The Conditioned Mind

The power failed before dawn on a Tuesday in April, while Typhoon Sinlaku passed slowly to our north.¹ It did not return until Friday afternoon, 3.5 days in which our apartment slowly became the temperature of the air outside. The building's generator ran the lights and the refrigerator but not the air conditioning. By the second night the bedsheets had turned into a warm damp adhesive; by morning I was a poorer version of myself, in no condition for anything requiring strength or thought.

My alarm goes off at 10:30 every morning, 6 days a week, to remind me to exercise. That week it went off and I silenced it, and silenced it again the next morning, and the next. I had not abandoned the discipline so much as lost the capacity for it. The sleepless nights led to poor food choices, the poor food to less energy, until exercise became unthinkable. The damage outlasted the outage: I did not exercise for over a week, not because the generator was down but because the ratchet had already turned.

That ratchet was familiar. For much of my career as a software engineer, I worked in an industry that rewards good work with more work. It took me too long to learn that a bad decision made at two in the morning, exhausted, could undo a week of clean work, far more than the late night ever saved. Decisions, good and bad, do not sit still; they compound. (I have written about this elsewhere, in "Amplified," at sk102.co.) Once I understood it, rest stopped looking like laziness. It was maintenance, the care of the mind everything else depended on. Years later, building an R&D organization from scratch, I wrote the lesson into it: a 4-day week, fully remote, because every decision, even a small one, deserves a mind operating at its best. The 10:30 alarm is the same principle, scaled to a single household, and none of my reasons for ignoring it outweighs what I owe my family: a mind that thinks clearly, for as long as I can keep it.

We were lucky. By the standard of the Northern Marianas, where parts of Saipan and Tinian went dark for weeks,² our discomfort was a footnote. But I could not stop thinking about what the heat had done to me, and was doing, all the time, to thousands of households across the island.

In 2018 a Harvard study in PLOS Medicine found that students in un-air-conditioned dorms in a Boston heat wave had reaction times 13.4 percent slower and arithmetic scores 13.3 percent lower than peers in cooled buildings; the worst gaps appeared in the days after the heat broke, before the buildings caught up.³ A larger study in the American Economic Journal in 2020 tracked PSAT scores from roughly 10 million American students: every additional degree Fahrenheit in a school year's average temperature cut learning by about 1 percent, and air conditioning all but erased the effect.⁴ Both describe mainland conditions, where heat is seasonal. Guam has 12 months of it. Lee Kuan Yew, asked to name the most influential invention of the millennium, chose the air conditioner: the thing, he said, that made development possible in the tropics.⁵

Residential power runs roughly 38 to 40 cents per kilowatt-hour, more than twice the national average.⁶ Some of that has structural causes the utility cannot fix alone: the Jones Act, typhoon-hardened infrastructure, a customer base too small for mainland economies. But the cost is real, and so is what it does to those paying it.

That price is about to climb. In late May, the Consolidated Commission on Utilities let GPA petition to raise the fuel surcharge (the largest share of every bill) from about 13.6 cents per kilowatt-hour to roughly 19.4, from July through January. For a household using 1,000 kilowatt-hours a month, that is about 58 dollars more, through the hottest half of the year.⁷ The cause is not waste but the rising cost of fuel shipments: Guam buys its fuel from Asia, whose crude passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which GPA says the war involving Iran has closed.⁷ Full recovery would have meant a steeper surcharge still, about 23 cents, or 95 dollars a month; instead, GPA borrowed against part of the gap to spread the burden.⁸ A humane decision, and a measure of how exposed the island is: a strait closes on the far side of the world, and a family in Yigo weighs whether it can afford to sleep cool. The grid is unreliable as well as expensive: after Sinlaku, 95 percent of customers were restored only by April 22.⁹

What the studies measured in dormitories and classrooms is, on Guam, a standing household condition. A family that cannot cool the room where its children sleep wakes less sharp, and the day's small decisions (about money, patience, what to eat and what to skip) are shaped by that depletion. The monthly bill then tightens the next month's calculation: a little less cooling, a little less sleep, a little worse the next day. That is the downward ratchet. And a flat rate increase is not felt flatly. The 6 cents a comfortable household never notices is, for a family already choosing between cooling and groceries, the thing that settles the question. The same American Economic Journal study found the pattern: the least air-conditioned schools were the ones serving the poorest children, and the heat widened the gap between them and everyone else.⁴ Affordability is not a side issue to the cognitive one; it is how that cost gets distributed, and it lands hardest on the households with the least room to carry it.

There is a way out, and it is already the cheaper one. A utility-scale solar farm in Mangilao sells power to GPA at about 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour under a 25-year contract that rises only 1 percent a year.¹⁰ That number does not move when a tanker is turned back at Hormuz: a fixed price in a world of volatile ones, the closest thing a ratepayer has to a hedge against the shock now landing on every bill. Sunlight is not shipped through a contested strait. Nationally, solar and onshore wind have been the cheapest new generation for a decade, and solar with storage now undercuts the fuel-burning plants it replaces.¹¹ For an island that burns imported oil rather than cheap mainland gas, the case is only stronger: every kilowatt-hour drawn from the sun is one insulated from a distant war.

Guam knows this. GPA has committed to 50 percent renewable generation by 2030 and 100 percent by 2040, ahead of the law; the Ukudu plant came online on Christmas Day 2025; some 330 megawatts of solar-plus-storage sit in procurement.¹² The commitments are real; the question the rate hike forces is speed. Every year the buildout slips is another the island pays the fuel price in full, on its bills and in the clarity those bills quietly tax. Nor must all of it wait for the big build: after Hurricane Maria, a microgrid in the Puerto Rican village of Castañer carried its clinic through Hurricane Fiona while the rest of the island went dark.¹³ Guam's southern villages could have the same, ready for the next typhoon.

The case for affordable, reliable power is usually made in the language of comfort or convenience. It understates what is at stake, and for whom. For a tropical island whose people must think clearly to earn their way forward, steady power and the cooling it buys are not luxuries but necessities, as fundamental as clean water and as consequential as education. Keeping power within reach of every home on the island is not charity. It is the precondition for the island Guam says it wants to be.

There is a dignity in this work that the people who do it may not always feel. The lineman restoring a downed feeder in the rain, the engineer drafting the next plant, the planner weighing a solar bid, the commissioner who has to approve a painful rate: their work is usually counted in kilowatts and capacity factors and cost recovery. Measured honestly, it is something larger. To keep a room cool on this island is to protect the clarity of the mind inside it, and the decisions it will make that day and the next, compounding across a family and a lifetime. The people who deliver Guam's power are not only keeping the lights on. They are, in the most literal way, helping their neighbors think.

That is a thing to take pride in, and a reason to hurry. Every month that affordable, steady power stays out of some household's reach is a month that household decides a little worse than it might have. The obligation is not abstract, and it is not someone else's: it rests with everyone whose hand is on the system, and it is owed to everyone on the island, beginning where the wait has been longest. To put affordable energy within everyone's reach, as quickly as it can be done, is among the highest forms of public service the island has to ask of anyone.

The 10:30 alarm will go off tomorrow. Excuses will iterate through my thoughts. I will change into my gym clothes anyway, because my family deserves the best version of me I can manage, and because the island deserves the same, at a scale I alone cannot build. What gets built in the next decade—the plants, the panels, the batteries, the small grids in the villages that have waited longest—will decide how clearly the next generation here gets to think.