Today is the day that we remember people we loved who died on active duty serving their country. My dad is one of those people. He died in an unexplained crash of an F4 Phantom fighter jet during a training mission. I found the crash site last fall and wrote about it here.

Memorial Day is usually hard for me because it’s a time when people feel free to say what his death and the deaths of so many others mean. And while this is normal, even the purpose of the shared civic ritual, all the losses of people we love resist collapsing down into a single story of serving one’s country and dying for others.

Other losses

My wife, Melody’s, grandmother was a twin. She lost her twin
brother to a plane crash somewhere over the Himalayas in World War 2. She always held out hope that he had somehow survived the crash and had built a life there on the other side of the world. It was the NPR story of another family looking for crashed WWII planes by asking local hunters if they knew of any crashed planes that led me to Arkansashunting.net where ultimately found people who helped me find the spot where my dad died.

When we don’t get a chance to see the body, there’s always a crack of hope for our mind to wonder at. I think this is part of why it was so important for me to find where my dad died. I never believed he survived but I fantasized about it sometimes. His death and life were never as real to me as when I was walking the woods pulling up pieces of airplane, flight suit and boot.

Other stories

My dad did die serving his country. He was on active duty getting trained on the weapons systems in the second seat of the F4 fighter jet.

He also died in the process of transitioning from the Air Force to the Air National Guard: the reserves of the air force. He wanted to take a step away from 80 hour work weeks, spend more time with his parents and sisters, and with us, doing woodworking, gunsmithing and hunting.

He also died fulfilling a dream he’d had since his teen years of being in the cockpit of a fighter jet. After seeing the Blue Angels at an air show, he turned to his friend and said “I’m going to fly one of those.” And though he wasn’t on the stick the day he died, he did fly one. Even though he wasn’t able to go to the Air Force Academy or take a direct route to piloting due to his need for glasses. When he died, he was actively making plans to build wood and canvas ultralight planes with his base commander. He was a maker and a first principles thinker who understood that direct experience is more reliable than authority.

Even after he transitioned to different dreams of Air Foce ROTC which made it possible to be the first to go to college in his family, he still was obsessed with the F4. He once stayed up all night programming punch cards to make the mainframes at University of Arkansas print out a huge image of the fighter plane made up of letters numbers and other ASCII characters.

Bigger stories

The two leading explanations for the crash are pilot error or mechanical failure resulting in a snap stall at high speed and low altitude. More people familiar with the crash believe it was pilot error. But others I’ve spoken to believe that the crash shares a lot of characteristics with a similar crash of the same model plane from the same lot produced on the same manufacturing line. That F4 had a mechanical failure causing amplification of pilot movement of the stick controlling the bellows that control how the tail moves to make the aircraft turn.

So he may also have died due to a mistake in quality control at McDonnel Douglass. Some have said that the quality control issues plaguing Boeing began after they acquired McDonnel Douglass. So his death may also mean that the captialist need for public companies to grow and grow and grow for their stakeholders inevitably mean that engineers get pressured to go faster and faster and people die as a result.

His service to our country also means that, before he ever climbed into the cockpit of an F4, he was the navigator for one of a relay race of large bombers that flew 24/7 on “nuke alert” for decades during the cold war. These planes and their crews flew in an endless triangle over the arctic circle ready to drop annihilation down on cities full of civilians. This a horror America invented and so far, the American military is the only one to ever unleash such a horror.

His death is, like all our lives, are caught up in the stories of power, war, economics that we are born into and each have to find a way to understand and choose how we will participate in and stand against.

My story

But lately, as my children grow into little adults, one photo captures what the loss of my father means for me. It shows him smiling with joy at the camera, shirt off, with my brother, Jason, and I riding him like a horse.

This photo is so sharp and still cuts me every time I see it. It shows me that I lost a father who loved me and could understand me with the knowledge that comes from being flesh and blood. And yet there are moments in my own life that become illuminated by this loss.

Presence illuminated by absence

On the way home from the dentist

One day, driving home from a hard visit to the dentist’s office with one of my daughters, I felt the weight of the emotional energy I had spent to support her through pain and advocate for her needs with the care team. And as I slumped forward in my seat, waiting at a stoplight, I thought, my father was never there to do this for me. And yet, I get to do this for my children. I reached back and squeezed my daughter’s foot dangling from her car-seat and reached back through time to touch the memory of myself straining to grow up into someone who didn’t need support.

The gift of parenting my children feels like a cosmic do-over to right the wrong of my missing father.

Savoring the beauty

A few weeks ago I was enjoying drinks and chatting with my neighbors on one of their back patios; a weekly happy hour tradition. The kids swing by the table and graze on whatever looks sweet or carby before running off to play together through the evening hours and into dusk. My 9 year old daughter, Hazel, interrupted our conversation to ask if I would push her on “the big girl swing.”

The “big girl swing” is a single strand of climbing rope looped over a high branch in an expansive canopy of an ancient California live oak in our neighborhood. It has a single circle of douglas fir wood for a seat, worn down by wave after wave of children using it. I made the swing when my oldest daughter was about this age. For Hazel, it had been a milestone as a toddler to graduate from a smaller, baby swing to this one.

I don’t always oblige, but this time I heard her reaching out to me with the desire for her father’s strength and attention; something forever out of reach to me, but something I can easily grant to her. I said “I’m enjoying this conversation, but because I care about you, I will take a break and come push you.”

As I stood in the dusk watching her spin and laugh with each successive push, rising up 20-30 feet into the air, pendulum swinging with joy, jokes and chatter rising up from the nearby neighbors, I felt something like what I think my father would have felt had he lived to see my brother and I this age. I felt some part of him in me, alive to this richness and joy.

In this moment, his loss illuminated this goodness, casting a shadow back through time to my own self. I remember learning to push myself on a swing like this, alone by pushing off the tree trunk with my legs. But I don’t remember feeling the power of a grown man pushing me and sharing in my joy and exhilaration. And yet, that night I was both — doubly alive and present to this moment.

Later that night, Hazel came back to the patio and sat by me, laying her body in a chair and her head in my lap. Leaning back, she noticed the bright fingernail moon shining between the eaves of the roofline. Then she said:

“Look at the moon, daddy. It’s so beautiful. We have to savor these moments of beauty in this world because we won’t have them forever.”

I lost my father. And yet what his death means is not simply a sacrifice in service of others, or a casualty of capitalism or the American war machine.

It is the defining tragedy of my life. And, at my best, I strive to live in spite of it and in contrast to it. I try to be the sort of man who pursues dreams other people think are impossible and who is simultaneously interruptible by his children to get down in the floor and play.

And sometimes, I feel his loss illuminating these moments of beauty with deeper meaning and sharpness. And, like Hazel reminded me, I try to savor them.

On October 6, 2024, my two brothers and I drove into the Ouachita National Forest. We were navigating to the best lead we’ve had in years on locating the place where my father died. 

Captain Richard Lumpkin was in the second seat of an F4 Phantom fighter jet when it crashed into the south Arkansas forest on June 5, 1985. That’s as much as I knew when I started searching for answers in my 20’s in college. My search for where he died ended this year after a series of breakthroughs led to some locals confirming the place where the plane went down.

Crash Site Visit

Day 1

We met up in Mount Ida and all piled into my little brother’s Tacoma which we were glad of when we hit our second portion of the road washed out by a dry stream.  About an hour later we pulled off into a clearing with a metal gate blocking the path down a grassy road.

We walked down the road through another clearing and into a food plot that had been plowed under.  A large forking oak stood on the eastern edge of the food plot.  We walked beyond it into the trees.

Within 5 minutes we started spotting pieces of the plane.  Small, hand sized pieces of forest green aluminum; the skin of the plane twisted and deformed.  Wiring harnesses embedded in the ground we pulled up like carrots. 

The first thing that struck me was the violence of the destruction. It was as though the plane had been put through a blender. I had always imagined that the plane had crashed and my dad and the pilot had burned. But it was clear that the plane had simply been annihilated; turned to confetti. We filled three shopping bags with debris before we stopped picking up pieces. There were too many to gather them all. 

My little brother had a special knack for seeing things my older brother and I missed. He kept pulling pieces from the ground I had stepped over without seeing. 

He found the end of a zipper attached to a piece of green nylon flight-suit.  At that moment I realized and said aloud, that we needed to be prepared to find human remains. I learned in 2022 that they only found 40 lbs of human remains between the two men who died there and that’s what we buried in the cemetery. This spot is where they were truly buried.

We walked the compass bearing 40 degrees off north from the first pieces we found.  We found a partially buried piece of one jet engine and another large piece eroding out of the ground.  Beyond the buried pieces we didn’t find any more debris.

We left most of the pieces near where we first found them.  Each of us selected some to take.

What they would have seen

I flew a drone capturing video along the trajectory they would have taken before hitting the trees.

Day 2: He would have loved this place

The next day I came back alone.  I drove another dirt road about a mile south looking for any clue of a road or offshoot from there to the second jet engine which eye witness accounts place about one mile southwest of the main crash site.  Then I drove back to the main site and stopped about a mile west and walked south to pick up the trajectory line again.  I walked that line back to the main crash site and found nothing.

On the second day in these woods, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the place.  My dad was an avid hunter who traveled all over the United States hunting big and small game.  I have a photo of him posing with a bear he killed. In the photo, my dad is dressed in camo with a camo bucket hat and two turkey feathers sticking out in front. 

I found a turkey feather near where we first found the pieces of the plane.  I put it on a rock near where I found the flight suit as a kind of gesture at a memorial.  This is where he died and where his body went into the ground.  He would have loved this place.

I returned to the main debris field and immediately started finding more.  Shortly after while walking back up toward the clearing, I found a piece of a boot.  The toe section, sheared off with the lining still inside.

What it means to me

It’s taken me months and I’m still unpacking what this all means for me.  But a few things feel different now:

1. He’s no longer missing 

One day he just disappeared from our lives and I knew it happened somewhere in the woods but now I know where.

2. I am heir to his life

I have felt from the beginning of this quest that I wanted to join the line of my life to the end of the line of his life. I had expected it to close the loop and bring something to an end.

What I did not expect is that by joining my line to his, I feel a new security and confidence in my identity as the son of Richard Lumpkin. And as a result I feel a new quiet power that flows from his supreme competence, curiosity, gregarious exploration and self-reliance. I’ve spent my adult life waking up to little bits and pieces of this. But now, somehow, after visiting this place, I feel the heir to it all. I am this kind of man because he was this kind of man. His way of being lives in me and is fully mine. And it wants to explore ever outward into new territory, new wilderness, new creativity, into fresh possibilities. And because of who he was, I am.

Thanks

I want to say thanks to a few people in particular who went above and beyond in helping us find the spot.

– Bill Womble who was one of the first on the scene and went over maps with us to help us confirm the general area.

– HC Varnadore who first took my family to visit the crash site on the one year anniversary and filled in a lot of details about the location. It was much easier to find back then and in the years since it got a lot harder to find.

– Josh Jackson who suggested I try OnX mapping software to identify who owned the land.  Turns out it’s federal land but that put me in touch with Dustin and ultimately Arkansashunting.net.

– Arkansashunting.net user AR1234 who found the historical aerial photo from 1986 that showed the shattered trees and road used in the investigation.  I was able to overlay this onto current maps indexed to the position of the road and get within 100 feet of the original ground scar to start our search.

– ArkansasHunting.net user DeputyDog (aka Seth Allen) who spent the better part of a week driving around the area talking to folks who were around when it happened and went out to visit the site ahead of us.

– Dustin Opine of Arkansas Game and Fish who responded to my cold email, remembered a local, Johnny Haga, who had pointed the spot out before and went out to confirm it. Their GPS pin led us straight to the debris field.

– Ryan Bolger who inspired me to keep pushing after he shared the story of his own search for his birth mother which had so much in common with my search.

– And of course, my two brothers, Jason Lumpkin and Andrew Wyers who joined me on this wild goose chase. Though Andrew’s father is my step-father, after the visit, he shared that he feels that so much of his life was set up by the foundation that Richard laid.

Like so many of us, I’ve been watching in horror since October 7th. I’ve felt paralyzed by not knowing what to do or say or how to understand how we got here.

It feels again like it felt after September 11th; the first time I felt myself clinging to the back of my country like some angry beast lumbering towards vengeance.

I’ve turned myself inside out imagining: hiding in a bedroom with with my kids while gunmen stalk us; calling to my daughters buried under rubble; watching my littlest one wither without access to insulin.

I’ve called and messaged my government representatives demanding they not support and pay for this because that is what the people the I know with friends and family in Gaza have asked us who have the power and privilege of being American to do.

After a month of talking with friends and family this is what I can say:

Making people into non-people

These weapons and these actions are inhuman. October 7th is a horrifying tragedy. And the people of Palestine are not animals and their ongoing slaughter is a travesty. The holocaust was possible because people convinced themselves the Jews weren’t human. The Isreali defense minister started this bombing campaign by saying “these people are human animals.”

We don’t have to know the solution to know it has to stop

We don’t have to have a foolproof plan to imagine a future other than this. In fact imagining another way forward is a prerequisite for finding another way. It doesn’t have to be this way.

The challenge to be present with others’ suffering and not be overwhelmed into inaction

When I worked as a hospital chaplain early in my career I was with people who were suffering and dying every day. And I was with doctors and nurses who cared for them. We all struggled to find the right balance of being present to the suffering all around us and not being so overwhelmed that we couldn’t do our jobs to serve those people suffering. There were times that being present to such intense suffering felt like holding my head underwater. I could only do it for so long before having to leave and come up for air.

Over time, the veteran chaplains and doctors and nurses who had learned how to show up day after day taught me that it does not do any one any good for me to try to take on other people’s suffering for them as though it were my own. It’s not possible, it’s not true and it doesn’t actually help. One nurse I worked with explained that holding this boundary is like having a callus on your foot: it has to be thin enough to feel when you are being hurt but not so thin you can’t keep walking.

I learned that what does help is paying attention to other people’s suffering, really paying attention, allowing ourselves to enter into it and know it and imagine ourselves in it and doing this in such a way that the people suffering feel seen and known in the truth of their pain. And then to step back into our own lives and positions of safety, stability, power and privilege and to take action on their behalf to help; the sort of action we can imagine we would want someone to do for or on behalf of us if it were us who were suffering this way.

Painting as a practice of paying attention

Painting for me is mostly about focusing my attention for an hour or so on one thing. It’s been hard to be present to the kind of suffering the people in Gaza are enduring without feeling it will overwhelm me. But this is one way I’ve been able to.

The Washington Post photo I was working from captured my attention with the dark monstrous thunderheads growing from air-strikes looming high above the fragmented buildings. The photo is from so far away we can’t see any people. That’s how the people running this war want it. As viewers we are far away. But the destruction is still overwhelming.

The explosions and smoke are eating the city and the people in it.

I’m ashamed that I can’t stay more present to this suffering and do more. But this is what I can do today to stay present and stay human without being so crippled by it that I can’t keep walking.

Over and Under thinking

On my walk this morning I was talking to my friend and linguist, Luke Wakefield, and I had an insight. For most of my life I’ve been deeply curious about how things work: everything from electronics to religion. I make models of the world to best fit the data of what I know and when I get new data I can’t really rest until I’ve expanded the model to make sense of it.

Most of the people I live and work with have come to understand this as part of my process. But I also regularly hear the phrases: “you’re overthinking it.” This always takes me by surprise as it usually comes when I feel like I’m getting close to actually understanding and articulating the dynamics of a thing from it’s underlying animating principles.

My “ah hah!” moment this morning came from the realization that what they may be expressing is that this thing I’m talking about, from their experience or way of thinking, comes easily, intuitively or automatically without the kind of conscious explanation or thought I’m articulating.

Which is to say, that it comes to them from what Daniel Kanneman calls system 1 thinking: a rapid, automatic, unconscious kind of thinking that runs in the background and gives us all kinds of useful predictions, intuitions and perceptions. This is contrast to system 2 thinking which we all tend to use when our system 1 thinking fails to make sense and we have to switch over to conscious, high cognitive load, high attention interrogation of what is going on here. Most of us can drive to and from work automatically, staying entirely in system 1 thinking. But if we have to negotiate a tricky merge in traffic or drive to a new location and find street parking? We’re likely to switch over to system 2.

The human brain even has dedicated functional areas or “modules” if you will, that specialize or can be trained to specialize and create automation or automaticity in certain tasks like: facial recognition, encoding and decoding writing, and more. This is pretty obvious from experience but what’s less obvious is that there is wide variation in the human population in the distribution and relative effectiveness of these modules.

Brain module diversity or disability?

Don’t have the module for facial recognition? We call that prosopagnosia or faceblindness. It doesn’t mean you can’t recognize faces. It just means that for you, it becomes a conscious, cognitive effort you have to spend energy, time and attention on, while for everyone else who has the module, it’s just a service their brain provides at no cost. Or in Kanneman’s framework, without the brain module to create the automation, the task moves from system 1 thinking to system 2 thinking.

Don’t have the module that does rapid automatic naming of written words? We call that dyslexia. It doesn’t mean you can’t read. It just means that it will cost you more. You’ll work twice as hard as people who have the module for half the speed and accuracy. And you’ll probably develop some hacks to get around needing to read with that part of your brain except when absolutely necessary.

The human brain is amazing. Even when the more common functional area doesn’t work, it can create new automations over time from practice and use. Or it can develop adaptive enhancements of other modules that do work well. My wife and 2 of my kids are faceblind. And they recognize voices faster than faces, which is especially fun when watching animated films. And while my two dyslexic daughters read more slowly than their classmates, they can run circles around most people in processing what’s being said and beating you to the punchline or the next point in the argument.

System 2 is Slower, but it can show its work

Another interesting consequence of having to develop conscious processes of doing the kind of processing that, for many, is unconscious and automatic, is that people who use system 2 thinking have more direct conscious access to the principles, values, and strategies that animate these actions. This means we can often put words to and describe them with more specificity and detail. But when we try to share this with someone for whom it’s simply an automatic and unconscious service their brain provides, it probably does sound like we’re overthinking it. While from the other perspective, their way of thinking and reasoning about it is:
1. not universally available to everyone

2. literally under thinking in that it’s thinking taking place below the conscious mind and inaccessible to it.

I see this dynamic operating among some autistic people who sometimes don’t have the kind of brain automation that can make perceiving and learning some unspoken social and cultural rules unconscious and intuitive. So instead they can become functional anthropologists, observing and studying in order to derive these complex rules and dynamics through observation. It’s no surprise then when, through this more conscious access to their thought process they are able to notice and describe bias, unfairness, and inconsistency in the social and cultural norms that are built up largely through unconscious system 1 thinking driving interactions between individuals and groups. By slowing down into System 2 thinking, we gain access to new insight we don’t have when we rely mostly on our brain’s System 1 auto-pilot.

Diverse neurologies enable a richer reality

The relatively new public discussion happening online and on social media about neurodiversity has done a great job of spreading a shared public vocabulary around attention, executive function, sensory differences. But what I’m hopeful about is the developing awareness of brain difference not universally as deficit from a default norm, but as normal variation in the population of a social species who is made stronger and richer by differences in ways of thikning and being in the world.

So the next time you hear someone talking in detail about something that to you seems obvious and automatic, before you accuse them of overthinking, pause and consider the opportunity to hear from someone who may have had to spend more energy to bootstrap their own brain function in this area from first principles rather than simply take what their unconscious mind has served up to them without effort.

Yesterday my friend Katie DiSimone died.  

I met Katie in an unsolicited direct message.  She reached out to me after I had asked some questions in a facebook group she ran. I was trying to figure out which hacked automated insulin delivery software was most likely to save my family from drowning in the endless labor of diabetes.

“You all live in Pasadena? I’m through that way frequently to visit friends.  I’d be glad to help you guys find a pump and get you stared on looping. 👍”

A few weeks later Loop gave us our lives back.

We met Katie in person at a film screening featuring her friends in a documentary about diabetes alert dogs called Luke and Jedi.  She was open, curious and fell in love with our daughter, Hazel.  Her daughter has type 1 diabetes too and Katie had made it her personal mission to make sure that tech-saviness would not be a barrier to other families getting access to this life-restoring technology.  She wrote the docs and supported hundreds in getting up and running with this tool.

A few months later I hosted a meetup where she helped people get loop built in an office conference room while other type 1 kids had nerf wars in my office.

I think that’s where we had our first argument.  I was advocating for some more distribution of the load of support and documentation writing she had been doing.  She didn’t see anything wrong with the current system and wasn’t looking for critique. Like all my favorite people, Katie had a strong perspective and owned it.

We met again at the 2018 DiabetesMine conference where I was demoing some ideas I had been working on. I wanted to give something back to the DIY community that had given my family so much.  She played with Hazel in the lobby and I remember her giving Hazel her full attention carrying on a serious 3 year old conversation as we stayed out way too late with the other conference attendees —other Tidepoolers, diabetes-hackers and influencers: heroes to me.  She made me feel like I belonged there.  Like I had always belonged because we had all suffered in similar ways.

A few months later we were colleagues at Tidepool working on and arguing about what good instructions for Tidepool Loop would look like. Katie always showed up with her full self and her full perspective.  And that could mean her eyes beaming with love at your type 1 toddler or her eyebrows raised in full incredulity at how you could be so myopic as to say the thing you just said.

I watched her advocate for changes to the Loop software with the devs.  I watched her catch bugs others missed, prove they existed and gather data on their scope and how they could be fixed.  I watched her leave Tidepool to spend more time with her family, a choice that, in retrospect was exactly right. I watched her double down on supporting the community in the Looped Facebook group.  I watched her burn out and take a step back, then get drawn in again helping people. I watched her transform her life a half a dozen times before it ended.

And like so many others over this past year, I watched Katie walk into cancer, toward death with her bright, curious eyes open, writing the docs for us the whole time.  In her facebook posts she invited us past the silence that usually isolates us from the suffering of those we love.  She invited us into the sacred space of knowing her death was certain, the time of her death was uncertain to join her in asking: what should she do?

She kept working.  She took walks with her dog.  She took vacations. She went to swim meets.  She did chemo and radiation. She printed out her entire facebook history (and documented the best ways to do it and save money in the process). She gathered up the last crumbs of life left on her plate and savored them.  And she invited us along.

Katie showed me that a person can approach their death the same way they approached their life: eyes open, curious, feeling it fully and sharing it with vibrant intensity.

Or, how remote work can trick you into feeling more stressed than you need to

There is no trash can or recycling bin in your computer, just different ways the system tags files. But the useful fiction of the recycle bin interface lets us know what to expect about files we put there even if it’s not literally true. In a similar way, we might think of emotions as a kind of software interface to what might otherwise be an overwhelming amount of sensory and analysis data. The work our emotions are doing is a kind of summary of sensory inputs, our perceptions about them, and their matching to prior experiences.

As useful as these emotion-interfaces are, it’s important to remember that they aren’t reality itself any more than the recycle bin icon is, and to keep a critical eye on what they have to tell us about reality.

New Job: new anxiety?

I recently started a new job. I was feeling some stress about it as I learned about my new teammates and worked to pick up projects mid-stream. In the early mornings when I would wake up, I would feel a familiar, burning acid stomach feeling. I’ve always felt anxiety, dread, and fear there in my stomach and my half-awake mind doesn’t have the benefit of all the things I know when fully awake.

One day, when trying to get back to sleep, I propped up on some pillows, elevating my torso. To my surprise, the sensation I had been reading as anxiety stopped immediately. I was having a sensory experience that my mind was reading and tagging as anxiety, but by changing my position, the sensory input stopped and the emotion quickly evaporated. Sometimes these interfaces, heuristics, and strategies we use to know what we are experiencing get it wrong or at least don’t get the whole picture.

Extended Senses; extended emotions

If emotions are a kind of interface to the overwhelming flow of sensory inputs and perceptual judgments our minds make of them, then it follows that our senses are some of the primary inputs for our emotions. This is interesting to note when considering the current discussions of AI. Everyone seems preoccupied with the question of their sentience but no one seems to talk about how whatever sensors we give them or they find a way to get will dramatically impact whatever analog they develop for emotions or consciousness. Another way to say this is that an octopus has a different consciousness than a mammal precisely because its bodily and sensory inputs are different.

We live at a time when we have dramatically extended our sensory inputs from people and objects in our immediate vicinity to a whole host of people and systems across the planet. I have joined three different remote companies over the last 5 years. Joining each one was not so much agreeing to be at a particular place at a particular time as much as it was agreeing to hook a set of notifications up to my consciousness and engage them with a certain level of throughput.

Each time I do this I notice a distinct uptick in my anxiety, stress, and sense of overwhelm– at least until I gain enough institutional knowledge to filter the signal from the noise. Which is precisely a process that our brains do with new sensory inputs as well. At first, a new environment can feel too noisy, too bright, or smells too intense or distracting. But quickly most people’s brains filter out sensory inputs that are consistent and non-threatening. That said, difficulty doing this characterizes much neurodivergent sensory experience. Not everyone’s brains do this for them automatically.

Alarms, Alerts, and Notifications As Senses

I’ve long been scrupulous as a designer and a user about when and how I let systems interrupt my attention. I believe our attention is our most precious and scarce asset. And, once diverted, getting my attention back focused where I want it is costly. Further, these interruptions are most often un-designed or underdesigned and at worst, exploitative. Why would I invite some random app and the design and product teams behind it to hijack my attention multiple times a day?

After living with near-constant awareness of my daughter’s blood glucose and diabetes health through continuous glucose monitoring, I can tell you that I have come to feel like an additional sense. This makes a lot of sense given the work of neuroscientist, David Eagleman, on sensory augmentation and substitution.

The internet allows us to tie new senses into our minds. Is it any wonder that they are contributing to new and sometimes negative emotional outcomes?

I’ve written elsewhere about the ways that I enjoy feeling my senses extended by technology. Knowing that my daughter’s glucose is in a safe range while she and my wife are asleep sleep halfway around the world while I travel is invaluable. I love being surprised by my phone’s voice assistant reading texts from family and friends to me that arrive while I’m out on a morning walk and feeling closer to them than ever as their thoughts seem to unfold in my mind as read aloud by my voice assistant in my Bluetooth earbuds.

What gives me pause is the need to bring that same critical eye to the emotional interfaces my mind brings to these new sensory inputs. If my brain can misread signals from my stomach as anxiety, it’s probably going to misread signals from my work Slack too and roll them up into some kind of emotional experience that may or may not be a real picture of reality.

As a member of the community of design practitioners, I think we have a lot to learn from this metaphor of notifications as extended senses. How might we design notifications that don’t demand full attention hijack from our user with adrenaline-infused audio alerts, but instead follow how our senses work with more subtle dial-ups and dial-downs of attention through more senses than the visual and the auditory? I’ve begun to explore this a bit in my bgAWARE project but there’s a lot more work to be done to move away from the current all-or-nothing paradigm that’s fracturing our attention constantly.

So? What helps?

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend spending some time auditing and managing which apps and input streams are allowed to interrupt you and when. This is arguably one of the most crucial mental health interventions you can make. Slack has robust controls over when it’s allowed to ask for your attention. iOS and Android have rolled out new tools to silence, group and delay notifications. These are worth learning about and using.

As far as positive practices, the most helpful ones I’ve found for bringing this critical eye to these emotional experiences are, writing, meditation, and emotion logging.

Writing

Making time for personal writing, journaling and reflection often results in new perspectives and re-frames on emotions that at first seem very reliably tagged. Kevin Kelly says he writes in order to know what he thinks. This description of making time to write captures so much of what I find valuable in the practice. It gives me space to explore what I’ve been feeling and thinking in a way that I can’t do alone with my thoughts because I simply can’t sting enough of them together before they start falling out of my attention. I’ve been using the practice of morning pages: making time to sit down and write every day without agenda, without goal. I type and I don’t target a word count or a number of pages. I try to write for 20 minutes. I don’t always make time for it but I notice that when I do, I feel less anxious, more present, and more able to be the person I aspire to be to the people to whom I’m committed.

Meditation

Meditation practice builds the habit of an inner observer or executive function watching the river of thoughts and emotions roll by, driven by the current of sensory input. Meditation does this by cutting down on the signal input or limiting and focusing sensory attention.

Emotion Logging

Finally, I’ve been striving to learn and use more names for my emotions. The psychology literature is clear that the more and different kinds of emotions we learn to perceive and name in ourselves, the healthier we will be. And this makes intuitive sense given this metaphor of emotions as interfaces. We are literally giving our minds more and more nuanced interface elements with which to build emotional interfaces to summarize and understand our experience. I built an app called CharacterMe focused on helping teens understand and name their emotions. Lately, I’ve been loving the award-winning app, How We Feel, for support in taking time to attend to, name, and log my emotions.

What’s the point?

This is not an essay against Slack or email or notifications. Although I have critiques of how all 3 could work better with what we know about our senses, our attention and how they impact our emotions.

This is a call to:

1. Pay attention to what new senses we link to our consciousness

2. Remain curious and skeptical about the emotions that come along with them.

Our brains do a lot of work for us automatically and below the level of our conscious selves. But some of the emotions are as fictional as the recycle bin on your computer’s desktop. And I’ve found that my well-being is rewarded by being skeptical about these interfaces and checking my brain’s work on a regular basis.

When I was a boy, we used to visit my grandma Jodie’s house. Grandma Jodie was a short, quiet woman when I knew her. I only knew her after the great pain of losing her son to the public violence of a fighter jet crash. Truth is I don’t know how quiet she was before that.

The house was filled to the brim with craft. Ceramics, quilts in progress, all manner of hand crafts. On one end was a small chrome edged formica table. One of the square sides was up against a wall. Plugged into the wall in a night-light was a glowing, luminous column of glass the size of a child’s pinky finger. It was filled with bright red liquid churning with bubbles and spiraled ever upward. The column grew from an acorn shaped shell of Christmas red and green plastic, glowing from an inner light. I never knew what this thing was but I was obsessed with it and would go to see it whenever I was there.

I don’t remember being there enough to ever feel entirely easy. My father’s absence hovered over every visit —the pain of his non-being; of all we’d lost together.

Years later I found a photo of my dad and mom sitting at that table when they were in their teens or early 20’s. I didn’t see the light but I recognized the same corner where I had sat staring at it. I painted him there looking straight into the camera in the style of candid family photos. I liked his pose. He seemed at once effortlessly comfortable and crammed, folded around that table in a tiny space. He fitted himself into it in a way I recognize with my own body.

This year our Christmas tree was too dark. I didn’t get all the strings of lights undone before the girls started putting ornaments up and it was too late. But I wanted more light. I ordered a string of those bubble lights and carefuly wove them into the decorated tree. I see them now across the room bubbling madly, glowing warm and I feel connected to that place, that corner of the table, that mother and son, now both dead. I burn my Christmas lights and remember.

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Every once in a while, friends whose kids are into photography ask for recommendations on what cameras they might buy for their developing photographers who want to move beyond their phones.

Here are a few of the things I usually share.

If you already own lenses of a certain kit, start there

If your family already owns lenses from Canon, Nikon or another system, think seriously about getting them one from that series. Having a kit of lenses to try can speed up experimentation and save money.

For a while in the 00’s everyone had some generation of the a digital Canon EOS system camera in a dusty bag in their garage that you could usually find and try out. These are great little cameras. If you can find one, put it in “P” for program mode and start shooting.

Buy Used

I recommend buying older-model digital cameras used. Not just for kids. Also for me. Stay within the last 5-10 years for maximum features and cheapest prices. I buy from craigslist, eBay and facebook marketplace and facebook groups. Most will ship but you may need an invite to join and someone to vouch for you that you aren’t a scammer.
Also mpb.com and keh.com are good along with other re-sellers who confirm the gear is in good working order but will cost you more.

Recs For Beginners

For beginners, I like cameras with a great built-in lens. Here are two:

Fujifilm x10, x20 or x30

Tiny, built-in zoom lens and an optical viewfinder that’s mostly useable. Small sensor. Poor battery life. Buy 2 or 3 they are cheap on amazon. Fun fun fun to shoot.

Current Ebay Listing

Fujifilm x100 Series

Fujifilm x100 (S, T or V): Amazing image quality, optical / digital viewfinder hybrid that is a joy to look through. Poor battery life. Buy 2 or 3 they are cheap on amazon. Great sensor. Fixed medium / wide angle 23mm lens. Zoom with your feet. Uh Oh. Looks like TikTok discovered it an has driven up the prices.

Current Ebay listing

Next Up

After you get frustrated with your fixed lens you will want to start exploring old lenses and weird lenses you find at estate sales. For this, you will want the Fujifilm xPro 1. Same amazing hybrid viewfinder as the x100 but you can put nearly any lens on it you can find with the right adapters. And all the Fuji lenses are also great. What’s wild about these is they are now cheaper than the x100 series. It’s a fantastically good camera for $3-400 Retailed for $1400 new. Pretty good battery life. But still buy 2-3 on amazon.

In light of the current price surge on the x100 series I think I’d recommend this one. It’s the same sensor, processor and viewfinder with the added benefit of interchangeable lenses. And it’s still an excellent camera 10 years later.

Current Ebay listing

Lenses

There’s a lot to talk about here but here are a few thoughts.

Fixed focal length lenses or “Primes”

I prefer fixed focal length lenses with an aperture of 2 or lower. Zoom lenses promise a lot of flexibility but all but the best and most expensive of them are bad overall. And working with fixed focal lengths will help you begin to understand how the focal length shapes the image. If you’re coming from phone photography a wide angle (28 or 24mm equivalent) will feel most natural. A 35mm or 50mm are the classic “normal” lenses that most closely mimic the focal length of the human eye.

Crop Factor 😩

But remember, on all but the most expensive “full frame” cameras your 50mm lens will become a 75mm lens on a “cropped” sensor. This is because the lens focal length measurements are all based on a 35mm negative. Only “Full frame” sensor cameras match that size. The rest of them (and all those in my list above) compromise cost by using a slightly smaller sensor which means they zoom in on the image created by the lens. Hence the “crop factor.” If you don’t have a frame of reference for what these lenses looked like on film or if you never shot film this will probably feel meaningless. But it means that it’s harder to find a wide-angle lens that still looks wide on a cropped sensor.

This headache is mostly why I recommend starting with cameras with fixed lenses because the camera maker has worked this all out for you and built the camera with a good lens for its sensor. You will absolutely grow out of this but it can work quite well for a year or three.

Start with one wide angle (17-24mm) and one tele or portrait lense (50-90mm)

Most of my 20 years of photography I’ve shot with one or the other. You can put one on your camera and the other in your pocket or backpack and skip carrying a camera bag.

Camera Straps

Don’t use the terrible straps that come with cameras. They are universally terrible and ugly. Spend a little money or make one yourself. The camera you take with you is the one you will use so get a strap you feel comfortable wearing. All the FujiFilm cameras above are light enough to wear all day with almost any strap.

I discovered Balaji Srinivasan last march. He was on Tim Ferris’ podcast. He’s a biochemist by training and a serial entrepreneur most recently with Coinbase. I was struck by the parallels between what he was talking about and our project at Sol: proof of work, communities of practice, financial incentives for work shared in public, increasing access to education globally outside the traditional academy.

Since then I’ve listened to a few more interviews and read a few pieces of his at 1729.com.

Like many I’m struck by his broad understanding of the forces that have shaped human history and his willingness to synthesize them with the currrent moment and act on them with an entreprenuer’s risk-tolerance.

I am concerned with his insistence on setting himself up in contrast to “Woke Capital” or techno-progressivists vs. political progressivists.

He’s an open transhumanist ideologue and brings with him all the reductionism and myopia of that movement when it comes to their conception of personhood, people with disabilities and Cartesian error of mistaking the thinking thing for the whole thing. But what I find compelling at the heart of his vision is the impulse to reform our most central social institutions.

I share the impulse to reform and the conviction that many times current forms are not capable of the kind of change needed in this time of accellerating social changes and existential threats.

America’s current foundering in the midst of the pandemic despite having access to more vaccine than any other nation is proof enough to me that our current institutions are not set up to face exponential threats of climate change, and the epistemic crisis that underlies it.

And on that point of how we know what we know, his focus on the pursuit of “truth” as facts is particularly interesting. The simplicity with which he speaks of truth strikes me as something that could only come from someone whose academic training was in the sciences not the humanities.

But I suspect he is aware of this and has rejected the post-modern critique as part of the “Woke” ideology he finds so frustratingly censorious.

He speaks openly of his intent to persuade and influence. He speaks of media narratives as “software” that can be loaded into people’s brains. He advises caution against spending time with people whose imaginations have been formed by a steady diet of cable news because they will load their software into your mind. And yet I hear in his speaking and writing an equal intent to merge new code into the minds of his audience. He speaks in long narrative soliloqies punctuated by pithy aphorisms and tweetable slogans that seem designed to spread as memes.

He embodies the writings of Daniel Kanneman who, in documenting the cognitive biases all human minds work within, warns and prescribes of the ways our minds are so easily manipulated to take in new beliefs by recency, repetition and confirmation bias.

Srinivasan strikes me as one of the first people I’ve found speaking publicly who is living in the reality that I started to see dimly a decade ago: that we are living in a Gutenberg moment in which our technological innovations are having an exponential impact on our social, cultural, religious and political institutions, the impact of which has barely begun.

40 years after the printing press we saw the Christian Reformation and the complete social and political upheaval of Europe in the years that followed it. We are about 20 years into the internet as a broadly accessible phenomenon.

It seems clear to me that by mearely increasing the speed of the spread of ideas (of the network throughput), we unwittingly knock over the stability of the institutions built to manage a society capable of listening, talking and changing at that prior speed.

For the people who see the moment for what it is, one of profound transition, the future is most maleable. I got into tech and design because I saw this wave swelling and I wanted, I wanted to have a hand in shaping our shared future with an eye for how it could improve things for those with the least power and privilege in our current order.

I am as impressed with Balaji’s perception of this moment and commitment to seize it as I am concerned about the vision of the future he wants to help shape.

I remember discovering a glossy orange box of drug-store color prints, jammed overfull, stuffed with the condensed photos of my father’s life. They were high up on a shelf in the back of the entryway closet of my parents’ home. I eagerly pulled it down and started flipping through undersaturated, fading color snapshots. Even the negatives had started to fade.

My father died when I was young and these had likely been in the box since then. I knew sunlight was bad for photos but these hadn’t been in the sun and yet they were still fading away. The contents of a half lifetime of moments, crammed into a shoebox in the back of a closet. And even then they were fading away.

I had already begun to save my photos in similar shoeboxes piling up in my closet, labeled by year — the accreted evidence of my own photography practice. I carried them around with me for a while, shifting them from closet to closet when I moved. But after finding the orange box, I started the long process of making digital scans before my own prints and negatives started to fade.

A black box of silver halide prints

I remember finding a matte black, two inch thick, box at my grandmother’s house. It was filled with black and white 8×10 silver halide prints. These prints are made by exposing the negative to a timed blast of light through the negative on a kind of reverse camera called an enlarger. In the darkroom, the paper serves as the film in this operation. Little photosensitive silver halide crystals in the paper absorb the light but don’t start to change until you submerge the paper in the developer chemical. Then you can see the ghostly images slowly grow in contrast under the red light bulbs who don’t effect the paper. Next you move the print to the stop bath to stop the developer from further darkening the print. Finally a couple minutes in the fixer to freezes everything in place and preserves the print you made. Hang it up to dry and these photos can last over 100 years.

My grandfather had shot and developed these in his home darkroom. A lifetime of photographic practice collected into 100 prints in a matte black box. I flipped through them hoping to learn about this other man who died before I got to know him, let alone share his love of photography. I expected his prints would have held up better. But whether it was the home mixed chemicals or something about his process, these photos too were fading.

Hard drives are sand paintings

I’ve been taking photos intentionally since 1999 when I was a senior in high school and won a local contest with a photo of a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape in a drainage ditch. For the last 17 years I’ve shot mostly digital. And in the past few years I’ve shared nearly six thousand of them on Instagram. I flip back through them sometimes when I feel down and remember the good times I’ve had. But it’s a solo, private review.

I often wonder what my family will find of my work when I die. They won’t find any shoeboxes. And if I’m not careful they won’t find any digital files either. Hard drives are like sand paintings: the slightest electrical or magnetic breeze can destroy them. Even if the digital media survive there has to be software left to read the particular file formats they are saved in. No one will find my photos in the back of a closet.

I once joined a conversation among librarians and engineers from Google about the most reliable way to transmit information across very large long time scales. They insisted that google’s strategy of using hard drives with thousands of copies spread across the planet was the most foolproof plan. Despite social collapse, nuclear holocaust, or natural disaster some copies would survive.

I said then as I say now, that the only proven method for transmitting information across very large time scales is religion. Religion creates text and then those texts create communities around them that reproduce and expand on the text. Without a community to carry your words or art or photos forward through time they will fade.

Telling the family origin stories

This Christmas I’ve been trying to make time to tell the origin stories of our family to our three daughters. Stories of early jobs, dates, international travel, proposals and struggles to find work and meaning. These girls, raised in close proximity with iPhones, keep asking for photos of these formative events. Fortunately I can still pull up most of them as digital scans of mostly negatives I shot before the digital era. “You have to write these down!” My oldest daughter exclaimed repeatedly as we told the stories of the hilarious and harrowing experiences that formed her mother and I.

I used to think I wanted to make my mark on the universe, to prove that I existed and that my life mattered. But that’s a very present focused ambition. Now, I’m increasingly focused on joining my mark to what came before and what will be coming after.

What makes religious or familial communities survive beyond one generation is that the stories they tell and retell help those presently living make sense of their experience and orient themselves in the world in context of a lineage larger then their own life and experience. Either they do this job well enough to get passed on or they fade and are forgotten.

The only way to keep the stories of our lives from fading is by joining them to a larger story that helps those who come after us know a little bit more about who they are and who they could be.

I never got to hear the stories that went with the photos my father and grandfather shot. I’ve had to piece together who they were and who I am with a sparse few stories cherished from family members and a few more stolen from people who knew then and were generous enough to share any memories they had.

The gift I want to give my children is a story, with a some context for the kinds of people from whom they come and the kinds of people they might become.

Photos always fade. But stories can make and re-make communities across thousands of years —but only if they help the hearers make sense of their own lived experience.