It’s Friday morning, July 14th.  I strongly considered walking to the train station this morning to try to get back into that habit, since I’ve been sick this week, but then last night I had an especially horrible night’s sleep.  I think I got maybe an hour or an hour and a half total of sleep, not continuously, but spread out over the time between 10 and 3.  Now I feel surreal and slightly hallucinatory.  I really don’t even want to go into the office, but I’ve already missed one day this week (Monday), and I’m off this weekend, so I’ll try to trudge through today.

I don’t know what to do about this.  My sleep and other issues seem to be worsening, and it’s getting to the point where fewer and fewer things keep me wanting to do anything.  Most days, honestly, I half-wish I were dead, but today it’s more than half.  I’m so tired; I don’t know what to do.  But I’m not sleepy.

I think tonight, even though it gave me some trouble last time, I’m going to take one of those melatonin, as well as two Benadryl, just to see if it helps at all.  The research apparently shows that melatonin doesn’t do much other than to reset one’s sleep clock if one is off kilter, but maybe in some people—maybe in people with weird brains to begin with—it might help.  I don’t know.  Anyway, I don’t work tomorrow, so if I have a bad reaction and get a headache and all that, it won’t matter much.

It’s not as if I have any plans for Saturday.  I don’t see anyone or spend time with anyone, though I’m going to call my sister this weekend, and that’s a good thing.  I don’t go out or do anything interesting.  I’ve sort of half-decided I want to try to replace the inner tube in my bike and retry that again, maybe go for a ride.  That might be worth doing.  I have the necessary equipment, at least.  I don’t know if I’ll have the will to do it, but I’ll wait and see.

I had plans to talk about that second topic I raised at the end of yesterday’s lengthy post.  I’m referring here to my thought that, perhaps, having big jackpot lotteries and the like for people to play legally has actually done harm to the overall work ethic and productivity of the nation, because at least some people will console and delude themselves with the dream—and yes, it is a dream, since to a good, five-sigma approximation, no one wins the lottery—that they might get a windfall and never have to work again, and then they could get and have all the joys and comforts they envision.

I imagine—and this is conjectural—that when there is no lottery available, people can’t even dream of getting ahead or getting more comfortable other than through working hard and saving their money.

Like I mentioned yesterday, this is not something I would imagine is to blame for all, or even a lion’s share, of the diminishment of the middle class and the work ethic and whatnot.  There are many factors in the equation or the program or whatever you might call it that determines the economic and sociological structure and function of a society.

But I don’t think the lottery has been a good thing in any sense.  It doesn’t appear to have benefited public education at all, which was one of the things for which lotteries were supposed to raise money.  If anything, it might have given those in government an excuse to be able to cut some of the tax-based funding for education.

Certainly the public schools appear to have gone downhill even since I was in school, and I don’t think I’m just being a typical curmudgeon who thinks the younger generation is stupider than the youth of my generation were.  In fact, I don’t think they are stupider.  Probably they’re overall somewhat smarter—they certainly have less exposure to environmental lead than people did when I was a kid, and the general knowledge base of civilization has definitely increased.  But the education system in general appears to be much worse than it used to be, and what’s more troubling is that people seem not to care as much about education as in the past.  The respect for teachers and for schools and for getting an education in general seem to have declined significantly.

That doesn’t seem like a good way to run a society with an eye toward the future.  In fact, the future seems more and more bleak by the year.  Thankfully, of course, there are smart people out there, and some of them will be able to get educated in spite of the schools they attend, and when push comes to shove, these individuals will do their best to come up with new solutions to new and old problems, and they will carry the rest of the human infestation along with them, for better or for worse.

But if people in general were better educated—if they were taught even basic probability and statistics in high school, or even junior high, for instance—there would be much less of a market for con games such as state lotteries.  One sees people lining up almost every day in the convenience stores, spending absurd amounts of money (which they cannot afford) on slips of paper that they might as well use to blow their noses or wipe their asses.

I always told my patients that they should never make a special trip to buy a lottery ticket, because they were far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident on the way to the store than they were to win the jackpot.  I suspect this might be true even if they walk to the store, though at least then they would be getting exercise.  The odds of them getting injured are even greater than the odds of them getting killed, and in the USA, people with injuries that cause persistent diminishment of ability are going to have extra expenses and decreased productivity and lower quality of life for a long time, and our healthcare system is woefully inadequate.

And make no mistake, injuries that you have do cause chronic diminishment of your capacity—“you are still the victim of the accidents you leave”.

Nietzsche’s famous quote about “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” is just a load of bullshit.  Remember, the man died of neurosyphilis, but syphilis doesn’t progress to the nervous system very rapidly.  It didn’t kill him quickly, but it certainly didn’t make him stronger, neither physically nor mentally.  Exercise, practice, education, deliberate self-improvement—these things can make one stronger.  Accident and injury don’t tend to do that.

Not to say that a person can’t find wisdom and lessons even from horrible events, but to do that, one needs to be primed to look for such lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I probably could go on and on and off on tangents of various kinds related to this.  It’s frustrating to see people make excuses for why they don’t think they need to worry about educating their children, and at the same time to see people wasting their money on absurd gambles.  Gambling is only a winning industry for those who own the casinos or the lotteries (if them).  It is true that a very good poker player can make a living at the game, but only if there are worse poker players against whom they can play.  It’s a zero sum game.  There are no lions unless there are hinds; there are no wolves unless there are sheep.

Better to get educated, because knowledge can be shared and gained without real loss to the sharer.  Information can be reproduced now at very low cost—lower than it’s ever been before.  Education can be a positive-sum game, a mutual exchange to mutual benefit, which is the type of interaction at the heart of any functioning, productive economy.  If you get smarter, it doesn’t make me stupider; indeed, it often makes me smarter by feedback, for if you learn or create some truly new knowledge, then I can subsequently learn it.  More knowledge, more information, can benefit everyone.

But I doubt that it will.  I don’t have high hopes for the vast majority of humans.  As David Deutsch has pointed out, it certainly seems possible for the future of humanity to be a cosmically significant one, in the long term.  But there’s nothing that guarantees it.  It can easily go wrong, and most times throughout history, the production of knowledge has gone wrong, and has ground to a halt for centuries at a time and more.

Oh, well.  I’m too tired to do much but feel pessimistic about everything, anyway.  This blog is the closest thing to contribution to society that I do anymore.  I don’t know that it does me any good, though.

Anyway, I’m off to head to the train station now, for another depressing day of pretending that there is any point at all to continuing to strive to make a living.  I hope you all feel better, or at least better rested, than I do.