The Blog I'm Not Writing

Department of The Importance Of Paying Atten — SQUIRREL !!!!…
What Was I Saying?

“I’m so poor I can’t even pay attention.”
( Moiself’s  favorite excuse when called out by a high school teacher for goofing off
in class and distracting other students. )

Dateline: Sunday; 7:40 AM-ish;    [1]   listening to the  No Stupid Questions podcast’s latest episode, Is Your Attention Span Shrinking?  Moiself  finds in the subject matter an abundance of questions to contemplate, while I put one foot in front of the other and try not to trip over the wet leaves in the street gutters – and why is it that I am recently noticing that wet leaves look as beautiful, only in a different way, than the leaves still on their respective trees, during the autumnal color change?  Their colors seem just as, if not more, vibrant, and if I posted a picture of them…

Yet again, I digress.  

During and after listening to the podcast I had an abundance of questions spinning through my brain, including but not limited to,

* Does a wealth of information inevitably lead to a dearth of attention?

* What’s the deal with of selective attention  – why did our brains evolve that skill?  Why not pay attention to “everything?” Does it have to do with the fact that cognition so dang expensive, metabolically speaking ( our brain consumes more energy than any other part of our body )?

*  Is it true, as alleged by social and behavioral scientists (and any parent who’s tried to get their teenager to put down their phone and complete a household that takes more than four minutes), that human attention spans have shrunk?

* How do you even measure the attention span of someone in 2024 and try to compare it with, say, the average person’s attention span in 1854?

* Maybe attention spans have stayed the same, only we now have more things and experiences vying for that attention?

In this episode,  NSQ  cohost Angela Duckworth frequently cites the work of the late great Herb Simon.  Simon was an American scholar interested in the fields of computer science, cognitive psychology, and decision-making.  Simon was ahead of his time when, years before internet surfing and social media were things, and years before teachers, parents, psychologists, and neurologists noted the phenomenon of shrinking attention spans, he posited that

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. 

Duckworth, after bemoaning the increasing technology-aided demands on her attention, told of a surprise recommendation she received, to switch to a “dumb” phone (technical name, light phone).  The surprise was that the recommendation came from Duckworth’s daughter – someone in the age group you would least expect to voluntarily set aside a smart phone to use a phone that basically acts as a…gasp…phone.   [2]

DUCKWORTH:
“… I think I get like 200 emails a day…a hundred of which actually require a substantive reply. I feel like my attention is just being grabbed, like pulled by the collar, you know, one place or the other. And I will say that when Herb Simon says that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” — I feel like there is so much that I could pay attention to, and indeed, I feel impoverished because this limited resource…this little spotlight that I have…I only have one. It’s like, ‘Oh, it can go here or it can go here.’ You know, I do feel kind of robbed. And one of the books that I started reading, but I haven’t gotten too far into it, is called Stolen Focus (by Johann Hari)….”     [3] 

It was recommended to me by my daughter, Lucy, who’s 21. She was like, ‘I totally [agree with] this hypothesis that Johann Hari puts forth,’ which is that we really are in a kind of war of distraction…we’re living the world that Herb Simon described well before he could anticipate just how many distractions there would be. The book really focuses on technology, by the way. So, she tells me with great urgency… ‘Mom, you have to read this book.’ The last time I checked in with Lucy, she had gone even a step farther.

So, there is a thing called a Light Phone.   I actually got one as a gift once….if we have smartphones, it’s like deliberately a ‘dumb phone,’ because…you can’t use maps. You can’t surf the internet. You can’t go to social media. Because I think there are a lot of people who are like, ‘You know what? I need to modify my situation. I can’t use willpower. Like, I cannot just will myself to pay attention to what I need to pay attention to.’….

So, the Light Phone…was literally just a phone. I was like, really? This 21-year-old is delighted to have a phone that has reversed the technological trends of 20-plus years of engineering. And I think it’s…because she feels like she has put herself in a room not with an infinite buffet of things that she could go look at, or listen to, or swipe to, or click to, and just kind of taken more control. She wants less information because she senses in herself this ‘poverty of attention.’  I don’t know how much this is going to be a trend, but I think she’s experiencing something that honestly, we’re all experiencing and looking for a solution….”

How many of us are willing to do that (switch to a light phone, or employ other technology-limiting guidelines upon ourselves), even as a temporary experiment?  What would we find out about ourselves, and our attention spans, if we did?

There seems to be proponents and opponents and studies done on all sides of this  multifaceted issue – I’ve included the above excerpt as a teaser in hopes that y’all will listen to the entire episode.   Moiself  would love your applicable comments and opinions on the matter…but if it takes longer than 60 seconds to read them, I’ll probably move onto something else.

*   *   *

Department Of A Plea, For This Holiday, And Beyond….

Consider the turkey, if you will.

“This is an important issue. We’re talking about over 200 million turkeys who are reared in a way that comes close to being described as torture. It hurts them to stand up because their immature leg bones don’t bear the immense weight that they’ve been bred to put on in a short time.
They suffer at slaughter and, as I describe in the book, if they get bird flu, the entire shed is killed by heatstroke quite commonly. It’s not the only method used in the United States, but it’s used on millions of birds. The ventilation is stopped in the shed, heaters are brought in, and they are deliberately heated to death over a period of hours. That’s something that Americans don’t know, and it’s important they should know, because it should stop.”

( NY Times The Interview:
“Peter Singer Wants To Shatter Your Moral Complacency.”  )

Sometimes, when considering the never-ending ongoing Middle East Situation ®, and how nations which continue expanding their oil production as if global warming is what happens to other planets, and the host of other life shit buckets “challenges” we face, I feel almost beyond despondent.

If you strive to live an ethical life (and moiself  does), one of the aims of that life is to reduce suffering when you can.  So many things seem totally beyond my control; I moiself  cannot get Vladimir Putin to stop poisoning his opponents, or even convince a modicum of my own countrymen to stop voting like self-interested, dictatorial, xenophobic, sexist ignoramuses on the chance that a serial liar and convicted con artist might lower their gasoline prices.  But I can control what I eat; I can control what products I “consume.”

I can’t speak for y’all, but it is difficult for moiself  to pretend to *not* know something once I know it ( damnit ).    [4]  I’m not alone in this.  Still, many of us who consider ourselves to be Good People ®  – the kind of people who, even if we are meat eaters, would never, say, stomp on a  turkey chick – continue to *not* educate ourselves about where that meat comes from and what is the life of the mass-produced/industrial farming animals whose flesh we consume.  Let’s face it, we don’t wanna do better.  At least, not all the time, and not when the doing better  has to do with eliminating or altering something we considered a family and/or cultural tradition, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving.

…MH, moiself, and our offspring made winter trips to the (now closed) Flying L Ranch in Glenwood, WA, several years in a row.  During one such trip, as we drove past many farms and ranches in the mountainous, bucolic areas near Mt. Adams, we passed a field inhabited by a strange flock of creatures – what I thereafter referred to as
“The Raquel Welch/Pamela Anderson turkey commune.”   [5]

The turkeys were grotesquely-shaped – each turkey looked as if it consisted of ginormous gazongas topped with a tiny head – and acted like zombies.  Yes, they were outside, in a field (no doubt so the turkey rancher could claim that they were “free range”).  But they might as well have been locked up in a brood house; they could not take advantage of being in a field, because they did not move – essentially, they could not move.  I had MH stop the car and we watched them for a while; it was funny at first (only one of them attempted movement, which caused it to topple over on its face), then disturbing.

Upon returning home I did some research.  The turkeys were immobile, like statues, because they’d been bred to grow an excess of breast tissue – the white meat turkey consumers prefer, by a large margin, over the dark leg meat.  The turkeys have been bred to do this and to do it quickly, and their rapid, distorted weight gain means that:

* they can no longer reproduce naturally ;   [6]

* their legs cannot support their body mass.

The turkeys become crippled by their own weight, and cannot move without enormous effort.  Although, when raised in factory farm conditions, there is nowhere to move to:  thousands of turkeys are packed into dark, poorly-ventilated sheds and warehouses in cramped quarters (less than 4 square feet of space per bird).  To keep the crowded birds from scratching and pecking each other, workers mutilate the turkeys: they amputate parts of the turkeys’ toes and upper beaks with hot blades and slice off the males’ snoods.    [7]  No local anesthetics/pain relievers are used during these procedures.

People who raise and work with wild turkeys, domestic non-factory turkeys and rescued factory turkeys attest to how turkeys are gentle, intelligent, and family-oriented.  In natural conditions, turkey hens are devoted mothers who care diligently for their chicks ( poults ), which learn crucial survival information from their mother, including social behaviors.

When I lived in the Bay Area I regularly went hiking in the Rancho San Antonio Wilderness Preserve.  There was an educational farm sharing trail space with the preserve, and I remember “meeting” a turkey which lived on that farm.  After that first encounter I would always stop by the farm whenever I came to the preserve, and more often than not that turkey woud be there, and run over to the fence to “greet” me.  I was astounded by how beautiful I thought it was – I’d never heard a turkey described as beautiful – and by how it seemed to enjoy and solicit my attention (even though I had no food to give it).  Thus, I was not surprised when I read about these basic (but little known) turkey facts:

* Turkeys are social animals.
They enjoy the company of other creatures, including humans.

* Turkeys can recognize each other by their voices,
and more than 20 unique vocalizations have been identified in wild turkeys.

* Turkeys are incredibly curious and inquisitive animals who enjoy exploring.

* Turkeys are highly intelligent animals who, just like the dogs and cats in our homes, are playful individuals with unique personalities.

* Turkeys form strong social bonds and show affection towards one another.

* Turkeys are gentle creatures who enjoy socializing with human companions
and protecting other turkeys with whom they’ve bonded.

* In the wild, mother Turkeys naturally raise their chicks for five months
and fiercely protect them from danger.

* The natural lifespan of the turkey is up to 10 years
( excerpt from Ten Facts About Turkeys, Four Paws in the US )

But, along the lines of being bred for physical deformities the turkey industry would have you believe that all emotion and intelligence have been bred out of domestic turkeys.   Don’t fall for these harmful myths; watch this four minute clip (here ), or search for other videos taken by people who work with such birds, and you can see their relationships with rescued factory farm turkeys.

Here is the life of that golden brown carcass who, post mortem, is the centerpiece of your traditional Thanksgiving meal:

* Sit
* stand if you can
* eat
* get slaughtered when you are three to five months old
( after enduring the abuse of the factory farm workers, who’ve been documented
torturing, maiming and killing the miserable birds under their control ).

But we like our full stomachs and our traditions, don’t we?  Most of us have no interest in educating ourselves about “…the grim, unnatural life cycle of turkeys raised for meat and the unrelenting torment they face from hatching to slaughter.”    We may nod in acknowledgement that, alas, turkeys, like most animals raised for food, have a miserable life…but at least we can hope they have a quick death?

Sorry. Those turkeys who survive the journey to the slaughterhouse (many die on the way, jammed into crowded trucks, transported with no food or water) are hung upside down by their (crippled) legs, then run through a disassembly line: first their heads are dragged through an electrified “stunning tank,” which is meant to immobilize them.  Those that manage to lift their heads up and avoid the stunning tank (which many try to do), are thus still conscious when their throats are slit. If the blade fails to cut the birds’ throats properly, they’re scalded alive in the tank of boiling water that’s used for feather removal.

Don’t take my word for it; the ASPCA,  PETA, and other animal rights organizations have documented the factory farm/slaughter house horror shows.   

Moiself  is going out for Tday with family and friends, to McMenamin’s Grand Lodge, as we did last year.   [8]   And although I  (and probably MH) will enjoy McMenamin’s yummers Holiday Vegan Plate option,    [9]  most of the other attendees will order the restaurant’s turkey dinner…and I will not  Debbie Downer  them for doing so (as fun as that might be).

*   *   *

Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [10]

*   *   *

May we strive for a balance of information and attention;
May you be protective of your limited resources;
May you resist the temptation to do a Thanksgiving Debbie Downer
(but if you succumb and do a good one, send the documentation to moiself );
…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

*   *   *

[1] Not Amish; I don’t think they listen to podcasts.

[2] as in, making and receiving calls; no Google or anyone else’s maps, no internet surfing ability; no social media….  

[3] Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, and How to Think Deeply Again.

[4] I understand the reasons we prefer to remain ignorant in certain matters.  We like our comfortable lives and don’t want to upset our routines or feel guilty about our favorite things.

[5] I realized, after son K and daughter Belle had no reaction to the Raquel Welch reference, I needed to update my go-to terms for preposterously-bosomed females.  And the Pamela Anderson reference is aging as well.

[6] Commercial turkeys are “artificially inseminated”: the industry euphemism for roughly restraining female turkeys, turning them upside down, and violently shoving tubes or syringes of semen into their vaginas. To collect the semen, workers known as “milkers” restrain male turkeys and forcibly masturbate them until they ejaculate.  One worker describes his brief stint at a turkey hen breeding facility in Missouri: “The birds were terrified, and beat their wings and struggled in panic…Having been through this week after week, the birds feared the chute and bulked and huddled up. The drivers literally kicked them into the chute…I have never done such hard, dirty, disgusting work in my life: 10 hours of pushing birds, grabbing birds, wrestling birds, jerking them upside down, pushing open their vents, dodging their panic-blown excrement and breathing the dust stirred up by terrified birds.”        ( Excerpt from “Twelve reasons you may never want to eat turkeys again.” )

[7] The snood is the flap of skin that runs from male turkey’s beak to its chest.

[8] And had great food and a great time, I highly recommend it.

[9] Field Roast Celebration Roast, veggie gravy, mashed red potatoes, garlic green beans, Fireside cranberry relish, and a dinner roll.

[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org