Of course we are apes, not monkeys, but Ernest Cline, the ape that wrote this standup routine knows that calling people monkeys sounds a lot funnier than calling them apes. Another ape, David McRaney, has been reminding us of our flaws on his website, You Are Not So Smart. In his latest piece, he argues that Procrastination is not a matter of being lazy, but a matter of being more concerned with immediate than long term benefits, and of not thinking enough about outsmarting your future lazy self:

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. ...

You’ll get around to it. You’ll start tomorrow. You’ll take the time to learn a foreign language, to learn how to play an instrument. There’s a growing list of books you will read one day.

Like Blowing Smoke. Seems to me I bragged to LisB about how fast I could read it. But then other stuff came up.

Before you do though, maybe you should check your email. You should head over to Facebook too, just to get it out of the way. A cup of coffee would probably get you going, it won’t take long to go grab one. Maybe just a few episodes of that show you like.

Maybe I'll see what's up at dag ... D'oh! I can't even estimate how many times a day I go to open some work-related app and reflexively open firefox instead - "Wait! What was I supposed to be doing?" Anyway this ape says we have stupid monkey parts of our brain:

Evolutionarily it makes sense to always go for the sure bet now; your ancestors didn’t have to think about retirement or heart disease. Your brain evolved in a world where you probably wouldn’t live to meet your grandchildren. The stupid monkey part of your brain wants to gobble up candy bars and go deeply into debt. Old you, if there even is one, can deal with those things.

Hyperbolic discounting makes later an easy place to throw all the things don’t want to deal with, but you also over-commit to future plans for the same reason. You run out of time to get things done because you think in the future, that mysterious fantastical realm of possibilities, you’ll have more free time than you do now.

He just shamed me into mopping the bathroom floor - which I was going to get around to ...

The trick is to accept the now you will not be the person facing those choices, it will be the future you – a person who can’t be trusted. Future-you will give in, and then you’ll go back to being now-you and feel weak and ashamed. Now-you must trick future-you into doing what is right for both parties.

This is why food plans like Nutrisystem work for many people. Now-you commits to spending a lot of money on a giant box of food which future-you will have to deal with. People who get this concept use programs like Freedom, which disables Internet access on a computer for up to eight hours, a tool allowing now-you to make it impossible for future-you to sabotage your work.

Social Security and Health Care come to mind. In Did we vote ourselves to extinction? Tom Whipple bemoans the tendency for immediate gratification of both the electorate and the elected:

The disconnect between the American body politic and reality grows larger every day.

Upon assuming office, the Obama administration faced the biggest choice of any American President since Lincoln -- either face up to the fact that the industrial age, with its mantra of endless economic growth, was over and start making preparations for a new era, or try to revive the economy. Apparently the new President, unwilling to grapple with the downsizing of civilization, chose to prolong the deteriorating industrial economy for a few more years by increasing deficit spending, attempting to reform health care, and resorting to various monetary tactics that may or may not keep the financial system from ultimately collapsing. The basis of the problem is that without steadily increasing amounts of cheap energy, reviving economic growth as we know it is simply not sustainable for long. Borrowing and printing trillions of dollars may briefly slow the decline, but little more.

Even an energy depletion guru like Whipple is naive in thinking the Obama presidency could survive advocating a no-growth future. I doubt whether more than a few people reading this don't expect that somehow that we will come out of this recession and return to a growth economy. For the nation at large it probably isn't even a question. But it should be.

The one policy area where the Obama administration tried to make major changes was in dealing with global warming by controlling carbon emissions. ... Unfortunately the most serious of all issues facing us in the long run could turn out to be the failure of the United States to exercise any sort of leadership on emissions controls. As matters stand right now the new majority in the House of Representatives seems dead set [against] any kind of controls and says it will do its utmost to prevent the administration from controlling emissions administratively.

Jim Kunstler is an acid critic of short-sighted society, and offers interviewer/blogger Chris Martenson recommendations towards a presidential energy plan:

* I would commence a public debate on whether we go forward with a nuclear power program, to weigh the hazards involved -- but, frankly, there may be no other ways to keep the lights on in a decade or so. It may turn out that we are too short of capital to carry out such a program, or our society may be too disorderly in the years ahead to run it, or we may decide the hazards are not worth it, but the discussion must start now.

I think such a debate is raging, not very publicly though, between those who stand to make short-term profit from building nuclear plants and those who worry about their long-term effects. What is lacking seems to be approved designs for safe reactors.

* I would direct major capital resources to repairing the conventional passenger railroads in the US, because commercial aviation as we know it will not continue another ten years, and ditto Happy Motoring, and this is a big continent-sized nation. If we don't get regular rail running, we may not be able to go anywhere. We should just put aside our fantasies about high-speed rail or mag-lev. We're too broke for that, and we need to temper our techno-grandiosity. But, believe me, Americans will be deliriously happy ten years from now if they can go from Des Moines to Chicago at 80 mph on time. During the Obama years, we've stupidly poured our dwindling capital resources into building more highways. This foolishness has got to stop. I would promote public transit at the smaller municipal scale as well, to go with regular rail.

It is frustrating that the Chinese have just completed the world's longest bullet train line, but China has an entrenched government that can afford to plan for the long-term. The US obviously doesn't. I suspect aviation will continue longer than ten years, but for greatly reduced numbers.

* I'd begin the task of rehabilitating our inland waterways so we can move more goods around the nation by boat -- and in particular the port facilities that have been mostly removed in places like St. Louis and Cincinnati and around the Great Lakes.

Not the kind of issue generally discussed.

* I would put an emphasis on walkable communities. I would prepare the nation for the possibility of gasoline rationing, since events could shove us into criticality at any time.

I see some evidence of walkable communities for the well-to-do along with the gentrification of some city neighborhoods, but the suburbs remain auto-centric and are getting poorer.

* I would begin closing down scores of unnecessary overseas military bases, and I would terminate the nation-building project in Afghanistan since there is no possibility that we can control the terrain or the population there for anything more than the shortest run.

Now Kunstler enters fantasy land. Someone on another thread mentioned the staggering number of military bases we maintain. I wonder sometimes if Klingon costumes are so popular at SciFi conventions because Americans see more of themselves in a warlike Empire than in the pro bono Federation.

* I would direct the Attorney General of the US to mount investigations of the Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and other big banks in connection with the massive swindles and frauds in house lending and the securitization of mortgages -- because the rule of law requires that somebody be held accountable for the demolition of the banking system.

Yeah, that's gonna happen.

No, as noted by Mark Brown in his Car-Free Baltimore blog, we're going to keep buying stuff:

... there is cultural pressure to own things in the U.S. And cultural norms often outweigh logic. In a great book by Everett Rogers called Diffusion of Innovations, ... Rogers breaks down the process of adopting a new idea into five stages; Knowledge, Persuasion, Decision, Implementation, and Confirmation. While this process is too boring to explain here, a key point is that research shows people are influenced by mass media and interpersonal channels, with interpersonal channels being extremely influential during the persuasion stage.

And, we're going to keep electing people that tell us that having what we want, right now, is our God-given right. And we'll buy leaf-blowers right up until the day there is no fuel for them.