“I can’t stand this place,” is an expression of disgruntled employees, students, and neighbors. The “place,” could be anywhere, and place could mean “the factory,” “the school,” or “the block.” In the context of its use, the expression by the disgruntled also includes the people associated with the place. In fact, unless the place foists uncomfortable conditions, such as no air conditioning in summer and no heating in winter, on the complainers, the expression almost always means the people who make up the place. We can tolerate, and even enjoy, uncomfortable places when we connect with likeminded people, thus the popularity of local bars and restaurants in old buildings that owners have never refurbished or remodeled.
 
The average temperature on Earth’s surface is a seemingly comfortable 59o F, but that’s an average. The range in temperature is relatively great, of course: Winter vs. summer temperatures, high elevation vs. low elevation temperatures, and land vs. surface water temperatures. Earth does not have a mission to keep its inhabitants comfortable. It’s a planet, not a personified thermostat. As often happens, during an especially warm summer or an especially cold winter, the disgruntled remain disgruntled.
 
One can complain about the weather and say, “I can’t stand this place,” but, except for a few people who have the means to move to a more comfortable climate and those who live temporarily on the International Space Station, no one can leave to find another place of constant comfort. Variable Earth is it. You get the comfort and the discomfort that the location affords you. If you look around, you’ll find that this planet isn’t such a bad place to live. The other planets are either too cold or too hot for comfort, and they are enveloped in noxious and toxic gases or are airless.
 
If you can’t do much about the status and vicissitudes of the planet, then your alternative is to focus on people. Yes, it’s people that allow one to transcend a place “I can’t stand.” But in every place that one finds the disgruntled, those who remain disgruntled fail to realize that they are, in fact, the people who make up the place. You can’t leave Earth, so you will find uncomfortable places everywhere, regardless of your economic status. Think of people as “place,” and you have a mechanism for changing an “I can’t stand this place” into “It’s physically uncomfortable, but that’s just part of what this place is. The comfortable part is the makeup of the people in this place.” And, since each disgruntled person is one of those in the “makeup,” then it’s up to each to transform a place into “I think this place isn’t too bad” or even into “We do great things together under some difficult circumstances.”
 
The gruntled have a better chance to effect change in a place by cooperating than the disgruntled ever have by complaining.

Courthouses archive plat maps available to the public. These cadastral maps show property dimensions and owners, information that makes determining taxation, resolving disputes, and surveying easy. Need a reference point or line? Unfold a plat map. They are “plat” because they are “flat.”
 
There’s another public archive that makes life easy. It’s the storehouse with shelves of platitudes. They are “flat” representations of common knowledge. Platitudes make thinking easy. They are off-the-shelf ways of understanding the world. About 100 billion predecessor humans have stocked the platitude shelves for at least 200,000 years. Here’s one: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
 
Really discouraging, isn’t that? You want to declare your individuality, but 100 billion humans have beaten you to such a declaration, and, well, there’s nothing new. How, then, do you achieve your individuality?
 
You are probably dependent upon platitudinous thinking for much of what you think or do. A tornado rips through a town: “It was like a war zone.” A killer walks into a club. “Our hearts and prayers go out….” Frustrating, isn’t it. Tragedy strikes, and we are left with flat thinking, expressing platitudinous thoughts that, like plat maps, make thinking easier when comprehending and consoling are impossible. In the depths of emotion, we speak flatly in easy-to-understand words.
 
Maybe the losses and tragedies of 200,000 years weigh on all of us regardless of our historical awareness. Maybe all those previous moments of suffering are bound to our DNA. Maybe we have just been worn down by what appears to be an inevitability of loss and tragedy. We go into the archive, find the readily marked dimensions of feeling, and rely on a two-dimensional representation of a 3-D feeling.
 
We can’t fault ourselves for being born the most recent humans in a 200,000-year history. All those who have preceded us had 200 millennia to express the inexpressible. They said what they could and laid the verbal base for how we deal with loss and tragedy. It’s not that we don’t feel; it’s that we just can’t come up with many new ways to deal with the same feelings that our ancestors felt.
 
We pride ourselves on being Homo sapiens, a wise species capable of reason. But reason does little to express how we feel during and after tragedy. The archive’s shelves of platitudes, filled by 100 billion relatives, provide some ease in expressing what we feel. And everyone, because we are all descendants of those 100 billion, understands what they expressed before us—and for us.   

Headlands are small peninsulas that extend the land’s reach into the water, forming an irregular coastline. As waves approach these headlands, they refract in response to a shoaling sea or lake bottom. This bending of waves makes a repeated set of pincers that attack both sides of headlands, wearing the rock away and isolating its most waterward segment. As the headlands erode, features like sea arches and sea stacks begin to form. Sea stacks are erosional remnants of a headland that once stood farther out to sea. If you see a sea stack, you know the previous dimension of the headland.*
 
Headlands are ephemeral features under the relentless erosive force of waves, and the process by which they erode is analogous to attacks on any human endeavor that stands out against a constant wave of opposition. Almost everyone or every institution in a position of authority projects into the sea of disgruntled humanity. Just as headlands undergo incessant attacks, so leaders undergo them. You can’t, as you know, please everyone. If you want to stand out, you will be exposed to waves that strike your peninsular sides. The attacks, like those of the waves, are rarely head-on. What’s a leader to do?
 
Whereas it is true that headlands are ephemeral, it is also true that some are composed of rocks more resistant to erosion than others. Soft limestone headlands like Dorset’s Old Harry usually wear away more quickly than durable igneous rocks like Seal Rock in Oregon, but even those harder rocks develop weaknesses like joints (cracks) that make them more susceptible to erosive forces. Regardless of rock durability, relentless waves ultimately wear headlands away.
 
No leading empire has an indefinite lifespan. Internal cracks can weaken it, and attacks are usually not all-out frontal assaults. Rather, the erosion occurs along sides, isolating the leading edge from the main body of the headland.
 
Should I draw some lesson from the erosion of headlands? Watch your sides.
 
*Not familiar with sea stacks? Look up 1) Heligoland’s Lange Anna, 2) Dorset’s Old Harry, 3) Hoy’s Old Man of Hoy, 4) Australia’s Twelve Apostles, or 5) Oregon’s Haystack Rock.    

Disappointment and frustration. Much, as we say, to our chagrin. Apparently, all of us have those moments when something goes awry.
 
Chagrin is, in a sense, an ironic word. It derives in part from a word that means “rough skin,” but it expresses our level of “thin skin.” We let events or personal encounters break through, leaving a contusion on the soul.
 
We live in a world of sharp objects, so getting scraped or even deeply cut is inevitable. Generally, contusions heal, but some of us with thin skin get so deeply cut by the slightest bump that others have to tend the wound, even do some stitching.
 
Callouses are rough and tough skin. They develop from friction, giving once soft hands a new defensive barrier against future abrasions. Callouses indicate survival during past encounters with abrasive materials.
 
Want less emotional chagrin? Get some rough skin by handling the abrasiveness around you. You’ll better handle increasingly more abrasiveness by handling the rough stuff now. Thicker skin wards off future cuts.  

Now what? Dr. Cait Newport and others of the University of Oxford and the University of Queensland have experimentally demonstrated that archerfish can recognize human faces. The fish demonstrate their ability by spitting at a specific image among other images—as many as 44 such images. I’m not kidding. You can find the study in Scientific Reports. “I spit in your face” is no longer pejorative.
 
Tropical archerfish catch their prey by lying just below the water’s surface and then spitting to knock a nearby insect into the water. One might assume that the tiny brain of an archerfish is incapable of deep thought. As humans, we like to think of ourselves as “deep thinkers” whose discernment is both unequaled and unparalleled by “lesser organisms.”
 
Now, here’s the what. If I asked you to recognize a fish face among other fish faces, could you do it? Think about your ability to recognize faces of people from different countries. Think of “they all look the same” to me. Think of such generalizing in the context of a simple fish brain that can distinguish one human face from another. And the archerfish is doing the recognizing with a tiny brain observing an image refracted by water. The archerfish also identifies not only a member of a different species, but also a member of a different phylum. Come on! What do fish and humans have that is similar save a backbone and a body with a head at one end and a butt at the other? Yet, here is a simple organism capable of doing something you might have difficulty doing with members of your own species.
 
When we don’t see people as individuals, our supposed complex brains don’t match the ability of an archerfish’s comparatively simple brain.   

Who assembles? Well, there are those that assemble because they have to for various reasons: political sessions of representatives, obligatory school attendance, and religious services. There are those who enter the public realm for some purpose but gather partly by chance, such as on pedestrian sidewalks and in car traffic, on a bus, train, or plane, or in holiday store crowds seeking bargains. There are those who gather to be alone in public, such as those who open up their laptops or books in a coffee shop to sit in close proximity to strangers who rarely exchange a word. And there are those who gather around a pianist at a hotel bar, more strangers drawn together by the alcohol and music. Finally, there are the mobs, driven by some reason or emotion to protest, avenge, cause mayhem for its own sake, or loot.
 
Count as something you’ll never see: Agoraphobics intentionally assembling. We can’t blame them. They expect a danger sometimes real and sometimes unreal. They know the feeling of panic. Yet, there’s something in the symptoms of agoraphobia that unifies agoraphobics as a group. Isn’t that interesting? Separate, but together: Belonging to a group while fearing groups.
 
Choosing to be part of a mob is probably not a good idea. As everyone knows, mobs breed anonymity, and anonymity breeds license; license breeds unrestricted acts, and unrestricted acts breed insult and injury. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone in a mob were agoraphobic? Imagine: People together but acting separately, individuals overly conscious of their setting, aware of their place in place. No mob rule. No mayhem or looting. No loss of property or innocent victims. A mob afraid of itself.  

Hypothetical: Someone has offended you at the distance of one meter (about 3 feet). You feel the offense; it’s almost tangible. You might even be angry. You obsess over it.  The offense is an incessant thought. You personify the offense: The offending person becomes the obsession. The person looms large in your field of view. Ubiquitous. Try to do this or that, and, there, at least in your mind’s eye, is the offender, close by and the focus of your attention, a circle about one meter in diameter.
 
Mentally go ten meters away from the place where the offending incident occurred. Look back. In your imagination see the two of you from that distance.   
 
Go 100 meters away. Look back. Now what? You are looking at the two of you at a distance that separates the right field fence and home plate or the distance between the start and finish of a ten-second sprint by a world-class runner.
 
Go 1,000 meters away. Still a problem of great concern? One kilometer. That’s more than a half mile. With the naked eye you can make out the shapes of two people very well, but they are rather small.
 
Go 10,000 meters away. That’s a little over six miles. Look back, but use a terrestrial telescope. Those two figures are very far away. What seems to be the problem? Even in the telescope, the two of them appear very small. Wonder what they are saying to each other. Wonder what each one thinks. Think either will remember the incident tomorrow?
 
Go 100,000 meters away. Can’t see the two dots? You’re more than 60 miles away. Get out the military reconnaissance camera lenses, you know, the ones they use on satellites to spy on enemies or something used for Google Earth. You do want to see your “enemy,” don’t you? The person does still loom large, right?
 
Go 1,000,000 meters away. Better break out the Hubble Space Telescope, turn it around, and focus on a one-meter circle where the two stand back on Earth.
 
Want to go farther? See the offending person from 10,000,000 meters. How about 100,000,000 meters, or more than 62 million miles?
 
I know what you’re thinking. “But the offense was real. I was really offended. I don’t like the offender. This matter is affecting my life here, now, and in the one-meter circle of my life.”
 
To which I say, “Yes, it certainly was an offense, and I can see why it bothered you. Yes, I would most likely be upset, too. No one likes to be offended. Still, what if we all took a little trip? What if we could see both our problems and ourselves from distances increasing by powers of ten? The question isn’t new, but maybe it’s worth asking.”

With respect to light, it’s a principle. If light follows a path in one direction, it can follow it in the reverse direction. Are there paths that prohibit this? Yes, near a black hole light has no reversible option. With respect to life, reversibility is also a principle, but some actions are exceptions. Suicide, for example, is a black hole that prohibits reversibility.
 
Kevin Hines is a survivor of a suicide attempt. In an online ABC report (April 28, 2006) and in an interview with Glenn Beck, Hines explained that within milliseconds of letting go of the railing on the Golden Gate Bridge, he regretted his decision to jump. Fortunately for Hines, his act was partly reversible. He survived the fall but suffered some injuries. Because he survived, his story survived. Unlike the story of Hines, the stories of those who successfully commit suicide fall into a black hole, their last act irreversible. Information goes in; no information appears to come out. We will never know whether or not some, most, or even all suicides experience the almost instantaneous regret Hines felt. The pathway is not a two-way street, and they cannot enlighten us.
 
Some pathways in life are only partly reversible, as though the light bouncing off a mirror sends back only a partial image of a face. Injury provides examples. Serious physical injuries can persist as unalterable changes even in an age of medical wonders. When injuries seem irreversible, they can engender psychological counterparts, such as despair and thoughts of suicide. In the realm of the human psyche, however, reversibility is possible. You might know someone who suffered from related physical and psychological injuries, but reversed the latter in spite of the extent or severity of the former.
 
Reversing psychological injury requires effort. But what kind of effort allows one to reach the goal of reversibility? Rationally planned steps rarely work because logic fails when emotions rule, a process exemplified by John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth century prodigy, when he fell into the depths of depression. Mill was the epitome of the logical, highly informed person. He believed he had “an object,” or purpose, in life, “to be a reformer of the world.” Then, in 1826, in a “dull state of nerves” he asked himself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” His answer was, “No!” Then he seemed “to have nothing left to live for.”
 
In his Autobiography, Mill writes, “I frequently asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom.”*
 
*John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1865, Project Gutenberg EBook available online

All matter (Earth, you, a pencil, a speck of dust) exerts a gravitational force. Objects with greater mass (not necessarily size) exert greater gravitational force than those of smaller mass. Earth’s gravitational field is a well down which you fall even as you are the gravitational well down which Earth falls. Earth and you attract, but Earth attracts more. It is from this relationship between your mass and Earth’s that we get our sense of up and down. Up is a direction opposite to the gravitational well of Earth. Generally, up is away from Earth’s center. Why “generally”?
 
Mass determines gravity’s “pull.” Take a plumb bob on a string to the base of the Himalayas, and see what happens. Instead of “pointing downward” toward Earth’s center, the bob will lie askew, a bit tilted so to speak. The Himalayas, rising to the height of Mt. Everest, have a massive, deep hidden “root” below the surface, deeper, in fact, than the mountains are high. Earth’s crust is very thick there. More mass, more pull. The plumb bob “falls” a bit sideways toward the mountain system’s center of gravity. Down and up are different there.
 
We all live much of our lives on the basis of general predictability. “Up” should be up; down, down. We expect the world to conform to our experience and knowledge. In some places, however, we find a skewed plumb bob. There’s a pull from an unexpected direction. Some mass warps the ordinary field.
 
Beneath the visible mountain of everyone’s life is a hidden root, a mass with its own gravitational pull. That’s why the plumb bob of relationships is a bit skewed and up and down lie in an unexpected plane, even when the surface, like the great Himalayas, seems to be the dominant mass.    

Let’s make it simple: If you want to determine work in a physical sense, you have to multiply force times the displacement (distance an object moves) times the cosine of theta, which is the angle between force and the direction an object moves (or between force and the displacement vector). Say you want to push a wagon up a hill. The direction you want to push and the force are parallel. Theta is zero. ‘Nuff said.
 
So, a component of work is that angle, but at zero value it plays no role in the formula for determining the amount of work. In other words, you can ignore theta when you push that wagon up a hill. What’s left in the formula for work? Well, you have the force times the displacement. And those are significant parameters for determining the amount of work. Now, let’s say the hill is long, but not very steep and that you want to go up 100 feet above the starting elevation. You’ll do so much work to get the wagon up that incline. What if the hill were steeper? To get up that steeper rise to that 100-foot elevation, you’ll do the same amount of work. Stay with me.
 
You’ll do the same amount of work regardless of the steepness of the incline. That seems counterintuitive, right? Going up a steep hill in everyday experience seems harder than going up a gentler incline. But the numbers don’t lie. The amount of work is the same in both instances. And that’s because of the formulaic definition.
 
Work is the same on both inclines, but force isn’t the same. Going up a steep incline requires more force than going up a gentler one. You won’t go as far on the steeper climb as on the gentler one, so to make the amount of work equal you need more “push” in the formula. Why should I tell you what you learned in high school physics?
 
Think of persuasion. You will probably have to expend as much mental effort to ease someone into thinking the way you do or accepting a point you are trying to make as you will expend in trying to shout the person into agreement. One is going to require more force because it is a steeper path. The gentler incline is probably the wiser move. Yes, the work is the same, but the force is different. And, if you easily nudge someone, that is, if you apply the gentle force in the direction you want the person to go, even though distance is longer (and, obviously, in persuasion, you spend more time in the process), you’ll nullify the effect of theta while decreasing the force necessary to get the job done.
 
When you want to persuade someone, take the gentle incline that requires less force. The distance to the goal will be longer, but you won’t overexert yourself.