music: The Flaming Lips- Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
I was walking back into school today from a quick trip out for lunch and I stop to say hi to a student I had last year. He asks:
“So why didn’t you bike today?”
I thought it was going to rain and I told him so. (although I just realized that I haven’t gotten on my bike since I knocked into a minivan making a wild right turn two weeks back…)
“What about the windchill? You still would bike in the cold?”
I show him my jacket.
“You always do things the hard way, Mister. Why don’t you do things the easy way some time?”
um.
I mean.
There are a million reasons that I give myself for choosing to live the way I do, and I believe strongly in most of those reasons. But he’s undeniably right.
Back to work.
Posted by davidtaus at October 27, 2005 05:18 PM | TrackBackQuestion: When people choose to do things the easy way, does it become too easy to stop making choices?
Posted by: brad at October 27, 2005 09:08 PMI think most people natually choose to do whatever is easiest. This certainly doesn’t make the easy choice the right choice, but it is something to keep in mind when thinking broadly about societal habits. If you want a majority of people to enact change, making it logistically and financially easier than the alternative will bring it about much faster and with far less resistance than even the best logical/theoretical argument. Ex: Hybrid & high MPG cars sure got a whole lot more press and attention when gas prices rose dramatically…
Posted by: jz at October 28, 2005 02:17 PMThere are easy decisions and actions that are available at any juncture in one’s day. The meal bought versus the one prepared. The trip by gas pedal instead of pedal power. The hotel instead of the campground. Plastic instead of paper. I am finding that many of the easy decisions have costs that are not written into the equation. Dumping toxins into the river instead of dealing with our industrial by-products is a good example. An easy—sometimes justified as “an economic”— decision. Well, no, we just diffuse the expense of our actions across a greater surface area of impact. We call that a footprint in technology realms. Very much like footprints on the trail.
The larger the footprint, the greater the cost.
We each choose a path to follow as we make our way through this world. The path of least resistance in some cases means the one of greatest impact. Undoubtedly there are days when what is easy fits better than what is hard. As a generation that has seldom if ever known scarcity, maybe it is a good practice to make things hard at times. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Yeah, I read that on your blog.
Posted by: Tim [tmo] at October 31, 2005 01:04 AM