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Javier E

Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671246

writing cursive trends language technology education social media

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes.
  • Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.
  • the decline in cursive seems inevitable. Writing is, after all, a technology, and most technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced.
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  • As Tamara Plakins Thornton demonstrates in her book Handwriting in America, it has always been affected by changing social and cultural forces. In 18th-century America, writing was the domain of the privileged.
  • By law or custom, the enslaved were prohibited from literacy almost everywhere
  • The notion of a signature as a unique representation of a particular individual gradually came to be enshrined in the law and accepted as legitimate legal evidence.
  • Writing, though, was much less widespread—taught separately and sparingly in colonial America, most often to men of status and responsibility and to women of the upper classes. Men and women even learned different scripts—an ornamental hand for ladies, and an unadorned, more functional form for the male world of power and commerce.
  • increase in the number of women able to write. By 1860, more than 90 percent of the white population in America could both read and write.
  • Penmanship came to be seen as a marker and expression of the self—of gender and class, to be sure, but also of deeper elements of character and soul.
  • n New England, nearly all men and women could read; in the South, which had not developed an equivalent system of common schools, a far lower percentage of even the white population could do so
  • No, most of these history students admitted, they could not read manuscripts. If they were assigned a research paper, they sought subjects that relied only on published sources.
  • Didn’t professors make handwritten comments on their papers and exams? Many of the students found these illegible. Sometimes they would ask a teacher to decipher the comments; more often they just ignored them.
  • I wondered how many of my colleagues have been dutifully offering handwritten observations without any clue that they would never be read.
  • I asked the students if they made grocery lists, kept journals, or wrote thank-you or condolence letters. Almost all said yes. Almost all said they did so on laptops and phones or sometimes on paper in block letters
  • “There is something charming about receiving a handwritten note,” one student acknowledged. Did he mean charming like an antique curiosity? Charming in the sense of magical in its capacity to create physical connections between human minds? Charming as in establishing an aura of the original, the unique, and the authentic? Perhaps all of these
  • there are dangers in cursive’s loss. Students will miss the excitement and inspiration that I have seen them experience as they interact with the physical embodiment of thoughts and ideas voiced by a person long since silenced by death. Handwriting can make the past seem almost alive in the present.
  • All of us, not just students and scholars, will be affected by cursive’s loss. The inability to read handwriting deprives society of direct access to its own past. We will become reliant on a small group of trained translators and experts to report what history—including the documents and papers of our own families—was about.
  • The spread of literacy in the early modern West was driven by people’s desire to read God’s word for themselves, to be empowered by an experience of unmediated connection. The abandonment of cursive represents a curious reverse parallel: We are losing a connection, and thereby disempowering ourselves.
Javier E

Opinion | Do I Have to Floss My Teeth? The Science Is Inconclusive - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...th-flossing-cold-medicine.html

science knowledge certainty

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • the more I learn about science, the more I discover basic mysteries that I assumed were solved long ago. Perhaps we’ve exited the Dark Ages, but our own age still seems rather dim.
  • How do you make sense of a world where the scientific sands are always shifting and where so much remains unknown? It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve made my peace with it by learning to hold everything loosely, to remain ever humble about what we do know and ever optimistic about what we will.
  • What sustains me now is neither certainty nor hopelessness, but a determined, humble optimism. The right answers are often simply unknown, and I might die without getting to know the truth
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  • It was hard to get there, because I had to learn over and over again that extreme conviction requires extraordinary evidence, and the evidence we have is usually far from extraordinary.
  • Just as we solved many of the mysteries that befuddled our ancestors, our descendants will solve many of the mysteries that befuddle us. Our ignorance is profound, forgivable and temporary. There are only two true errors: One is believing that we have no errors left to make, and the other is believing that those errors are permanent and irreversible.
  • It’s hard to maintain this attitude when you realize just how much we have left to figure out. And we often have to cultivate this attitude for ourselves, because our educators and experts often fail to give it to us.
  • Experts, for their part, are perfectly comfortable issuing blanket recommendations with scant evidence and then shaming people for not following them.
  • Our teachers and officials may think the public simply can’t handle uncertainty, and maybe that’s why they project so much confidence, even when the science is faulty. But the best way to cultivate informed citizens is to give them the evidence that we have, not the evidence we wish we had.
Javier E

Heather Cox Richardson Wants You to Study History - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-heather-cox-richardson.html

richardson study history why historiography research education

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • “Anybody who studies history learns two things: They learn to do research and they learn to write,” Richardson said. “The reason that matters now is that most people who are in college now are going to end up switching jobs a number of times in their careers.”
  • What history will give you is the ability to pivot into the different ideas, the different fields, the different careers as they arise.”
  • A historian will also know how to metabolize confounding situations, distill them to their essence and communicate that information to others
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  • “It makes sense to recognize that these skills provide a tool kit for moving into the future in a way that I’m not entirely sure we always recognize.”
patricajohnson51

Tackling the Challenges of Network Administration: A Comprehensive Guide - 7 views

Thanks for the insights! Very informative post on tackling network administration challenges. I definitely needed this for my college assignments.

#writemynetworkadministrationassignment #networkadministration #collegeassignments #students technology research social media education

started by karenmcgregor on 16 Nov 23 1 follow-up, last by patricajohnson51 on 06 Dec 23
Javier E

'I Am Sorry': Harvard President Gay Addresses Backlash Over Congressional Testimony on ... - 0 views

www.thecrimson.com/...-apology-congressional-remarks

harvard president anti-Semitism congressional testimony truth language education

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • “I am sorry,” Gay said in an interview with The Crimson on Thursday. “Words matter.”“When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” Gay added.
  • But Stefanik pressed Gay to give a yes or no answer to the question about whether calls for the genocide of Jews constitute a violation of Harvard’s policies.“Antisemitic speech when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action,” Gay said.
  • “Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth,” Gay added
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  • “I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay said in the interview. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
Javier E

Stop Trying to Have an Impact - Take Inspired Action Instead | by JB Hollows | Oct, 202... - 0 views

betterhumans.pub/ed-action-instead-6f60a4d46722

response climate change psychology

shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • When asked why I do this work, why I put in the hours for often little financial return, and why I spend thousands on my development, the answer is often, “To make the world a better place.”
  • I’ve been a changemaker for over ten years. I’ve coached and mentored hundreds of people. I’ve run wellness workshops in prisons and businesses
  • Very honourable, you may think. But what does it really mean?
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  • I dug deeper into what lies beneath these grand ideas. What’s the one thing each of us could do that would lead to potential world change?
  • There’s an old African proverb: “Each One Teach One”. The phrase originated in the United States when Africans were enslaved and denied education. When someone learned how to read or write, it became their responsibility to teach someone else.
Javier E

How Climate Change Is Changing Therapy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-anxiety-therapy.html

climate change therapy mental health adaptation role psychology

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”
  • That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption
  • “We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”
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  • starting in the mid-2010s, those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers, though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting longer.
  • Sometimes there were weeks when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside. Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to breathe the outside air at all.
  • Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.
  • As a therapist, Bryant found himself unsure how to respond
  • while his clinical education offered lots of training in, say, substance abuse or family therapy, there was nothing about environmental crisis, or how to treat patients whose mental health was affected by it
  • Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists
  • could now turn to resources like the list maintained by the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which contains more than 100 psychotherapists around the country who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”
  • Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment.
  • “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”
  • In many of the messages, people asked Bryant for referrals to climate-focused therapists in Houston or Canada or Taiwan, wherever it was the writer lived.
  • his practice had shifted to reflect a new reality of climate psychology. His clients didn’t just bring up the changing climate incidentally, or during disconcerting local reminders; rather, many were activists or scientists or people who specifically sought out Bryant because of their concerns about the climate crisis.
  • Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.”
  • It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful
  • But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth
  • Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
  • In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes
  • All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”
  • Many of these predictions have since been borne out
  • Studies have found rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
  • Climate-driven migration is on the rise, and so are stories of xenophobia and community mistrust.
  • eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.
  • Many say it has led to symptoms of depression or anxiety; more than a quarter make an active effort not to think about it.
  • A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in the same year found that nearly half of Americans think climate change is already harming the nation’s mental health.
  • In June, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’” in which “difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself,” but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.
  • According to a 2022 survey by Yale and George Mason University, a majority of Americans report that they spend time worrying about climate change.
  • This is not an easy way to live.
  • Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful: “a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate” — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.
  • When Barbara Easterlin first started studying environmental psychology 30 years ago, she told me, the focus of study was on ways in which cultivating a relationship with nature can be good for mental health
  • There was little or no attention to the fact that living through, or helping to cause, a collapse of nature can also be mentally harmful.
  • the field is still so new that it does not yet have evidence-tested treatments or standards of practice. Therapists sometimes feel as if they are finding the path as they go.
  • Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing
  • climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.
  • One of the emerging tenets of climate psychology is that counselors should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as reasonable, not pathological
  • it does mean validating that feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness, but, as Weston put it, “are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people
  • In the words of a handbook on climate psychology, “Paying heed to what is happening in our communities and across the globe is a healthier response than turning away in denial or disavowal.”
  • But this, too, raises difficult questions. “How much do we normalize people to the system we’re in?” Weston asked. “And is that the definition of health?
  • Or is the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”
  • “It seems to shift all the time, the sort of content and material that people are bringing in,” Alexandra Woollacott, a psychotherapist in Seattle, told the group. Sometimes it was a pervasive anxiety about the future, or trauma responses to fires or smoke or heat; other times, clients, especially young ones, wanted to vent their “sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal” at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.
  • “I’m so glad that we have each other to process this,” she said, “because we’re humans living through this, too. I have my own trauma responses to it, I have my own grief process around it, I have my own fury at government and oil companies, and I think I don’t want to burden my clients with my own emotional response to it.”
  • In a field that has long emphasized boundaries, discouraging therapists from bringing their own issues or experiences into the therapy room, climate therapy offers a particular challenge: Separation can be harder when the problems at hand affect therapist and client alike
  • Some therapists I spoke to were worried about navigating the breakdown of barriers, while others had embraced it. “There is no place on the planet that won’t eventually be impacted, where client and therapist won’t be in it together,” a family therapist wrote in a CPA-NA newsletter. “Most therapists I know have become more vulnerable and self-disclosing in their practice.”
  • “If you look at or consider typical theoretical framings of something like post-traumatic growth, which is the understanding of this idea that people can sort of grow and become stronger and better after a traumatic event,” she said, then the climate crisis poses a dilemma because “there is no afterwards, right? There is no resolution anytime in our lifetimes to this crisis that we nonetheless have to build the capacities to face and to endure and to hopefully engage.”
  • “How,” she asked, “do you think about resilience apart from resolution?”
  • many of her patients are also disconnected from the natural world, which means that they struggle to process or even recognize the grief and alienation that comes from living in a society that treats nature as other, a resource to be used and discarded.
  • “I’m so excited by what you’re bringing in,” Woollacott replied. “I’m doing psychoanalytic training at the moment, and we study attachment theory” — how the stability of early emotional bonds affects future relationships and feelings of well-being. “But nowhere in the literature does it talk about our attachment to the land.”
  • Torres said that she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves “as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.” It was valuable to recognize, she said, that “we are part of the land” and suffer when it suffers.
  • Torres described introducing her clients to methods — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation — to help them manage acute feelings of stress or panic and to avoid the brittleness of burnout.
  • She also encourages them to narrativize the problem, including themselves as agents of change inside stories about how they came to be in this situation, and how they might make it different.
  • then she encourages them to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. As Woollacott said earlier: “People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away.”
  • Dwyer told the group that she had been thinking more about psychological adaptation as a form of climate mitigation
  • Therapy, she said, could be a way to steward human energy and creative capacities at a time when they’re most needed.
  • It was hard, Bryant told me when we first spoke, to do this sort of work without finding yourself asking bigger questions — namely, what was therapy actually about?
  • Many of the therapists I talked to spoke of their role not as “fixing” a patient’s problem or responding to a pathology, but simply giving their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them
  • many of the methods in their traditional tool kits continue to be useful in climate psychology. Anxiety and hopelessness and anger are all familiar territory, after all, with long histories of well-studied treatments.
  • They focused on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.
  • Weston, the therapist in New York, has had patients who struggle to be in a world that surrounds them with waste and trash, who experience panic because they can never find a place free of reminders of their society’s destruction
  • eston said, that she has trouble with the repeated refrain that therapist and patient experiencing the same losses and dreads at the same time constituted a major departure from traditional therapeutic practice
  • she believed this framing reflected and reinforced a bias inherent in a field that has long been most accessible to, and practiced by, the privileged. It was hardly new in the world, after all, to face the collapse of your entire way of life and still find ways to keep going.
  • Lately, Bryant told me, he’s been most excited about the work that happens outside the therapy room: places where groups of people gather to talk about their feelings and the future they’re facing
  • It was at such a meeting — a community event where people were brainstorming ways to adapt to climate chaos — that Weston, realizing she had concrete skills to offer, was inspired to rework her practice to focus on the challenge. She remembers finding the gathering empowering and energizing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. In such settings, it was automatic that people would feel embraced instead of isolated, natural that the conversation would start moving away from the individual and toward collective experiences and ideas.
  • There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.
Javier E

Opinion | How to be Human - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-skills-connection.html

listening conversation morality illuminator wisdom witness curiosity respect question company attention social skills community education psychology

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills
  • The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
  • People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance
  • ...68 more annotations...
  • we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave
  • Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.
  • If I can shine positive attention on others, I can help them to blossom. If I see potential in others, they may come to see potential in themselves. True understanding is one of the most generous gifts any of us can give to another.
  • I see the results, too, in the epidemic of invisibility I encounter as a journalist. I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel unseen and disrespected
  • I’ve been working on a book called “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” I wanted it to be a practical book — so that I would learn these skills myself, and also, I hope, teach people how to understand others, how to make them feel respected, valued and understood.
  • I wanted to learn these skills for utilitarian reasons
  • If I’m going to work with someone, I don’t just want to see his superficial technical abilities. I want to understand him more deeply — to know whether he is calm in a crisis, comfortable with uncertainty or generous to colleagues.
  • I wanted to learn these skills for moral reasons
  • Many of the most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Nyquist really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, brought out the best in them. Nyquist, too, was an illuminator.
  • Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival
  • We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.
  • In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers are so into themselves, they make others feel insignificant
  • They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.
  • Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people.
  • hey have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times — so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.
  • A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.
  • social clumsiness I encounter too frequently. I’ll be leaving a party or some gathering and I’ll realize: That whole time, nobody asked me a single question. I estimate that only 30 percent of the people in the world are good question askers. The rest are nice people, but they just don’t ask. I think it’s because they haven’t been taught to and so don’t display basic curiosity about others.
  • Many years ago, patent lawyers at Bell Labs were trying to figure out why some employees were much more productive than others.
  • Illuminators are a joy to be around
  • The gift of attention.
  • Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world. A person who radiates warmth will bring out the glowing sides of the people he meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.”
  • When Jimmy sees a person — any person — he is seeing a creature with infinite value and dignity, made in the image of God. He is seeing someone so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person.
  • Accompaniment.
  • Accompaniment is an other-centered way of being with people during the normal routines of life.
  • If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being
  • I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” These are the sorts of people who are just great company, who turn conversation into a form of play and encourage you to be yourself. It’s a great talent, to be lingerable.
  • Other times, a good accompanist does nothing more than practice the art of presence, just being there.
  • The art of conversation.
  • If you tell me something important and then I paraphrase it back to you, what psychologists call “looping,” we can correct any misimpressions that may exist between us.
  • Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories.
  • He’s continually responding to my comments with encouraging affirmations, with “amen,” “aha” and “yes!” I love talking to that guy.
  • I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values.
  • Storify whenever possible
  • People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories.
  • Do the looping, especially with adolescents
  • If you want to know how the people around you see the world, you have to ask them. Here are a few tips I’ve collected from experts on how to become a better conversationalist:
  • Turn your partner into a narrator
  • People don’t go into enough detail when they tell you a story. If you ask specific follow-up questions — Was your boss screaming or irritated when she said that to you? What was her tone of voice? — then they will revisit the moment in a more concrete way and tell a richer story
  • If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say: “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own Susan.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.
  • Don’t be a topper
  • Big questions.
  • The quality of your conversations will depend on the quality of your questions
  • As adults, we get more inhibited with our questions, if we even ask them at all. I’ve learned we’re generally too cautious. People are dying to tell you their stories. Very often, no one has ever asked about them.
  • So when I first meet people, I tend to ask them where they grew up. People are at their best when talking about their childhoods. Or I ask where they got their names. That gets them talking about their families and ethnic backgrounds.
  • After you’ve established trust with a person, it’s great to ask 30,000-foot questions, ones that lift people out of their daily vantage points and help them see themselves from above.
  • These are questions like: What crossroads are you at? Most people are in the middle of some life transition; this question encourages them to step back and describe theirs
  • I’ve learned it’s best to resist this temptation. My first job in any conversation across difference or inequality is to stand in other people’s standpoint and fully understand how the world looks to them. I’ve found it’s best to ask other people three separate times and in three different ways about what they have just said. “I want to understand as much as possible. What am I missing here?”
  • Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Or: If you died today, what would you regret not doing?
  • “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?
  • “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?”
  • “What is the gift you currently hold in exile?,” meaning, what talent are you not using
  • “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who ran for school board? She wants to understand why a person felt the call of responsibility. She wants to understand motivation.
  • “How do your ancestors show up in your life?” But it led to a great conversation in which each of us talked about how we’d been formed by our family heritages and cultures. I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you’re asking good questions, you’re adopting a posture of humility, and you’re honoring the other person.
  • Stand in their standpoint
  • I used to feel the temptation to get defensive, to say: “You don’t know everything I’m dealing with. You don’t know that I’m one of the good guys here.”
  • If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is the chapter about?
  • every conversation takes place on two levels
  • The official conversation is represented by the words we are saying on whatever topic we are talking about. The actual conversations occur amid the ebb and flow of emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment I am showing you respect or disrespect, making you feel a little safer or a little more threatened.
  • If we let fear and a sense of threat build our conversation, then very quickly our motivations will deteriorate
  • If, on the other hand, I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect. And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.
  • the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute.
  • I used to think the wise person was a lofty sage who doled out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda or Dumbledore or Solomon. But now I think the wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity.
  • The illuminators offer the privilege of witness. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations and episodes we tell and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life — intimacy versus independence, control versus freedom — and understand that our current selves are just where we are right now on our long continuum of growth.
  • The really good confidants — the people we go to when we are troubled — are more like coaches than philosopher kings.
  • They take in your story, accept it, but prod you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale.
  • They’re not here to fix you; they are here simply to help you edit your story so that it’s more honest and accurate. They’re here to call you by name, as beloved
  • They see who you are becoming before you do and provide you with a reputation you can then go live into.
  • there has been a comprehensive shift in my posture. I think I’m more approachable, vulnerable. I know more about human psychology than I used to. I have a long way to go, but I’m evidence that people can change, sometimes dramatically, even in middle and older age.
Javier E

His Job Was to Make Instagram Safe for Teens. His 14-Year-Old Showed Him What the App W... - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ens-harassment-safety-5d991be1

social media bias technology psychology meta facebook instagram

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days.
  • For Bejar, that finding was hardly a surprise. His daughter and her friends had been receiving unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment on the platform since the age of 14, he wrote, and Meta’s systems generally ignored their reports—or responded by saying that the harassment didn’t violate platform rules.
  • “I asked her why boys keep doing that,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants. “She said if the only thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?”
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • For the well-being of its users, Bejar argued, Meta needed to change course, focusing less on a flawed system of rules-based policing and more on addressing such bad experiences
  • The company would need to collect data on what upset users and then work to combat the source of it, nudging those who made others uncomfortable to improve their behavior and isolating communities of users who deliberately sought to harm others.
  • “I am appealing to you because I believe that working this way will require a culture shift,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg—the company would have to acknowledge that its existing approach to governing Facebook and Instagram wasn’t working.
  • During and after Bejar’s time as a consultant, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, the company has rolled out several product features meant to address some of the Well-Being Team’s findings. Those features include warnings to users before they post comments that Meta’s automated systems flag as potentially offensive, and reminders to be kind when sending direct messages to users like content creators who receive a large volume of messages. 
  • Meta’s classifiers were reliable enough to remove only a low single-digit percentage of hate speech with any degree of precision.
  • Bejar was floored—all the more so when he learned that virtually all of his daughter’s friends had been subjected to similar harassment. “DTF?” a user they’d never met would ask, using shorthand for a vulgar proposition. Instagram acted so rarely on reports of such behavior that the girls no longer bothered reporting them. 
  • Meta’s own statistics suggested that big problems didn’t exist. 
  • Meta had come to approach governing user behavior as an overwhelmingly automated process. Engineers would compile data sets of unacceptable content—things like terrorism, pornography, bullying or “excessive gore”—and then train machine-learning models to screen future content for similar material.
  • While users could still flag things that upset them, Meta shifted resources away from reviewing them. To discourage users from filing reports, internal documents from 2019 show, Meta added steps to the reporting process. Meta said the changes were meant to discourage frivolous reports and educate users about platform rules. 
  • The outperformance of Meta’s automated enforcement relied on what Bejar considered two sleights of hand. The systems didn’t catch anywhere near the majority of banned content—only the majority of what the company ultimately removed
  • “Please don’t talk about my underage tits,” Bejar’s daughter shot back before reporting his comment to Instagram. A few days later, the platform got back to her: The insult didn’t violate its community guidelines.
  • Also buttressing Meta’s statistics were rules written narrowly enough to ban only unambiguously vile material. Meta’s rules didn’t clearly prohibit adults from flooding the comments section on a teenager’s posts with kiss emojis or posting pictures of kids in their underwear, inviting their followers to “see more” in a private Facebook Messenger group. 
  • “Mark personally values freedom of expression first and foremost and would say this is a feature and not a bug,” Rosen responded
  • Narrow rules and unreliable automated enforcement systems left a lot of room for bad behavior—but they made the company’s child-safety statistics look pretty good according to Meta’s metric of choice: prevalence.
  • Defined as the percentage of content viewed worldwide that explicitly violates a Meta rule, prevalence was the company’s preferred measuring stick for the problems users experienced.
  • According to prevalence, child exploitation was so rare on the platform that it couldn’t be reliably estimated, less than 0.05%, the threshold for functional measurement. Content deemed to encourage self-harm, such as eating disorders, was just as minimal, and rule violations for bullying and harassment occurred in just eight of 10,000 views. 
  • “There’s a grading-your-own-homework problem,”
  • Meta defines what constitutes harmful content, so it shapes the discussion of how successful it is at dealing with it.”
  • It could reconsider its AI-generated “beauty filters,” which internal research suggested made both the people who used them and those who viewed the images more self-critical
  • the team built a new questionnaire called BEEF, short for “Bad Emotional Experience Feedback.
  • A recurring survey of issues 238,000 users had experienced over the past seven days, the effort identified problems with prevalence from the start: Users were 100 times more likely to tell Instagram they’d witnessed bullying in the last week than Meta’s bullying-prevalence statistics indicated they should.
  • “People feel like they’re having a bad experience or they don’t,” one presentation on BEEF noted. “Their perception isn’t constrained by policy.
  • they seemed particularly common among teens on Instagram.
  • Among users under the age of 16, 26% recalled having a bad experience in the last week due to witnessing hostility against someone based on their race, religion or identity
  • More than a fifth felt worse about themselves after viewing others’ posts, and 13% had experienced unwanted sexual advances in the past seven days. 
  • The vast gap between the low prevalence of content deemed problematic in the company’s own statistics and what users told the company they experienced suggested that Meta’s definitions were off, Bejar argued
  • To minimize content that teenagers told researchers made them feel bad about themselves, Instagram could cap how much beauty- and fashion-influencer content users saw.
  • Proving to Meta’s leadership that the company’s prevalence metrics were missing the point was going to require data the company didn’t have. So Bejar and a group of staffers from the Well-Being Team started collecting it
  • And it could build ways for users to report unwanted contacts, the first step to figuring out how to discourage them.
  • One experiment run in response to BEEF data showed that when users were notified that their comment or post had upset people who saw it, they often deleted it of their own accord. “Even if you don’t mandate behaviors,” said Krieger, “you can at least send signals about what behaviors aren’t welcome.”
  • But among the ranks of Meta’s senior middle management, Bejar and Krieger said, BEEF hit a wall. Managers who had made their careers on incrementally improving prevalence statistics weren’t receptive to the suggestion that the approach wasn’t working. 
  • After three decades in Silicon Valley, he understood that members of the company’s C-Suite might not appreciate a damning appraisal of the safety risks young users faced from its product—especially one citing the company’s own data. 
  • “This was the email that my entire career in tech trained me not to send,” he says. “But a part of me was still hoping they just didn’t know.”
  • “Policy enforcement is analogous to the police,” he wrote in the email Oct. 5, 2021—arguing that it’s essential to respond to crime, but that it’s not what makes a community safe. Meta had an opportunity to do right by its users and take on a problem that Bejar believed was almost certainly industrywide.
  • fter Haugen’s airing of internal research, Meta had cracked down on the distribution of anything that would, if leaked, cause further reputational damage. With executives privately asserting that the company’s research division harbored a fifth column of detractors, Meta was formalizing a raft of new rules for employees’ internal communication.
  • Among the mandates for achieving “Narrative Excellence,” as the company called it, was to keep research data tight and never assert a moral or legal duty to fix a problem.
  • “I had to write about it as a hypothetical,” Bejar said. Rather than acknowledging that Instagram’s survey data showed that teens regularly faced unwanted sexual advances, the memo merely suggested how Instagram might help teens if they faced such a problem.
  • The hope that the team’s work would continue didn’t last. The company stopped conducting the specific survey behind BEEF, then laid off most everyone who’d worked on it as part of what Zuckerberg called Meta’s “year of efficiency.
  • If Meta was to change, Bejar told the Journal, the effort would have to come from the outside. He began consulting with a coalition of state attorneys general who filed suit against the company late last month, alleging that the company had built its products to maximize engagement at the expense of young users’ physical and mental health. Bejar also got in touch with members of Congress about where he believes the company’s user-safety efforts fell short. 
Javier E

Macron urged to think again about philosophy downgrade in Baccalauréat | Worl... - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...rade-in-baccalaureat-bssz6z2dk

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  • Javier E on 16 Jun 22
     
    Baccalauréat
Javier E

The Disneyfication of Prince Harry | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...disneyfication-of-prince-harry

infantilization uk royals culture psychology education

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Watching these films appears to be a childhood habit Harry never gave up – and several of the strands of the story he has so publicly told about himself seem to have echoes of these cartoons The original Lion King came out in 1994, shortly after Harry’s tenth birthday, so he was its prime target audience. The film tells the story of a boy prince, Simba, who is haunted by guilt over the death of a parent, detailing his struggles to find a pathway into adulthood – which he accomplishes through a judicious mixture of martial action and emotional sensitivity, becoming heroic in the process. 
  • So much of Harry’s turmoil is foreshadowed in Disney, it seems. Perhaps even in remaining true to his childhood vision of the world and its realities he is the boy who never grew up – Peter Pan.
Javier E

Overstimulation Nation - Slack Tide by Matt Labash - 0 views

mattlabash.substack.com/...overstimulation-nation

quality of life quality activity experiences disorder merton nostalgia soul sickness stillness boredom psychology language education

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The local radio jock said to me, “You must think all of this is pretty silly”. He motioned towards the crowd and then to a rollercoaster directly beside us that came screeching at our heads every 95 seconds. But I said, “No. In a century people are going to look back on right now as a sort of magic era, a charmed time of peace and prosperity and freedom from fear, as something that can never happen again, no matter how much they wish it would.”
  • telling the truth always liberates us, even if it scares the hell out of us simultaneously
  • Bad things have always happened in this world. That’s nothing new. And bad things will continue to have their uninterrupted run, right until the end of time.  But the “freedom from fear” Coupland speaks of is largely a function of not wallowing in it all the live-long day, which  our trusty bad-news delivery systems are pretty good about making us do. They give us the illusion of constant movement, even if our only destination is backwards, prompting us to forever double down on fear, and agitation, and mutual suspicion, while steeping us in our own soul sickness.
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  • It’s a trap, which maybe seeking out a little more deliberate boredom – also known as stillness - could help us avoid
  • Thomas Merton, whose praises I have sung in these pages before, framed it:
  • Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity or experience as such. Everything depends on the *quality* of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt
  • But the purity of our conscience has a natural proportion with the depth of our being and the quality of our acts: and when our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the *quantity* of our acts, without perfecting their quality. And so we go from bad to worse, exhaust ourselves, empty our whole life of all content, and fall into despair
  • There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.
  • being bored might be a good start for healing what ails us.
  • even with all the excitement, I couldn’t sustain any. I was bored by the excitement. Or rather, I craved boredom, finding all the excitement dull in a not-this-shitshow-again sort of way. For the last decade or so, we’ve been too over-excited, over-provoked, and overstimulated.
Javier E

'The only logical choice': anti-vaxxers who changed their minds on Covid vaccines | US ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...vid-anti-vaxxers-changed-minds

persuasion anti-vax respect campaign psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The decision isn’t between getting vaccinated and doing nothing, she said. It’s between getting vaccinated and getting Covid. “The question is, do you want to be vaccinated before you go through it?”
  • Back when she was anti-vaccine, Greene said she remembers doctors reacting with vitriol when they found out. “It just made me close myself off further – I felt really judged and upset and hurt and embarrassed.”
  • If you don’t have a regular physician or pediatrician, it’s difficult to find good answers to your questions, he pointed out – which is often the case due to “decades of negligence within our communities”,
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  • Reaching hesitant families means withholding the kind of judgment that kept her ashamed, and understanding that people have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed.
  • Being consistent and visible within the community is important, Autar said. “It can’t be just a moment here and now type of thing – ‘When we have a surge, we’re going to come back out and galvanize all those resources.’ No, we still are in a pandemic. And we need to still remain visible within hesitant communities. And that’s hard work.”
  • He added: “Our approach has always been ‘we’re here to educate you about the vaccine, your options, your choices’, rather than take the approach of ‘you need to get this vaccine’.”
  • “They may not change their mind overnight, but by taking your time, you’re ensuring that they could change their minds,” Greene said. “But if it becomes this conflict and it’s a negative experience, you’re basically closing that door off completely.”
  • “There’s so much pressure for moms to do everything perfectly,” Greene said. Among middle-class mothers, for instance, there’s a message that “you can afford all these products to do better, and so you don’t need vaccines – vaccines are for poor people
Javier E

Opinion | Lower fertility rates are the new cultural norm - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...estigating-low-fertility-rates

fertility rate us research psychology social media tech norm

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The percentage who say that having children is very important to them has dropped from 43 percent to 30 percent since 2019. This fits with data showing that, since 2007, the total fertility rate in the United States has fallen from 2.1 lifetime births per woman, the “replacement rate” necessary to sustain population levels, to just 1.64 in 2020.
  • The U.S. economy is losing an edge that robust population dynamics gave it relative to low-birth-rate peer nations in Japan and Western Europe; this country, too, faces chronic labor-supply constraints as well as an even less favorable “dependency ratio” between workers and retirees than it already expected.
  • the timing and the magnitude of such a demographic sea-change cry out for explanation. What happened in 2007?
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  • New financial constraints on family formation are a potential cause, as implied by another striking finding in the Journal poll — 78 percent of adults lack confidence this generation of children will enjoy a better life than they do.
  • Yet a recent analysis for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group by Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, economics professors at the University of Maryland and Wellesley College, respectively, determined that “beyond the temporary effects of the Great Recession, no recent economic or policy change is responsible for a meaningful share of the decline in the US fertility rate since 2007.”
  • Their study took account of such factors as the high cost of child care, student debt service and housing as well as Medicaid coverage and the wider availability of long-acting reversible contraception. Yet they had “no success finding evidence” that any of these were decisive.
  • Kearney and Levine speculated instead that the answers lie in the cultural zeitgeist — “shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults,”
  • A possibility worth considering, they suggested, is that young adults who experienced “intensive parenting” as children now balk at the heavy investment of time and resources needed to raise their own kids that way: It would clash with their career and leisure goals.
  • another event that year: Apple released the first iPhone, a revolutionary cultural moment if there ever was one. The ensuing smartphone-enabled social media boom — Facebook had opened membership to anyone older than 13 in 2006 — forever changed how human beings relate with one another.
  • We are just beginning to understand this development’s effect on mental health, education, religious observance, community cohesion — everything. Why wouldn’t it also affect people’s willingness to have children?
  • one indirect way new media affect childbearing rates is through “time competition effects” — essentially, hours spent watching the tube cannot be spent forming romantic partnerships.
  • a 2021 review of survey data on young adults and adolescents in the United States and other countries, the years between 2009 and 2018 saw a marked decline in reported sexual activity.
  • the authors hypothesized that people are distracted from the search for partners by “increasing use of computer games and social media.
  • during the late 20th century, Brazil’s fertility rates fell after women who watched soap operas depicting smaller families sought to emulate them by having fewer children themselves.
  • This may be an area where incentives do not influence behavior, at least not enough. Whether the cultural shift to lower birthrates occurs on an accelerated basis, as in the United States after 2007, or gradually, as it did in Japan, it appears permanent — “sticky,” as policy wonks say.
Javier E

Why Is Finland the Happiest Country on Earth? The Answer Is Complicated. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inland-happiness-optimism.html

finland happiness perseverance enough content psychology bias education

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, which rates well-being in countries around the world. For the sixth year in a row, Finland was ranked at the very top.
  • “I wouldn’t say that I consider us very happy,” said Nina Hansen, 58, a high school English teacher from Kokkola, a midsize city on Finland’s west coast. “I’m a little suspicious of that word, actually.”
  • what, supposedly, makes Finland so happy. Our subjects ranged in age from 13 to 88 and represented a variety of genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds and professions
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  • While people praised Finland’s strong social safety net and spoke glowingly of the psychological benefits of nature and the personal joys of sports or music, they also talked about guilt, anxiety and loneliness. Rather than “happy,” they were more likely to characterize Finns as “quite gloomy,” “a little moody” or not given to unnecessary smiling
  • Many also shared concerns about threats to their way of life, including possible gains by a far-right party in the country’s elections in April, the war in Ukraine and a tense relationship with Russia, which could worsen now that Finland is set to join NATO.
  • It turns out even the happiest people in the world aren’t that happy. But they are something more like content.
  • Finns derive satisfaction from leading sustainable lives and perceive financial success as being able to identify and meet basic need
  • “In other words,” he wrote in an email, “when you know what is enough, you are happy.”
  • “‘Happiness,’ sometimes it’s a light word and used like it’s only a smile on a face,” Teemu Kiiski, the chief executive of Finnish Design Shop, said. “But I think that this Nordic happiness is something more foundational.”
  • e conventional wisdom is that it’s easier to be happy in a country like Finland where the government ensures a secure foundation on which to build a fulfilling life and a promising future. But that expectation can also create pressure to live up to the national reputation.
  • “We are very privileged and we know our privilege,” said Clara Paasimaki, 19, one of Ms. Hansen’s students in Kokkola, “so we are also scared to say that we are discontent with anything, because we know that we have it so much better than other people,” especially in non-Nordic countries.
  • “The fact that Finland has been ‘the happiest country on earth’ for six years in a row could start building pressure on people,” he wrote in an email. “If we Finns are all so happy, why am I not happy?
  • The Finnish way of life is summed up in “sisu,” a trait said to be part of the national character. The word roughly translates to “grim determination in the face of hardships,” such as the country’s long winters: Even in adversity, a Finn is expected to persevere, without complaining.
  • “Back in the day when it wasn’t that easy to survive the winter, people had to struggle, and then it’s kind of been passed along the generations,” said Ms. Paasimaki’s classmate Matias From, 18. “Our parents were this way. Our grandparents were this way. Tough and not worrying about everything. Just living life.”
  • Since immigrating from Zimbabwe in 1992, Julia Wilson-Hangasmaa, 59, has come to appreciate the freedom Finland affords people to pursue their dreams without worrying about meeting basic needs
  • When she returns to her home country, she is struck by the “good energy” that comes not from the satisfaction of sisu but from exuberant joy.
  • “What I miss the most, I realize when I enter Zimbabwe, are the smiles,” she said, among “those people who don’t have much, compared to Western standards, but who are rich in spirit.”
  • Many of our subjects cited the abundance of nature as crucial to Finnish happiness: Nearly 75 percent of Finland is covered by forest, and all of it is open to everyone thanks to a law known as “jokamiehen oikeudet,” or “everyman’s right,” that entitles people to roam freely throughout any natural areas, on public or privately owned land.
  • “I enjoy the peace and movement in nature,” said Helina Marjamaa, 66, a former track athlete who represented the country at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games. “That’s where I get strength. Birds are singing, snow is melting, and nature is coming to life. It’s just incredibly beautiful.”
  • “I am worried with this level of ignorance we have toward our own environment,” he said, citing endangered species and climate change. The threat, he said, “still doesn’t seem to shift the political thinking.”
  • Born 17 years after Finland won independence from Russia, Eeva Valtonen has watched her homeland transform: from the devastation of World War II through years of rebuilding to a nation held up as an exemplar to the world.
  • “My mother used to say, ‘Remember, the blessing in life is in work, and every work you do, do it well,’” Ms. Valtonen, 88, said. “I think Finnish people have been very much the same way. Everybody did everything together and helped each other.”
  • Maybe it isn’t that Finns are so much happier than everyone else. Maybe it’s that their expectations for contentment are more reasonable, and if they aren’t met, in the spirit of sisu, they persevere.
  • “We don’t whine,” Ms. Eerikainen said. “We just do.”
Javier E

How to Navigate a 'Quarterlife' Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...quarter-life-crisis.html

crisis twenties psychology education

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Satya Doyle Byock, a 39-year-old therapist, noticed a shift in tone over the past few years in the young people who streamed into her office: frenetic, frazzled clients in their late teens, 20s and 30s. They were unnerved and unmoored, constantly feeling like something was wrong with them.
  • “Crippling anxiety, depression, anguish, and disorientation are effectively the norm,”
  • her new book, “Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.” The book uses anecdotes from Ms. Byock’s practice to outline obstacles faced by today’s young adults — roughly between the ages of 16 and 36 — and how to deal with them.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • Just like midlife, quarterlife can bring its own crisis — trying to separate from your parents or caregivers and forge a sense of self is a struggle. But the generation entering adulthood now faces novel, sometimes debilitating, challenges.
  • Many find themselves so mired in day-to-day monetary concerns, from the relentless crush of student debt to the swelling costs of everything, that they feel unable to consider what they want for themselves long term
  • “We’ve been constrained by this myth that you graduate from college and you start your life,” she said. Without the social script previous generations followed — graduate college, marry, raise a family — Ms. Byock said her young clients often flailed around in a state of extended adolescence.
  • nearly one-third of Gen Z adults are living with their parents or other relatives and plan to stay there.
  • Many young people today struggle to afford college or decide not to attend, and the “existential crisis” that used to hit after graduation descends earlier and earlier
  • Ms. Byock said to pay attention to what you’re naturally curious about, and not to dismiss your interests as stupid or futile.
  • Experts said those entering adulthood need clear guidance for how to make it out of the muddle. Here are their top pieces of advice on how to navigate a quarterlife crisis today.
  • She recommends scheduling reminders to check in with yourself, roughly every three months, to examine where you are in your life and whether you feel stuck or dissatisfied
  • From there, she said, you can start to identify aspects of your life that you want to change.
  • “Start to give your own inner life the respect that it’s due,”
  • But quarterlife is about becoming a whole person, Ms. Byock said, and both groups need to absorb each other’s characteristics to balance themselves out
  • However, there is a difference between self-interest and self-indulgence, Ms. Byock said. Investigating and interrogating who you are takes work. “It’s not just about choosing your labels and being done,” she said.
  • Be patient.
  • Quarterlifers may feel pressure to race through each step of their lives, Ms. Byock said, craving the sense of achievement that comes with completing a task.
  • But learning to listen to oneself is a lifelong process.
  • Instead of searching for quick fixes, she said, young adults should think about longer-term goals: starting therapy that stretches beyond a handful of sessions, building healthy nutrition and exercise habits, working toward self-reliance.
  • “I know that seems sort of absurdly large and huge in scope,” she said. “But it’s allowing ourselves to meander and move through life, versus just ‘Check the boxes and get it right.’”
  • take stock of your day-to-day life and notice where things are missing. She groups quarterlifers into two categories: “stability types” and “meaning types.”
  • “Stability types” are seen by others as solid and stable. They prioritize a sense of security, succeed in their careers and may pursue building a family.
  • “But there’s a sense of emptiness and a sense of faking it,” she said. “They think this couldn’t possibly be all that life is about.”
  • On the other end of the spectrum, there are “meaning types” who are typically artists; they have intense creative passions but have a hard time dealing with day-to-day tasks
  • “These are folks for whom doing what society expects of you is so overwhelming and so discordant with their own sense of self that they seem to constantly be floundering,” she said. “They can’t quite figure it out.”
  • That paralysis is often exacerbated by mounting climate anxiety and the slog of a multiyear pandemic that has left many young people mourning family and friends, or smaller losses like a conventional college experience or the traditions of starting a first job.
  • Stability types need to think about how to give their lives a sense of passion and purpose. And meaning types need to find security, perhaps by starting with a consistent routine that can both anchor and unlock creativity.
  • perhaps the prototypical inspiration for staying calm in chaos: Yoda. The Jedi master is “one of the few images we have of what feeling quiet amid extreme pain and apocalypse can look like,
  • Even when there seems to be little stability externally, she said, quarterlifers can try to create their own steadiness.
  • establishing habits that help you ground yourself as a young adult is critical because transitional periods make us more susceptible to burnout
  • He suggests building a practical tool kit of self-care practices, like regularly taking stock of what you’re grateful for, taking controlled breaths and maintaining healthy nutrition and exercise routines. “These are techniques that can help you find clarity,”
  • Don’t be afraid to make a big change.
  • It’s important to identify what aspects of your life you have the power to alter, Dr. Brown said. “You can’t change an annoying boss,” he said, “but you might be able to plan a career change.”
  • That’s easier said than done, he acknowledged, and young adults should weigh the risks of continuing to live in their status quo — staying in their hometown, or lingering in a career that doesn’t excite them — with the potential benefits of trying something new.
  • quarterlife is typically “the freest stage of the whole life span,
  • Young adults may have an easier time moving to a new city or starting a new job than their older counterparts would.
  • Know when to call your parents — and when to call on yourself.
  • Quarterlife is about the journey from dependence to independence, Ms. Byock said — learning to rely on ourselves, after, for some, growing up in a culture of helicopter parenting and hands-on family dynamics.
  • there are ways your relationship with your parents can evolve, helping you carve out more independence
  • That can involve talking about family history and past memories or asking questions about your parents’ upbringing
  • “You’re transitioning the relationship from one of hierarchy to one of friendship,” she said. “It isn’t just about moving away or getting physical distance.”
  • Every quarterlifer typically has a moment when they know they need to step away from their parents and to face obstacles on their own
  • That doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t, still depend on your parents in moments of crisis, she said. “I don’t think it’s just about never needing one’s parents again,” she said. “But it’s about doing the subtle work within oneself to know: This is a time I need to stand on my own.”
Javier E

Opinion | Where Have all the Adults in Children's Books Gone? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...childrens-books-adults.html

children adults books psychology education

shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Some might see the entrenchment of child-centeredness in children’s literature as reinforcing what some social critics consider a rising tide of narcissism in young people today. But to be fair: Such criticisms of youth transcend the ages.
  • What is certainly true now is the primacy of “mirrors and windows,” a philosophy that strives to show children characters who reflect how they look back to them, as well as those from different backgrounds, mostly with an eye to diversity.
  • This is a noble goal, but those mirrors and windows should apply to adults as well. Adults are, after all, central figures in children’s lives — their parents and caregivers, their teachers, their role models
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  • . The implicit lesson is that grown-ups aren’t infallible. It’s OK to laugh at them and it’s OK to feel compassion for them and it’s even OK to feel sorry for them on occasion.
  • The adult figures in children’s literature are also frequently outsiders or eccentrics in some way, and quite often subject to ridicule
  • yes, adults are often the Other — which makes them a mystery and a curiosity. Literature offers insight into these occasionally intimidating creatures.
  • In real life, children revere adults and they fear them. It only follows, then, that they appreciate when adult characters behave admirably but also delight in seeing the consequences — especially when rendered with humor — when they don’t.
  • Nursery rhymes, folk tales, myths and legends overwhelmingly cast adults as their central characters — and have endured for good reason
  • In somewhat later tales, children investigated crimes alongside Sherlock Holmes, adventured through Narnia, inhabited Oz and traversed Middle-earth. Grown-up heroes can be hobbits, or rabbits (“Watership Down”), badgers or moles (“The Wind in the Willows”). Children join them no matter what because they like to be in league with their protagonists and by extension, their authors.
  • In children’s books with adult heroes, children get to conspire alongside their elders. Defying the too-often adversarial relationship between adults and children in literature, such books enable children to see that adults are perfectly capable of occupying their shared world with less antagonism — as partners in life, in love and in adventure.
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