Group items tagged

We’re happiest when our ties with others are deep and strong. And the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex.

So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain

married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married

As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.

Faith was the second factor. Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all

The share of young adults who attend religious services more than monthly has fallen from 38 percent in 1972 to 27 percent in 2018, even as the share who never attend has risen rapidly.

The third factor was friendship. The effect of seeing friends frequently is less clear than that of marriage or religion, but young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers.

Indeed, it may be that rising social time spent with friends in recent years could be buffering young adults from the declines in institutions such as marriage or religion, as friends stand in place of other relationships or forms of community.*

And, finally, we looked at sex. Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex.

This trend in rising sexlessness is broadly confirmed in other surveys of sexual behavior,

Less sex, we speculate, could help account for declining happiness for many young adults.

What’s more, as the #MeToo era has taught us, there has been too much unwanted or nonconsensual sex out there, which is obviously bad for the (more often female) target of such advances. From this perspective, the so-called sex recession might just amount to a sexual recalibration, with a lot of bad sex being eliminated from our social lives—and this would be a good thing. For all these reasons, the feminist family historian Stephanie Coontz is “suspicious of any hand-wringing” about the sex recession.

Astute investors like Jorge Paulo Lemann, of 3G Capital, specialise in buying public companies and running them like private ones, with lean staffing and a focus on the long term.

But the most interesting alternative to public companies is a new breed of high-potential startups

The central difference lies in ownership: whereas nobody is sure who owns public companies, startups go to great lengths to define who owns what.

New companies also exploit new technology, which enables them to go global without being big themselves.

They can incorporate online for a few hundred dollars, raise money from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, hire programmers from Upwork, rent computer-processing power from Amazon, find manufacturers on Alibaba, arrange payments systems at Square, and immediately set about conquering the world.

They need time to daydream, deal with anxieties, process their thoughts and share them with parents, who can provide reassurance.

Texting looms as the next national epidemic, with half of teenagers sending 50 or more text messages a day and those aged 13 through 17 averaging 3,364 texts a month, Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Research Center found in a 2012 study

the cognitive challenges and attention problems that result from overuse of digital technology.

Almost all respondents (95 per cent) owned at least two digital devices

bio-behavioural sciences

Respondents who spent more than six hours daily on their digital devices were more likely to report experiencing forgetfulness in the past month compared to those who spent fewer hours

the survey for first time shows this connection between overuse or higher use of digital devices and more complaints of memory disturbances in Hongkongers

"digital immigrants"

In his 2008 book iBrain, Small talks about "digital natives"

The survey also found poor dietary and exercise habits among the respondents

The term digital dementia was coined a few years ago in South Korea, after doctors reported seeing young patients with memory and cognitive problems, conditions that were more commonly linked to brain injuries.

Samsung Medical Centre in Seoul, South Korea: "As people are more dependent on digital devices for searching information than memorising, the brain function for searching improves whereas an ability to remember decreases

Dr Manfred Spitzer, a German neuroscientist and author of the 2012 book Digital Dementia: What We and Our Children are Doing to our Minds,

warns that children who spend too much time on electronic devices could experience irreversible deficits in brain development.

multitasking teens

The devices are not all bad," he says. "It's really about content, context and dose

balance the online time with offline time