Parsimony, Plans, and the Gum Wrapper Guitar Amp
Summer 2023
I bought first guitar amp when I was a teenager from this kid down the street for 17 bucks, which I suspect he promptly spent on weed. It was a little practice amp, a size that would fit into a backpack. I had no idea where it came from, but I doubt it was stolen—more likely it was pulled out of a dumpster. The thing looked like it had been built in the 1970s and was some off-brand I had never heard of. Most strikingly, it had in place of a power switch a foil gum wrapper. It could not be switched off but had to be unplugged. I basically learned electric guitar on that amp over the next few years and wrote my first songs on it.
As a human being I have a lot in common with that amp. I don’t seem to have an off switch either, and do not stop unless fully unplugged (I typically must burn out or break down to recognize that I’ve been pushing too hard for too long). I saw it coming this time—I wrote back in January about the aftermath of the holiday bustle and how I struggle like so many of us do to make and keep New Year’s Resolutions. My biggest interest: trying to figure out some ways to make life less complicated. I then promptly forgot about this when my best friend, my dog Chewie, passed away at the end of January. Instead of facing the grief and really reconciling with it (though I did some of that, too), I mostly tried to either escape from it with bad habits (too much beer) and work (overcommitting and overloading myself to keep occupied). The rest of the time I compartmentalized it to keep up with the demands of my career and other aspects of my life. Bad idea.
The grief continues to come back with a vengeance because I tried to bottle it up, save it for later, for when I feel like I can safely feel it without letting anyone else (most of all myself…more in a minute) down. I didn’t become like that sorry little practice amp overnight—to get from being a working-class kid who scraped together 17 bucks for an amp to applying for a tenured professorship, I have trained myself to believe that failure is not an option, and that has resulted in an attitude that I cannot afford to take a breath even when I really should.
Grief with the passing of someone close to you is devastating precisely because it makes all these habits and patterns and practices irrelevant overnight. I spent more time with Chewie than any human being, including my wife, over the past nearly eight years. I used to walk Chewie every day, sometimes several times and several miles (I talked about this on a previous blog entry here). Stepping away from my desk and into the outdoors with him was easily as beneficial for me as for him. Without those moments to break up the day of reading and writing and teaching, I don’t think I ever would have finished my PhD. He made me slow down and think. We loved being outside together.
I teach statistics in the social sciences (among other things). Students often find it the most stressful and difficult class they ever take. It requires a lot of time to get through, but it offers some important lessons. As difficult as statistics can be as a subject, the goal of all that number-crunching and model-building is to simplify complexity. To summarize a huge and noisy pile of information in a form that can be easily accessed by, and explained to, other people. And the number one rule of statistics is parsimony. It’s a reflection of the old Occam’s Razor dictum: “do not multiply entities beyond necessity.” Don’t make it more difficult than it must be to answer your research question. Don’t add a bunch of assumptions into your analysis that you cannot support with evidence. Don’t add variables to the model that don’t meaningfully help you explain what’s happening; and remove what you don’t need. If you have many explanations that are valid, go with the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions. To me, these aren’t just arcane mathematical or scientific rules. When applied carefully and consistently, they are the secrets to getting everything in life wrong less often.
As much as our society is dependent on statistics and algorithms, it is also deeply irrational in another sense, spreading our attention and time and resources too thin, too often. It is too much, too fast, all the time. I don’t blame society for the fact that my own life is out of sorts. Yes, the social world militates against slowing down, for any reason, but I am burned out because of my own dysfunctional mindset. It is my fault that I made questionable decisions in addressing grief, dealing with stress, and longer-term, allowing myself to be controlled by an overwhelming fear of failure. I cannot singlehandedly control the pace of the society I live in (but as I wrote in the past, I can change how I think about that pace and my willingness to participate in it). The first step, so goes the cliché, is to admit that you have a problem.
Last summer, I decided to give making music another go, because it was something I used to be really passionate about and I figured a lot of what I did back in the day was being wasted by not being “out there.” I re-released a bunch of old music, made a bunch of youtube videos, and even re-recorded my first album from scratch. I learned a lot. But did anyone require that I did some of the things I did, at the pace I did them? Of course not. I could have spaced things out better so that there wasn’t so much pressure. I started this blog two years ago this month (first post here). Who told me I had to write a blog entry once a month no matter how busy I was? I did. No one else. I could say the same for a lot of other things—did I really have to do that? Whose expectation was I really trying to live up to? Mine.
I found two easy ways to practice what I preach, to stop functioning from overwork to burnout like that crappy old guitar amp.
First, apply the principle of parsimony to my own life. Start by carving out space to feel a little less overwhelmed, because my health is, frankly, quite poor right now, worse than it’s been in over a decade. Then, take inventory: what do I want to be doing with my time? I need good new habits to replace the time and emotional satisfaction I got from walking with Chewie, clearing my head, breathing fresh air. I have been taking walks again, and it’s been rewarding, but I haven’t made it a habit. Perhaps I should. Music is fun, and I’ll probably do it in my spare time as long as I have a pulse (and the arthritis I’ve slowly developed in my hands doesn’t get too bad to play) but I let go of making it my career many years ago (and for the best—it led me down a rather self-destructive path I have no desire to revisit).
The second, prioritize: I am a scholar now—that is my career and my path, and I am content in that. It is something I have wanted to do since I was a kid (before I ever picked up a guitar or bought a crappy practice amp for 17 bucks). One question I ask as a scholar is whether I want to stick with what I’m doing or try something different. I once dreamed of getting more than one PhD and maybe still will someday, but not now. My first book, “Faiths in Green,” went to paperback this year.
Connecting society, nature, and the sacred was deeply rewarding, because spending time outside is such a part of my life, and I am passionate about rethinking how people relate to nature from fresh and multiple perspectives. When I slow down and think about it, this is something I could spend the rest of my life doing, to some degree—I have ideas for a second book in the works and am reading toward them now. It’s something I live, think about, write about, even something that’s inspired a lot of the music I wrote over the years. Having this kind of central focus, this vision, and being able to effectively express it, seems like progress.
One of the things I have long been a part of, walking every day with Chewie, was the cycle of the natural world, the four seasons (winter was typically our favorite season). I’m going to make a new rule for myself. Four times a year. I will write four new blog entries every year. Four. Maybe more if I’m inspired or something special happens. This is the summer entry. No more running behind and catching up. Time to focus on my interpersonal life—loved ones and friends. Time for my job as a scholar, a teacher, serving my community and university. Picking up the old guitar or developing some ideas on this blog occasionally in-between (and kicking a new piece of music out four times a year, maximum, as well). Now that I know what I want the rest of my life to be “about,” I can develop a sustainable rhythm that makes sense. A big idea that matters, that animates the rest, where I have some skin in the game and can build sustained motivation.
More excitingly, I’m going up for tenure and promotion next year. Now that I have a sense of what I’m doing, what I want to be doing, I have a lot of stuff to get organized, and some writing and research projects to move forward before I do. I will be directing the sociology program at my university next year and have other service responsibilities in that role that I want to be fully committed to. That is where my attention will be focused for the foreseeable future. I’d also like to finish up some outstanding research (sincere apologies to my patient coauthors for my recent lapse) and maybe even get another book going. And the next blog entry will hopefully be something a bit more scholarly and less self-absorbed—it has just taken a lot of mental and emotional bandwidth to find my way back to a stable place from which to meaningfully move forward.
Image: bald eagle, Diamond Point Park, Bemidji, MN, taken recently during a much-needed walk.
