THAT'S MEN:Does cryonics prove men are the romantics?, ask PADRAIG O'MORAIN
FURTHER evidence for my belief that it is men, and not women, who are the true romantics comes from the cryonics industry.
The industry offers the service of freezing your body after death in the hope that one day you might be revived and brought back to life.
But it turns out the industry has identified what it calls “hostile wife phenomenon”.
In other words, the man who decides to get his brain frozen – and it is mostly men who do this – can expect opposition and scepticism from his wife.
It is, I think, romantic – in the sense of departing from reality – to have your body frozen in the belief that not only will science one day advance so far as to return you to ruddy health, but also that the cryonics guys will stay in business so that there is actually a body to unfreeze when the time comes.
Do I have to tell any reader that this is exactly the sort of thing wives are very, very sceptical about?
According to Kerry Howley writing for the New York Times, this wifely scepticism goes all the way back to the 1960s. A research paper by those old romantics, de Wolf, de Wolf and Federowicz, notes that since it arrived on the scene in 1964, cryonics "has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists".
As one man put it on a cryonics mailing list, “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted, and generally spooky”.
How could she think such a thing?
There's a theory that women don't like cryonics because of a sense of betrayal. The idea is that hubby (who, of course, is going to die first) is planning to take himself off into the future and leave her stranded in the present while he parties with females like that tall blue alien from Avatar.
And there’s the money. If you want to be on the list, you pay an annual fee before you die and then, of course, after you die it jumps from $120 a year to $35,000 a year, according to the website of the Cryonics Institute. You wouldn’t want to be depending on the wife to stump up that sort of money now, would you?
I'm afraid this comment on the New York Timesarticle by someone called "inwholise" sums up the unromantic view: "Two hundred years from your death no one, I repeat no one, will care what happens to your body. Can you imagine a great, great, great granddaughter deciding to either pay the rent for three great grandpas' frozen remains or the utility bill . . . not gonna happen . . . and let's be honest you're already dead. PS Bury the head too, no one will want it."
Now there’s a woman talking.
Had a relaxing holiday?
If you’re a manager maybe not. I see on management-issues.com that four out of 10 UK managers return to work more anxious than they were before their break. That’s according to a survey of 2,500 managers by the Institute of Leadership and Management.
At least one third of managers work while on leave, sometimes motivated by worries about their job security or just because of the seductive ease of checking e-mails on your smartphone.
The biggest stressor, it seems, is the deluge of e-mail awaiting managers on their return.
In the report, journalist Brian Amble suggests strategies for reducing holiday stress. They include coming home a couple of days before your return to work to “ease” you back into the rat race; planning your next holiday as soon as you return; and bringing something back from your holiday and keeping it on your desk.
I dunno. I think “hostile spouse phenomenon” might be far better than any of these strategies for keeping you off the Blackberry and forcing you to relax.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Livingis published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free by e-mail.