Momentum

Later in the day, after spending hours exploring the pyramids in Cairo, we rented some busted up four-wheelers and took to the desert behind the pyramids. Driving over a huge dune, pyramids being revealed as you ascend, is a truly breathtaking sight. You can almost imagine what it would have been like to ride a camel across the desert and to see them for the first time. One thing that would have been different back then, though, is that you wouldn’t see any trash. Today the desert is littered with flattened plastic bottles, clothes, and even an occasional boot.

For a visitor, it’s sad to see the trash. The desert is more beautiful than one would expect. It’s full of striated rocks, fossilized shells from when the Nile was much higher, and coral from the same time. But the Egyptians, for the most part, don’t notice or care about the trash. The desert has it good compared to most of the city. Every bit of street has a little bit of trash on it, and some parts have a lot.

At first, when you see someone dump a bag of fast-food detritus out of their car window, it’s alarming. But after even a couple days, it seems normal. The last night I was there I had a small plastic bag I couldn’t find a trash can for, and part of my brain wanted to just throw it on the street. It would be a drop in the ocean. So I understand partly why it happens: momentum.

Visiting somewhere like Tokyo is the exact opposite. Even though the city is maddeningly absent of trash cans, the thought of littering would never even cross your mind. The city is pristine, and you’ll never see a resident litter. Their momentum is the opposite of Egypt’s.

The more you think about it, the more you realize that momentum is responsible for a frighteningly large portion of our experience. Think about how bizarre our government is. If we were to design from scratch a good electoral system, I think it would look very little like the one we currently have. But momentum requires gerrymandering and paper ballots and two similar-but-hostile political parties.

Last night I watched a documentary produced by the BBC about drugs. They took twenty of the most abused drugs in the UK and ranked them by danger. Number one, predictably, was heroin. Two was cocaine. Any of us could have guessed those. Ecstasy, surprisingly, was nineteen. Alcohol was nine and tobacco was five.

If we didn’t have momentum, or drugs, and all drugs were introduced to us today, which would become socially acceptable and sanctioned by the government? Certainly not tobacco, and probably not alcohol either. Both are devastating to individuals and society and are extremely addictive. But we do have momentum, so both of those drugs are legal and, between both, used by almost everyone.

Shifting momentum on things like drug acceptance or political systems is an extraordinarily daunting task. If it can be done at all, it would take years or decades at a minimum to make an appreciable impact. A giant boulder rocketing forward requires a lot of force to shift its trajectory even a little bit, let alone turn it around.

At the same time, we as individuals do a lot because of momentum. If you drink alcohol or smoke tobacco, you can decide to do the logical thing and stop using them. If it’s important to you to have psychoactive substances to use, you could switch to pot and ecstasy, and probably be doing yourself a favor. Rather than graduate college and get a job you dislike, as momentum dictates, you can learn independently and start your own business or freelance. That’s not to say that either of these changes is right for you, only that if you are going with the flow on either of them, you’re almost certainly doing it because of momentum rather than reason.

The more decisions you make independently based on logic, the better your life will be. Sometimes that logic will lead you to make the same choice that momentum would have brought you to, and sometimes it won’t. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself: if I was making this decision from scratch, based on everything I know now, would I still do it this way? Any time the answer is no, you’re the victim of momentum. Momentum can work for you, too, though. You rebuild your patterns and habits, and eventually momentum makes it hard to shift back to old defaults.

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Photo is from “behind” the pyramids.

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you should. I’ve been posting photos of places I travel recently.

Anyone in Taiwan? I’m there this Sunday and was thinking of doing a small tea meetup if I have readers there.