The Iron Yuppie

An OLD article in the New Yorker (you're going to be seeing a lot of these from me as I clean out my queue) covered some of the odd elements around owning an S.U.V. and had a great tie into another area of my passion... psychology.

I'm not sure if you know about the concept of Learned Helplessness but Wikipedia sums it up pretty nicely:

Learned helplessness [...] is a description of the effect of inescapable punishment (such as electrical shock) on animal behaviour. Learned helplessness may also occur in everyday situations where continued failure may inhibit somebody from experiencing agency in the future, leading to many forms of depression.

The interesting part here is that we, Americans mostly but I'm sure it is to some degree a world wide phenomenon, are both the cause of and victim of our own types of Learned Helplessness behavior.

Recently, everyone has been so concerned with terrorism, but the likelihood of getting hit by a terrorist attack is so much lower than a plane crash, which is already ridiculously low. But that's not how humans work. We don't do the math and then realize that there's no chance we'll need 15 rooms in our house for the once in a lifetime occurance when everyone in our family comes to town spontaneously and there's a plumbers convention causing every hotel and motel to be filled. Instead, we go out and buy the biggest house we can find and sit around listening to ourselves make echos (or fill up the 3rd through 10th bedrooms as "storage").

Same thing happens with danger. So we want to take action to prevent harm instead of sitting back and waiting for harm to come to us. But the fact is that harm will come to us whether we like it or not, so don't bother wasting time/money energy on it. And now we get to the quote:

We live in an age, after all, that is strangely fixated on the idea of helplessness: we're fascinated by hurricanes and terrorist acts and epidemics like SARS--situations in which we feel powerless to affect our own destiny. In fact, the risks posed to life and limb fby forces outside our control are dwarfed by the factors we can control. Our fixation with helplessness distorts our perceptions of risk. "When you feel safe, you can be passive," Rapaille says of the fundamental appreal of the S.U.V. "Safe means I can sleep. I can give up control. I can relax. I can take off my shoes. I can listen to music."

Yet nothing could be further from the truth. We trade in perceived safety for ACTUAL danger (the average number of fatalities per passanger mile in an S.U.V. far outpace something small and seemingly unsafe like a Honda Civic). Ack.

posted by Iron Yuppie  # 7/17/2006 04:23:00 PM 0 Comments

This is now my second post from "Windows Live Writer" and I like it. A LOT. Super simple, it did auto detection that I post through blogger and tracks a bunch of different elements including styles and recent posts.

The only thing I'm not ecstatic about is the fact that every time I do a new post, it has to open up a new window. I'd much prefer having all the windows in one tabbed interface, or just closing the existing window (once posted) and reuse. Also, rather than firing up the browser page externally, you could have it in the same tabbed interface. All in all though, nice work Windows team!

posted by Iron Yuppie  # 7/17/2006 12:19:00 PM 2 Comments

Bret Easton Ellis has a new book out (and by new, I mean new to me, since it's been out since last August). I quite liked American Psycho though it was beyond insane, and this piggy backs on that. Apparently the character in the book "Bret Easton Ellis" is tracked by the character in American Psycho Patrick Bateman. Kind of stolen a little from Steven King, but I still want to read it.

posted by Iron Yuppie  # 7/17/2006 12:17:00 PM 0 Comments