What on earth is a lens cap and how can a lens cap teach someone a lesson about wilful blindness? And what is ‘wilful blindness’? Welcome to this Deep Dive, which I confess is really rather left field. When I wrote the free episode about the discovery of the lost camcorder it was originally my intention to focus the Deep Dive on the nuances of the phrasal verbs in the transcript. But, the more I thought about the home videos and the effect they had on me, the more I realised that I just had to write something about a lens cap. In case you didn’t know, a lens cap is a small circular piece of plastic that clips snugly over the lens of single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras or camcorders and protects the lens from damage caused by scratches or dents. The lens is the circular glass optical device that focuses or disperses light beams through refraction; in other words it is the eye of the camera. You don’t see lens caps much these days because not many people use conventional still cameras and virtually nobody uses camcorders any more. The free podcast episode focuses on how the footage of eight years, from 2004 to 2012, taught me two powerful lessons: firstly, that precious moments are potentially around every corner and, secondly, that the duties that seem important in the moment, and that might prevent you from accessing and enjoying those precious moments, rarely turn out to matter in the grand scheme of things. By the way, the set phrase ‘in the grand scheme of things’ means ‘in the very long run’, ‘when all is said and done’ or ‘at the end of the day’. I particularly love the phrase ‘in the grand scheme of things’ because it’s quite eloquent and communicates the idea of life being part of a grand scheme or great plan which comprises all the little actions that people take in their everyday lives. I explained in the episode about the lost camcorder footage that my parents were often not great at getting around to doing certain things that involved friction or discomfort. There was something about the way they did life that affected their motivation to face, and deal with, technical tasks. If there was a certain amount of friction involved in solving a technical issue, they simply left it unsolved. I thought an awful lot about that when I was converting the home videos to MP4 files, because Dad’s choice not to confront that friction or convert those videos to watchable files himself meant that, if I hadn’t found the camera and done it myself, they would never ever have seen those precious memories. Curiously, this problem that my parents had with facing technical issues was also immortalised in the home videos themselves, namely in my mother’s inability to operate the camcorder properly. To be more specific, on many occasions when my mother had the camera in her hand, the footage began with a black screen and a perturbed voice saying, ‘Why is everything dark? What’s wrong with this camera?’, only for someone else to point out that the screen was dark because the lens cap had not been removed before Mum had pressed the record button. Now, this was amusing the first few times that I saw it, but it happened so many times in so many videos that I found myself becoming more than a little irked. What’s more, this was not the only technical hurdle that my mum faced. Almost without exception, the videos she shot were marred or partially ruined because she accidentally zoomed in on a target, without knowing what she’d done, and then complained bitterly that there was some problem with the camera because everything was ‘too big’, ‘too blurry’ and ‘out of focus’. Her frustration with herself was evident in the running commentary she gave while filming, and she seemed to think that the camera had some kind of personal vendetta against her. You may recall that, in order to convert those home videos to files, I had to play them in real time, so I saw my mother hit the same technical hurdles again and again over the course of eight years. While I watched footage in which my mother was expressing intense frustration about the camera, I often asked myself, ‘Why didn’t she just stop recording and ask one of us what the problem was and how to solve it?’ We could have told her instantly that if she followed a simple, repeatable procedure when switching the camera on, she could have avoided filming several hours of unwatchable material. And if she had been even remotely interested in filming correctly and creating footage that was worth saving, she could have written down short instructions to herself on a piece of paper that could easily have been stored in the bag with the camcorder. These instructions could have been as simple as: (1) Remove the lens cap before filming. The lens cap is the grey plastic disc that covers the lens, (2) If the images look too big and blurry, the image is zoomed in too far. Zoom out by pushing the zoom lever to the left. The zoom lever is the grey lever on top of the camera. This checklist could have been written in less than a minute, and Mum could have read it in fewer than ten seconds every time she was about to start filming. But she didn’t ask us for help or reminders and didn’t write anything down, and therefore didn’t learn anything about how to solve the problems. Believe me, after watching nearly twenty hours of footage playing back in real time, I was so frustrated with my mum’s apparent helplessness and inability to learn the basic functions of the camcorder that I could barely contain my irritation. On more than one occasion, I found myself yelling at the screen, ‘Yes, it’s dark because the lens cap is on. Take it off!’ She fell into the same hole again and again without learning anything at all about the camcorder, and the consequence of this was that a fair chunk of the footage was unusable. At this point, you may be thinking, ‘Come on, Jason, give your parents a break.’ I agree. I am being overly harsh. But there is a reason for it. Watching my mother make the same technical mistakes again and again without learning triggered a kind of epiphany within me. Yes, I was angry and frustrated that she seemed not to care, but really, I was angry with myself for not learning similarly basic and easy things that would save me a huge amount of time in my own daily life if only I could be bothered to learn them. Watching my mother struggle only reminded me of my own issues with technical obstacles; in other words, I have exactly the same problem as my mother but in different areas, to which I choose to be blind. I’m very interested in metacognition, which, in broad terms, means ‘thinking about thinking’. These days, whenever I feel intense emotion about something, I automatically stop mentally and think, ‘What emotions am I feeling and why? What is at the root of this feeling?’ This is now my standard modus operandi in life, and I must say that it has paid immense dividends. Allow me to explain how metacognition helped me understand the emotions I had about the lens cap and zoom function: (1) I watched my mother struggle with apparent helplessness in dealing with a very simple technical problem. (2) I felt irritated and frustrated because her inability or unwillingness to solve the problem had consequences, in the undeniable fact that a lot of potentially good footage was ruined. (3) The root of this feeling was, in fact, discomfort: I felt profoundly uncomfortable because, watching my mother struggle with something that was easy to solve, inevitably made me think about areas in my life where I struggle with things that other people would probably consider easy to solve. (4) I struggle with those problems for exactly the same reason that my mother struggles with the camcorder: whether through laziness or a desire to protect my threatened ego, I simply can’t be bothered to dedicate any time or energy to solving them. And there it is. I am very able to identify the areas where other people have weaknesses in solving problems or completing tasks, but not so able or willing to identify those areas in my own life. I’m too lazy or incapable to face the friction of dealing with them, even if not doing so has real and negative consequences for me. Why don’t I turn that critical eye back on myself and identify the areas where others may think I’m lazy or incapable? In order to redress the balance and demonstrate that I am willing to turn that critical eye back on myself, I would like to specify a couple of areas in my life where problems could be solved very easily and quickly but, for reasons which I will explain later, I choose not to think about them, so I simply live with the consequences. First, until this year, I have never bothered to complete my online tax return until the last possible deadline. Is it difficult to complete an online tax return? No. Are the technical barriers to completing a tax return insurmountable? Also, no. However, the fact that I chose, year after year, not to bother doing my tax return until the eleventh hour meant that I wound up paying far more tax than I needed to. Effectively, my procrastination was giving the tax authorities (known as HMRC, or His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) a free cash loan for a calendar year. But it’s not just about finances. Last year, I started doing some basic decorating in our family home. Part of that decorating involved replacing the door handles on all the internal doors. I replaced about half of the handles in the house and then gave up with the project. Now, the door to my office, the door to the bathroom and the door to my bedroom are without handles. That’s right: for at least the last year, there have been no handles on any of these doors. The lesson that I learned from watching my mother choose to struggle with the lens cap and the zoom function turned out to be a lesson on what I call ‘wilful blindness’. It
