tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/griffith-review-millennials-strike-back-37707/articlesGriffith Review - Millennials Strike Back – The Conversation2017-06-19T06:45:23Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/791882017-06-19T06:45:23Z2017-06-19T06:45:23ZScience can be beautiful, but please don’t call it basic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173271/original/file-20170611-18375-1iz6f8r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fishing boats docked at Hobart, Tasmania </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/rmonty119/17076317322/in/photolist-SbseoK-pBysTy-UvXqdE-ShpfbQ-9NiUux-7ZmkR3-aqy7u1-7Wea9c-5hzUUi-psaFmb-9d1k9v-i3ivAf-9dfoVP-BKmNYC-p3a8Uu-pk719K-9dccng-ecrhyb-7ESAA3-6mJdBc-dFzKJa-7AUXhe-MK7sw-9dfoQ4-74U3ZX-aT8x48-aWHfMT-acPKqX-MK7dj-AQftHv-BEnQsT-Riy2LJ-vfzcqQ-aWHj76-eciPkJ-obA5au-ecdcDk-eckDEB-BKmQow-BC5pPb-5hEhzf-uekHz-MKeyv-Be9J9V-49W9Kj-85qiiW-7tppws-s1YAdb-NP3HqM-6mNoqf">rmonty119/flickr </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/millennials-strike-back/">Millenials Strike Back</a>, the 56th edition of Griffith Review in which Generation Y writers address the issues that define and concern them.</em></p>
<p><em>The following is an extract taken from <a href="https://griffithreview.com/articles/modern-science-modern-life-beautiful-process-barriers-to-effective-research/">Modern Science, Modern Life</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Research underpinning fundamental scientific concepts or mechanisms of disease is referred to as “basic science”. </p>
<p>I detest the term. </p>
<p>It conjures up images of mundane, uninteresting, simple lab work, but this is rarely the case. No two days are the same. </p>
<p>And more importantly, basic science provides the crucial foundations for research pathways and is essential for identifying opportunities for innovation. </p>
<p>Perhaps it should be called discovery science? You can’t always see the potential applications for basic research; indeed, the applications may not even exist in our lifetime. Isaac Newton surely did not anticipate his universal law of gravitation being involved in the implementation of satellite technology.</p>
<h2>Funding scientific research</h2>
<p>Unfortunately, basic science remains one of the least attractive kinds of science to fund, especially in Australia. Our country is lagging behind as a result. </p>
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<p>Australia is ranked 19th overall on the <a href="https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii-2016-report#">Global Innovation Index</a> and just 73rd for “<a href="https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/analysis-indicator">innovation efficiency</a>”, which compares how much research input, across all fields, is turned into commercial output. </p>
<p>I wonder how much better we’d do if our National Health and Medical Research Council funded more than the <a href="https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/grants-funding/outcomes-funding-rounds">current 18%</a> of submitted research proposals. Of this funding, basic science receives proportionately <a href="https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/grants-funding/research-funding-statistics-and-data">little</a>. </p>
<p>While investing in science that has more obvious and direct commercial outputs appears to make more economic sense than investing in basic science, you can’t take market logic and apply it to science. Some of its greatest achievements began with an accidental discovery or an unexpected result. This is the beauty of science.</p>
<p>For example, the discovery that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium called <em>Helicobacter pylori</em> was, in part, a beautiful accident. Australian Nobel laureates <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2005/press.html">Barry Marshall and Robin Warren</a> stumbled across the existence of this bacteria after their lab technician forgot to discard the experiment before the Easter holiday period. </p>
<p>Marshall and Warren wanted to confirm their observations that bacteria were present in the location of the stomach ulcer, so they had been collecting samples from people with diagnosed ulcers. The lab technician had seeded those samples onto a culture plate with a nutritious jelly and left them to grow for two days (as per standard bacterium-growing protocols). Nothing grew, and they didn’t find the evidence they were hoping for. </p>
<p>As it turns out, leaving them in the incubator for five days was key. It was the necessary step they didn’t know was missing.</p>
<h2>Measuring value</h2>
<p>The pressure to perform and publish also stifles the research landscape. A scientist’s worth is apparently quantifiable. We are judged on the volume and impact of our work.</p>
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<p>The number of papers we write and the number of times those papers are cited are turned into a single number: an <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/102/46/16569.abstract">h-index</a>. Technical skills, teaching and mentoring aptitude, passion, and experimental rigor don’t feature in the metrics. Some of the most brilliant scientists I have encountered exhibit all of these qualities, but do not have glowing h-indices to show for it.</p>
<p>Scientists and funding bodies generally acknowledge that the h-index is imperfect; however, the score still carries considerable weight, and can be key in deciding funding success, fellowships, promotions and, ultimately, a person’s ability to continue being a scientist. </p>
<p>In my eyes, this definition of success is wrong. A scientist with a high h-index, but who performs poor-quality research, does not embody success. Another problem is that scientific journals have an aversion to publishing negative results or minor findings, which, in turn, impacts researchers’ h-indices. A scientist who has spent years on an experiment that fails to yield a positive result may not have the opportunity to publish their work because journals want a juicy story: a new pathway discovered, a paradigm shift, something done with flashy new technology, or a potential cure. </p>
<p>This can come at a huge cost when the perceived value of the headline usurps the quality of the data or its interpretation, and, after many failed attempts at replication, the data gets retracted. This pressure on scientists to report significant results, especially unusual or breakthrough findings, in turn exposes the research itself to bias.</p>
<h2>Public views of science</h2>
<p>The bias in scientific reporting also flows on to the public. <a href="https://theconversation.com/essays-on-health-reporting-medical-news-is-too-important-to-mess-up-68920?sr=10">Journalists</a> trawl academic journals for articles they can turn into splashy headlines and too often report half-truths, premature assumptions, and over-exaggerated extrapolations of data. </p>
<p>According to the media, there’s a new “treatment” reported for <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-causes-alzheimers-disease-what-we-know-dont-know-and-suspect-75847">Alzheimer’s Disease</a> every month. In reality, there is still no cure for Alzheimer’s Disease in humans.</p>
<p>Furthermore, if an experiment doesn’t have a positive result and therefore is not published, others are likely to waste time, money and resources repeating that work in the future. However, scientists are nothing if not problem solvers and pushed back against this tendency in recent years. For example, the journal PLOS ONE started a collection for all negative, null and inconclusive results, aptly titled <a href="http://collections.plos.org/missing-pieces">The Missing Pieces</a>. </p>
<p>It is refreshing to see that the requirement for significant results is no longer the only path to publishing research, but there’s still a long way to go.</p>
<h2>A lonely road</h2>
<p>A year ago, I was treading a very lonely path through science. </p>
<p>There were no funds for me to research full time in Hobart and I wasn’t able to move away for similar work elsewhere for family reasons. Instead I was fortunate to be able to do another job that I love: I taught full-time at a university while caring for my parents, and spent almost two years doing neuroscience research for free. You could say that I made it hard for myself, but I was determined.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173243/original/file-20170610-4774-bqocfi.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Observing peripheral nerve cells, or neurons, under the microscope.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Lila Landowski</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>I received a small grant for the materials necessary to complete the work. A portion of the grant was intended as a stipend; however, with the increasing cost of materials, I forfeited this to buy what I needed to perform what I saw as essential research. </p>
<p>I was also the only scientist working on peripheral nerves – in this case, nerves in the skin – in the institute’s laboratory at the time. I couldn’t benefit from collective knowledge, nor could I share the workload. Most weeks I worked around 80 hours, and often more. I didn’t resent this because I thought it was what I needed to do to keep up in the industry, but I later discovered that my efforts had instead disadvantaged my research career: taking time off work to be a carer or to have a child would have been accounted for in my research profile as a “career break”. </p>
<p>Oblivious to this, I’d tried to do it all while the research clock kept ticking and my h-index was diluted. I could have easily dropped off the radar.</p>
<p>I had been fighting so hard for the career I love, but the seemingly endless setbacks left me heartbroken and demoralised. I lamented on social media:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If only we, as scientists, could be judged on our passion and enthusiasm, our zest for driving new lines of inquiry, on our ability to ask the challenging questions, and for our genuine scientific skills.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Science is supremely beautiful, but I know it can be brutal and unforgiving if you stray from the well-worn pathways. Many people struggle, not fortunate enough to secure a job, a grant or a mentor to keep their passion alive. The issues with research practice and publication can be infuriating, particularly when the path you want to follow hasn’t been paved yet.</p>
<p>I am one of the lucky ones. My supervisor <a href="http://www.utas.edu.au/profiles/staff/health/david-howells">Professor Howells</a> is a true advocate for junior researchers and is both my hero and my mentor. Rather than beating my own passage through the challenges of research, we face them as a team. </p>
<p>And it made all the difference: I’ve secured considerable funds to keep my research work going for the next three years. It’s safe to say that my heart is filled with hope.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BDUt9J8I31Z","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79188/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dr Lila Landowski receives research funding from the Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation and The Mason Foundation, and her salary is funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council grant.</span></em></p>Science is supremely beautiful, but can also be brutal and unforgiving if you stray from the well-worn pathways.Lila Landowski, Neuroscientist, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/758392017-05-07T19:37:43Z2017-05-07T19:37:43ZOff the plan: shelter, the future and the problems in between<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167639/original/file-20170503-4113-1xqmwh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Are the millennials doomed to be nomads, locked out of the home-ownership market forever?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/24952851@N00/4648198581">sharon_k/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/millennials-strike-back/">Millennials Strike Back</a>, the 56th edition of Griffith Review. Selected pieces consist of extracts or long reads in which Generation Y writers consider the issues that define and concern them.</em> </p>
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<p>It’s early 2017, and the first lists of the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/01/23/sydney-has-the-second-most-unaffordable-housing-in-the-world/">most unaffordable housing in the world</a> have dropped. Oh boy. I’ve been waiting for this since the great <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-smashed-avo-debate-misses-inequality-within-generations-70475">smashed-avocado-versus-home-deposit showdown</a> of 2016. It’s gratifying. There’s my current city, Melbourne, holding sixth place for third year running. Go! </p>
<p>And there’s my old city, Sydney, right up at number two. Other Australian capitals might not make the top ten but they are each awarded a rank of “severely unaffordable”. </p>
<p>Reading lists like this gives me a shot of serotonin straight to the soul. There it is now: pleasant smug! Validation! I feel like I will never be able to afford a home because I will never be able to afford a home. It’s not millennial whinging. There is data. There are studies; lists.</p>
<p>In Hong Kong, the city that has topped the lists for as long as I’ve been reading them, a think-tank alleged that it would take a couple under 35 14-and-a-half years to save enough for a deposit on a small apartment. The government, <a href="http://www.scmp.com/article/1648543/build-youth-hostels-young-people-who-cant-afford-homes-says-hong-kong-think-tank">the think-tank advised</a>, should get out in front of the crisis and build “hostels” for young people to live in while they save. </p>
<p>It’s an evocative real-estate dystopia: rows of young people prostrate in bunks, exhausted, saving every cent of their income for their own tiny box in which to teeter on the edge of one of the most densely populated islands on earth. </p>
<p>I can close my eyes and picture myself there: earplugs and herbal sleeping tablets lined up beside my bunk where I lie reading <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/28/william-gibson-neuromancer-cyberpunk-books">William Gibson’s Neuromancer</a> with a torch, before drifting off to dream of warehouse conversions.</p>
<p>At its most basic level, real estate is code for the amount of private space you can draw around your body. Owning a home also has deep cultural and economic connotations. A home owner is a member of a street, a community. They are a successful adult human. They own a piece of the pie, the dream.</p>
<h2>Desperation behind the dream</h2>
<p>In the era of late capitalism, the American dream throws around words like liberty and freedom and insists that, in America, a person who works hard can achieve anything. The home emerges as a site in which to exercise those freedoms. </p>
<p>In Australia, we have a more recent and explicit version. Our great Australian dream ditches the appeal to higher values and insists that hard work and real estate are essential for a good life. It goes so far as to predicate success and happiness on a steadily appreciating quarter-acre block with a brick veneer on top.</p>
<p>Every Australian of my parents’ generation seems to have a story about a terrace home with water glimpses they almost bought for 20 grand and a hand job. These stories – monotonous, formally identical with those of lottery tickets lost or found – bubble up with the warm beer at intergenerational social events.</p>
<p>They sour the coleslaw and cause sausage chunks to stick in the throat. “Did I tell you about the three-bedroom terrace on the harbour that your mother and I…” says Dad, again. I plug my ears with indignation.</p>
<p>Some people his age bought those houses and are now wealthy. In Australia, real-estate investment is <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-housing-boom-is-remaking-australias-social-class-structure-66976">class consolidation</a>. Being locked out of the house market is, for middle-class young people, like having the privileges your status implied suspended indefinitely. Stamped with some official line:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The middle class is currently under review. Check back later.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In 2014, Australia’s federal treasurer stated, like a dullard commenter on an online op-ed, that “<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-09/joe-hockey-accused-of-insensitivity-over-sydney-house-prices/6532630">if housing was unaffordable, no-one would be buying it</a>”. He advised entitled young people that the first step to buying a house is “getting a good job that pays good money”. </p>
<p>Right. Yep. Got it. I’ll make a list of great advice I’ve been given regarding home ownership and put this pearl right up next to “move somewhere cheaper” and “don’t eat out”.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Then-treasurer Joe Hockey says if housing was unaffordable no one would be buying it.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In Australia, as in many parts of the world, population growth has led to housing shortages and <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-housing-issues-should-the-budget-tackle-this-is-what-our-experts-say-73751">high purchase and rental costs</a>. Unsustainable sprawl creeps from the perimeters of capital cities into the scrub and farmland beyond. </p>
<p>We suffer from a lack of housing diversity: four-bedroom McMansions are out of reach for lower-income families; tiny apartments in toaster buildings are suitable only for students, singles and short stayers. Inner-city real estate is unaffordable; outer-suburban life isolated, unless you happen to be one in a growing number with multiple families in apartments <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-lower-income-buyers-build-housing-wealth-too-18418">on the outskirts of the city</a>, in which case your troubles are bigger than mine.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, homelessness is on the rise in cities, and yet the view that the fault for this lies with the individual still holds prominence. In Melbourne in January 2017, while the mayor reportedly began talks about the <a href="https://theconversation.com/ban-on-sleeping-rough-does-nothing-to-fix-the-problems-of-homelessness-71630">forced removal of the homeless</a>, the Victoria Police chief commissioner <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-cbd-rough-sleepers-are-pretending-to-be-homeless-victorias-top-cop-graham-ashton-20170119-gtune7.html">insisted</a> that the people who are sleeping rough are not homeless at all but “choosing to camp” because “there’s more people to shake down for money” in the summer, when the tennis is on. </p>
<p>And in winter, the <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj8st7rttLTAhXCJpQKHXE-Dj8QFgglMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heraldsun.com.au%2Fnews%2Fvictoria%2Frough-sleepers-say-melbourne-best-city-in-australia-for-homeless%2Fnews-story%2Fd805e02f31e5016e29652eedae010efa&usg=AFQjCNHgzLSduddGcA_uduzWQeSW-2kWhA">Herald Sun insisted</a> that homeless freeloaders were flocking to Melbourne for “free food, clothes, showers and dental treatment”.</p>
<p>Housing unaffordability is <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-housing-affordability-crisis-in-regional-australia-yes-and-heres-why-71808">not limited to capital cities</a>. Australia also achieves a global ranking of “severely unaffordable” for areas outside these cities: Wingecarribee and Tweed Heads in NSW, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast in Queensland are all brightly decorated. In 2015, the median price for a house in the Bendigo suburb of Ascot <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/tasmania/regional-centres-beyond-big-capitals-have-had-very-good-year/news-story/89fa240b53805741fd25c39e6e20d27d">rose 31%</a>. </p>
<p>And there are other problems in the regional centres too. A friend recently came back to the city from a desert town where she had been living for more than seven years. She wanted to reconnect with city life, needed the infrastructure that was there, but also, at 35, she wanted to settle in her desert home but fracking is affecting the groundwater. “I just can’t afford to buy a house in a city that will have no drinking water in five years,” she said.</p>
<p>She wasn’t referring to her bank account. Sometimes buying a piece of land brings a whole new insecurity. Officially declared “affordable” places like Karratha, Port Hedland and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, and Gladstone in Queensland, <a href="https://theconversation.com/housing-still-out-of-reach-for-many-even-as-rents-fall-in-post-boom-western-australia-76461">quake in the aftershock of the mining boom</a>. </p>
<p>What kinds of investments were these places before, and then after their minerals were extracted from the area? What kinds of homes are they now?</p>
<h2>Seeking escape from rental</h2>
<p>Increasingly, we rent our homes. As a renter, your life is intensely scrutinised and regulated. As a landlord, not so much. Rent is unregulated, expensive and <a href="https://theconversation.com/rental-insecurity-why-fixed-long-term-leases-arent-the-answer-73114">getting more so</a>. A Harvard University-run study <a href="http://time.com/4042690/average-rents-high-america/">predicts</a> that by 2025, 15 million North American households will spend more than half their income on rent. </p>
<p>My own experience as a renter is of begging and hustling for small repairs, being treated as a suspect and an enemy by the people I pay a third of my income to, and finally, inevitably, being booted out unceremoniously when the market looks tasty. Sometimes it’s humiliating. When I got the keys to my first rental in Melbourne, there was a shrivelled roast chicken in the oven. </p>
<p>Sometimes you have to do low-level crime. We all know that bidding on rental properties is technically illegal, but we also need a place to live and will pay whatever we can. Above all, the renter must treat the real estate agent like a high-ranking government official. I wear high heels when house hunting, I carry a smart black folio full of documentation. I lick arse and smile “thank you”.</p>
<p>It’s unsurprising then that the dream endures. To have your own space. To be free of the rent grind. To put nails in the wall and plant a garden. To have a pet. These are seductive adult fantasies we have been training for since we were children playing house.</p>
<p>Despite my lack of a stable income, I have been obsessively monitoring the real-estate websites for years, typing in search words like wishes on stars. I was surprised one morning when I discovered that my bank – lack of stable income and infamy of the sub-prime mortgage crisis notwithstanding – was more than happy to pre-approve me for a home loan. </p>
<p>My jaw dropped in disbelief when the hold music cut out and the kind young man on the other end of the phone line said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Good news, Miss Doyle: we can pre-approve a loan of $330,000. You can go and start bidding today!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was a Saturday. I was hungover. Melancholic. Looking for distraction from the adult fantasies of others being beamed at me via my Facebook feed. I had been despondently browsing real-estate sites and called the bank on a whim. I flushed with a strange pride when the operator evaluated and praised my “good financial conduct”. </p>
<p>He was not concerned with my smattering of casual employment. He could see all the way back to the school banking program, to those dollar-coin deposits. Back then, I used a bank-supplied plastic moneybox. It was a space alien, squat, not grey but orange, descended from far-flung intergalactic civilisation to recruit six-year-old terrestrial banking customers.</p>
<p>The man in the call centre could follow my financial life story from these coerced beginnings all the way to the overcautious adult I had become. He could see, at a glance, the ten-dollar bottles of red, the vast sums spent on rent and my tricky method of never letting my credit card debt exceed my savings, carefully balancing the two so that I have both the illusion of thrift, and of largesse. </p>
<p>He could see enough to surmise that I’m the kind of gal who could service a fat loan. Doesn’t that sound dirty? Service my fat loan.</p>
<p>Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? I take a third job to meet my repayments and avoid homelessness? I’m forced to sell early and the bank takes the property price along with my repayments? I give up one set of illusions about my freedom to feed another? I would merely be joining the vast majority of my peers who carry debts they cannot pay down.</p>
<h2>Blowing the budget at the auction</h2>
<p>Full of adrenaline and aspiration, I dragged my partner to an auction.</p>
<p>“Welcome to Edgewater Towers,” declared a framed print advertisement from the 1960s. “Fabulous Manhattan living comes to Melbourne.” The print hung strategically in the lobby of what must have been one of the first high-rise housing developments in inner-suburban Melbourne. </p>
<p>I had just finished watching the final season of Mad Men. To me, it was a pop-cultural omen. The apartment for sale – three conservatively valued rooms with views of a rollercoaster – had shag carpet on the wall. In my mind, I was already rubbing up against it singing “Zou bisou bisou”.</p>
<p>A small crowd squeezed into the lounge room-cum-kitchen.</p>
<p>“I think you should buy it,” my sweetheart whispered.</p>
<p>“I don’t even know how to bid.”</p>
<p>“Do you want me to do the bidding?”</p>
<p>Neither of us mentioned how the last home-ownership conversation we had involved living on a boat. All at once we were ready for a new life. We were ready to make our own great Australian dream come true.</p>
<p>The auctioneer opened the bidding at a quarter-of-a-million dollars.</p>
<p>My sweetheart squeezed my hand. “Should I?”</p>
<p>I felt the sweaty pressure on my hand. Ignored the expectant look.</p>
<p>“$450,000,” said a voice from the back.</p>
<p>Annnd, we’re out.</p>
<p>Our hands slackened. We giggled foolishly as the rollercoaster rattled and crashed like nothing you would find in Manhattan. I suddenly remembered that in 1979 it came right off those brittle wooden rails and crashed into playground lore forever. </p>
<p>Perhaps someone stood in this very apartment and watched it splinter and fall, listening to the screams, unable to finish their aperitif. That person probably bought the joint for 20 grand and a hand job.</p>
<p>“Five hundred thousand.”</p>
<p>A gasp went up.</p>
<p>I looked around at the auction contenders. A woman with a flash handbag and a severe hairstyle, gripping a black folder, refusing to smile at her eager 20-ish daughter. A 50-something couple in his-and-hers boat shoes. A young woman who, when the auctioneer goaded her by suggesting another bid might secure a beach lifestyle in time for summer, admitted she “already owns one in this building”.</p>
<p>“Even better – buy this for a higher price and your own goes up in value,” said the auctioneer. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is one smart investor.”</p>
<p>Finally, a couple in their late 30s secured the place. She looked pregnant. He looked shaken. They may just have gone $200,000 over budget but you have to follow the dream.</p>
<h2>All in it together</h2>
<p>Some young adults are taking ingenious routes to secure their piece of the dream. </p>
<p>My friend Liza, her two sisters, their parents, partners and children all went in on the mortgage on a huge stucco palace in a rapidly gentrifying inner-western suburb of Sydney. The home, with its columns, fancy brickwork and outdoor pizza oven, was probably built by a successful Italian family some time during the disco era.</p>
<p>Liza’s family have split the house into multiple apartments. They all live together, sharing babysitting duties and gardening in a way that is sometimes utopic and sometimes smothering.</p>
<p>“There are downsides,” she says. “Like, I look out my window and there’s my whole family standing there. I don’t really get the option to not engage. It can be hard to establish boundaries. But the pros outweigh the cons for sure.”</p>
<p>“Were you into it from the start?” I say.</p>
<p>“I was pregnant. I was also alone. It was kind of a case of having a plan versus having no plan, you know?”</p>
<p>I do know.</p>
<p>“I couldn’t afford to buy, or even rent anything on my own. At least not anywhere I would want to live. I probably would have brought up Henry-Lee in a share house rather than move out to the middle of nowhere,” she pauses. “That probably sounds really bourgie.”</p>
<p>I understand this cringing feeling. There is something yuck about middle-class people in Australia whining about housing, insisting on living in the suburbs we like to socialise and work in. </p>
<p>There is something yuck, too, about newspapers insisting that Australian children need backyards and that apartment living is totally unsuitable for families. But the idea of Liza and her child in an apartment hours from her friends and family, her work and community makes me anxious.</p>
<p>“I was just thinking the other day how lucky all our kids are. They get their own space, but there are always other kids around to play with. Plus my sisters and I help each other with the domestic stuff, and we all chip in for a cleaner,’ she says, washing that feeling away.</p>
<p>Multi-generational households are <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-adult-children-stay-at-home-looking-beyond-the-myths-of-kidults-kippers-and-gestaters-68931">becoming more popular</a> globally. In 2012, The Independent <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/beating-the-housing-shortage-one-home-three-generations-7626973.html">reported</a> there were more than 500,000 households containing three generations or more in the UK. They predicted another 50,000 to be added by 2019.</p>
<p>Arrangements like Liza’s are not wholly innovative, of course, but hark back to other places and times. The "nuclear family” is, tellingly, a term that came to prominence during the postwar prosperity my parents came of age in.</p>
<p>It’s all a matter of spin, though. Inner-urban millennials with the resources and skills to turn the shed into a tiny house can be celebrated for their ingenuity and ethics. Well-heeled siblings who pull together to buy together are adapting to a cut-throat market. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, people living in public housing, squats or on the street are treated with the disdain our culture reserves for the poor. And adults who live with their parents for too long are lambasted as “<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-adult-children-stay-at-home-looking-beyond-the-myths-of-kidults-kippers-and-gestaters-68931">kidults</a>”.</p>
<p>In Japan they are dubbed the <em>parasaito shinguru</em>, “parasite singles”, and scapegoated for social problems ranging from the ageing population to the recession. In the US, they are “boomerang children”, because when you throw them out they come right back to you. In Italy, a cabinet minister described adults who live with their parents as <em>bamboccioni</em>, translated variously as “big babies” or “big dummy boys”.</p>
<p>At 33, Alex is a <em>bamboccione</em> of the Melbourne suburbs, though his mother would never use that term. He is a conscientious person. I met him singing in a community choir, to give you an idea. I did not know then, as we reached for Justin Timberlake harmonies, that Alex was still living his in his parent’s brick home on a Ramsay-Street-from-Neighbours-esque cul-de-sac along with his two younger brothers and, at various other times, his older sisters and their partners.</p>
<p>He explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I did move out for a little while. The rent was huge, and the house was cramped and kind of a dump. At some point I had to come home for financial reasons and then I just stayed. I mean, it’s really nice out here.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alex shows me his bungalow at the edge of an extensive and neatly trimmed lawn. He has a bed that looks too short for him, an old lamp and a La-Z-Boy recliner. There are books piled up in neat stacks. He has tacked a couple of newspaper prints to the wall above an old upright piano. It could be the room of a studious teenager.</p>
<p>“I don’t know if I’m, you know, infantilised, because my mum is just over there,” he laughs, pointing to the big house behind us. ‘I suppose it took me a long time to find myself. I was in my late 20s before I started to understand who I was and what I wanted, or what I didn’t want, which is sometimes an easier place to start.“</p>
<p>Alex doesn’t want the same things as me. He doesn’t want to work full-time. He doesn’t want kids. He doesn’t want to pay rent. He embodies every reason the media exploits in labelling my generation as irresponsible kidults. I ask Alex what he thinks about that and he laughs.</p>
<p>"I think ‘fuck off’! I have been responsible since I was 17. I just happen to live at home because that way I can save. And because I like it here. My brothers are here too. We all get along. We look after each other.”</p>
<p>In the big house, Alex introduces me to his family for the first time. His mother, Kathy, gives me a broad, warm hug. She has a wonderful smile. There’s a cheese platter. There’s champagne with strawberries and some kind of flower in the bottom of the glass. </p>
<p>It’s warm and gorgeous here. Like a TV family. A window above the dining table looks onto a reserve where neighbourhood dogs chase sticks and roll jubilantly in the cut grass. A soccer ball bounces against a fence.</p>
<p>“I told my neighbours you were coming around and they said to send you over to them,” says the matriarch. “No-one can get rid of their kids round here.”</p>
<p>A heavily pregnant daughter and her partner pick at a plate of crudités.</p>
<p>One by one, sons emerged. Healthy, suntanned men. They work together as electricians and their new vans are parked on the front lawn. One just returned from a hiking trip with his buddy.</p>
<p>“Do you think you will ever move out?” I ask the youngest.</p>
<p>“I think Mum might be giving me a nudge,” he smiles, cutting another piece of smoked gouda.</p>
<p>Kathy’s face contracts into a happy wince.</p>
<p>“You should get a sense of it,” she says.</p>
<p>I get the feeling that in this family moving out is an important experience, like travelling. Something you can always come home from.</p>
<p>We plate up four kinds of barbecue and switch from champagne to shiraz. I joke about wanting to move in too and Kathy laughs, pleased. Then her face settles into a look of utter seriousness.</p>
<p>“You are always welcome.”</p>
<p>She tells me about how she was shipped off to boarding school from the farm and never went back. After high school, she trained as a nurse, living in dormitories, guarded by nuns until she and some friends could afford to rent their own house.</p>
<p>“It was all so much fun!” she said. “But these are different times.”</p>
<p>Kathy graduated from nursing school into marriage and moved from that house into this one. I don’t covet this life, of course. It feels so far away from my reality. When, at 11pm, I start to say goodbyes, Kathy looks hurt.</p>
<p>“Do you have to leave?” she says.</p>
<p>I wish I didn’t. If this was my family, I might get myself another wine, another bowl of ice-cream and nap on the couch in front of the tennis. Though I also might not. I was out of home at 17, aching for life to start. </p>
<p>At that age adulthood meant independence; it’s only now that I see it also means connection. How do you find this sense of permanence and community when the most pragmatic part of you life – your home and neighbourhood – is leased to you on a 12-month basis?</p>
<h2>Taking the communal route</h2>
<p>Seeking my own alternatives, I take off early one Sunday in December and drive east to the oldest intentional community in Victoria. I found out about the open day on the community website. </p>
<p>There is a manifesto there, which talks about the isolation of the suburban nuclear family. It talks about pollution, crowding, unaffordable rent, lack of public infrastructure and loss of community. It was written in the ’70s, but still resonates today.</p>
<p>On arrival, I find I am not the only millennial this picture of boomer-era radicalism appeals to. Frankie, a 30-year-old from the affluent bayside suburbs of Melbourne, is commune shopping. She has known “since high school” that she wanted a different kind of living arrangement. She’s single, polyamorous, optimistic and scathing of nuclear families and suburban life. </p>
<p>Perhaps “scathing” is too strong a word. Her opinions are all tempered with careful university-learnt defensiveness that reminds me of interviews with Lena Dunham. She prefaces every opinion with disclaimers like, “I hear what you are saying and I totally respect that but…”</p>
<p>We wander around the grounds of the commune with three residents: John, Emma and Ethan, whose ages range from mid-40s to 60s. Clusters of houses, organised by personality and lifestyle, are dotted in clearings in the bush. One cluster belongs to young families with kids, another to single people in their midlife, still another to retirees.</p>
<p>“This is the best cluster,” declares Ethan, waving his hand across a small glen like a wry lord. “For this is where I live.”</p>
<p>He shows us the mudbrick and straw-bale homes favoured by the community members. They remind me of the house I was born in, an architecture of mid-century optimism. The houses ostensibly share a garden but they are separate dwellings. No commune members toil there à la the paintings of socialist realism. Frankie looks disappointed.</p>
<p>“Do you have much time all together?” she asks.</p>
<p>The communalists exchange searching looks.</p>
<p>“I think we had a thing last Christmas?”</p>
<p>Frankie looks destroyed.</p>
<p>“At the beginning all we did was build. We kept saying to one another, won’t it be great when the building is done so we can get down to community building? What we didn’t realise was that working hard together like that was the community,” says John, summing up the plight of all utopians: once you build your paradise, you have to live in it.</p>
<p>We women hang back as the tour continues. We bash our way through the scrub and casually get to the core of each other’s lives, with the skilled precision possessed by most female outsiders. </p>
<p>Frankie, so earnest she sears my corneas, reminds me of Julianne Moore’s character in the movie Safe with her sensitivity to city toxins and her yearning to be sucked into a pristine bubble. Emma, on the other hand, is pragmatic, tempering her New Age affirmations (“you have to be the change you want to see in the world”) with some refreshing frankness. She tells me, confidentially:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m not one of these vagina worshippers. A lot of that menstrual moon goddess stuff goes on up here but you can leave me right out of it, that’s for sure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If I lived here, we would be BFFs in no time.</p>
<p>“What’s your story?” Frankie asks me, breaking the morose silence.</p>
<p>I feel a flush of guilt. I know that I will probably write about this. I’m an exploiter! I want to say. A parasite! Don’t talk candidly with me.</p>
<p>But actually we three have a lot in common. I’m drawn to this kind of arrangement for similar reasons to Frankie and Emma: I want a community; I don’t want to work three jobs to service a city mortgage; I don’t want kids of my own but I like the idea of having them around, especially the teenagers. Emma is proud to have become a confidant for many young people here at difficult times. </p>
<p>I want long evenings talking politics, literature and floor plans while the possums scurry through the scrub and the dogs bark in the valley below. </p>
<p>And I’m an uncomfortable mass of contradictions, as they all are. I’m territorial but desperate for connection, like John, pragmatic yet idealistic like Emma, competitive and irreverent, like Ethan, 30 and searching for a satisfying life, like Frankie. Oh please love me, shelter me, have me at your collective table!</p>
<p>“I want to find out more about the alternatives,” I say instead.</p>
<p>Frankie nods enthusiastically.</p>
<p>A car pulls up to us, the occupants smiling broadly, sizing us up.</p>
<p>“Are any of you interested in the Deans’ place?” the driver asks.</p>
<p>“We’ll talk about that later,” John mutters.</p>
<p>It’s as though we’ve been suddenly and unceremoniously undressed. Ezmay tries to cover by making a joke about hawkers but it falls flat. The beast of real estate has run a sharp claw through the scrim of ideals. A tiny tractor moves a flock of sheep through a green square below us. Rows of olive trees stand to salty attention.</p>
<p>“So there are vacant houses for sale here?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” says John. “We have one that has been empty for almost five years. There was one family who were interested but the cluster has to vote unanimously in favour of them. The last buyers didn’t get the vote.”</p>
<p>“How much is it?”</p>
<p>John stalls. He talks about shares and full membership petitioning and how moving onto the commune is a process. He talks about the future and the past, and about the philosophy of the place.</p>
<p>Finally he gives us a number.</p>
<p>Annnd, I’m out.</p>
<h2>Building the Base</h2>
<p>Later, safely ensconced in the unintentionality of the city, I wonder what my generation’s model for intentional living would be? Are we too jaded and locked out for utopian aspirations?</p>
<p>Al doesn’t think so. I read about the 20-year-old “entrepreneur and change-maker” in an article on a real-estate website. Al believes in the power of our generation. He insists we are at a better moment in history than we think we are.</p>
<p>Currently, he is focusing his change-making drive on the way millennials arrange their lives. His newest business endeavour is Base, a “project which seeks to create and invest in spaces and experiences to cultivate communities, culture and personal growth”. </p>
<p>What this means is that Al has found a way to capitalise on both the need for young people to share space in an increasingly expensive rental market, and their need to feel as though their lives are making an impact in a time when activism and getting involved in the community are a matter of clicking “Share” on Facebook. </p>
<p>Al’s vision for Base is a “curated share house” for “nomadic change-makers”. Think of a cross between Big Brother and a commune in an inner-city warehouse. And all the locks on the doors will open with an iPhone app. That’s an important feature. Al repeats it twice.</p>
<p>The idea for Base came to him when he was doing the festival circuit, introducing crowds at Rainbow Serpent and Burning Man to his vision for “living onely”, that is, “coming together, alive”. In his TEDx Talk, he asks an audience of 14-year-olds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What if we could work together to create the abundance, the sustainability and the love that we truly are? We are a rainforest, the sun can be a shared vision … My mission is to become the mycorrhizal fungi that the trees use to communicate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In my experience, share houses usually communicate via notes and suggestively placed cleaning products, but that is the past – the future is Base, abundant, onely, fungal.</p>
<p>On the phone, Al comes across as an ardent young man with a tick-like propensity for dropping nonsensical motivational platitudes. “You only see the wind when it causes a disturbance,” he tells me, as he multitasks, fielding my questions while driving to his next appointment. “That’s a quote I like to use.”</p>
<p>Al believes in the power of the internet. In sharing. He likes diagrams and permaculture. He took the idea for Base to an incubator, one that “incubates people rather than ideas”. He toured similar ventures in the US, then came back to Australia, looked for a corporate sponsor and began curating the Base applicants.</p>
<p>“They had to be hungry and driven. With a clear idea of where they are going. Being driven towards something. Or away from something.”</p>
<p>“We asked them, ‘If you had the wealth of Bill Gates would you drive it in a particular direction?’ We asked them their favourite colour, why they are wearing the shoes they are wearing. All these choices are important. You drive the car you drive for a reason.”</p>
<p>I swallow.</p>
<p>“We want to use the space as an incubator. Some of the profits will be to develop the space. But a portion will go into a hedge fund to invest in the ideas that come out of the space. The ideas that come out of Base will be a lot more heart-centred,” he says. “We want to create exponential impact … And residual impact.”</p>
<p>After a spate of press coverage (an article about Base went minor-viral in a look-at-this-douchebag kind of way), Al is making connections that are less about social change and more about real estate. If he can play his cards right, he’ll become a new kind of ideologically packaged pseudo-landlord, a real estate “curator”.</p>
<p>“We want to create a culture,” he insists, as though he was actually born and raised in an incubator and emerged just yesterday, sticky feathered and tweeting. “The culture can be seen as the wind, we want to create the wind. That’s just a little analogy I use.”</p>
<p>“Cool,” I reply. Because what else can you say?</p>
<p>It’s easy to rag on Al. He is, among other things, his very own real-estate dystopia. The one where young people are so desperate to control their space and make money from it to boot that they are willing to draw up minor cosmologies and enlist everything from ancient ritual to actuarial principles to make it seem meaningful.</p>
<p>But like all canny investors, he also has some insights into what is trending – in this case, the way that younger people live now, and will in the future. </p>
<p>Al insists that his generation (it’s my generation too, though I feel curmudgeonly beyond belief) are more nomadic and more connected, via the internet, and that living arrangements need to make space for this. </p>
<p>Base will have “nomad rooms” for short stays because the occupants might have “collaborators” across the world who they haven’t met in real life. Its occupancy will fluctuate, a continual flow of new ideas and perspectives filtering through the space, incubating everything, fungal and otherwise.</p>
<p>I’m fairly sure that Al has never read Neuromancer, with its evocation of youth in storage, renting their bodies and minds while they save money and energy through induced hibernation. I soon realise that for Al, sleeping, flesh and living-as-we-know-it are increasingly temporary burdens. </p>
<p>Al’s future is post-human, not in the Gibsonian sense but in the way anticipated by Ray Kurzweil, who insists that soon we will reach the singularity – a point where technology hits the exponential curve, nanobots self-replicate and we can saturate the universe with intelligence.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1uIzS1uCOcE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Ray Kurzweil discusses the coming singularity.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Living is life,” Al says. “It’s not just where we actually, uh, sleep. Living is exactly that: life.”</p>
<p>I hang up the phone. A feeling of desperation rises in my gullet. Another dystopia emerges from the echo of the interview. I close my eyes and see scribbled diagrams of the concept of onely unfurl across the sky, blocking the sun (“a shared vision”), the stars and every private thought you ever had. The whole universe becomes real estate for our asinine self-contemplations.</p>
<p>I need to get out of the house and into the anonymous streets. I want to interact with the world as it is, as it appears to me immediately. I want to experience the kind of connection I find in being just one more human trying to get along in an imperfect but pleasant day to day.</p>
<h2>Dystopia on display</h2>
<p>I ride my bike through the backstreets of my increasingly gentrified neighbourhood. There is a development site every couple of blocks. Lately it seems that the advertisements for these off-plan apartments are aimed particularly at my demographic. They show happy bearded men on bicycles and long-haired women in bespoke tunics at cafes, reflecting the neighbourhood back at itself, insisting that you – yes you – belong here. Buy-in now.</p>
<p>A few years ago, a study of water usage revealed how many new apartments are empty, owned by investors who would rather wait out the term of appreciation rather than bother with renters. “<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/ghost-tower-warning-for-docklands-after-data-reveals-high-melbourne-home-vacancies-20141111-11kkxz.html">Ghost Tower Warning</a>”, ran the headline.</p>
<p>I ride past an old warehouse site with banners out the front. It looks like a display suite and I am drawn in, despite myself, yanked through the doors by my real-estate obsession. The warehouse is actually filled with a local university’s interior architecture graduate exhibition. </p>
<p>I wander around, looking at the models and plans, struck by the depressingly urgent contexts they take on. Projects cite increasing urban homelessness; the need for public space in the face of diminishing residential area per capita; the need for meaningful intersections between architecture, the body and everyday life. Architecture as a way to endure increasingly volatile environmental conditions: scourge, scarcity.</p>
<p>The images and models, however, all look oddly similar. Greyscale figures in their 20s and 30s – some alone, some in couples, a few children – stand in and walk through stark, minimal, hyper-functional spaces. The labels read, “Toilet Pavilion”, “Bathing Pavilion”, “Meditation Alcove”. It’s the design equivalent of a “Keep Calm and Carry On” sticker. </p>
<p>One project shows a skeletal substructure of a building in a catastrophe-ravaged scene. Fortunately, the architect had the foresight to anticipate this calamity and the blackened core of his building is a perfectly pleasant, usable space. In the drawing, a young couple gaze unthinkably at an artwork hanging on a steel beam. We know it’s art (presumably flood and fire resistant) because it’s in a frame.</p>
<p>In other images, people are just staring at the exposed brick as though this, in view of events, has become an anchor for calm reflection. Through all of these stark, designed worlds tramp lone, youthful figures wearing headphones – suggesting rich inner worlds, even though they live in a bunker and must wander forever through the ruins of the city.</p>
<p>Looking around the actual space of the exhibition, I see we are performing a very similar reality. We are young people alone or in pairs. Staring at beams and exposed brick, listening to something privately through headphones. Contemplating shelter, the future and the problems that arise between.</p>
<p>We are all anticipating, aestheticising, buying and selling our crisis.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from Briohny Doyle’s forthcoming book, Adult Fantasy, to be published with Scribe in June 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75839/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Briohny Doyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Owning a home has deep cultural and economic connotations. A home owner is a member of a street, a community. They are a successful adult human. They own a piece of the pie, the dream.Briohny Doyle, Sessional Lecturer, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/758482017-04-30T20:02:24Z2017-04-30T20:02:24ZYour sons and your daughters: mental health in the age of overtime<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164964/original/image-20170411-26741-o2ibi7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In a country consistently rated as one of the world’s most liveable, we’ve somehow developed a deadly disregard toward our own welfare.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Joel Carrett</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/millennials-strike-back/">Millennials Strike Back</a>, the 56th edition of Griffith Review. Articles are a little longer than most published on The Conversation, and present an in-depth analysis of the challenges facing the oft-criticised millennial generation.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Weary working warriors of Australia, we need to talk about what your heroic long hours, your selfless overtime, and your lack of self-care is doing to our nation’s mental health.</p>
<p>I’m looking at anyone who associates the word “millennial” with young people who seem to feel entitled to the “good things” in life but are unwilling to put in the hard work to earn them; anyone who thinks being overworked and underpaid is a normal way to start your career.</p>
<p>Without a doubt, you’re going to experience some deep-seated resistance to what I am about to say. It’s not your fault; your work ethic has been conditioned with each and every pay cheque, and I’m about to undermine it. But you need to hear this, for the good of us all. </p>
<p>So, for the love of God, will you do yourselves the favour of putting aside your well-meant anxieties and hard-earned wisdoms for a minute, and just listen?</p>
<p>First up, let me lay out my privilege. I’m a PhD student currently investigating the genetics of mental illness – post-natal psychosis, to be precise – at the University of Cambridge.</p>
<p>I’m incredibly lucky: I’m studying at a university consistently ranked in the world’s top five; I have a partial scholarship and a well-funded lab; and my college graduate-student committee supplies me with a steady stream of free tea, biscuits and well-written magazine essays. </p>
<p>Before Cambridge I was a resident of <a href="http://www.anu.edu.au/study/accommodation/student-residences/bruce-hall">Bruce Hall</a>, the first (and best) residential hall at the Australian National University. Again a partial scholarship, again a very well-run and funded program, and again a student committee and college infrastructure that facilitated a warm, vibrant and welcoming community. I’ve done pretty well so far.</p>
<p>And now, my motivation for sticking my neck out: my mental health. It’s never been top notch, and it was probably never going to be (which is kind of how I ended up studying its inheritance and manifestation). </p>
<p>Both sides of my family have depressive tendencies, and I’m <a href="https://www.whatdoescismean.com/whatdoescismean/">cis-female</a> – which, depending on what you read, gives me a higher chance either of suffering depression or communicating that I’m depressed. </p>
<p>After several undiagnosed “rough patches” in my late teens and early twenties, I finally ended up on an SSRI medication after succumbing to a crushing state of depressive exhaustion in the first year of my PhD, most likely precipitated by the British winter. I currently function pretty well as long as I minimise sources of mental, emotional and physiological stress in my life. And there’s the bind.</p>
<p>I openly embrace my high-achiever-type neuroses, but my studies aren’t the biggest risk to my hard-earned homeostasis. You’d be forgiven for assuming so: not a week seems to go by without a Guardian article describing anxiety and depression in students. But data on the cause has been thin on the ground. </p>
<p>Fortunately, in 2014, the Graduate Assembly of the University of California, Berkeley, administered a survey investigating graduate-student wellbeing. The <a href="http://ga.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Well-Being-Report-Deck.pdf">resulting report</a> found 47% of responding PhD students, and 37% of masters students, “reach the threshold considered depressed”. </p>
<p>First out of the top-ten predictors was career prospects. Academic progress was seventh on the list, behind physical health, living conditions, academic engagement, social support and financial confidence. Makes sense to me. </p>
<p>Tiring as it can be to spend all day in my departmental library engaged in a battle of wits with the living, breathing thing that is my thesis, I love the freedom and flexibility that comes with student life. </p>
<p>What puts me at risk of a low patch is cramped rooms and uncomfortable single beds, overcooked cafeteria meals and under-equipped student gyms, and lacking an income that permits minor creature comforts, let alone achieving the milestones of modern adulthood: buying property, building a community, saving for a distant holiday and a very distant retirement. </p>
<p>Happily, if all goes relatively well, I should submit my thesis halfway through this year, defend it shortly after that and, with my newly Oxbridged CV, secure a well-paying job. But despite the double bed on my horizon, I’m deeply troubled by what leaving student life will do to my mental health.</p>
<h2>A worsening ‘balance’</h2>
<p>We’ve been “having the conversation” about mental health in Australia for a few years now. As a result, slow, ponderous change is occurring within the leviathan of a system intended to protect and care for people in crisis. </p>
<p>But all the awareness campaigns have had little effect on the “garden variety” mental illness that’s actually causing most of the disability and death.</p>
<p>Even if you (still) think we’re merely medicalising the normal ups and downs of life, you’ve got to admit there are a lot of people in a lot of pain. You may have heard that, on average, <a href="http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-mental-health-and-suicide-prevention/talking-to-media-about-mental-illness/facts-and-stats">one in five adults</a> experience anxiety, mood disorders or substance abuse every year. </p>
<p>You may even have heard that the <a href="http://www.aihw.gov.au/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=60129556207">leading cause of disease burden</a> within the 15-44 age bracket is “suicide and self-inflicted injuries” for males and “anxiety and depressive disorders” for females. These statistics can only relate to what people are actually diagnosed with, or will admit to.</p>
<p>The hard data is much more dire. <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/3303.0%7E2015%7EMain%20Features%7EIntentional%20self-harm:%20key%20characteristics%7E8">Cause-of-death statistics</a> released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2015 revealed that suicide is the leading cause of death for people aged 15-44, and the second-leading cause for those aged 44-54 – regardless of gender.</p>
<p>The number of lives lost to suicide is simply too great for the “serious” mental illnesses – debilitating depression, bipolar and psychotic disorders – to be the main cause. What’s killing us is common despair. In a country consistently rated as one of the world’s most liveable, we’ve somehow developed a deadly disregard toward our own welfare.</p>
<p>The Australian way of life is highly ranked across almost every dimension in the <a href="http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/">OECD Better Life Index</a>, from income and housing, through social connection, education and health, to civic engagement and environmental quality. But when it comes to work–life balance we’re far below the average. We’re 29th, in fact, below the US and UK (and Chile and Slovenia and Hungary and…), and things show no sign of improvement. </p>
<p>In 2014, The Australia Institute <a href="http://www.tai.org.au/sites/defualt/files/P99%20Walking%20the%20tightrope.pdf">reported</a> that work-life balance had worsened for 42% of the workforce in the previous five years. In addition, the proportion of workers reporting improvement was only a few percentage points larger than those reporting no change at all. </p>
<p>The greatest problem was longer hours, many of which weren’t even paid; almost A$110 billion of hours were effectively donated in the year of the report.</p>
<p>What’s the big deal about work–life balance? A little hard work and a few years of long hours never hurt anybody, right?</p>
<p>Give me a dollar for every time someone says it’s a rite of passage for the young, it’s a valiant sacrifice by working parents or, most crucially, it’s just how things are and we cannot change it, and I’d have enough for a house deposit. Here’s where the urge to slam my head into the nearest solid object becomes almost overwhelming, because when work-life balance goes awry, the first thing to suffer is mental and physical health.</p>
<p>When people are short on time, they simply don’t prioritise personal care anymore. I’m talking about eating, sleeping, exercising – the holy trinity of basic, essential personal maintenance. </p>
<p>We know that not getting enough quality sleep is <a href="https://psychcentral.com/lib/sleep-and-mental-health-disorders/">intimately connected</a> to mental illness risk. Exercise too: aside from the physical benefits, regular exercise can have <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/12/exercise.aspx">huge effects</a> on our mood. And evidence emerging from cutting-edge labs suggests that diet might have a <a href="https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/d/diet-and-mental-health">crucial role</a> in influencing neurochemicals via the billions of bacteria living in our guts.</p>
<p>If you’re stressed, exhausted and unwell, your mind and body become drastically less able to deal with the challenges life throws at us – everything from maintaining healthy personal relationships to riding the waves of global change. </p>
<p>And if you’re not in the habit of taking time out for your mental health, when those challenges hit us, we can become anxious and/or depressed, or simply function less well in life. This state of poor functioning makes people more likely to end up in the awful spiral that leads to suicide. We know this, and yet we seem unable to do anything about it.</p>
<p>The World Economic Forum and the Harvard School of Public Health estimate the <a href="http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Harvard_HE_GlobalEconomicBurdenNonCommunicableDiseases_2011.pdf">global cost of mental health conditions</a> at around US$2.5 trillion, with almost two-thirds of this coming from indirect costs – loss of productivity and income resulting from disability and death. </p>
<p>For Australia, the estimated costs of lost productivity are in the billions. In 2014, <a href="https://www.headsup.org.au/docs/default-source/resources/bl1269-brochure---pwc-roi-analysis.pdf?sfvrsn=6">PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated</a> mental-health-related absenteeism costs the Australian economy A$4.7 billion annually, while presenteeism costs A$6.1 billion. And if all the hours of unpaid overtime were given to work seekers as paid work, unemployment could be virtually non-existent.</p>
<p>Change is possible, but only if you, my working warriors, are willing to allow it – if you let go of the toxic idea that this is “just how things are”. </p>
<p>Some of the socioeconomic tools necessary are already being trialled and implemented in such diverse environments as Silicon Valley and the Scandinavian bloc. With some tweaking, experimenting and help from your friendly neighbourhood millennial, they can be made to work for Australia too.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164965/original/image-20170411-26733-1jif53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164965/original/image-20170411-26733-1jif53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164965/original/image-20170411-26733-1jif53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164965/original/image-20170411-26733-1jif53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164965/original/image-20170411-26733-1jif53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164965/original/image-20170411-26733-1jif53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164965/original/image-20170411-26733-1jif53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Not getting enough quality sleep is intimately connected to mental health risk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Change the definitions of work and rest</h2>
<p>At its most basic, the solution to what maligns us is rest. When we properly account for all the “work” a person does in a day by adding caring, training, travelling and maintaining to the equation, and then acknowledge that work with a proper allowance of time and resources, we will ease a great amount of the psychological-turned-physiological stress plaguing us.</p>
<p>In my second year at Cambridge I was elected as our college graduate-committee welfare officer. It was my job to try to improve and protect the mental welfare of more than 200 high-achieving, workaholic, more-than-slightly neurotic Cambridge students. </p>
<p>It’s a task I still have in an unofficial capacity – how could I not?</p>
<p>I can’t stop my friends and fellows from working long hours if they want to. Some of them are even physiologically capable of it – but most of them aren’t. Yet they won’t look after themselves until someone gives them permission. </p>
<p>And my most effective tool for doing that is changing their definition of “work”. Because, really, work is anything that is not rest. That’s why discussions about the “unpaid economy” have been going since the notion of GDP was created and defined in the 1940s.</p>
<p>What the UK calls the <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/householdsatelliteaccounts2011to2014">“household satellite account”</a> includes child care, transport, nutrition, household maintenance, clothing and laundry, adult care and volunteering – all tasks that have a paid equivalent. </p>
<p>If you are teaching your child to read, or helping with homework, you are working. If you’re cleaning or mending for yourself or someone else, you are working. If you’re helping a loved one through a rough patch, whether by accompanying them to appointments, cooking them a nutritious meal or just providing a listening ear, you are working.</p>
<p>So, in reality, if the nature of work is properly taken into account, we’re working far more than eight hours a day, five days a week. And we’re therefore not allocating enough time and resources for rest. </p>
<p>Proper rest means self-care or leisure: socialising, playing games, working on hobbies. These are states of flow and immersion, the roots of the current mindfulness movement. </p>
<p>Is it any wonder that hands-on crafts such as colouring, knitting and collaging have gained popularity in the past few years, when we’re working harder than ever, for longer than ever and with less time to recover than ever. </p>
<p>Whip out a colouring book and a set of pencils and you can rapidly put yourself into a state where all you’re thinking about is staying within the lines and which colour to use next. Your heart rate drops, your blood pressure eases: you are at rest. </p>
<p>One of the reasons social media and smartphones can be so “addictive” is their ability to instantly distract you, to suck you into a state of pseudo-flow. The hypnotic progression of beautiful photos on Instagram, the ability to tap into your inner child and send dorky pictures on Snapchat – used improperly, these are drug-like quick fixes, embraced by a population desperate for rest.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164787/original/image-20170411-31875-16226m1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164787/original/image-20170411-31875-16226m1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164787/original/image-20170411-31875-16226m1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164787/original/image-20170411-31875-16226m1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164787/original/image-20170411-31875-16226m1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164787/original/image-20170411-31875-16226m1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164787/original/image-20170411-31875-16226m1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Whip out a colouring book and a set of pencils and you can rapidly put yourself at ease.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New problems, old solutions</h2>
<p>But what to do? </p>
<p>One solution is a <a href="https://theconversation.com/universal-basic-income-the-dangerous-idea-of-2016-70395">universal basic income</a>: giving people free money. The idea is not new; it’s actually been done before. </p>
<p>Alaska has been successfully reducing poverty and inequality for more than 35 years by <a href="http://basicincome.org/news/2016/09/alaska-us-amount-2016-permanent-fund-dividend-1022/">providing universal dividends</a> from the use of national assets – in its case the money came from oil resources, but it could also come from as varied sources as mineral and water rights or financial infrastructure and intellectual property. </p>
<p>And in the 1970s, Canada <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html">ran an experiment</a> that provided a basic living wage for all two-parent, two-child families in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, that were earning less than CA$50,000. In just four years, Dauphin had increased high-school completion, decreased doctor and hospital visits, and boosted mental health.</p>
<p>Universal basic income is a <a href="https://theconversation.com/universal-basic-income-the-dangerous-idea-of-2016-70395">radical concept</a>. But it’s shown enough promise that Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y-Combinator has decided to <a href="https://qz.com/696377/y-combinator-is-running-a-basic-income-experiment-with-100-oakland-families/">test it</a> in Oakland, California. Local, state and federal governments are also working on trials in <a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/6/14007230/kenya-basic-income-givedirectly-experiment-village">rural parts of Kenya</a>, in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/netherlands-utrecht-universal-basic-income-experiment/487883/">urban Utrecht</a>, in <a href="https://qz.com/914247/canada-is-betting-on-a-universal-basic-income-to-help-cities-gutted-by-manufacturing-job-loss/">Ontario</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/03/finland-trials-basic-income-for-unemployed">Finland</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/08/universal-basic-income-glasgow-welfare-revolution">Scotland</a>. </p>
<p>For governments and businesses, universal basic income offers a way to simplify welfare, bolster the wages of the new “precariat”, and prepare for the coming mechanisation of huge swathes of the workforce in the near future. </p>
<p>Used properly, it could also be a huge boon for mental health. Consistent provision of a safety net could reduce the impulse to keep working instead of taking time to rest and recover. It could make leaving an unhealthy work situation easier, putting pressure on employers to keep their workplaces healthy. And, finally, it could allow for measuring and monetising the unpaid economy.</p>
<p>As a young and inexperienced student, a universal basic income calls out to my lefty soul. But the solution could be even simpler: reduce the numbers of hours people have to spend at work. </p>
<p>A Melbourne Institute study <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/workers-over-40-perform-best-with-three-day-week-25-hours-melbourne-institute-study-a6988921.html">made waves last year</a> when it found that the optimal working week for the over-40s was only 25-30 hours: six hours a day, or a three-day week. </p>
<p>And, as multiple trials in Sweden <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38843341">have shown</a>, a six-hour workday with no cut in wages can actually increase profit by boosting productivity. Workers also tend to be happier and healthier, leading, in time, to increased productivity.</p>
<p>Another way to free up time for rest could be literally changing the way we live.</p>
<p><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1080/00050067.2010.482109/abstract">A survey</a> of more than 6,000 students from two major Australian universities found that students had better-than-expected mental health if they were living in university residences, with parents, or with a partner and/or family. </p>
<p>Living with community brings more benefits than reducing rent and warding off loneliness. When tasks such as cooking, cleaning and care work are divided, each person has more time for self-care and leisure. What’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-co-housing-could-make-homes-cheaper-and-greener-39235">now being called “co-housing”</a> – a model where communal spaces exist but each inhabitant or family has more private space than the average flatmate – is already gaining popularity with young professionals and creatives alike. </p>
<p>On a large scale, as in university residences, co-housing could even create jobs – for example, in communal kitchens. Living densely could also help solve the problems of urban sprawl threatening Australia’s economic and environmental sustainability, by reducing commuting times and enabling better resource sharing.</p>
<p>So, the solutions are out there, just waiting to be applied in our economically blessed Australian context. Yes, they involve sweeping change, long-term planning and pie-in-the-sky thinking, but so did the huge social schemes implemented by the last generation to be born in a time of plenty and grow up in an era of increasing instability.</p>
<p>The solutions of the postwar reformers are faltering now, faced with vast changes in technology, society and environment – but the youth of today are equal to the challenge.</p>
<p>The Pew Research Centre <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change.pdf">has named millennials</a> “the most educated generation ever”. They’re clever, they’re informed, they’re driven, they’re charitable, they’re idealistic. And, most of all, they are desperate to reject the unhealthy working hours, unsustainable wages and unrealistic goals of modern employment.</p>
<p>Desperate enough to brush off labels of entitled, lazy and naive in order to pursue a way of living that they feel in their hearts must be right. They can and will change your lives for the better, if only you let them.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>If you are feeling distressed or are concerned about a friend, family member or work colleague, call <a href="http://www.lifeline.org.au">Lifeline</a> 13 11 14, <a href="http://www.suicidecallbackservice.org.au">Suicide Call Back Service</a> 1300 659 467, or <a href="http://www.kidshelp.com.au">Kids Helpline</a> 1800 55 1800.</em></p>
<p><em>You can read other essays from Griffith Review’s latest edition <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/millennials-strike-back/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75848/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Courtney A Landers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>All the awareness campaigns have had little effect on the ‘garden variety’ mental illness that’s causing most of the disability and death.Courtney A Landers, PhD Candidate in Mental Health Genetics, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/764582017-04-30T20:01:35Z2017-04-30T20:01:35ZFighting the common fate of humans: to better life and beat death<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167142/original/file-20170428-15086-15blist.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Can technology help us to beat death?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/Zwiebackesser</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This piece is republished with permission from <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/millennials-strike-back/">Millenials Strike Back</a>, the 56th edition of Griffith Review. Selected pieces consist of extracts, or long reads in which Generation Y writers address the issues that define and concern them.</em> </p>
<hr>
<p>The oldest surviving great work of literature tells the story of a Sumerian king, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gilgamesh">Gilgamesh</a>, whose historical equivalent may have ruled the city of Uruk some time between 2800 and 2500 BC.</p>
<p>A hero of superhuman strength, Gilgamesh becomes instilled with existential dread after witnessing the death of his friend, and travels the Earth in search of a cure for mortality. </p>
<p>Twice the cure slips through his fingers and he learns the futility of fighting the common fate of man.</p>
<h2>Merging with machines</h2>
<p>Transhumanism is the idea that we can transcend our biological limits, by merging with machines. The idea was popularised by the renowned technoprophet <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-biography">Ray Kurzweil</a> (now a director of engineering at Google), who came to public attention in the 1990s with a string of astute predictions about technology. </p>
<p>In his 1990 book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Age-Intelligent-Machines-Ray-Kurzweil/dp/0262610795">The Age of Intelligent Machines</a> (MIT Press), Kurzweil predicted that a computer would beat the world’s best chess player by the year 2000. It <a href="https://www.wired.com/2011/05/0511ibm-deep-blue-beats-chess-champ-kasparov/">happened in 1997</a>.</p>
<p>He also foresaw the explosive growth of the internet, along with the advent of wearable technology, drone warfare and the automated translation of language. Kurzweil’s <a href="https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045/">most famous prediction is what he calls</a> “the singularity” – the emergence of an artificial super-intelligence, triggering runaway technological growth – which he foresees happening somewhere around 2045.</p>
<p>In some sense, the merger of humans and machines has already begun. Bionic implants, such as the <a href="http://www.cochlear.com/wps/wcm/connect/au/home/understand/hearing-and-hl/hl-treatments/cochlear-implant">cochlear implant</a>, use electrical impulses orchestrated by computer chips to communicate with the brain, and so restore lost senses.</p>
<p>At <a href="https://svhm.org.au/home/research">St Vincent’s Hospital</a> and the <a href="http://research.unimelb.edu.au/">University of Melbourne</a>, my colleagues are developing other ways to tap into neuronal activity, thereby giving people natural control of a robotic hand.</p>
<p>These cases involve sending simple signals between a piece of hardware and the brain. To truly merge minds and machines, however, we need some way to send thoughts and memories.</p>
<p>In 2011, scientists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles took the first step towards this when they <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21677369">implanted rats with a computer chip</a> that worked as a kind of external hard drive for the brain. </p>
<p>First the rats learned a particular skill, pulling a sequence of levers to gain a reward. The silicon implant listened in as that new memory was encoded in the brain’s hippocampus region, and recorded the pattern of electrical signals it detected. </p>
<p>Next the rats were induced to forget the skill, by giving them a drug that impaired the hippocampus. The silicon implant then took over, firing a bunch of electrical signals to mimic the pattern it had recorded during training. </p>
<p>Amazingly, the rats remembered the skill – the electrical signals from the chip were essentially replaying the memory, in a crude version of that scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves learns (downloads) kung-fu.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V8ZdGmgj0PQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Matrix: I know king fu.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Again, the potential roadblock: the brain may be more different from a computer than people such as Kurzweil appreciate. As <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nicolas-p-rougier-201211">Nicolas Rougier</a>, a computer scientist at Inria (the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation), <a href="https://theconversation.com/silicon-soul-the-vain-dream-of-electronic-immortality-52368">argues</a>, the brain itself needs the complex sensory input of the body in order to function properly.</p>
<p>Separate the brain from that input and things start to go awry pretty quickly. Hence sensory deprivation is used as a form of torture. Even if artificial intelligence is achieved, that does not mean our brains will be able to integrate with it.</p>
<p>Whatever happens at the singularity (if it ever occurs), Kurzweil, now aged 68, wants to be around to see it. His <a href="http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/">Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever</a> (Rodale Books, 2004) is a guidebook for extending life in the hope of seeing the longevity revolution. In it he details his dietary practices, and outlines some of the 200 supplements he takes daily.</p>
<p>Failing that, he has a plan B.</p>
<h2>Freezing death</h2>
<p>The central idea of cryonics is to preserve the body after death in the hope that, one day, future civilisations will have the ability (and the desire) to reanimate the dead.</p>
<p>Both Kurzweil and de Grey, along with about 1,500 others (including, apparently, Britney Spears), are <a href="http://thenewdaily.com.au/life/tech/2015/06/19/can-buy-immortality-200000-want/">signed up to be cryopreserved</a> by <a href="http://www.alcor.org/">Alcor Life Extension Foundation</a> in Arizona.</p>
<p>Offhand, the idea seems crackpot. Even in daily experience, you know that freezing changes stuff: you can tell a strawberry that’s been frozen. Taste, and especially texture, change unmistakably. The problem is that when the strawberry cells freeze, they fill with ice crystals. The ice rips them apart, essentially turning them to mush. </p>
<p>That’s why Alcor don’t freeze you; they turn you to glass.</p>
<p>After you die, your body is drained of blood and replaced with a special cryogenic mixture of antifreeze and preservatives. When cooled, the liquid turns to a glassy state, but without forming dangerous crystals. </p>
<p>You are placed in a giant thermos flask of liquid nitrogen and cooled to -196°C, cold enough to effectively stop biological time. There you can stay without changing, for a year or a century, until science discovers the cure for whatever caused your demise.</p>
<p>“People don’t understand cryonics,” says Alcor president Max More in a YouTube tour of his facility. “They think it’s this strange thing we do to dead people, rather than understanding it really is an extension of emergency medicine.”</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uBUTlNu90Xw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Alcor president Max More.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The idea may not be as crackpot as it sounds. Similar cryopreservation techniques are already being used to preserve human embryos used in fertility treatments. </p>
<p>“There are people walking around today who have been cryopreserved,” More continues. “They were just embryos at the time.”</p>
<p>One proof of concept, of sorts, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/">was reported</a> by cryogenics expert Greg Fahy of <a href="http://www.21cm.com/">21st Century Medicine</a> (a privately funded cryonics research lab) in 2009.</p>
<p>Fahy’s team removed a rabbit kidney, vitrified it, and reimplanted into the rabbit as its only working kidney. Amazingly, the rabbit survived, if only for nine days. </p>
<p>More recently, a new technique developed by Fahy enabled the perfect preservation of a rabbit brain though vitrification and storage at -196°C. After rewarming, advanced 3D imaging revealed that the rabbit’s “connectome” – that is, the connections between neurons – was undisturbed.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the chemicals used for the new technique are toxic, but the work does raise the hope of some future method that may achieve the same degree of preservation with more friendly substances.</p>
<p>That said, preserving structure does not necessarily preserve function. Our thoughts and memories are not just coded in the physical connections between neurons, but also in the strength of those connections – coded somehow in the folding of proteins.</p>
<p>That’s why the most remarkable cryonics work to date may be that performed at Alcor in 2015, when scientists managed to glassify a tiny worm for two weeks, and then <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25867710">return it to life with its memory intact</a>.</p>
<p>Now, while the worm has only 302 neurons, you have more than 100 billion, and while the worm has 5,000 neuron-to-neuron connections you have at least 100 trillion. So there’s some way to go, but there’s certainly hope.</p>
<p>In Australia, a new not-for-profit, <a href="https://southerncryonics.com/the-project/">Southern Cryonics</a>, is planning to open the first cryonics facility in the Southern Hemisphere. </p>
<p>“Eventually, medicine will be able to keep people healthy indefinitely,” Southern Cryonics spokesperson and secretary Matt Fisher tells me in a phonecall.</p>
<p>“I want to see the other side of that transition. I want to live in a world where everyone can be healthy for as long as they want. And I want everyone I know and care about to have that opportunity as well.”</p>
<p>To get Southern Cryonics off the ground, ten founding members have each put in A$50,000, entitling them to a cryonic preservation for themselves or a person of their choice. Given that the company is not-for-profit, Fisher has no financial incentive to campaign for it. He simply believes in it.</p>
<p>“I’d really like to see [cryonic preservation] become the most common choice for internment across Australia,” he says.</p>
<p>Fisher admits there is no proof yet that cryopreservation works. The question is not about what is possible today, he says. It’s about what may be possible in the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76458/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cathal D. O'Connell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How far would you go to better your life, to live longer, to beat death? And how much can technology help us in that quest?Cathal D. O'Connell, Centre Manager, BioFab3D (St Vincent's Hospital), The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.