Thursday, January 17, 2019
Side gigs part 0, or...
The pain that precedes the change...
Please read part 1 here.
Before I delve into vagaries of driving for Lyft, it's important to go back to the inflection point that came before my turning on the app for the first time.
Working at a college has many extra perks, not the least of which is the ability to take any class I want. This is how I became an EMT, a certified ESL teacher, how I learned about importing and exporting, had a great meal in Peekskill, and how I would have prepared for starting PA school, had I not realized that window has closed. If I chose that path and saw it through to its fruition, I'd be typing this blog post from the island of St. Croix, while completing my first semester at Barry University satellite campus. Free classes aren't the best added benefit of working here, but I do enjoy having them at my disposal.
In a vacuum, there's nothing wrong with taking any of the above classes. The problem is that these weren't ends unto themselves, but a means to a greater goal I never ended up reaching. The ESL class was supposed to facilitate my foray into teaching, and perhaps even leaving financial aid to teach full-time. I am able to explain why American say "girls" when referring to women - it's a very easy word for English speakers to say. It's one syllable using the bottom of the throat and little use of the tongue. The EMT course was sort of chosen at random, except that I have always wanted to be one. It could have gone more than a few interesting places, but amounted to nothing, save that I can help people in an emergency. Unless you collapse in front of me, all these things ended in little more than frustration. (Please don't collapse in front of me; I'm really rusty.)
It all came to a head in July, when the college gives out its continuing education classes for the Fall semester. Even if I didn't find something I would deem useful, I always enjoyed reading though the offerings, until one day I didn't.
Circling back to Behaviorism, a subject expects a reward for an action; the rat wants food, so it presses a bar. I want the alarm to stop ringing, so I silence my phone. A child wants attention and praise from her mom, so she shows her a drawing of the family. If the rewards are achieved, great. If they're not, you'll eventually enter the process known as extinction.
Clinically speaking, extinction is the removal of a behavior because it is no longer rewarded. B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviorism, coined the term when his rat's pellet chute jammed and pressing the bar no longer delivered food. The rodent actually pressed the bar more, then tailed off to the point it stopped all together. Skinner was elated to discover the phenomena, though it's not recorded that he gave much thought to the rat going hungry.
As implied above, going through extinction is not pleasant, for either the rat or for anyone else. In the weeks and months I've been trying to hammer out this post, there was a cognitive dissonance I couldn't quite place until recently: was this really extinction? There's a better question: why was it so important I answer this question in the first place? Anyway, at first blush the answer was yes. I felt good after I read the semester's brochure, and suddenly I believed I wouldn't. Reading the Summer listings only made me depressed, so I stopped altogether at the Fall's. Does this not meet the criterion? It sounds like it, but the truth is more complex.
The reality is that the positive reinforcement I got from reading the class listings was still there: I could have daydreamed about becoming a home inspector and what benefit I would eventually gain from becoming one, or becoming a life coach (talk about the blind leading the blind...), or a certified hypnotist, or learning to golf, ad nauseum. What changed was not that the reward wasn't there for the taking, but that I no longer wanted it.
While I've always been under some degree of financial stress, as reflected in almost every post on this blog, it was amorphous, an abstraction I'd one day tackle. Day to day living was fine. I needed a few small adjustments, which I usually took, and were time-limited, so everything worked out. However, nothing really changed - it didn't have to. I may have wanted to make major changes, and could see the benefits for doing so, but Cuban cigars and Miami Beach beckoned. I was still making progress, but there was no urgency. Issues like my debt level, were merely background noise, a low hum that could be easily drowned out by distracting myself with classes, books, symposiums, ect. The continuing ed courses were certainly a part of that solution. As of July, the whispers of a crisis to come became an screaming alarm needing an immediate solution. I had to replace the vague reassurance of taking a class with the direct reward of earning more money. Whether driving for a rideshare company would get me that money was unknown, but I felt I had no choice. With all that in mind and despite my fears, I took out my phone last August, telling the world I was available for rides.
Please read part 1 here.
Before I delve into vagaries of driving for Lyft, it's important to go back to the inflection point that came before my turning on the app for the first time.
Working at a college has many extra perks, not the least of which is the ability to take any class I want. This is how I became an EMT, a certified ESL teacher, how I learned about importing and exporting, had a great meal in Peekskill, and how I would have prepared for starting PA school, had I not realized that window has closed. If I chose that path and saw it through to its fruition, I'd be typing this blog post from the island of St. Croix, while completing my first semester at Barry University satellite campus. Free classes aren't the best added benefit of working here, but I do enjoy having them at my disposal.
In a vacuum, there's nothing wrong with taking any of the above classes. The problem is that these weren't ends unto themselves, but a means to a greater goal I never ended up reaching. The ESL class was supposed to facilitate my foray into teaching, and perhaps even leaving financial aid to teach full-time. I am able to explain why American say "girls" when referring to women - it's a very easy word for English speakers to say. It's one syllable using the bottom of the throat and little use of the tongue. The EMT course was sort of chosen at random, except that I have always wanted to be one. It could have gone more than a few interesting places, but amounted to nothing, save that I can help people in an emergency. Unless you collapse in front of me, all these things ended in little more than frustration. (Please don't collapse in front of me; I'm really rusty.)
It all came to a head in July, when the college gives out its continuing education classes for the Fall semester. Even if I didn't find something I would deem useful, I always enjoyed reading though the offerings, until one day I didn't.
Circling back to Behaviorism, a subject expects a reward for an action; the rat wants food, so it presses a bar. I want the alarm to stop ringing, so I silence my phone. A child wants attention and praise from her mom, so she shows her a drawing of the family. If the rewards are achieved, great. If they're not, you'll eventually enter the process known as extinction.
Clinically speaking, extinction is the removal of a behavior because it is no longer rewarded. B.F. Skinner, the father of behaviorism, coined the term when his rat's pellet chute jammed and pressing the bar no longer delivered food. The rodent actually pressed the bar more, then tailed off to the point it stopped all together. Skinner was elated to discover the phenomena, though it's not recorded that he gave much thought to the rat going hungry.
As implied above, going through extinction is not pleasant, for either the rat or for anyone else. In the weeks and months I've been trying to hammer out this post, there was a cognitive dissonance I couldn't quite place until recently: was this really extinction? There's a better question: why was it so important I answer this question in the first place? Anyway, at first blush the answer was yes. I felt good after I read the semester's brochure, and suddenly I believed I wouldn't. Reading the Summer listings only made me depressed, so I stopped altogether at the Fall's. Does this not meet the criterion? It sounds like it, but the truth is more complex.
The reality is that the positive reinforcement I got from reading the class listings was still there: I could have daydreamed about becoming a home inspector and what benefit I would eventually gain from becoming one, or becoming a life coach (talk about the blind leading the blind...), or a certified hypnotist, or learning to golf, ad nauseum. What changed was not that the reward wasn't there for the taking, but that I no longer wanted it.
While I've always been under some degree of financial stress, as reflected in almost every post on this blog, it was amorphous, an abstraction I'd one day tackle. Day to day living was fine. I needed a few small adjustments, which I usually took, and were time-limited, so everything worked out. However, nothing really changed - it didn't have to. I may have wanted to make major changes, and could see the benefits for doing so, but Cuban cigars and Miami Beach beckoned. I was still making progress, but there was no urgency. Issues like my debt level, were merely background noise, a low hum that could be easily drowned out by distracting myself with classes, books, symposiums, ect. The continuing ed courses were certainly a part of that solution. As of July, the whispers of a crisis to come became an screaming alarm needing an immediate solution. I had to replace the vague reassurance of taking a class with the direct reward of earning more money. Whether driving for a rideshare company would get me that money was unknown, but I felt I had no choice. With all that in mind and despite my fears, I took out my phone last August, telling the world I was available for rides.
