I'm a big fan of the now cancelled series Scrubs. I'm a bit like the main character, so I'll start with a line he said at the end of an episode. It's meant to make a point, so don't take any literal meanings out of it :)
JD says, no one understands the importance of sex better than someone who isn't having any. Similarly, I feel that no one understands the importance of balance better than someone who doesn't have one.
Now since I'm done with the titillating opening, lets get down to business. Every natural system in this world has opposing forces, and it may seem like it strives to achieve a balance. I'm not an expert, and there are 2 opposing lines of thought on that, but you may consider this balance a choice of a higher power, or a freak of coincidence that's one of the infinitely many possibilities that have an interesting residual in our universe, and on this planet. The overall fact remains that this leads to an important observation, that balance is essential for something bigger to emerge out of simpler forces.
Some people confuse this balance to be stable. In reality, no interesting system we know about has a stable balance, or in more technical terms, a stable equilibrium. They manifest as unstable equilibria, with small ranges of stability that our world seems to reside in. In fact, as someone who writes simulations, that's the region we strive to achieve, and trust me, it's pretty hard to achieve.
This analogy carries over to our lives and our minds too. A balance is important, not just for ephemeral things like happiness, but even for basic sanity and survival. Your body and mind do not take kindly to extreme conditions. But again, it'd be naive to assume there isn't wiggle room. In that vein, I've spent long parts of my life oscillating between excesses of work and fun. A side note, oscillations are interesting manifestations of turbulence in physical systems, but differentiating actual ones from spurious implementation induced strokes is very hard work.
Honestly, I'm in a field that spends a lot of time and money teaching their members about work-life balance, and then go right off expecting you to ignore it. After looking at the recent incidents in the world, I'm starting to believe this problem isn't just localized to computer science. Over the past month, I read multiple headlines along the lines of disgruntled person goes to a public place and shoots a bunch of people. In one notable exception, the person responsible even survived, and is enjoying media coverage of his now red hair. Maybe it's just me or the effect of media focus, but I feel that the incidence of such events is on the rise. Again, I'm not an expert, but some reasoning suggests that there's a reason for these extreme actions. Every assailant in these cases had extreme cases of stress, having either lost jobs, or hope in their PhDs. So you can see why it hits a little close to home, I'm in the 5th year of the latter myself.
People are likely to suggest that these are outliers, resultants of some other extreme actions along with an inordinate response. Coincidentally simulation folk are very familiar with these too, these are indicative of a case where that unstable equilibrium suddenly loses the second word, and becomes just unstable. That happens because some of the underlying forces and assumptions that made things balance, are violated, resulting in an increasing oscillation leading to blowup. In laymen terms, that means that what was keeping you sane, just stops, because your brain just can't balance the forces exerted on you anymore.
Like any decent scientist, I'm inclined to offer an explanation, so let me start with something that I heard a while before I came to USA. I was always told that Indian people here are lonely. After coming here, I realized that's not the case, it's just that the primary model of society is nuclear families and individuals, the latter slowly becoming the dominant set. In my opinion that is the primary cause of this increasingly extreme outbursts of stress.
So, in the early 20th century, right up till the 70s, the primary model of existence was families. People lived in big families, and had a large set of cousins they knew about. Well, ok, maybe not in the cities, but at least in towns. And this model still exists largely in most Asian countries, where these sort of outbursts are not as common. But the fact remains families were, and still are, major balancing forces in our lives. Then somewhere down the line, the baby boomer generation came. They moved out, did great things. Slowly and steadily, that model became the norm, and we started to ignore families, to express individualism. Before you get the idea that I'm trying to prophesize the importance of families, I'm not. I'm simply offering a line of reasoning, and I don't intend the choice of one over the other. So, getting back, individualism prompted people to do great things, since removing family commitments from our lives opens up a lot of extra time and motivation, since the primary focus of our life is work. But, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Earlier generations still had the support of the family they left behind, that foundation. Increasingly however, that foundation is getting eroded, because extended families and people you cared about are becoming an ever smaller set of people. These people help you snap out of depressing thoughts festering in your brain, lines of thought that are better left alone. Social isolation makes you delve exactly into these lines of thought, except, a lot of people don't have any tether at all, meaning they can drown in them. The result is what you see in the headlines, because depression/stress and anger never make for a good combination. I've seen people shoot others over trivial car accidents, so don't underestimate the power of that deadly cocktail.
Granted I took some liberties with rigor, that line of reasoning should hold, so I'll move on to the other part of my discussion. Unstable equilibria, turbulence, they're very interesting phenomena. They may oscillate wildly, and seemingly randomly, but there's always a pattern. The economic issues straining society are becoming ever more prominent. With general public unrest in a lot of places, the chances of a spark igniting this tinderbox are huge. And if you think the natural state of society is stability, well, you didn't really get the point. It's well established that physical systems prefer higher entropy, or more simply put, more variations and chaos. Add weapons to that equation, and the results aren't going to be pretty.
Before you start thinking I'm going to recommend buying gold and making basements to stock supplies and weapons to defend against the coming apocalypse, let me point out that I'm not Glenn Beck. All I'm saying is that increasing volatility is making our society unstable, and the only reliable force we know of is family. So it only makes sense to try and return to that model, at least until we can come up with a better one. What's obvious, is that the current path is becoming untenable, and something needs to be done. The world is heading towards a realignment, and such transitions are never peaceful or painless, lets hope me and you come out of it in one piece.
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