Four Days Of Solitude

At a quarter past midnight, the last ferry for four days left Patmos. Most likely, it brought some additional food inventory for the supermarkets. The gasoline boat made its final delivery of the year yesterday. For four days – Patmos is on its own – like something out of Orhan Pamuk's Nights of Plague. In the summer, ferries of one kind of another come multiple times per day. In the Spring, there was sometimes a day between ferries. But the end of the year has this unusual four-day gap in service. 

It's a strange thing to think that barring a medical emergency requiring a helicopter, everyone and everything that's here, stays here. No comings nor goings. I've spent signifiant time on many islands and even lived on a few – never have I had a four day moratorium on transit. There is something both comforting and scary about separating from the outside world for a few days. 

Of course that's probably how it was for thousands of years on the Greek islands. People may have crossed the seas occasionally to trade, but for the most part each island was its own world. Greek mythology tells of all the sea creatures, monsters and other dangers believed to exist among the various straits and passages – and of course the fickle will of the gods that could protect, torment or destroy anyone, anytime. An island – especially one as small and removed as Patmos – couldn't count on complex supply chains for its sustenance. So whether you liked your neighbors or not – there you were, in it together.

As are we with our 1000+ friends here. I'm fine with it, although Michelle is concerned that spirits who may inhabit Hora will use this as their chance to go full Scooby Doo on us all while no one can escape. Understandable, Hora can be a little creepy, but I would assume if any spirits or ghosts were planning to go on the rampage, they probably would have by now – or maybe chosen a more auspicious time, like 2000. If Rudy Giuliani could have thousands of body bags ready in case something went horribly wrong on Y2K (which was a comforting thought to me since I was in Times Square for millennium…), then why not some Hora-dwelling ghosts?

Last night I learned from Tassos at Alas Grill that on January 1st, one restaurant will be open – Stamatis on Grikos, which is otherwise closed for the season. Apparently, the Stamatis family found their niche by offering live music on New Year's Day and taking advanced reservations – knowing they will have a full house for the day before going to all the trouble of opening. They do it again on January 6th for the Greek Orthodox Epiphany holiday. Apparently, Tzaveri Taverna in Skala used to also host special holiday events – but since they moved locations, they have a lovely patio, but less total seating capacity, making holidays no longer worth their while. 

So once there were two choices, now there's just one. Or stay home with family, cook and relax which is what the vast majority of Patmians will do.

Patmos does a fantastic job of reducing Decision-Making Anxiety. Clinical studies and an increasing body of literature shows humans respond well to the freedom to choose, but too many choices actually stress us. Our brains aren't made to process the number of decisions we now find ourselves making in modern urban and suburban first-world societies. Think about the amount of time one can spend figuring out the right appliance, or the very real FOMO people face when choosing between social plans. I've had it before where I stand in a supermarket aisle trying to figure out the difference – if any – between two seemingly identical products. Is there a reason one brand of butter costs a dollar more than another one? Is it better, or just branding? If they're both organic, is one next-level organic in some way I haven't yet learned about? Or do they actually come from the same dairy and have different labels slapped on them?

I believe one aspect of the appeal of Trader Joe's and Costco is they actually reduce choices for their customers. Trader Joe's has one brand of almost anything – Trader Joe's (or Trader Giotto's, Trader Ming's or Trader Jose's if it's an ethnic product). My butter choices are salted/unsalted, conventional/organic. That's it. Costco usually gives me two or three choices on any given item – and I might like them or not – but the options in most categories are pretty succinct. They're offering a good price for whatever they're offering. So it's house-brand toilet paper or Charmin. Both well priced for what they are. I'm a Charmin man – toilet paper's not the place to skimp in my book.

Last year at this time, an application I made on a lark ended up getting me the house in Westlake we're now in – and I had a short window to move when returning from France with the kids. Because my prior place was furnished, I needed just about everything – including a fridge, washer and dryer. I bought everything on After-Christmas sales online from Cannes and was extremely stressed. Choosing things that I/we have to live with long-term are the WORST decisions to me. Unlike some people, I don't relish the process and enjoy imagining all the possibilities – I just want a the Interior Design Fairy to float down, waive her (at risk of being sexist) wand and make my home look right – without paying tens of thousands of dollars for her services. 

Choice is a blessing – people like my grandparents and great-grandparents have fought hard for freedom and upward mobility. Literally, both of my grandfathers went to war to protect us from fascist aggression and death. So complaining about how many flavors of yogurt there are or how to choose the best dryer isn't something I want to take too far. And everything has a reasonable limit. 

When I contemplate what about life on Patmos is so much better, undoubtedly streamlined choices plays a big part. Sure, I have to plan my cooking around what's in the rather modest-sized grocery stores, the butcher's case and the handful of produce trucks. I'm just not sure I'm suffering for it. For the most part, produce is seasonal – especially if you guy from the trucks which mostly source local. If I was an individual pod coffee person, I might have to choose Nespresso over Keurig because that's the brand for which the supermarkets predominately supply. If I ever get a car, a Fiat or Hyundai are good choices because they have models that fit the island, they're fuel efficient and the mechanic shop here is used to working on them. In Westlake, when my last lease was up I was seriously stressed figuring out what was the best choice for me and my kids. I solicited a lot of opinions, drove a lot of models, did a lot of research. It took a couple of months. Here, I might just go online and find the best price I can get on a Hyundai i30. It's pretty simple. As Dimitris once taught me, you don't want a larger car – it's just hard to park and challenging to drive through the narrow roads.

Maybe another way to say it is that Patmians have fewer choices that we do at home, but I'm not sure they're not getting the better overall deal. They don't discuss which international cuisine they'd like when they go out to dinner – which is sad – but they also don't spend much time or energy figuring out their New Year's plans. Tassos told me everyone spends the evening until midnight with their families and then those who want to celebrate post-midnight go to one of the three open bars/cafes for drinks. His friends know what they'll be doing and there's no text chain.

I've heard and read many smart people saying a major reason for the social challenges in our world today is that no one – not a single person – knows how all the systems work. Perhaps as recently as the 19th Century, it might be possible to have a solid know-it-all who could explain everything from the value of currency to the workings of a steam engine to evolving germ theory. Today, Warren Buffett couldn't accurately and thoroughly explain the global financial system. In medicine, specialization now runs so deep most doctors can't really speak knowledgeably about another discipline. Yesterday, I did some research for a friend with a complex not-fully-diagnosed set of health issues and found he may want to see a Genomist. I didn't even know Genomists existed.

As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in Sapiens, the complexity of our world based on current technology and systems has caused us all to develop increasingly specialized knowledge and skills. He pointed out how a shockingly few people can explain exactly how a zipper works, even though we all have them. That's largely because it's not terribly consequential that I can explain or even repair a zipper. My knowledge around SaaS software products gives me a higher economic value than if I was conversant in zippers. Only the further we all go down the path of specialization – the less we know about how other things work. Getting by in our complex world requires trusting other people and that systems we can't comprehend are working correctly and in everyone's best interest. Which of course isn't always the case. The problem we now run into is questioning experts in other areas or the correct functioning of important systems can in and of itself create instability.

If I'm not happy with how the medical system has addressed my friend's illness, one conclusion could be my friend's condition is uncommon, complicated and therefore hard to figure out. He may unfortunately have to drive his own care and self-advocate. Another could be one or several doctors are terrible at their jobs, perhaps crossing into malpractice. Yet another could be that each doctor did everything he or she knew how to do within their deep, but narrow specialization and just can't see the problem for what it is. Still another could be the system is totally fucked and we need massive overhaul. Or some combination of these. I just don't know enough to definitively evaluate and come to a fair conclusion. I can't say if we have some of the best medicine in the world, imperfect as it may be – because no system is perfect – or if it's time to burn America's healthcare system to the ground and start over. 

We live in a world where we don't know if we're dealing with government officials who are doing their best job despite limitations and challenges, or if a group of corrupt and lazy bureaucrats are creating bad outcomes. This makes it both easy to make accusations but also for bad actors to fog citizens rightfully demanding accountability. If I wanted to understand whether my municipal water district or school district is doing a good job, I'll probably need a serious education myself. Within it, I would probably need a well-considered definition of "good job" because not only are desired outcomes hard to agree on, but what might be a "good job" for my son could be quite different than for his autistic friend. 

There was an incident last year in the neighboring school district where a third grade student went home for Winter Break a boy and came back presenting as a girl. The school and teacher had no notice. The teacher had a situation on her hands with a student asking to be called by a new name and kids needing to understand what was happening. So she grabbed a state-approved, age appropriate storybook dealing with transgendered students and read it to the class. She alerted the principal and did her best to muddle through the day without making the student's gender identity more of an issue than it needed to be.

Unsurprisingly, there were angry parents blaming varying combinations of the teacher, the school, the school district and the family of the transgendered student. The principal backed the teacher to the hilt. Eventually the issue was raised at a school board meeting. 

How does one untangle this situation? Is it a societal issue that kids are being allowed or encouraged to identify as transgendered when perhaps they aren't yet ready to make the decision? Is it a societal issue that kids with gender dysphoria have been denied the attention and empathy they have so long deserved? Was the teacher to blame for reading the book and going on with the school day with a transgendered student? Or was she a hero for making the best of a very challenging situation? Was the school district or state wrong to have materials and policies to accommodate the student? Or were they dead-on in their approach? Is it the family's fault for having no communication with the school prior to the student showing up as a girl? Or should they have the right to send their child to school reflecting her true inner-self without apologies or permission?

If I'm honest, I don't fully know. This is such a complex topic and I have such minimal information on anything from how many children actually have gender dysphoria, how do you confirm a child actually has gender dysphoria, what age is appropriate to take action on it, what the best practices are around gender change in a classroom setting and what rights parents of the other students should have. There's a lot involved. I can say clearly I think the parents of the transgendered child were in the wrong for not talking to anyone before bringing their child to school as a girl for the first time. I also think the teacher is a hero for doing about as well as anyone in her situation could do. She found herself in what she had to know was going to be a seriously problematic situation and she did her best to give her students enough context to work with the situation and get through the school day. I don't think she had a political or social agenda – I think she was a caring person placed in an unfair spot trying to get the best outcome for a group of eight-year-olds.  There's no playbook for what she faced.

Wherever you come out on this story, the point is we live in a complicated world where it's easier to complain and accuse than to sort through the complexities and solve. 

All of this to say, our world sometimes feels like it's spinning out of control because in fact, we struggle to understand it and despite how many brands of butter at our disposal, we feel a distinct lack of control ourselves. 

When friends and family share their well-founded worries or pessimism about the direction of the world, I'm inclined to agree. I worry about a lot too and it is scary – more so than spirits in Hora.

Then sometimes I remember my grandparents grew up the poor children of immigrants during the Depression only to have their young adulthood marked by not just war, but the mother of all wars. Ken Follett gave his World War II era book a name I love for the period – Winter Of The World.

Literally, everything was at stake right down whether or not my family would have continued to exist after a German victory. My Grandpa (the one I knew and adore) was a navigator who dropped bombs over Germany and one time had to fly a bomber back to base in England when a bullet pierced the cockpit and killed the pilot. When his tour was over was sent somewhere for a few months to "de-stress" before being discharged. He never talked about it. Meanwhile, I have the privilege to have never fired a gun. I hang out on an island in Greece. My kids go to great schools. I have never been without nutrition for a day in my life. I do not believe anyone is coming to systematically exterminate my friends and family.

That's not to say humanity isn't in a crazy place. Or dangers don't abound. I worry for my children's future and well-being. I see so many dangers – places where we can collectively crash. At the same time, I remember when Sennen was born and I looked around the living room and saw all the hard surfaces and dangerous corners I had never noticed before. We were alert and to my knowledge, Sennen never hurt himself on any of them.

I suppose every now and then, it's good to be cut-off from the world for a few days. Maybe it helps to think less about the multitude of relatively unimportant choices that fill our lives and be grateful we live in a world with choices at all. And if those choices should ever be fewer – widdled down to Nespresso, espresso or drip – take a deep breath and embrace the relief. There's so much noise blocking the music.