Travel

I returned from London on Monday.  It was a very different vacation than most that I have taken in the past.  I think the best description is that each day can be subdivided into two days: solitary and not.  Since B was TAing at the U Chicago GSB, he was working most of the day.  O was working at UBS during the day as well, so I spent the morning and afternoons walking around, taking tours, looking at buildings and museums, and thinking.  Some of the days, I visited B at work and read.  In the evenings, when everyone was done with work, we’d go out and play.  The bars in London close pretty early, which was a little bit frustrating, but not the end of the world.

The value of the trip, for me, was the thinking time, and quite nearly, a proof of concept for The Good Life.  To put things in perspective, I’ll reflect on Wash U and my time there.  In talking with my students this semester, I’ve fielded the question, “Do you miss Wash U?” quite a few times, and what I have realized is that I don’t miss St. Louis, the classes, or the campus.  Rather, I miss the people, and being in a stimulating environment where people give a shit about the world: the bubble.

If satisfaction arises from immersing ourselves in good conversation and good people, why do we sometimes prioritize our careers over everything else?  People will often move across the country to be with Deloitte or Goldman, but they won’t move across the country to be with the people who are most important to them.  As my mother pointed out, ideally, you care enough about your work, and it is meaningful to you to the point that it truly is reasonable for us to move based on job pressures.  But for quite a few others, a deeper satisfaction (at least at our age!) comes from our peers.

To that end, some of the most important people in my life are moving to Oakland.  Should I go too?

I finished reading Peter F. Hamilton’s books in The Night’s Dawn Trilogy.  I was very impressed.  The books are filled with both scientific creativity, as well as ethical and spiritual reflection…not unlike Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming Saga.  Maybe Hamilton has something really valuable to offer all people, or maybe his books are just coming at a particular time in my life where I see my future as pliable and inspiring.  The following quotation is from the final book of the trilogy, The Naked God, and fits in nicely with Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which I finished today.

You don’t have to tell the rich and the educated, the privileged … It is the others you must convince, the ignorant masses, yet paradoxically, they are the ones hardest for you to reach.  Theirs are the minds which, thanks to circumstance, have set and hardened against new concepts and ideas from an early age.

And compare with Von Mises:

If the small minority of enlightened citizens … do not succeed in winning the support of their fellow citizens … the cause of mankind and civilization is hopeless.  There is no other means to safeguard a  a propitious development of human affairs than to make the masses of inferior people adopt the ideas of the elite.  This has to be achieved by convincing them.  It cannot be accomplished by a despotic regime that instead of enlightening the masses beats them into submission.  In the long run, the ideas of the majority, however detrimental they may be, will carry on.  The future of mankind depends on the ability of the elite to influence public opinion in the right direction.

To me, both of these authors’ ideas speak directly at the young environmentalism movement.