Control: The Addictive Illusion

 I would love to be able to control my life. Control the fates of the country, the world, the challenges of the loved ones in my life. I can’t. No one can. That doesn’t mean to imply that we are powerless. We can help to make certain paths more likely and other paths less likely. We are movers of statistical probabilities!

But, somehow, that doesn’t sound all that impressive. It doesn’t sound like something to put on a tombstone or as part of a eulogy.

We are all going to die. Unless some dramatic discovery pops up, we have very little ability to even change our death date in a positive manner. (There are a lot of ways to change it in a negative manner.) A lot of the “do this and live longer” people have finally admitted that it isn’t true. So, they have moved to “do this and feel well longer”. I think this is a very healthy migration. Certainly, it is more accurate and, perhaps, by being more honest more people will be open to the message.

     There are many things that can happen to vividly demonstrate that we do not really have control over events of life. “Acts of God” are a group that is becoming more prevalent of late — due to climate change and shifts in population growth and the direction towards which many direct their hopes. Pay that final mortgage payment — earthquake! Farmers are especially susceptible to such — if one saves and budgets then most of the time a person can survive the lean years (and, due to droughts, floods, mechanical calamities, infestations, etc — there will be some). But, change the statistical frequency of events and all bets are off.

     There are also events, which abruptly change potential paths, that cannot be considered “Acts of God” — because they appear to be in the hands of people. Study for six years to obtain a degree in a field that, at the start of study, seems “lucrative and stable”. Public tastes change, technological “breakthroughs” happen, people wielding power make absurd decisions — what was once stable is now a platform of gelatin. Do your best to protect your family by taking only public transportation — and a drunk driver wipes out much of the family when you are walking along the sidewalk. Even when the statistical situation is stable, there is never a guarantee that you won’t be on the losing end of the curve.

     All that is about control of yourself and the world around you. Control of others? Please, please forget about that. It is possible to create confining parameters to greatly limit choices — a virtual, or physical, prison — but choices always exist even if none of them are desired. With choices, control vanishes. That does not mean to imply that people’s situations are their choices. Control doesn’t exist anywhere. And most might choose to live under very restrictive circumstances rather than the choice of death.

     Except for the method of imposing restrictions on choices, we cannot control anyone (including ourselves). We can, however, provide incentives and encouragement to persuade others (and ourselves) to want to change. We cannot make others happy but we can do things, say things, and work to arrange things such that they are more likely to allow themselves to feel happy. We cannot, and do not, make others angry — their reactions are up to them to choose. But, by pushing their “buttons” we can help to create conditions such that they are more likely to choose to be angry. And by creating conditions that they associate with happiness, we help them to allow themselves to be happy.

     People recognize that we cannot control the weather. They recognize we cannot control the traffic lights when we drive (at least, not most of us). There are other things “out there” that people acknowledge we cannot control. But most of us still think there are aspects of ourselves and others that we can control. Would that it were so.

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Assumptions: a deadly block to communication

 

     We have a good friend of the family who has a saying. "To assume is to make an ass of you (u) and me". It's a good way to remember the danger of making assumptions.

     So, what's so dangerous about assumptions? Just what IS an assumption? An assumption is a lack of communication. Even though the other person, or persons, have not said something you tell yourself that you know what they are thinking, how they would react, what they would say, or what they would do. Just writing that out makes it easy to recognize how absurd it can be.

     Yes, there are people in our lives that we may have a good chance of knowing how they would behave -- say, greater than 50% chance. Even in those cases, there is also a significant (depending on how much we REALLY know them, maybe from 5% up to 80 or 90%) chance that we are wrong.

     So, why do we continue to make assumptions? First, because it is easy. Not communicating may not have many positive benefits but it is easy. Another purpose may be because we want OUR viewpoint to be in control so by not giving the other party(ies) a chance to establish their point-of-view, we maintain the status that we want. Yet another is that it can give us the feeling that we know the other person better than we really do.

     The first step to fighting the use of assumptions is to recognize it. I might go even further to say that recognizing the use of an assumption gives us the ability to override it. That can be very hard. Just like rationalizations, assumptions are a large part of most people's everyday lives. There may be some people who seem to like to make other people's lives harder to live but there are few of us who, consciously, try to make our own lives harder.

     Once it is recognized, the next step is to stop doing it.  You may say to yourself "well, if I recognize I am doing it, why would I continue?" The same "advantages" exist with conscious awareness as in a subconscious manner. Easy, maintain control, keep an illusion.

     Stopped, the next step is to establish communication. There may be some aspects of communication that are focused enough for a blog of this nature but it is way too large of an area to discuss in general in a blog.

     But there are useful courses.

Fracking: what's the big deal?

Fracking is talked about a lot nowadays -- mostly heatedly and almost always in a binary fashion (YES/Good or NO/Bad). What is fracking all about?

When we think of drilling for some liquid substance, what first comes to mind is something similar to putting a straw into an underground reservoir. Some may include the idea of a bunch of very wet sand, where the liquid is dispersed through the area but freely available.

Both of these were probably true for the earliest wells. A hole was pierced in the soil and it either hit an area of liquid (water, oil, also natural gas -- which is not liquid but, in this case, has the important properties of a liquid) or it was able to find an area that the liquid could collect in from the surrounding area.  For water, this is called the aquifer. For water and other "liquids" (including natural gas), this ability to collect from the surrounding area is making use of a quality called "permeability" -- the ease of movement of liquids/gases through solids.

Pool are pools. It is a matter of finding them and using them. Permeability decreases as the area gets deeper because of the weight of the earth above. Greater pressure lowers the permeability of the surrounding area.

As we make use of more of our natural reservoirs of water, oil, and other liquid/gas resources, it is harder to find easy-to-use locations. Isolated pools become deeper (or underwater) and smaller (making them less economically possible to exploit). Natural permeability occurs more towards the surface and is harder to find. Thus, there is the desire to go where we have not gone before (national parks, wilderness, and beneath beds of water) and to promote artificial permeability.

Finally, you say, we get to fracking. Fracking is the process of breaking up the surrounding rock and creating permeability where none (or little) existed before. Early fracking mainly used explosives to break up the ground underneath. Although it usually worked, it was not very effective because of the irregularity of the fissures (or cracks) created and because, if it was deep, those cracks were likely to close back up from the pressure.

The modern practice of fracking usually involves hydrologic pressure. A liquid (often water) is injected into the well under great pressure and this causes the surrounding area to crack. Additives are put into the liquid to help keep the cracks open (thus, allowing permeability) after the pressure is removed. One method is called "acid etching" where an acid makes "grooves" in the cracks as they expand leaving little furrows when pressure is removed. This is done to make access to reserves more possible.

There are two primary problems with fracking. First, it requires a lot of liquid to achieve fracking. While that didn't use to be looked at as a problem -- with global climate change and uncertain icepacks and rains and overused aquifers it is quite a problem nowadays. I don't know the exact proportion of water to newly accessible liquid (you wouldn't normally use this technique for water wells, obviously) but there is a lot of water used. In addition, the additives put into water may not be either environmentally or health beneficial and those additives will find their way into the surrounding area.

The second problem is that the cracking of the earth is indiscriminate -- it does not JUST allow the desired liquid/gas to pool together. If there are pockets of water and gas or oil nearby, the fracking is likely to allow the mixing of such -- and causing health and environmental problems with use of the water.

The first problem might be addressable with new techniques (air fracking, perhaps, with environmentally safe additives) but the second problem is inherent to the process.

The only real method of eliminating the need for fracking to access dwindling natural reserves is to use alternate energy/base material sources.

What are your thoughts about fracking?