Alan has talked about his reasons for creating and working on $0$. It’s time for me to talk about mine.

Born an academic

I’ve always been smart. For the first third of my life, my intelligence was the defining feature of my life. In SC, we had to take a standardized test every year in elementary school. This was long before No Kid Left Behind and the rise of standardized testing, so this was a no big deal. I was always at the top of the class. Usually at the top of the state too. I loved learning. Hated school, but loved learning. I absorbed knowledge like a sponge.

My dad had a book. We called it the blue book, because the cover was blue. It was a book of puzzles, and I loved it. What I didn’t know at the time was that it wasn’t just any book of puzzles. It was written by an educational psychologist, someone who wrote it to train brains, especially young brains, in critical thinking. I ate it up. Analogies, spatial puzzles, word games, it was a treat to me. I was a blue sky thinker. Always asking why, always looking for the deeper meaning. A born academic.

Grounded by empathy

While my dad would read me Scientific America and encourage me to ask the big questions, my mom was exactly the opposite. If it didn’t directly affect her world, she didn’t care. She was eminently practical. Dad was a salesman, always on the road, talking to people, being entertaining, making friends to get that sale. The classic extrovert. Mom, on the other hand, was an accountant, and a textbook introvert. She lived in the practicalities of a general ledger. Running the numbers and making them add up. She went to work, did her thing by herself, then came home. At home she would read, listen to her quiet music, and just be. She could be happy just sitting and reading for an entire weekend. She did yoga and meditation. From her I learned how to sit, how to breathe. How to be quiet and listen. How to understand. How to compromise and move through the world without making ripples. Dad taught me to think, but mom taught me to understand.

Lessons not learned

Of course, I didn’t learn these lessons until much later. When I was younger, I was too preoccupied to do much more than stay alive. I grew up out in the country. We lived on three acres of land, technically a farm, reachable only by dirt road in rural South Carolina. We didn’t have another person in a half mile in any direction. No one with kids our age for at least a mile in any direction. And due to a quirk of the bus routes and where my mom worked, we didn’t go to the local elementary school. No, we went to a school in the middle of a neighborhood a good 10 miles away. Most of the kids there walked to school. They hung out with each other all the time, but we couldn’t hang out with them, not without a good 20 minute drive, something impossible for us to do ourselves. To say I grew up isolated would be an understatement. The only other person my age I had was my younger brother, 22 months behind me.

I started showing symptoms of bipolar disorder early on. Depression is insidious, and difficult to see in kids sometimes. Especially in kids who are isolated. It’s not like I could withdraw from my friends. I didn’t have many friends to withdraw from. I was already weird, because I was much, much smarter than most of my peers, and would rather read than do sports. I was also physically small. In elementary school, all of these things translate to target. In addition, my manic phases are not traditional. I don’t get happy or bouncy. I get irritable and angry. This translated into an explosive temper.

Now I mentioned earlier that my intelligence was the defining factor of my early life. I was smart enough to know that things were going on with me. I would be sitting in class in elementary school, and I could feel a fuse burning in my head. I would know, just know that if I didn’t get out of there, I was going to do something bad. So, I would do what, to me, was the logical thing: I went somewhere away from people. In practice, what I did was go and hide in the coat closet. In the middle of class. Without telling anyone why. For no apparent reason. If I wanted to be left alone, this was definitely not the right move, but it seemed correct at the time. Kid logic.

I got into a lot of fights as I got older. I also got a lot of bad grades. Depression meant that while I loved learning, I hated homework, which I saw as pointless. I already understood it. Why did I have to do all this busywork? I barely graduated high school. I got suspended. A LOT. Just missed being expelled. Every year my parents had to make a special request to put me in the highest level classes, because my grades didn’t qualify me for them. I hated my parents. They didn’t understand me. They enforced a lot of pointless rules. Puberty on top of undiagnosed bipolar on top of isolation. I was too busy trying to stay alive to learn anything.

Therapy as life

I was going to fail eventually. When I did, it was therapy that saved me. I fought hard against it, but when I finally hit bottom and decided things had to change, I devoted myself to it with the kind of singlemindedness normally only found in animals in heat. I worked hard. I delved into myself, tore down barriers, examined habits in detail, scraped myself down to the ground and started over. I learned how to be a human pretty much from the beginning. It took a long time and a lot of work, but it was worth it. It was then where I really started to understand and appreciate the lessons that my parents taught me.

Most of what I learned in therapy can be boiled down mindfulness and acceptance. Mindfulness to understand what is going on in my head and in the world, and make sure that my actions correctly reflect reality, and acceptance so I don’t chase things that simply cannot be. Add in compassion, meditation, and some metaphysics and you essentially have Buddhism. I don’t meditate or believe in the metaphysics, but I do believe in compassion for a whole host of reasons. Those three things, compassion, mindfulness, and acceptance, along with a regime of medication, are what keep me stable and functional. My life has become the practice of therapy.

The science of compassion

I never managed to finish college before therapy. It took about 6 years of hardcore, weekly therapy before I could get back into school for real. When I did, I didn’t go back in for computers, which was what I started in. No, I went back for psychology. My interest had changed due to my years in therapy. I wanted to help others the way I had been helped. During my academic studies of psychology, I discovered something called positive psychology. Positive psych is the study of human strengths, including things like happiness, altruism, generosity, and compassion. I was hooked. I poured myself into positive psych. I looked into how it could be used to improve lives. It was perfect for me. The academic study of how to make people happier.

One thing I found was that altruism, helping others, makes people happy. I also discovered that moods are contagious. On the face of it, these things seem obvious. It seems intuitive that we get the warm fuzzies from helping someone else, and that someone else’s good mood can make you happy, and vice versa with a bad mood. But there’s more to it than that. If you know these things, then they can be intentionally manipulated. If you are having a bad day, then you can do something for someone else to cheer yourself up. And understanding mood contagion can let someone use small actions have a big impact. 

Understanding the problem

There is an entire field called User Experience. It is about using an understanding of human behavior to design a product or experience. It is where design and psychology meet. That is where Alan and I live. Alan is more on the design side, I am more on the psychology side. Alan is more practical, I am more academic. When Alan brought his idea for $0$ to me, my first thought was “This thing could change the world!” And I still firmly believe that.

Many of the economic and governmental systems in the US are broken. It is too easy to slip into poverty and too hard to get out. One bad decision or one bit of bad luck and a life or multiple lives are ruined. Sometimes all it can take is heavier than usual traffic or a sick pet and someone loses a job. A blown tire can be enough to push someone over the edge into an emergency situation.

And the worst part of the situation is this: Most of the people in these situations either don’t know they are in this situation, or would never admit that they are. They believe that they are doing fine, even when they are not, or they believe that they have a safety net, or that it could never happen to them, or any number of other things. Or, and this is the real killer, their pride would never allow them to admit that they need help.

That is the problem that Alan and I are facing. It’s not just the problem of the working poor. It’s the fact that it is an invisible problem, even to the people who have it. Early on in the project, we tried to get data about this population. We looked everywhere, and I mean everywhere. As an academic, I’m not unfamiliar with searching for data sources, and Alan has a lot of data sources from his work as well. We didn’t find a thing. The data simply doesn’t exist. That’s because no one has been able to gather it. That’s when we knew we had to gather it ourselves, one person at a time.

Weaponizing altruism

When I went to grad school, I ended up with people a lot younger than me. Millennials, Gen Y, and Z. Something I noticed about them is that they have a tendency not to “keep score”. There’s a lot less of the “you owe me one” that seems to happen with the older generations. Instead, there is a lot more give and take. People give when they have and take when they need, and depending on the day and the situation, everyone is a giver and a taker. There is a rejection of the coldness and “do it yourself” of the Boomers in favor of compassion and giving. It can be seen in meme culture, and in the way they protest and fight for equality.

That was what I was thinking about when Alan brought $0$ to me. How can we harness that energy on a broad scale? How can we use that passion to fight this problem? That’s what gets me out of bed to work on $0$ every day. I am here to see how we can use compassion and generosity to help these people teetering on the edge. I want to weaponize altruism against poverty. I want to fix the system that is broken, so that these people who are suffering can live their lives with a little less worry.

That’s why I work on $0$.