The Google of Desire

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

What are you looking for? People are searching Google for “oil spill in gulf of mexico.” St. Louis, MO is the world’s epicenter for people typing in “how to find a boyfriend.” The number one city searching for “sex” is Delhi, India. The number one city searching for “peace” – Edmonton, Canada.

I’m going to follow the high (Canadian) road and try some Google searches before hoisting a cold drink and paddling a kayak into the Labor Day sunset. Here are my results, not all of them real.

Normally this Google search returns an administration that is wrongheadedly driven to job generation by building more roads, more airports and increasing our dependency on fossil fuels. That’s my read on Laura Tyson’s recent New York Times op-ed piece.

But when I did this Google search, I got something that didn’t suck. My search returned a president who delivers on his promise to build a green infrastructure for America, with solar and wind power. His administration helps move us away from oil, cars and bad mortgages and into something smarter – new online technologies and training and a green economy.

This returns yoga studios that offer classes by donation, like YogaCo and Yogis Anonymous, in Santa Monica. You simply pay what you think the class is worth. Your class is not some recurring charge on your credit card, or a health-club membership, or some other obligation like changing the oil in your car. The health club, credit card model of yoga doesn’t teach us as much about ourselves. As Max Strom writes in A Life Worth Breathing, we can’t use the methods we commonly employ in business and commerce to learn about ourselves. It’s like using a hammer to brush your teeth. Money needs to change hands for yoga classes, but just in a different way.

This search returns links about Bruce Lipton, a biologist who is leading a re-examination of Darwinian evolutionary theory. He spoke at a great event that I attended this week. Bruce says that Darwin’s concept of evolution, the “survival of the fittest,” has led humanity into competition and war. He thinks evolution is really about “survival of the fittingest” – successful species are those that adapt, fit in with nature and play well with other species. If we understand this in time, and stop killing the planet, Mother Nature might not need to cast us out of her garden.

This returns a link to this video, which is coffee porn for the overcaffinated engineer mind. The search does not return any links to Starbucks, which has a good health plan for its employees but teaches them to make an indifferent espresso, a great tragedy for dopamine delivery.

My dream Google search returns news of Architecture for Humanity’s efforts to rebuild in Haiti, Black Entertainment Television’s financing of local housing materials manufacturing in Haiti, and World Shelters’ work here and abroad to put a roof over everyone’s head.

Eastern Nebraska. Huh. Always wanted to know that.

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The Value of Stuff

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

I have stuff. I’ve used eBay to sell some. In the past I would put a camera up for auction and it would sell at a profit, like a hot stock. But more recently, I put up my entire Rollei camera outfit. It was a classic kit and went for half what I paid for it. The other day, the guts of my outmoded multi-thousand-dollar edit system went for $80. Markets can provide an experience not unlike the amusement park ride that makes you throw up. Walter Kirn put it like this recently in the New York Times Magazine:

“According to the worldly theologians of finance and commerce, a force known as “the business cycle” that governs the rise and fall of markets was supposed to have taken us higher by now, replenishing depleted bank accounts, restoring a sheen of functionality to corroded Rust Belt cities and permitting again the buying and selling of homes. The rock in front of this tomb remains in place, though, and the day of rejoicing still appears far off.”

If you look at the value of things in terms of numbers, well, it can get you nuts. Since going nuts is expensive, I’m trying to think of markets differently. Like my 1960s era Rollei SL66 camera. It included a type of Zeiss lens that many believe was among the finest ever made. It was a sad day when I eBay’d it. But the man who came to pick it up turned that around.

He was Japanese, a pocket-protector type engineer who was passing through California on his way back home. He explained that in Japan there’s a tradition of asking retired engineers to work on projects – a way of using, and respecting, their wisdom. The guy who came to get my camera was on a mission. He was going around the States buying great lenses to give to a retired engineer in Japan. The old guy was going to study them so he could make better lenses for the digital age. Suddenly my heirloom Rollei was pointing the way to the future. Some old guy whose skills may have been ignored over here was leading the charge in Japan. I liked the sound of that, so I gave the engineer a light meter and a couple of filters to go with the Rollei. The transaction transformed the value of my camera  – raising it.

Max Strom, a yoga teacher, has seen the value of yoga increase among people who drive $85,000 cars. These folks arrive at his classes, turn off their cell phones and spend $20 to look inside themselves and see what they might find. As Max wrote, the experience often “triggers the profound realization that a 90 minute, $20 yoga class fulfills many of their essential needs, more than any of their other possessions they have worked like dogs to obtain.” The value of that twenty bucks? Pretty huge. Even more when you consider, as Max argues, that “Yoga is being embraced primarily by college-educated, upper-middle-class thinkers and businesspeople in positions of power–the very strata of society that has the power to make the changes this world so desperately needs.”

I believe in money, because I use it to pay my mortgage. But when the true value of a yoga class or an old camera floats above its money value, suddenly you’re playing the spiritual stock market – always a good bet.