication costs about $750 a month. Without my medication I’m pretty much useless to society. If I worked minimum wage, $750 a month would be 30% of my gross pay (before any taxes etc).

I’ve only been able to have great jobs because I had family members who helped pay for my meds when I was going thru tough times financially. Without that, I’d probably be living on the street.

I think we also have a moral imperative to help others. While not just health related I think most people can agree that if we have the means, we shouldn’t let anyone die because they don’t have enough money at that time. This is something that’s fully achievable and actually very affordable (for a country such as Canada).

If you want you can read the full report presented to the House of Commons here. The short version is that people would pay between $2 and $5 per medication with a yearly cap of $100. This would cost approximately 3.5 Billion in the first year phasing up to 15.3 Billion. That being said, after 5 years Canadian as a whole would be saving ~7 billion a year with Pharmacare as opposed to without. Meaning that we would have every Canadian covered for a total of 46 billion instead of spending 51 billion (across public, private and out of pocket).

Even if you don’t care about others and are fully selfish, you probably would rather save 7 billion as a whole, especially if that means having someone be healthy which means they pay taxes that help improve all the services government provides instead of living on the street and being a “nuisance”

Either way, we need a National Pharmacare plan and urge you to support it as well.

Mistakes will be made, but not by me

Note: This post references an event that happened in the past.

In concept I love the idea of failure as a means of growth. It’s how you iterate on products, on what you like, on who you are. I also feel comfortable taking responsibility for those failures. If we’re in a team setting and something goes off the rails, I feel comfortable taking responsibility publicly or outside of the team because I feel confident that the failure is not a reflection of who I am. It’s just a thing that happened.

There’s a different kind of failure. One that goes down to shaking your core belief of who you are as a person, one that breaks your internal narrative. I had a few of those growing up, and they always made me sick to my stomach. I would because physically ill, at times for months at a time when something triggered a memory of what I did. Something that triggered the memory that my internal monologue was a fraud.

I often associated that feeling with my anxiety. They were just overblown reactions to events. Having a better handle on my anxiety now, I thought I was done with those days. Nowadays when something bad happens, I know what I did and I understand my actions and the events that lead to it. Even when making mistakes, which I still regularly make, they don’t make me rethink who I am as a person, they are just mistakes.

Recently I did something that, from a 3rd party perspective, would probably be characterized as being in bad taste. But given the context, one I knew of, and had just not thought about at the time, was devastating to someone else.

I was stuck in my own head, thinking only of how current events impacted me, how I reacted to them, how I felt about them, how I could tell myself a story to make me at ease with the events that happened. A shitty self defense mechanism that jokingly downplayed someone else while up-playing myself. A few things made this even worse that I didn’t realize at the time and didn’t even think of it until it was flagged to me. I then thought it was bad but, perhaps as a self defense mechanism, told myself it wasn’t that bad. I told myself there was a confluence of events, it wasn’t just me, I wasn’t wholly responsible, multiple things came into play for this to happen, you know?

When the realization of the effects of my actions fully dawned on me, I felt that same feeling I felt so long ago. I wasn’t sad or angry…. I was disgusted.

I was disgusted by the juxtaposition of the story I tell myself, that I’m compassionate, that I help others, that I, overall, make the world a better place with the impact of what I said had, and will probably keep having on someone else. I robbed them of their safety, I robbed them of the ability to enjoy a moment, enjoy a memory, by poisoning it. When something like what I did would happen to me, I would ruminate on it for days, weeks, even months. I know the effects of what I did, and it is so diametrically opposed to the story I tell myself that I became ill.

Another part of me feels ashamed and embarrassed to even be thinking of how this impacted me. Just another demonstration of the shitty behavior that lead to this. I want to apologize, I want to fix things, but I don’t know how to convey that in a way that doesn’t focus on what the impact has been on me. Quite the selfish apology wouldn’t you say? I wish I had a time machine to undo what I’ve done.

I felt embarrassed I didn’t even realize what I was doing, that I was cutting in a wound I knew existed. Why had I not considered others when I spoke then? I know a few of the reasons I tell myself, but they are all trivial, they don’t undo anything, they don’t fix anything, they won’t even help ease the pain I caused in others. It’s all just stories I tell myself to minimize my actions. To try to tell myself that this event doesn’t condemn me to be the terrible individual it makes me feel like I am.

Even an apology feels shallow and empty at this point. Just Another selfish act to help ease my pain. To help me rebuild this narrative I tell myself about how, on the whole, I make the world a better place. The problem is, I don’t know of a better solution. Self inflicted pain and torture won’t make it better for them, it’s just more internal narrative fixing. How can one apologize and make amends after this?

I can only see a consistent set of small actions, repeated over an extended period of time, towards them and towards others to try to pay down this debt. To try to help heal as many wounds as I can because I can’t heal the one I inflicted.

That person who comments

I had a message a while back that read:

“Hey, so I read your last blog post. And to be honest, I drafted 3 different comments on 3 different posts on your blog, but lost my nerve before hitting submit on any of them. I really enjoy reading your blog, since it’s real and honest, but commenting is intimidating. I don’t want to be *that* person that comments with a tangentially related personal experience on all your posts. But I really appreciate that you write outloud, putting yourself out there for us to see a real, live human being living a real, human life.
Anyway, I didn’t post that as a comment, since it’s rambly and self indulgent.”

And I found it super interesting since I often have no idea who actually reads this and if there is any value to it.
I do have a few folks who reach out privately on various topics and give feedback, some of them pretty regularly (which I greatly appreciate) but it’s often a bit of a mystery. I know that shouldn’t really matter but it’s still something I always find interesting. Why is it that we always seek that external validation? Is it simply the dopamine hit we get when we interact with other humans? Is the only purpose to help mammal bonding?

And if it is “just” that, do we need to do anything about it?

Nondualism

I’ve always liked the idea of nondualism, I do sometimes struggle with it. I forget, I “other”, I assume bad intent, I lack compassion, etc.

Lucas wrote about it here: https://lucascherkewski.com/study/franklin-other-us/ which was a good reminder.

I find the problem is when I’m in the moment I often forget it. I might get back to it a bit later. Realize I lost it and then be compassionate in the past tense. I’m hoping it’s like all exercise, the more I practice it, the better it’ll be.

Remember the Past to Appreciate the Present

I really loved the Mass Effect video game, the whole trilogy in fact is amazing. One thing I still remember clearly is finishing Mass Effect and having this song come on during the credits:

From the start of the guitar to when the lyrics kick in, the song always spoke to me. While I was perhaps slightly better than in the past in 2008, it was still a pretty big mess. The feeling of longing, nostalgia and what I’ll call hopeful despair that I took from the song really made an impact on me at the time.

I identified with the lyrics, I had always up to that point struggled with being able to be a “full” person on my own. That I shouldn’t need anyone else that I used as a crutch. My happiness, my wisdom, my actions, they shouldn’t rely on there being someone else there with me (in particular as a romantic partner).

And I need you to recover
Because I can’t make it on my own

M4 Lyrics

A few books got me to accept the impossibility of that task. That humans were not built to be that way (by this I mean, being alone, not that the traditional concept of relationship is for everyone).

Once in a while the song comes up in one of my playlists. And it reminds me, in an almost nostalgic way, of the times when I really didn’t have my shit together.

Sometimes it’s good to remember the past to appreciate the present.