Wednesday, May 6, 2015

On the other hand

With all these recent legal journal items about "work life balance" and lawyer mental health, maybe it'd be a good idea to take a look at the other side of this, if it is the other side.

That is, all of these article would lead a person to suggest that almost all lawyers must have the blues, big time, all the time.  Indeed, a friend of mine mentioned to me the other day, upon learning of a lawyers death, that lawyers "didn't seem happy".

But is that right?

I don't know, but I wonder.  What I wonder is if all these articles and the statistics in them are skewed. Clearly some people aren't happy in the profession, but then I suppose that's probably true of any profession.

In making a personal observation, I think I've only ever known one lawyer that seemed to me to be truly unhappy. But I also think that it was something with his character.  Maybe his profession was making him unhappy.  That seemed to be the case. But maybe that's because he was prone to that anyhow, and the choice of profession was a bad one. Indeed, that's been the point of my recent comments.  I don't think the view that the is driving everyone in it into despair is correct, so much as I think that it doesn't suit every personality.  If that's the case, the field should look at who is entering it and why, and people entering it should likewise try to see if they think the field matches their makeup. That's about the end of my point.

Having said that, in looking around at the hundreds of lawyers I've known, most don't seem to be unhappy.  Maybe the lawyers in Wyoming, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah I run into are just exceptions, but I doubt it.  They mostly seem happy within their professions.

And there are reasons that the profession would suit people too, beyond the usual slop that people put out about "challenging" and all that rot.  It does entail, at least in the litigation end, an endless variety of interesting situations.  Most lawyers are polymaths really, and there are very few professions that truly offer an endless variety of interesting scenarios.  And there are lot of interesting people that lawyers get to work with as well.  It'd be hard to be bored, I think, being a lawyer, or at least being a litigator.

And for people who like to write, there's a lot of writing.  Not all of the writing is of the mystery thriller type, of course, but there are people who just like to write.  I do.  For those people, just getting to write is fun.  I love writing, which is probably obvious, and writing a brief for me is fun.  I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

All things being equal, therefore, I guess this takes me back to two points. I don't really trust statistics very much and what's important is that a person find out if a career is right for them.  There aren't any perfect ones, and they're all very individual.  A person who loves one thing might not another, and the concept that some careers are good ones because of what they pay is misguided, if it goes no further than that.

Contrary to our natures



When this blog was started several years ago, the purpose of it was to explore historical topics, often the routine day to day type stuff, from the period of roughly a century ago.  It started off as a means of researching things, for a guy too busy to really research, for a historical novel.

It didn't start off as a general commentary on the world type of deal, nor did it start off as a "self help" type of blog either.  Over time, however, the switch to this blog for commentary, away from the blog that generally hosts photographs, has caused a huge expansion here of commentary of all types, including in this category and, frankly, in every other.

 
The pondering professor of our Laws of History thread.

Readers of this blog (of which there are extraordinarily few) know that I've made a series of comments in the "career" category recently that touch on lawyers and mental health. They also know that I was working on a case (actually, two cases) in which an opposing lawyer, without warning or indication, killed himself.  That's bothered me a great deal thereafter.  It isn't as if we could have done anything, but that it occurred bothers me.  And, as noted in the synchronicity threads, I've been reading a lot of comments in lawyer related journals and blogs on this topic as well.  Perhaps they were always there and I hadn't bothered taking note of them, or perhaps that's synchronicity again.

In that category, I stumbled upon a piece written by a fellow who runs a very well liked blog, and who is a lawyer, but whom has never practiced.  I very rarely check that blog, The Art of Manliness, but it's entertaining to read (or probably aggravating to read for some) and I was spending some early morning time in a hotel room waiting for a deposition to start and stopped in there for the first time in eons.  Sure enough, there's an article by a lawyer on the topic of mental health.  Specifically, there was an article on depression, which is the same thing that a lot of these lawyer journals are writing on.  Having somewhat read some of the others, and being surprised to find this one, I read it. Turns out there's an entire series of them and I didn't read them all, but in the one I did read, I was struck by this quote:
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.
I think there's a whole lot to that.
 
The "office" your DNA views as suitable. . . and suitable alone.

Indeed, I think a drove of current social and psychological ills, not just depression by any means, stem from the fact that we've built a massively artificial world that most of us don't really like living in.  It's a true paradox, as I think that same effort lies at a simple root, the human desire to be free from true want.  I.e., starvation.  Fear of starvation lead us to farming to hedge against it, and that lead to civilization.  Paradoxically, the more we strive for "an easy life", the further we take ourselves away from our origins, which is really where we still dwell, deep in our minds.

Okay, at this point I'm trailing into true esoteric philosophy and into psychology, but I think I may be more qualified than many to do just that.  Indeed, I was an adherent of the field of evolutionary biology long before that field came to be called that, and my background may explain why.  So just a tad on that.

Some background

 
With my father, at the fish hatchery, as a little boy.

When I was growing up, I was basically outdoors all the time, and I came from a very "outdoorsy" group of people. And in the Western sense.  People who hunted and fished, garden and who were close to agriculture by heritage.    They were also all well educated.  There was no real separation in any one aspect of our lives.  Life, play, church, were all one thing, much as I wrote about conceptually the other day.

When I went to go to college, post high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and decided on being a game warden, which reflects my views at the time, and shows my mindset in some ways now, set on rural topics as it is.  However, my father worried about that and gently suggested that career openings in that field were pretty limited.  He rarely gave any advice of that type, so I heeded his suggestion (showing I guess how much I respected his advice), and majored in geology, and outdoor field.

As a geology student, we studied the natural world, but the whole natural world back into vast antiquity.  Part of that was studying the fossil record and the adaptive nature of species over vast time.  It was fascinating. But having a polymath personality, I also took a lot of classes in everything else, and when I completed my degree at the University of Wyoming, I was only a few credits away from a degree in history as well.

Trilobites on display in a store window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now extinct, trilobites occurred in a large number of species and, a this fossil bed demonstrates, there were a lot of them.

That start on an accidental history degree lead me ultimately to a law degree, as it was one of my Casper College professors, Jon Brady, who first suggested it to me.  I later learned that another lawyer colleague of mine ended up a lawyer via a suggestion from the same professor.  Brady was a lawyer, but he was teaching as a history professor.  I know he'd practiced as a Navy JAG officer, but I don't know if he otherwise did.  If lawyer/history professor seems odd, one of the principal history professors at the University of Wyoming today is a lawyer as well, and the archivist at Casper College is a lawyer.  I totally disagree with the law school suggestion that "you can do a lot with a law degree" other than practice law, but these gentlemen's careers would suggest otherwise.

Anyhow, at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the suggestion.  I was a geology student and I was having the time of my life.  I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is exactly what I did.  By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that finding employment was going to be difficult.  Given that, the suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology.  I did ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.


Casper College Geomorphology Class, 1983.  Odd to think of, but in those days, in the summer, I wore t-shirts.  I hardly ever do that now when out in the sticks. This photos was taken in the badlands of South Dakota.

So what does that have to do with anything?

Well, like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to me).  And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.

Our artificial environment

So, as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people do the unnatural environment all that well.  In other words, I know why the caged tiger paces.

People who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who do not. There's no real getting around it.  People who live outdoors and around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier and healthier.  Generally they seem to have a much more balanced approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death.  They don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical quackery.  You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be little girls.  Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.

You won't find a lot of people who are down, either.  

Indeed the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London, the famous author, to the effect  and then goes on to conclude:
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.
I think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.

Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time.  All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.

Ruin at Bandalier National Monument.  The culture that built these dwellings still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few actually grow it.  The modern pueblos continue to live in their own communities, sometimes baffling European Americans.  I've heard it declared more than once that "some have university educations but they still go back to the reservation."

Even in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now.  Now most people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea of what rural life consists of.  Only a few decades back this was not the case.  Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their 80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945.  He went to college and after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before . . . ."

Melrose, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. One of the old French mulatto colony near the John Henry cotton plantation. Uncle Joe Rocque, about eighty-six years old (see general caption)
 Louisiana farmer, 1940s.  Part of the community, not apart from it.

Now, however this is rarely the case.  Indeed, we can only imagine how unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the work force now.  "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "

No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.

Indeed, people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it one way or another.  Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.

Others try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls.  I can't recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes.  Many offices seem to be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor.  It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire.   That says a lot about what people actually value.

Others, however, sink into illness, including depression.  Unable to really fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger, they become despondent.  Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and upset.  No wonder.  People just aren't meant to live that way.

Others yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they rebel against it.  From time immemorial people have done this, and created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and try to create a new world from their despair.  Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit this mold.  Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on.  And it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.

But we really need not do so.  So why are we?

"It's inevitable".  No it isn't.  Nothing is, except our own ends.  We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves.  We don't have to do anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or that we haven't thought it out.

So, what can we do

First of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to suppress them .  Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or somewhat odd.  To heck with that.

The ills of careerism.

Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant.  In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.

How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it.  And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.

In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career.  Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career".  For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.

Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else.  More than family, more than location, more than anything.  People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.

The payoff for that is money, but that's it.  Nothing else.

The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.

What's that have to do with this topic?

Well, quite a lot.

People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good.  Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently.  And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.

That's not all of course.  Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place.  We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires.  In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship.  For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.

There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe.  There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them.  At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that?  One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves.  Not really a good situation.

Now, am I saying don't have a career?  No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe.  Deep down, that's really still who you are.  If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you.  But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.

As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way.  This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.

Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here.  Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities.  He noted that; "this is our home".  That says a lot.

Get out there.

 Public (Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail ourselves of these sites.

And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.

Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding.  Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.

 

That means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in the dirt, if we do it.  That's part of human nature as well, and humans are very bad about it.  I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses, and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. . you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with the concept that fish are tasty).   Some fisherman will take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing hunting.  Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner) outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a means that killed wildlife just the same)".

If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better.  If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures.  Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not.  Give it a try.  And so on.

Get elemental

At the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting.  Try fishing. Raise a garden.

Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.

Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass.  Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop.  I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something.  And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.

The Land Ethic

 Leopold-Murie.jpg
Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie.  The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now, this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations.  At this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Decades ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac about the land ethic.  Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't.  He was a hunter and a wildlife agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that, he lived what he wrote.

A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic.  I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that.  Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61.  It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.

If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl.  In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past.  Now, that's very much not the case.  I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem.  Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.

Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, howeverNot that the wildness of land is not appreciated.  Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at.  The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that.  Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order.  As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.

It's not inevitable.

The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so.  And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.

There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't.  Baloney.  We don't exist for business, it exists for us. 

Some thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this topic.  Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how mild, as "socialism".

The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature.  And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist.  The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd.  Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production.  Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.

Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism.  That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.

It's not impossible

Now, I know that some will read this and think that it's all impossible for where they are, but truth be known it's more possible in some ways now than it has been for city dwellers, save for those with means, for many years.  Certainly in the densely packed tenements of the early 19th  Century getting out to look at anything at all was pretty darned difficult.

Most cities now at least incorporate some green space. A river walk, etc.  And most have some opportunities for things that at least replicate real outdoor sports, and I mean the real outdoor activities, not things like sitting around in a big stadium watching a big team. That's not an outdoor activity but a different type of activity (that I'm not criticizing).  We owe it to ourselves.

Now, clearly, some of what is suggested here is short term, and some long. And this is undoubtedly the most radical post I've ever posted here.  It won't apply equally to everyone.  The more means a person has, if they're a city dweller, the easier for it is for them to get out.  And the more destructive they can be when doing so, as an irony of the active person with means is that the mere presence of their wealth in an activity starts to make it less possible for everyone else.  But for most of us we can get out some at least, and should.

I'm not suggesting here that people should abandon their jobs in the cities and move into a commune.  Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that as that doesn't square with what I"m actually addressing here at all.  But I am suggesting that we ought to think about what we're going, and it doesn't appear we are. We just charge on as if everything must work out this way, which is choosing to let events choose for us, or perhaps letting the few choose for the many. Part of that may be rethinkiing the way we think about careers.  We all know it, but at the end of the day having made yourself rich by way of that nomadic career won't add significantly, if at all, to your lifespan and you'll go on to your eternal reward the same as everyone else, and sooner or later will be part of the collective forgotten mass.  Having been a "success" at business will not buy you a second life to enjoy.

None of this is to say that if you have chosen that high dollar career and love it, that you are wrong.  Nor is this to say that you must become a Granola.  But, given the degree to which we seem to have a modern society we don't quite fit, perhaps we ought to start trying to fit a bit more into who we are, if we have the get up and go to do it, and perhaps we ought to consider that a bit more in our overall societal plans, assuming that there even are any.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Vikings, maybe not so much after all.

One of the most interesting introductions into the field of history in recent years has been the study of DNA.  The populations of various regions that have more or less static modern populations have been, in some cases, studied, sometimes with surprising results.  Perhaps no place has received more of this attention than Great Britain.

The classic story of Britain has been that it was settled in ancient times by some Celtic population. Following that, it seems a second one invaded at some point.  The Romans conquered it, or at least the southern half, and then in the 400s the Saxons, Angles and Jutes arrived and conquered the southern half of Great Britain, and the Irish Celts the north.  Or so the classic story goes.  Celtic holdouts from these invasions kept on only in Wales.  A couple of hundred years later Vikings from Denmark and Norway arrived, principally as brutal raiders at first, and later somewhat as invaders.  After that, in 1066, the Normans came over from France (the Normans themselves been descendant from Norsemen) and the process ceased, with no further invasions being successful.

Or so the written record held.

Then the study of genetics came in, challenged much of our assumptions, and with the most recent studies it would see that, well. . .the original story was probably more or less correct.

There's been different genetic studies of the British population, and they haven't all been uniform by any means, but the most recent one pretty much overturns the prior one.   The new one concludes that but for a single region of Britain, Scandinavian ancestry is slight.  This reverses the most recent prior conclusions which was that the Vikings came not so much as raiders, but as settlers. Well, they did do some settling, that's been known for a very long time, but it appears that, in fact, they were mostly just raiding.

In contrast, about 40% of the overall British DNA is German, which shows that the prior assumption that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes did in fact invade in strength is correct.  They didn't do under the British Celtic population, however, which was at one time the general assumption, although even Churchill questioned that in his classic multi-volume text on the history of the English speaking peoples.  A conquering people, their culture came to dominate but they obviously mixed with the conquered people, the overall human norm really.

As for the Celts, well it looks like people from Europe had started settling in Great Britain about 10,000 years ago, but we already knew that.  And it appears that the Celts were not one uniform people, but we already knew that too.

So, it seems, the written record was better than it was recently supposed.

Monday, May 4, 2015

The diversifying editorial

Today, the Tribune ran an editorial about diversifying the local economy in light of the decline in oil activity.

Truly, it's 1983 all over again.  Not that the economy shouldn't be diversified, it's just that we're truly seeing history repeat, including editorials of the past.

The fiction of the life work balance.

 Dyersivlle, Iowa, circa 1912.  My grandfather came from here, and his parents and their parents lived their whole lives there, as part of the community.  Not as part of a "career" with a life/work balance.

I don't mean, if you, say maybe you wanna' care for 365 days, right? You ain't got 365 days. You got it for one day, man. Well I tell you that one day man, better be your life man, because you know you could say oh man you could cry about the other 364 man, but you're gonna loose that one day man, and That's all you got. You gotta' call that love, man. That's what it is, man. If you got it today you don't wear it tomorrow, man. 'Cause you don't need it. 'Cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It's all the same f*** day man.
Ball and Chain, Janis Joplin.

Some time ago, I posted this item on stress and the law in the career advice category:
Lex Anteinternet: Unsolicted career advice for the student No. 2: S...: Quite some time ago I wrote a couple of posts that are basically directed at people pondering the law as a career; one being a Caveat Aucto...
That article here came, as noted, shortly after somebody I had a case against committed suicide.  Quite a shock.  After that, indeed just right before it, I noticed that I started seeing a lot of articles on lawyer stress.  Maybe those articles were always running and I didn't take note of them, or maybe this is an example of synchronicity at work again.  Lots of these articles stress having a proper "work life balance."  Now, somewhat related to this, I've been seeing a number of articles recently that run counter to the vast amount of written legal material that  stress a proper "work life balance".  This is an interesting counter trend, and perhaps one that prospective lawyers should pay attention to.

I don't know how many other careers have advices on the proper "work life balance". I have to say that "life work balance" is one of those terms that strike me as sort of phony, so I'm probably not one who is ideally suited to comment on it.  I expand on that below. Anyhow, the basic gist of the commentary on "life work balance" is that there's a concern in the legal profession that a large number of lawyers are focused only on their work and their personal lives accordingly suffer.  A number of things are interesting about this.

For one thing, it's true.  I'm sure that all professions think this is the case for their lines of work.  Indeed, I've met people who seemingly have vast amounts of free time who complaint about being so busy at work.  On the other hand, I've met people from some professions where there's a genuine belief that people have high incomes and low hours where the opposite is clearly true. Dentist provide one such example. They go to work at some insanely early hour and keep on after most people's closing times.

With lawyers its very much the case.  At least it is in some branches of the law.  I frankly don't know about every area of the law, as one of the things about the law is that law is a career "field", not one single career house, so to speak. Lawyers who do one thing often don't know much if anything about lawyers who do something else.  So what I can say is that at least for people who handle litigation this is true. They basically never are totally away from work.

Family members of litigators, as well as other categories of lawyers, well know this, and any litigator who is honest will tell you this.  They miss family functions, work long hours, and are often absorbed in thought about their cases all the time.  They never really stop working, even when they aren't at work.  They consider their cases and their projects continually.  I found myself pondering something in a case, for example, while attending Mass the other day. Not a very admirable thing to do.  As a result, their home lives and families accordingly suffer.  And that relates to the topic linked in here. Essentially engaged in a mentally stressful activity all the time, they endure high stress.

 
Where I recently found myself pondering a legal topic, and shouldn't have been.

That's where the "work life" advice comes in, and every lawyer has read it. A proper "work life" balance is necessary, we're told. What this means is that we need to balance our time and effort at work with time and effort in the personal aspects of our lives. Again, taken no further than that, that is no doubt correct, if possible.

Recently, however, I saw an article by a long practicing lawyer that just flat out stated that wasn't possible.  Soon thereafter, I read a short biography in our local bar journal noting that a very long practicing lawyer I know strove for that, but didn't feel he really fully succeeded at that.  I suspect that last item is really on the mark.  Now, the ABA journal has run an on line article by a legal recruiter in which he flat out states:
Most attorneys that tell you they are concerned with their ‘lifestyle’ and ‘balance’ never really amount to much in the law, and that is OK, because not everyone is cut out for practicing law in a high-pressure environment,"
Not surprisingly, that comment is receiving a lot of commentary itself.  The ABA article has floods of comments from lawyers calling bull on the recruiters comments.  And not surprisingly, as it came in the ABA context, there are comments, again, discussing in this in the context of the legal White Elephant/Giant Unicorn, "Big Law", an institution that even most really big time trial lawyers don't experience.

As an aside here, I wish the ABA would get over this entire concept of "Big Law".  It may be just me, but I really think the "Big Law" they conceive of was an institution that last existed in the form they think of it some decades ago.  Almost ever issue of the ABA journal's email features some article about some Big Law firm laying off a drove of people.  As The New Republic explored some time ago, the "white shoe" firms aren't what they once were.  Far more lawyers of all types practice outside of Big Law than in it, and as a result, nearly ever discussion of "Big Law" expands out the definition until firms that probably wouldn't recognize themselves as "Big Law" are included in the discussion. It's time for "Big Law" as a term, to go the way that the term "The Big Three" did in regards to automobile manufacturing.

 
1954 Chevrolet sedan. A vehicle that has as much relevance to modern automobile manufacturing as "Big Law" does to the practice of law.

Well, anyhow, the comments all have their points, but what if the bigger truth is being missed. This may just be part of the territory, and the recruiter discussing it may be missing that point (he sees it in the Big Law/Harvey the Rabbit/Unicorn context as well).  That's something to be aware of.

Some jobs are just that way.  Not all are, although my guess is that all people believe that theirs are.  I think that the law is just this way.  It follows a person around, and not matter what a person does to have a balanced life, that's the case.  I think they need to do something, but achieving a "proper work life balance" probably isn't really possible.

Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the entire concept of a "work life balance" is bizarrely modern and fictional in and of itself.  Your work is part of your life, not something that can be balanced against it. Indeed, for males in particular part of a person's psychological make up is their "occupational identity" (women apparently have this as a feature of their psychological identity to a much smaller degree, which probably says something about our ancient origins).  The concept that over half your actual hours on the planet are not part of your "life" and must be balanced against it is frankly bizarre.

Indeed, that creates a bit of an illusion that there's who you are, and then there's what you do for a living.  That concept is a common one, but it's a fraud and people should be cognizant of that.  A person isn't what they do for work, but what they do for work is certainly part of who they are.  If they don't like that, they should consider that, as that's a fact.

Indeed, a rational "whole man" concept would have to acknowledge that, and when we look back at big figures who we admire in part for the wholeness of their lives, we can see where they'd achieved that. Taking again the example of lawyers, we have people like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, St. Thomas More. or Abraham Lincoln, all of whom occupied that profession but were so much more than that. They didn't achieve that more by balancing their "life" against their work, but rather by taking on their lives as a worthwhile whole.

 Hans Holbein, the Younger - Sir Thomas More - Google Art Project.jpg
St. Thomas More, lawyer, judge, author of Utopia, and principled opponent of King Henry VIII.  I doubt he pondered "work life balance".


Thomas Jefferson. lawyer, farmer, politician.  He had a nice life work balance, but I doubt that was because he'd been counseled to have one.



 Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer that many would consider to have a poor life work balance in modern terms.

This wouldn't mean, of course, that a person ought to surrender themselves to the office and ponder nothing else, although there are plenty of lawyers who do just that. Rather, what it means is that a person should realize that their life is their life and incorporate a worthwhile approach to their work and profession within that.  That isn't possible for every line of work in the same way.  In many, indeed most, lines of work a person is actually free to be more themselves and bring their strong loves with them, something that's an irony about a professional life. That is, for people who work jobs that fall outside this scope of things, lets say mechanics, or mail carriers, etc., their personality can be actually more reflected in their daily lives as nobody expects them to serve in the capacity of their occupation without end.  For people who are doctors or lawyers, etc., this isn't true and people will indeed both identify with you constantly in your profession, even where you with they wouldn't, and the profession will follow you around night and day no matter what.

Indeed, let me note that the fact that this topic even comes up is a pretty loud commentary on modern life, as there's something deeply bizarre, and wrong, about the idea that a person's work isn't their life and shouldn't be.  I've noted before that in many ways we've created a world that we're poorly suited to live in, by replacing a more  natural world of work with a glass and steel cubicle world (for which office walls are barely removed).  Here too, this is something really odd, as we're effectively conceding that we've created a condition in which half our lives are spent in conditions we don't want to regard as part of our lives.  They surely are, but what an odd concept.

 Stockman, usually we don't separate the personalities of farmers/ranchers from their work, but conceive of them all as one (oh wait. . . that cowboy is me).

That, I suppose, means that a person does have to have a concept that's in the same neighborhood as "life work balance", but because your profession will be a big part of your life, that balance concept is bunk, in my view. Rather, you have to incorporate the rest of your vocations and avocations into that life, which is the only life you are going to get.

Those who are looking at this topic, from either end, are I think in error in their approach. But that doesn't mean that they don't both accidentally have a point. For the "work life" balance crowd, your work is part of your life, and you can't balance one against  the other.  For those who say "bunk" to the concept, well, a person is more than their profession, and lawyers who are only their professions and nothing more are both boring and ineffective. Therefore, the real task is to bring that "other" into your profession.  But, and this is important, for those who conceive of a professional career as only a means of making money, or something that they can turn their minds and lives off when they work through the door, and turn them back on when they walk out, they may wish to reconsider their career options, as that can't be done.

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Campbell County Courthouse, Gillette Wyoming

Courthouses of the West: Campbell County Courthouse, Gillette Wyoming:







This is the Campbell County Courthouse in Gillette Wyoming. The courthouse has been recently added on to, but the additions match so well that it is not really possible to tell. The court houses the district and circuit courts for Wyoming's Eighth Judicial District.

Campbell County's war memorial is located on the same block as the courthouse.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Some Gave All: Santa Fe Plaza Obelisk, Santa Fe Plaza, Santa Fe ...

Some Gave All: Santa Fe Plaza Obelisk, Santa Fe Plaza, Santa Fe ...:

 This is the Santa Fe Plaza Obelisk in the plaza for that city.

The plaza has been there since 1609. The monument since 1868.

1868 seems like quite awhile ago for most of us, although in thinking on it there's less time between when I was born and 1868 than there now is between the start of World War One and the present day.  Be that as it may, that certainly isn't as far back as 1609.

When we think of 1609, in North America, we tend to think of the east coast and early English colonist. But here, in 1609, the Spanish had established a presence in an area that was already settled, as this area was surrounded by Pueblo Indian communities.

I've posted a few other photos of old structures here recently, including the oldest house in the United States and the oldest church.  Santa Fe, for that matter, is the oldest capital city in the US, having been the capital of Nuevo Mexico since 1610.

We think of settlement in the country as going from east to west. But that wasn't always the case.  Here it had gone from south to north, sort of, if we don't consider too closely that the native inhabitants in this area built towns themselves.

And we tend not to think of how stable these communities were for a very long time.  Towns and cities in the west seem to boom and bust, but down here some have simply endured in their rural settings.  Major locations, although not with huge populations, that have proven very enduring.

Holscher's Hub: Route 66. When the highways used to run throught town.

Holscher's Hub: Route 66


Now, of course, the cross country highways go around towns.  This wasn't always true.  At one time, they went right through the center of town.

Sena Plaza

Sena Plaza

 The geopolitical history of the Southwest in a single location.

Lex Anteinternet: Working around the clock

Recently I posted:
Lex Anteinternet: Working around the clock: We are told that, prior to the influence of labor unions, working hours were long (and conditions dangerous) and about the only day anyone go...
Examples:



Conducting business. . . at Bandalier National Monument.

Painted Bricks: Evangelo's, Santa Fe New Mexico

Over on one of our other blogs, we posted this item:

Painted Bricks: Evangelo's, Santa Fe New Mexico:



Tavern sign for Evangelo's in Santa Fe, New Mexico, featuring the famous Life Magazine cover photograph of Angelo Klonis, the founder of the tavern. The late Mr. Klonis was a soldier during World War Two when this photograph of him ws taking by Life photographer Eugene Smith.  Konis, a Greek immigrant, opened this bar in his adopted home town in the late 1960s, at which time his identify as the soldier photographed by Smith was not widely known.
We also posted this on our blog Some Gave All.

There's some interesting things going on in this scene, that are worth at least noting.  For one thing, we have an iconic photograph of a U.S. soldier in World War Two, which is often mistaken for a photograph of a Marine given the helmet cover, appearing on the sign for a cocktail lounge in 2014.  Sort of unusual, but the fact that it was owned by teh soldier depicted explains that.

Note also, however, the dove with the olive branch, the symbol of peace.  Interesting really.  Perhaps a reflection of the views of the founder, who was a Greek immigrant who located himself in Santa Fe, went to war and then  came back to his adopted home town.

All on a building that is in the local adobe style, which not all of the buildings in downtown Santa Fe actually were when built.

I don't know what all we can take away from this, but it sends some interesting messages, intentional or not, to the careful observer.

The Big Speech: Roosevelt on Leadership

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

Theodore Roosevelt

Thursday, April 30, 2015

The Oldest House in the United States, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Oldest House in the United States, Santa Fe, N...:








This structure in Santa Fe exists on foundations dating back to approximately 1200, and was continually occupied up in to the 1920s.  Interestingly, it's directly across a very narrow street from San Miguel Church, the oldest church in the United States.

Postscript

It's been pointed out to me that I was remiss in not saying who had built the original foundation for the house.

This area of New Mexico has been occupied by Pueblo Indians of various groups for a very long time.  Natives from one of these bands constructed the original foundation, and Pueblo Indians from the Tano group occupied the pueblo in this area until around 1435 or so.  The area may have been vacant for some time thereafter, but was reoccupied by Tlaxcalen Indians, who came into the area with the Spanish in 1598.  They also built the nearby San Miguel Church.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Working around the clock

We are told that, prior to the influence of labor unions, working hours were long (and conditions dangers) and about the only day anyone got off was Sunday.  That day, of course, is the Christian day of rest, and people generally at least honored that, giving themselves, and their employees, the day off.

Labor unions came in, and the daily working day, at least in the United States, shrank to eight hours by law, and 40 hours per week, by law, save for employees who are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which are actually quite a new now, but not nearly so many when the FLSA came in.  Even so, when I was a boy, the working day was generally eight hours long for most people, and most people had Saturdays and Sundays off.  Some retail outlets were open on evenings, all of which were "department" stores, which were also open on Saturdays.  Nothing was open on Sundays, not even gas stations, except for grocery stores.

All a thing of the past now.

Now, as stores have become more and more national and international, more and more of them are open seven days a week, with employees who have to be there on Saturdays and Sundays, and quite a few are open late into the evening, or even twenty four hours a day.  Certainly "convenience stores" are.

All of that, of course, is well known.

But what is less well appreciated is that those people who were exempted from the FLSA in the first place, now never really leave work, unless they're very disciplined.

It's the cell phone, which isn't really a phone anymore so much as its a little computer with a telephonic feature, that has caused this. Cell phones can be set to receive email around the clock.  And they receive calls and text messages by default.  This means that the person with them is in contact with their occupations at all times, save for the discipline to sever the contact.  And that's not always possible.

Professionals and businesses rarely intrude on one another in this fashion with texts or calls, but they do innocently and inadvertently send emails to each other constantly.  I do myself, even though I generally keep the email function of my phone off. That is, I'll send weekend emails on occasion, and some people do a great deal.  They are not seeking to intrude, but a person with an Iphone set to pick them up, will pick them up.

Phone calls are another matter, interestingly.  As we carry our cell phones constantly anymore, and as we use them for work, some people (again not usually business clients or other professionals) will call them on weekend and off hours.  I received just such a call, for example, recently on a Saturday evening while I was at dinner.

Some such calls are true emergencies, but most are not.  It's just hard to resist the temptation.  I've noticed a younger generation has almost no ability to resist it.  But resist it we should.
The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath:
So we are informed at Mark 2:27. And very true it is.  Even for those who are non religious, people need a brake.  The expansion of work in an intrusive fashion is a feature of our evolving lives, and not a good one.

A century ago, in 1915, when a lawyer, for example, went home, his mail didn't go home with him, and his work probably didn't either.  He might get a telephone call, if he had a phone, at home, if it was a true emergency.   This would also have been true half a century later, in 1965.  Or in 1985.  Not now. This has been a revolutionary change, but it's one that we have to question if we're really benefiting from it?  My guess is that nobody does, and a condition in which fewer things are available after the business day and weekends, and in which people are harder to get in touch with while not at work, might be a better one.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Churches of the West: San Miguel Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Churches of the West: San Miguel Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico:








This church is the oldest church in the United States.  Built between 1610 and 1626, the church is still an active Catholic church offering two Masses on Sundays.
 
This church serves as a reminder that our concepts of North American settlement are often somewhat in error.  This church in is the American Southwest and has been in active use for over 400 years, a figure longer than any church in the American East, and a demonstration that much of what we associate with European civilization in North America was already further West at an early stage than we sometimes credit, and that what became the North American civilization was already less European, in significant ways. This church, for example was constructed by regional natives.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Lex Anteinternet: Protesting Too Much: Lex Anteinternet: The return...

I received this past week the newsletter my local representative puts out about the past legislative session.  In it, he notes that all four of the bills he sponsored passed and became law.  And then he goes on to metion. . .  three of them. 

That's right, only three.

The fourth one remains undisclosed in the letter.

I know which one that is, it's the bill discussed here:
Lex Anteinternet: Protesting Too Much: Lex Anteinternet: The return...:   I've commented several times on this year's legislative efforts regarding the Federal lands in the state, with a comment on the...
I noted in that entry I'd written my representative and received a reply.  I'll bet I wasn't the only one who  wrote him, and I'm guessing that those who did write were not pleased. 

Since this bill passed, and even at the time of its passing, news regarding it became remarkably quiet.  It's as if it isn't even there.  The legislature passed it, but chances are that they were getting a lot of mail like mine towards the end, and after, and now there may be a feeling that its better not to say too much.  This is not the norm for Wyoming's legislature, where normally we'd see discussion about big things that they've done.  If they've grown quiet on it, while still proceeding on, there may well be some conflicts and second thoughts, and a desire to get a ways past the session before this becomes news again.

Well, in my prior entries I noted that voters who care about this issue are unlikely to forget it.  Noting that  "four" of the bills you sponsored while discussing only three isn't going to cause us who wrote about it to forget who it was that caused this to occur.  I expect next election this will be an issue.  It should be. 

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Community Baptist Church, Glenrock Wyoming

Churches of the West: Community Baptist Church, Glenrock Wyoming: