The PolyBlog

Psychology lecture 3: A science of happiness

January 27 2025

As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking an intro to psych course through The Great Courses. The third lecture starts a recurring theme in the series from the professor who is very interested in the “positive dimensions of psychology”, going beyiond the classic “how do we recover from trauma or disorders” to focus more on well-being, aka “a science of happiness”.

There are a ton of books by psych professors out there; some make best-seller lists, others create lists for popular tabloid magazines (“Five things to be happy today!”). The classic summary of almost all the approaches is that happiness depends on a combination of pleasure (a seemingly obvious component), engagement (friends and family), and purpose or meaning. If you look at smaller behaviours to help boost happiness, the advice often focuses on exercise (on the basis of a release of hormones), sleep (for better health), or expressions of gratitude (reinforcement of blessings). And finally, after looking at all of those macro factors for “everyone”, the analysis often goes to the individual for personality type — mainly dividing between optimists and pessimists. Overall, most approaches say the Big Three make up 50% of the equation (including little and big things to improve things) and personality makes up the other 50%.

I confess that I am often very unsatisfied with the first half of that model, including the dozens of tweaks that various pop psych books suggest, like “don’t sweat the small stuff” or “the art of not giving a f***”.

For my own take on the subject of happiness, pleasure seems almost a no-brainer as a starting point. Do what makes you happy, right? And I’m generally okay with that premise. If you do more things that make you happy, you should theoretically be happier. If you spend more time doing things that you enjoy, you should become happier. Yet there are limitations in there that most of the texts NEVER talk about. Some things that give you pleasure may not actually make you happier. Some of this is just a limitation on the phrase, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Because work won’t feel like work. And thus, the conclusion is to follow your dreams. Great fodder for a bumper sticker, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

There is a very stong aspect of privilege there that you have a way to cover your living costs while doing all that…I have a much stronger resonance with the idea of first meeting the basics of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, particularly for physiology and safety, before having the room for the more social needs of love, self-esteem and self-actualization. There are a lot of unemployed artists out there who are “following their dreams” with no reality check on their abilities, and they are FAR from happy. You still have to have shelter, you still have to put food on your table. And much of the “self-actualization” advice out there doesn’t often take into account that some people NEED a structure around them to function; not everyone can be a successful entrepreneur, they don’t have the right mindset for it. Not to mention questions of over-indulgence with addiction and the impact of too much of something “pleasurable”. Or people defining something as giving them pleasure that actually doesn’t make them happy, chasing the wrong things. Pleasure is a performance indicator, not a variable to me. I think it can help you know what can help you be happier, I don’t know that pleasure alone makes you happy. There’s still a requirement to understand HOW it makes you happy and WHY, for how long, when, etc.

I also hate the idea of connection as a framing element, or at least how it is presented. The argument is simple…man is a social creature, and thus needs to be part of a community of friends and family. You need connections, you need to engage with others. Otherwise, you stagnate. Or you start to become the crazy hermit or the man from Hobbes’ Leviathan, living a life that is nasty, brutish and short. Overall, I’m okay with the premise. I don’t know if I would tie it to “happiness” per se, more just good mental health. Catalysts to evolve, perhaps.

Yet what I really don’t like is the assumption that more connection is better or that specific connections are required. Phrases like “blood is thicker than water” or “forgive family” or “family is forever” suggests that the most important connection is family. And that such a connection is paramount to happiness. And for thousands of years, that mythos hid a multitude of sins and the reality that not all family connections are healthy. Some are simply dysfunctional, cancers that should be excised, not nurtured. In the last 20 years, there’s been greater recognition that there is such a thing as hurting yourself by maintaining certain relationships just because they’re family, or suffering “friendly fire” that you wouldn’t tolerate from any other person if they weren’t related to you. I find it somewhat antithetical that someone should “excuse bad treatment” from family, because they ARE family, rather than expecting MORE from them. That you would excuse or tolerate rude insensitive behaviour that you wouldn’t accept from a friend. That you should somehow expect MORE from friends and LESS from family? That seems bonkers to me.

Equally, when you overlay personality types for things like introversion and extroversion, or an overlay of emotive/intuitive vs. analytical, you find that certain personality traits do NOT in fact all need or create the same types of interactions with a community. I feel like “not being alone” is valid as a potential contributor to happiness or absence of unhappiness, but beyond that, it is more like the goal should be “enough community connection for you.” For certain types, myself included, over-connection leads to negativity, aka unhappiness, not simply that more is better. Put differently, there’s a calibration aspect to connection that I don’t see mentioned very often, unless focused on introverts. You need the right kind and level of connections that is right for you. It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.

Finally, when I turn to purpose or meaning as the third element, I’m not sure it’s a valid variable. If you look at philosophy, you often see references in Puritan ethics and elsewhere, almost every religion perhaps, that you should do good deeds for others. In almost all modern psych references, they talk about that purpose or meaning almost universally as service to others. Making the world a better place somehow for the rest of mankind. Yet, I can’t help but wonder:

If you define service to others as “doing good”
If you equate “doing good” as being rewarding/pleasing to you too
If you equate doing things that are rewarding/pleasing to you as increasing happiness
And then you conclude “increasing happiness” means meaning / purpose in the form of service to others

isn’t that just a circular definition? If you assume serving others is good, and that good things make you happy, is it a surprise that you’ll be happier if you serve others?

Which isn’t to say they’re completely wrong. For a large number of people, serving others MAY give them a sense of purpose which is better than being directionless, AND the act of service itself can be rewarding. But I’m not sure it’s a component. At best, I see it as a possible tool, a contributor. Just as pleasure was an indicator, not an actual component on its own.

Finally, where I often go off the rails of their line of argument of what “leads to happiness” is that most of the approaches are looking for evidence of something that leads to something they can call happiness. So, if you have X, it will lead to an increased quantity of happiness Y. It makes sense. If X, then increased Y. A positive value for X is assumed.

But is the positive value of “X” actually required? Could it be simply the absence of negative X? For example, for pleasure, instead of something giving pleasure, could the absence of acute or chronic pain be an equal or even stronger motivator? Or perhaps a fundamental prerequisite? I often think so, until I see people in pain who are quite happy overall. Negative X is present but they’re still happy. Or if I look at connection, is it connection that is important or the absence of isolation? If you eliminate the sense of isolation, or chronic pain, does that take you back to the idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, however outdated, and let you return to climbing the pyramid? Is there richer fodder to be found in Amartya Sen’s work on human and social development, instead?

Or should we turn the notion of “purpose” inward and make it less about service to others and more about service to whatever goals you set for yourself, as long as they aren’t destructive? Some people set goals like visiting all the countries in the world or running marathons. And it gives purpose and meaning, or direction at least, to their lives, without any sense of “service to others”. And they are happiest when they set a new personal best or are in the throes of a run. No benefit to anyone else. No service. Just a purely selfish goal for themselves that gets them up early in the morning, that gets them out in their Nike’s saying “Just Do It” even when it’s raining at 5:00 a.m.

I can’t help but feel with all the research and thought on happiness, we’re still missing some base elements in the definitional framework. I like aspects of the big 3, and I believe strongly in the aspects of personality determining “happiness”, but I don’t know what the real variables/components are…for some, in philosophy more than psychology, that search for meaning is the real source of happiness. Finding the answer isn’t really the goal, just working on the questions.

Psychology lecture 2: Everyone’s a little bit racist

January 26 2025

As I mentioned in an early post, I’m taking The Great Courses’ “An Introduction to Psychology” (AITP) hosted by Catherine A. Sanderson, Amherst College.

The second lecture focused on “How and why psychology matters“. It has a decent opening with an overview of main descriptive methods such as surveys, case studies, and naturalistic observations (real-world examples), etc., as well as the limitations such as generalizing from small sample size to larger population, observational influences (Schrodinger!), wrong / inconsistent answers, and/or underreporting (much of the same research limitations for performance measurement and goal-setting). The lecture ended with an overview of indirect observation (mainly using technology), neuroscience, (controlled) experiments, natural experiments, behavioural genetics, and ethical concerns. Overall? The message is it matters because it tells us about ourselves, not earth-shattering.

Interestingly, though, when it was talking about the problems with studying people’s responses, it gave a link to the famous Harvard Implicit Association Test that I realized I had actually never done, even though I’ve seen references to it dozens of times over the years. It’s a great simulation, and I had to try.

The IAT was classically about race relations, at least originally. It starts off asking you to sort words as positive or negative…joy is positive, hate is negative, for example. You press the E key or the I key to sort the words into one of two buckets. Then, it has you sort pictures of white people and black people into two buckets. Totally unrelated, you’re just sorting them the same way, left or right.

But then it tests for a possible / implicit bias — they mix the two samples, and sometimes you see a picture of a person (white or black) or a word (positive or negative). The first time through, you are pressing E for bad OR black people and I for good OR white people. Note that it isn’t a picture of a white person with a good word, it’s a picture of a white person or a black person or a good word or a bad word being sorted into shared buckets. But E is associated with bad OR black and I is associated with good OR white. They do it twice. Then they reverse the combination — now E is associated with bad OR white people and I is associated with good OR black people. The test works by seeing how long it takes you to sort the people and the words into the right bucket (E or I).

In the end, the premise is that if it takes you longer to associate JOY as a positive emotion when the bucket also means BLACK people than when it also means WHITE people, you might have an implicit bias against black people…as it is taking more time for your brain to associate black people and positive emotions when they’re paired.

I confess that I was nervous about taking the test. Would it undermine my own beliefs about my biases? Would it somehow reveal that thinking I was “okay” and not a slave to my physical and emotional genetic contributions from my parents was in fact all a lie? That I actually was a raving racist and didn’t know it? I am, after all, one of those people who has used the phrase “I don’t see colour” without realizing what I was saying. What I really meant, and it’s no better, is that I, of course, see it but it appears no more important to me than cosmetic issues like colour of hair or earrings. I had never realized how potentially disrespectful that was … that it wasn’t relevant to me in how I chose to interact with you, so it didn’t seem relevant to me at all, but was still relevant to you and our interaction.

And yet, I don’t ever remember interacting with colleagues where my reaction was negative and they were all black, for example, but if the bias was implicit, I wouldn’t know. I feel like thinking about it is a Ted Lasso moment…I care that someone is gay or black or transgendered in the sense that it is important to them to be themselves. I don’t “not care”, as Ted says, I care very much. But there is part of too that it isn’t important to me in terms of how I’m going to interact. I hope.

But going to the goal of the test, maybe that muted sensitivity is not simply ignorance or lack of experience; maybe there’s a deeper bias hiding as a result of generally growing up in a white community with very little exposure to black people, and most people in the community were probably at least a little bit racist through ignorance at least. Wow, now I’m having an Avenue Q moment…

After doing the test, it’s interesting that it also collects data on what you THINK the results are before you see the actual results. In my case, I said likely a small/light bias…I’d be hard-pressed to expect anything else based on my background. And that is the exact result it found.

Whil that is somewhat reassuring, I found doing the test disturbing. I found it harder during the second and last part of the test, when I had to switch from E=bad/black to E=bad/white. I made more errors and took longer to classify the answer.

I was also fascinated to see the classic black/white test has expanded its offerings — gender vs. STEM; young vs. old; gay vs. straight; cisgender vs. transgender; abled vs. disabled; gender vs. career choice; Arab/Muslim names; white/black vs. things that look like weapons; fat vs. thin people; religions; skin-tone; and nationalism. Fascinating ideas.

The lecture was relatively basic, nothing revelatory. But the IAT was worth the time investment alone.

A 2025 goal: An intro to psychology course

January 26 2025

I often have substantial learning goals that are so amorphous that it’s hard to focus on any one aspect. Cooking more things requires me to learn more about cooking techniques. Making things with a 3D printer requires me to learn how to use it, fix it, maintain it, and swear in complete sentences. Plus, there are regular learning goals like French on Duolingo. And that doesn’t even include actual courses.

I have long lists of courses from Coursera or The Great Courses in my retirement plans, where I would love to go through numerous topics. I’ve previously completed a massive open online course (MOOC) on MetaLiteracy through Coursera and one on Understanding Video Games. In part, it was a result of the realization several years ago that while I’m interested in continuing to do courses and things, I don’t actually need a degree or even a grade at the end. I’m fine relying on a professor’s professional curation to spoon-feed me an intro; let me get what I get out of it, and then I can move on. A course structure gets me the desired curation; more targeted online stuff gives me additional access. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in courses on photography and astronomy, too.

I recently hit some work and personal milestones in my French learning. And it made me wonder…what would/could/should I focus on in 2025 that would give me a boost?

Plans for 2025

I initially thought of taking the daily engagement momentum with DuoLingo and boosting it to see if I could do the same with a lecture. Maybe a full lecture a day for the whole year? 365 lectures would be incredible. Probably 10 courses in total. Except DuoLingo lessons are 5-10 minutes, while lectures range from 15 to 60 minutes. I set up apps on Apple TV to make some of the coursework more accessible, and I tend to watch TV late in the day, so it is not impossible that I could do a lecture a day. Do I actually want to, though? I like the engagement, but I am doubtful about the duration per day, particularly at the end of the day if I’m too tired to focus on the content. I am playing with the idea of 10 minutes a day. Pick a course, watch 10m of video every day, keep going. For a total of 3650 minutes as my goal for the year. As the year started, I was in the DR, and not feeling much like learning, so it was a bit slow of a start.

I watched a couple of videos to test different subjects and decided early to combine my goal with something that interests me — an Introduction to Psychology option. I have read a lot of psych stuff over the years, ranging from pop-psych interpretations of goal-setting behaviour all the way to case studies of trauma recovery or ADHD diagnosis and treatments. I dabble in a lot of topics. My main interest is behaviour modification for positive change, but I’m also prone to reading deep dives into the minds of serial killers. 🙂

Ultimately, I committed to The Great Courses’ (TGC) “An Introduction to Psychology” (AITP) with Catherine A. Sanderson, Amherst College.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with TGC, the premise is basically finding great teachers from around the world — you know, the ones that students rate highly at various universities and give awards to — and hire them to do a version of their favourite course in front of a video camera. The best teachers, their favourite course, as rated and identified by students. It’s not unusual, online offerings like MasterClass and Coursera have tried to do the same. Other online sites went for quantity, taking any course from almost anyone, while TGC, MC, and Coursera often wanted the “best”. Coursera isn’t as rigid as the other two, often having multiple professors teaching similar course offerings, sometimes going for expertise or simply different perspectives.

This isn’t my first foray into online psych courses. Back around 2010, I looked into a MOOC offered by Carleton University. I committed to it a bit more in 2015, downloaded the texts, bought the textbook, and geared myself up to watch the lectures. I was intending to formally audit the course. Then life intervened and I didn’t really get going on it. I still have the first 10 printouts plus the textbook.

Lecture 1: Psychology, you, and your world

The AITP course for TGC by Professor Sanderson is different than I expected. As an intro course, I expected her to present an overall framework for psychology, delineate major streams of work and thought, and then start to work through the landscape. Instead, it seems a bit more like “hey, let’s look at this topic.” I have always been impressed with TGC for the quality of their video lectures, not quite TED Talk quality but close. But I had forgotten that almost all of their courses come with an online guidebook, too. AITP is set up for 36 lectures of about 30 minutes each, and there is a 382-page guidebook complete with a quiz that you can download/print/read online. I’ve watched the first five lectures, and while I won’t try to summarize them, I will try to see what I get out of the course as I go.

This lecture is basically what you would expect at the start of an introductory course. It starts with a definition of psychology as the scientific study of mental processes and behaviour; a layman’s focus on how we think, feel, remember and act; and an overview of the goals of psychology (description, asking why, predicting behaviour, and making change). Standard stuff, nothing revolutionary or surprising, I knew all of that already.

However, I was intrigued by how she describes the nature of psychology as a combination of clinical science, a biological science tied to neuroscience and physiology, a social science of behaviour, and even an applied science (with experiments). While it is easy to see them all linked together, I never really thought of the biological component as really being “part” of psychology, as my interest is more the description and social sciences side, with a tinge of clinical therapy. It’s obvious from her description that the bio component is equally psychology too, but as I said, I’m less interested and knowledgeable about the physiological/biological aspects.

I’m less enamoured with the ending of the lecture where she talks about the modern focus on positive psychology and the links to “how do we increase happiness?”. One of the examples she gives about the components of happiness, which shows up later in a separate lecture, is highly suspect to me in its diagnosis. For me, it’s more definitional…if you define happiness as being X, Y, and Z, it’s not surprising that you will find people “happier” if they do Z. But was Z valid to begin with? I’ll come back to it, but for me, it fits more in the realm of philosophy and ethics than psychology. I’ve spent some time over the years reading a lot on the positive aspects aka “happiness and well-being”, and while I don’t discount the approach completely, it doesn’t resonate with me.

But it’s an interesting start. And it’s a long-standing goal to start chipping away at. That makes ME happy. 🙂

Am I stuck in airplane mode?

January 25 2025

Most people know the Friends theme about being “always stuck in second gear” when it hasn’t been their day, their week, their month or even their year…and while it’s a cute lyric and metaphor, I mention it only to the extent that it’s adjacent to what I’m feeling.

When we got sick in the Dominican, our last day was a bit of a crunch. Andrea had to go to Punta Cana to a private hospital for tests and xrays; Jacob was visiting the toilet frequently to throw up; and although I was in the best shape out of the three of us, that is a low bar at best if I’m winning. We had to check out of the hotel early, get Andrea to the private hospital, get her back to the hotel, get a prescription, get some food in us before leaving the resort, get to the airport, get checked in, get to the gate, get on the plane, get out of the airport upon arrival, and generally get us all home in Ottawa at 4:00 a.m. when all any one of us wanted to do was just curl up into a ball and ignore the world.

Curling up wasn’t an option for any of the stages, so I went into what I often call crunch or crisis mode. You could view it a bit like fight / flight / freeze, but for me I prefer the metaphor of just “crisis mode”. I become a very linear thinker — problem? Solution! Problem? Solution! And so on. I don’t want to debate food options, I don’t want to discuss what to drink, I don’t want to discuss where to sit. Here’s food, here’s drink, here’s a seat, done.

I don’t go into this mode very often as I prefer to analyse situations more, be more flexible if I can, but crisis mode is my default when faced with any form of emotional drama or physical trauma. Get me through this, get us safe, and then unclench.

Except when we got home, there was no relaxation happening. Jacob was sick for more than 2 weeks, while simultaneously trying to get his schoolwork done for the end of the semester. Andrea rarely misses work, yet pneumonia let her go back a bit but then has been off again. I missed the first week, worked through the other weeks, but there ain’t much “thinking” and “analysing” going on. I’m basically still in “Problem? Solution!” mode, I think.

A chance to relax

I confess that I knew I wasn’t fully back to normal, but I thought it was mainly physical. I’ve had the residual cough, extra phlegm, and I’m tired every afternoon. I just run out of energy. But, as I said, with Andrea and Jacob still sick in there, I assumed it was just that still for me too.

But something happened this week to shake me out of my assumptions.

We had bought tickets for the three of us to go to the NAC to see a “Cinematic Sax” experience, with the NAC Orchestra plus Branford Marsalis doing solos on sax. It isn’t a “must-see” for us or anything, but it’s nice to go and see something different each year. And it makes for an easy Christmas present aka an “experience” not a “gift”.

Except I didn’t think about it enough…it was just at the start of Jacob’s exam period, so I should have figured that out when I first looked at the tickets. It was mostly okay for timing, as it turned out, but still, a late night before his potential first exam. Not a good combo. And he was still behind on schoolwork, playing catchup. He maybe could have gone, but it wasn’t a good use of his time, and still sick, all things being considered.

Andrea was still really sick, so she was out of the running early. Often, if Jacob and I can’t go, Andrea has a big enough social network to find other interested people to join. This time, she was out too.

We offered the tickets up to various people, some interested but unavailable either on short notice or the night in particular. But here’s where something interesting happened.

Our friend Stephan (the one who introduced Andrea and I) called and said he wanted to go, just for one ticket, and did I still want to go even if Andrea and Jacob couldn’t? My answer was almost instantly, unequivocally, no.

But wait a minute…why? I actually wasn’t really that sick anymore. I could easily have gone. But my whole body said “NO!” quite loudly. Physically, emotionally, intellectually, existentially, NO.

The response was so strong, it was clear it wasn’t an analytical decision, but an autonomic one. My body, my “being” was saying no, not my head.

Huh. That’s weird, I thought.

Unpacking my reaction

Over the course of the night, I thought more about it. So, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I don’t have a large or active social network, never have. I know lots of people but I don’t necessarily “do” things with them on my own. It’s a fear for retirement, how do I replace my social interactions at work so I don’t become an energy vampire towards Andrea and Jacob.

Stephan is one of my favourite people in the world. I could hang with him anytime, anywhere, all good. I would like to spend more time with him than I do, I always enjoy our get-togethers. Yet here I was saying no.

Cuz I was sick, right? Well, no, not exactly. I realized that if it was just, “hey go for a coffee or dinner”, I would have said yes. So I *WAS* able to consider going OUT, without worrying about making him or others sick. But my risk assessment for the NAC, in a big giant hall with thousands of people at the height of flu season in Ottawa, was “hell no”. Potential risk? Hard no. Immediate. Like I was still in crunch or crisis mode. But I couldn’t be, right? That was weeks ago. What else was going on? I started doing my mental “sore tooth” test of other things that I had reacted to lately too.

I’m really worried about Andrea. She has a REALLY bad cough, and she’s missed most of the last three weeks. That is NOT usual for her, and no real signs of progress. It looked good early on when she was on antibiotics, but now, not so much. And I’m not as tolerant of her passive nature on this. Go to the hospital, call so and so, do this, try this, what’s going on, what have you taken, etc. Far less understanding…Problem? What solution are you doing, have you tried this? I’m not comforting, I’m in problem-solving mode, what do you need me to get at the pharmacist?

Jacob has been neck-deep in school crap, trying to get himself to the end of the semester. And while I try to be understanding, my patience on some aspects has waned too. I’m not giving him options, or suggesting things, I’m dictating, “You will tell me what you have left to do for each of your 4 classes, and when, and we aka I will make up your priority list in which order you should focus on which things, here’s your list.” Problem? Solution. He clearly needs help, both Andrea and he agree too, but I’m not helping him figure it out, I don’t have time for that, nor the energy. Decision made, moving on.

At work, I’m mostly focusing on today’s tasks…problems? Solutions! Looking back, it has been more focused on transactions. What do you need? What do they need? What do I need? Who’s doing X? You want it to go that way? Umm, okay, let’s do that. Just to do it and get it off the list. Is it the best solution? I don’t know, I don’t care, I want a solution, not a debate. Not quite being an asshat, but I have been less open, less collaborative, more transactional. An opportunity came up recently for March, a potential trip to Nunavut. Now, Nunavut is on my bucket list, absolutely. And before I leave this job, I want to go to all three of the Territories if I can. So here’s the first opportunity. And the mental load of taking on planning a trip in March was NOT happening. I said no immediately and left it for others to pick up the challenge.

At home, I really haven’t cared much about food. I don’t want to debate option x or y or z, and Andrea has somehow been still doing most of the mental load for cooking without dropping, but I really have had no views. I feel like I’m still at the resort — I’ll eat what’s available, I don’t care too much about quality, so long as edible. I’m looking for fuel and yet I’m finding almost everything bland and unappetizing. Which could suggest part of what we were sick with was perhaps COVID that messed up my taste buds. But regardless, I have been less interested in food options and more interested in consumption of some sort.

For reading, I’ve gone sideways. I’m not really reading. I read a TON on vacation; I do go up and down; there’s stuff I want to read now; but I’m not actually interested enough to do it. Too passive an activity.

I’m not blogging much. It’s January, I always blog in January. All my plans for the year, etc. Didn’t bother this year. Although part of that is related to my retirement planning. I was blogging about that, hit the health category, had stuff go sideways, and I haven’t blogged since. I’m not sure what I’m doing on that front. I feel like I was lying to myself, and a bunch of stuff I planned were maybe just pipe dreams, not realistic. I also found out some of my finances were not quite as good as I thought, which has messed up my confidence about retirement at all. Maybe I should just work to 35 years in 2030, take the biggest pension I can, etc. My head is really messed up about that, and so I haven’t reset to January goal setting when I can’t figure out my retirement blogging.

Instead, each night, I’m binging one of about twenty different shows … I can’t even really commit to one, although Game of Thrones has been high on the list most nights. But I’m binging until 2:00 in the morning so that when I go to bed, I fall asleep right away and sleep generally until the morning. No tossing, no turning, just wearing myself out so I crash. I’ve been there before, it’s usually when I’m depressed or avoiding something big.

Soooooo, saying no to Stephan and the way I reacted to the question has prompted me to look at other behaviours in the last month or so.

I feel like I put myself in airplane mode, disconnected from local networks and outside signals, and hunkered down to get us all home and safe. Yet after physically arriving, my brain is still not out of airplane mode yet.

Realizing it, of course, was the first step. And I’ve made some adjustments in the last few days (including blogging this post). But it’s weird that I managed to go on auto-pilot for almost three weeks without noticing. I have a pretty finely-tuned early warning radar detection system in place, I just didn’t realize that I turned it off in the Dominican, and forgot to turn it back on when I got home.

I don’t know what I will do about it yet. Perhaps I’ll write some posts to get my mental juices flowing.

At least, I finally noticed.

A bad holiday decision?

January 19 2025

I generally don’t believe in regrets. I firmly believe that life is lived forward, not backward, and while I might learn from the past, I don’t revisit decisions to say, “Oh, it should have been x instead of y”. I try to make decisions with the best information I have at the time, and I live with them. There is no other choice.

Yet a decision we made before Christmas didn’t necessarily weigh risk factors as well as we should have.

Our shared need to relax

I’m just going to say it…2024 sucked.

Work isn’t always a barrel of laughs, but there was extra stuff this year that made it less enjoyable. Nothing egregious, even when it seemed so at the time. Finances are fine, all our basic life elements are covered, etc.

Health was a pain in the butt. Somewhere back in March, I did something to my lower back. I don’t know what, I don’t know how. But suddenly I started getting seizures and spasms that had me literally screaming in pain. Two trips to the ER, Xrays, meds, tons of physio and osteo stuff, and it would get better for a while — only to flare up again. Definitely not fun. By way of scaling it, if that pain was daily, if the seizures never let up, I’d be looking at much more serious decisions about my future come March (1 year in). I have no appetite for that kind of life. But let’s leave it at “sucking” for now.

Jacob’s health has been, well, probably worse although not acute. He’s dealing with chronic pain from what we thought was a concussion but probably wasn’t. Every day he has headaches and dizziness, and while we’ve made progress on the headache front, the dizziness remains unabated. His attendance at school is a crapfest. Every day is a game day decision — can he go? which periods? I’ve been fortunate that work has given me special accommodation to deal with his schedule, but it’s still looney toons some weeks. Plus dozens of appointments for the year, perhaps hundreds now. It feels like a roller coaster we can only survive, we cannot thrive.

Andrea’s health wasn’t great, but not scary bad. More “life”, I guess.

We had three funerals this year, so there’s that. Don, my brother; Andrea’s uncle, Scott; and Andrea’s grandfather, Doug. Just writing that sentence has started the waterworks for me. Each is different, each is painful, each is raw. Not “was”, but “is”. Less acute, but still raw.

So, we wanted a chance to relax. We needed it. And we started thinking, “Hey, how about a trip down South?”.

Not enough nuance to our parameters

Andrea did a bunch of the initial searching. But we were trying to parse some parameters to limit the risk. We were worried about the trip. We wanted to keep the travel process to a manageable level of chaos, partly for Jacob’s stamina and endurance. We wanted a good beach, not too big a resort, nice pool, some activity options. We did NOT want big things like trips to Tulum. It was likely to be a resort trip, not an excursions trip.

Looking through all the travel options that Andrea had found, the trips were inconsistent…one would have a great flight down, and then coming back, overnight in Toronto or Montreal. Or leave really early and take 12-14 hours to get to the destination airport. Until I looked at the Air Transat packages that she had found. All of their flights were direct from Ottawa to the destination airport, no transfers or routings. They had Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Mexico. Andrea’s been to Jamaica, we’ve all been to Mexico; the DR is relatively simple, and more attractive to us than Cuba. So we settled early. A 6:00 p.m. departure arriving around 10:00 p.m. at night, 4 hour flight down; coming back, it left really late (almost midnight), but again, a quick 4-hour hop back. Hah!

We got cancellation insurance, option to bail for any reason, which seemed good just in case we weren’t up to going. Between Jacob’s dizziness and my back, we weren’t sure everything would be going smoothly. A few days before going, I began to wonder if we had made the right choice. Jacob was behind on school, and had worked really hard the week before Christmas to get caught up. Which he did. But if we stayed home for a week, instead of going away, he could get a jump on the stuff he had to do in January before he got to his summative exams and final project deadlines. I was wondering if a staycation might not have been a better weighting of “value-added”. Yet we all really wanted the break, to go somewhere and get our heads out of our existing lives. We stuck to the plan.

The flight down, a 4-hour hop, was a bit misleading. It left later than scheduled, no big problem. There’s a one-hour time-difference to DR from Ottawa, so we actually were getting in an hour later, although that goes out in the wash. The deplaning and luggage process took forever — customs was easy, but everything else took almost 90 minutes. We then found our bus to the resort, which was supposed to be about an hour, and was actually closer to 90 minutes. The last 30m of the trip was listening to, I think, Placido Domingo singing opera which seemed like torture honestly. Once we were at the resort, maybe 20 of us checking in, it took forever. And I was completely spent. I couldn’t deal with people. My patience was at zero at this point. It literally took them 25 minutes to check the three of us ONCE WE GOT TO THE DESK. We were last of 20 or so. It was about 3:30 when we got to sleep. Not awesome.

For the week, we had a good beach albeit with very limited visibility in the bay. And Jacob’s dizziness? Exacerbated by being in the ocean. We had hoped to spend a good portion of the week reading and swimming at the beach, and Jacob couldn’t do it. Equally, I had trouble getting in and out of the ocean as there was a drop-off close to where we started (there were other options farther over with more gradual entry, apparently). And yet, I still have problems with my shins with repeated wounds. Which I did something to about a week before leaving, and it was still weeping. I could go in the ocean, but I couldn’t / shouldn’t go in the pool. We made compromises, but our swimming plans for the week were heavily messed up. We didn’t plan for many excursions, thought we could do some stuff on the property but there really wasn’t anything to see or do. There was a small plaza across the road we went to a couple of times for specific things. It wasn’t a bad resort, we just planned on more relaxing and found that it was too quiet for us. We needed a bit more oomph. The daily activities looked like bad summer camp, and the nighttime shows were laughable. The food at the main and secondary restaurants was okay, not bad, but not particularly scintillating. It was fine, with decent desserts. There were also three a la carte restaurants — Italian, French and Mediterranean. We liked the Italian the best; the French was okay, we didn’t feel a need to go back, while the Mediterranean was heavily seafood-oriented yet not amazing. If we were at home, we would go to the Italian one, occasionally, although there are better ones out there; we probably would not go to either of the other two more than once to try it.

In short, we were bored. We had booked for 9 days, but after 4 days, we looked into the cost to switch to just 7 days and to go home early…it was exorbitant to change, the flights were full, etc. so we left it as is.

New Year’s Eve was Tuesday night (we arrived on Friday), and we enjoyed the night. Dinner was late, we went back to the room and played games, and then they did fireworks at midnight. By some fluke in avoiding a dancing crowd across the street that was too loud for Jacob, we ended up walking a bit down the road for a better view, and it was like we were all alone having our own private fireworks show for 20-25 minutes. It was really great. Not so great when something hot landed on Jacob and Andrea, but they weren’t hurt, just surprised. We wandered down to a gazebo on a pier after midnight and said goodbye to 2024. I embraced a small ritual I had read about of taking a stone, imbuing it with all your negative thoughts from the past year, and just chucking it in the ocean. I hadn’t realized how stressed I was about the year until we did it…I felt a large release, and was even a bit emotional hugging Jacob and Andrea.

The real problem though is that I got the flu on Tuesday / Wednesday. Tuesday afternoon, I had a scratchy throat and was starting to feel a bit off; full cold-like symptoms on Wednesday. Spent a bit of extra time just at the room trying to sleep it off. Andrea started getting sick on Thursday, Jacob on Friday. By Sunday, Andrea was so sick that we had to go talk to the doctor on the resort, who recommended shipping her off to Punta Cana by cab to get them to do xrays and stuff. Her lungs had extra stuff sounding in it, and with Andrea’s medical history, we agreed it was a good idea.

Of course, that was our last day. And checkout from the room was supposed to be noon. I tried to get them to extend, and they gave me the runaround. I was completely caught…I had to checkout, but we wanted to leave Jacob at the resort even though he was feeling like crap now, and Andrea needed to go to the private hospital, get looked at, and get back so we could take our evening flight. It was a complete mess. The hotel was useless. In the end, I had to send Andrea off on her own, and I stayed with Jacob. I got nasty with the hotel staff as they were completely f***ing useless, and then later said, “Oh, we extended you in the room”, 2 hours after I had already checked out. They didn’t bother to tell me. F***ing asshat. So Jacob and I spent the day in the big open-air lobby, charging our phones, repacking bags, and Jacob running to the bathroom to vomit while I tried to connect with Andrea who was at the hospital in Punta Cana (90 minutes away) with a dying phone. She made it back, we got a prescription filled, found a way to pay the cab driver, packed our stuff, got on a shuttle bus and went to the airport. Jacob was really not well and travelling was horrendous for both him and Andrea. Flights were delayed, and we didn’t get home until almost 4 in the morning, which was 5:00 DR time. Not a good combo in the end.

Post-holiday recovery

On the Sunday for the return trip, I was vertical and probably in the best shape of all of us. I had some meds, I jacked the cold stuff even with decongestant which I’m not supposed to take, and focused on what we needed to check in, get us to the gate, etc. The flights were delayed as I said, and he was sick a couple of times at the airport. Andrea was focusing on breathing. My problem was more diarrhea, and I had Imodium on speeddial, but it was still messing me up.

We had planned that all three of us would take the Monday off when we got back as we knew we’d get in late at night / early in the morning. I missed almost the whole week of work. I was off the first couple of days, easily, and then slowly back online a bit by the end of the week, but not fully working. It was a full extra week after the trip to get back to something resembling functionality.

Andrea ended up back in the ER, twice actually, and it turned out the first doctor was right. She DID have stuff going on with her lungs — full pneumonia. She missed work for all of the first week, most of the second, and now two weeks afterwards, she is still fighting a persistent cough.

Jacob? Well, our decisions might have f***ed him for school. Our whole schtick for the last year has been getting him back to school more regularly and for longer periods of time. And after catching up before Christmas, he just missed almost all of the last two weeks. He has had a full-on flu case for two weeks. He managed a couple of classes this week, but he’s still fighting a bad cough. And because he has small lungs, it’s hard for him to clear phlegm and stuff. He’s doing everything he can to finish his semester but it is a rough go.

Not regret, but…

In the end, I suspect I picked up something on the plane on the way down. It took a few days to take hold, and then once it did, I infected Andrea and Jacob. Andrea was sleeping next to me, Jacob was in the same room, the physical path of contamination/contagion looked like a straight line in the hotel room.

And to be honest, that risk was nowhere on my radar. Sure, travelling on a plane is always a risk. COVID, flu, colds, whatever. But we’re fully vaccinated, and if I had thought of it at all, it would likely have been a relatively minor annoyance. I did not envision that it could knock all three of us on our butts for 2-3 weeks.

Is what I feel regret? If I had thought about it, we would have discussed it and rated it pretty low-risk…medium probability perhaps, it’s easy to get sick on a plane, but with relatively low impact. Sick for a few days, move on.

It’s easy to conflate a bunch of stuff together. A less-than-exciting trip; bad logistics at times; terrible experience at the end; and we got really sick. But if we hadn’t got sick, it would have been a shoulder shrug. New Year’s Eve was great, one of the better ones that I have had in recent memory perhaps. I liked getting away, I liked our ritual. I can lament some features of the trip, but I wouldn’t have even come close to “regretting it”, more just it didn’t work out as well as our previous trip to Mexico. We didn’t get the parameters right for balance perhaps. One of the benefits of our driving trips is we had stuff inherently built into each day; the DR was more emotionally flat. Except for getting sick, it would have been more disappointing than bad.

And if we had stayed home, we likely would have gone out for dinner a couple of times on our staycation, or to some museums, etc. And we could have just as easily gotten sick sitting next to people in an IMAX movie.

I’ll write in future about our actual trip, and the activities we did. In the end, I don’t think it was a bad holiday decision, just one that didn’t work out as well. And perhaps we didn’t adequately consider the risks of the impact for Jacob for school if he gets really sick and misses more time. Sigh.

Ultimately, Everyone’s fine. The news of our deaths was (slightly) exaggerated. But we sure don’t feel rested or like we had a good break.