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.

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.