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It would be easy to conclude that an absurdist view of life rules out happiness and leads anyone with any sense to despair at her very existence. And yet in his book, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy

this unexpected twist in Camus’ philosophy of life and happiness can help you change your perspective and see your daily struggles in a new, more equanimous way.

he argues that despite the hardships of this world, against all apparent odds, human beings regularly experience true happiness. People in terrible circumstances bask in love for one another. They enjoy simple diversions

Even Sisyphus was happy, according to Camus, because “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Simply put, he had something to keep him busy.

Instead of feeling desperation at the futility of life, Camus tells us to embrace its ridiculousness. It’s the only way to arrive at happiness, the most absurd emotion of all under these circumstances

We shouldn’t try to find some cosmic meaning in our relentless routines—getting, spending, eating, working, pushing our own little boulders up our own little hills

“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness,”

Happiness, for Camus, is an existential declaration of independence. Instead of advising “Don’t worry, be happy,” he offers a rebellious “Tell the universe to go suck eggs, be happy.”

If embracing the ridiculous seems impossible to you, Camus says it’s only because of your pride.

Instead, we should laugh uproariously at the fact that there is no meaning, and be happy anyway.

When the broad sweep of life brings you horror, concentrate on this moment, and savor it. The pleasure and meaning you can find right now are real; the meaninglessness of the future is not.

1. Stand up to your ennui.

You can’t necessarily change your perception of the world, but, as I have written, you most certainly can change your response to that perception. Meet that feeling of despair with a personal motto, such as “I don’t know what everything means, but I do know I am alive right now, and I will not squander this moment

2. Look for opportunities to do a little good.

One of the best ways to cultivate futility is by focusing on the big things you can’t control—war, natural disasters, hatred—as opposed to the little things you can.

Those little things include bringing a small blessing or source of relief to others.

if your commute to work is a soul-sucking existential nightmare, don’t ruminate on the cars stopped ahead of you. Rather, focus on making space for that poor sap stuck in the wrong lane who’s desperately trying to merge

3. Be fully present.

Absurdity tends to sting only when we see it from the “outside”; for example, when you think about how meaningless it has been to wash the dishes every day in the past only to find them dirty again right now—and imagine the countless dish washings that the rest of your life will comprise.

Confronting the absurd is much more comfortable when you do so with mindfulness.

“While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.

In fact, each of us can consciously implement Camus’ absurdism in order to forge a happier life. Here are three practical ways to find joy in the ridiculous.

Some mornings, I wake up seeing only boulders and can’t face pushing them once again up that hill

Those are the days when my old friend Camus comes in handy. Instead of despairing of the absurdity of life, I lean into it, laugh at it, and start my day in a light mood. Then I gather my beloved boulders and set out for the nearest hill.

As we get older, the space we used to fill with laughter, gossip, and staying up until the sky grew light can get consumed by more “adult” concerns, such as marriage, procreation, and fully developed careers—and we tend to end up with less of ourselves to give.

making friends at 40 is more akin to dating than I had anticipated: It’s dependent not only on chemistry and common interests, but also on a shared vision of what your new relationship could provide. Half the struggle is finding someone who wants the same thing you do, and at the exact same time

In Montana, I’d need to find people who were not just delightful and committed to friendship generally, but also willing to expand beyond those best friends they made at 21—people who, for whatever reason, still had their light on.

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

that a coming storm will sweep elites from power

and that violence might be necessary to save the country.

In October 2021, 17 percent of Americans believed in the conspiracy theory, up from 14 percent in March

the percentage of people who rejected QAnon falsehoods shrank to 34 percent in October from 40 percent in March

After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, QAnon was expected to be hobbled without him. But it has persisted despite that and despite efforts by tech platforms to staunch its spread. Forensic linguists have also tried to unmask and defang the anonymous author who signed online messages as Q.

Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of the research group and a social science researcher with decades of experience, said he never expected to be dealing with serious survey questions about whether powerful American institutions were controlled by devil-worshiping, sex-trafficking pedophiles. To have so many Americans agree with such a question, he said, was “stunning.”

Believers are “racially, religiously and politically diverse,”

Among Republicans, 25 percent found QAnon to be valid, compared with 14 percent of independents and 9 percent of Democrats.

Media preferences were a major predictor of QAnon susceptibility, with people who trust far-right news sources such as One America News Network and Newsmax nearly five times more likely to be believers than those who trust mainstream news

Fox News viewers were twice as likely to back QAnon ideas

Most QAnon believers associated Christianity with being American and said that the United States risked losing its culture and identity and must be protected from foreign influence

seven in 10 believers agreed with the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

More than half of QAnon supporters are white, while 20 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent are Black.

They were most likely to have household incomes of less than $50,000 a year, hold at most a high school degree, hail from the South and reside in a suburb.

The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.

The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?

The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales,

As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.

Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.

“The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,

“They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”

Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.

“The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.

As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.

“It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”

In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text

t people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,”

When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.

He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”

Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.

, strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.

The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.

Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.

In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.

hose promises have also fueled anxiety over how people will be able to compete for jobs outsourced to eerily refined machines or trust the accuracy of what they see online.

Officials with the San Francisco lab said GPT-4’s “multimodal” training across text and images would allow it to escape the chat box and more fully emulate a world of color and imagery, surpassing ChatGPT in its “advanced reasoning capabilities.”

A person could upload an image and GPT-4 could caption it for them, describing the objects and scene.

AI language models often confidently offer wrong answers because they are designed to spit out cogent phrases, not actual facts. And because they have been trained on internet text and imagery, they have also learned to emulate human biases of race, gender, religion and class.

GPT-4 still makes many of the errors of previous versions, including “hallucinating” nonsense, perpetuating social biases and offering bad advice. It also lacks knowledge of events that happened after about September 2021, when its training data was finalized, and “does not learn from its experience,” limiting people’s ability to teach it new things.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI in the hope its technology will become a secret weapon for its workplace software, search engine and other online ambitions. It has marketed the technology as a super-efficient companion that can handle mindless work and free people for creative pursuits, helping one software developer to do the work of an entire team or allowing a mom-and-pop shop to design a professional advertising campaign without outside help.

it could lead to business models and creative ventures no one can predict.

sparked criticism that the companies are rushing to exploit an untested, unregulated and unpredictable technology that could deceive people, undermine artists’ work and lead to real-world harm.

the company held back the feature to better understand potential risks. As one example, she said, the model might be able to look at an image of a big group of people and offer up known information about them, including their identities — a possible facial recognition use case that could be used for mass surveillance.

OpenAI researchers wrote, “As GPT-4 and AI systems like it are adopted more widely,” they “will have even greater potential to reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths, and to cement them or lock them in.”

“We can agree as a society broadly on some harms that a model should not contribute to,” such as building a nuclear bomb or generating child sexual abuse material, she said. “But many harms are nuanced and primarily affect marginalized groups,” she added, and those harmful biases, especially across other languages, “cannot be a secondary consideration in performance.”

OpenAI said its new model would be able to handle more than 25,000 words of text, a leap forward that could facilitate longer conversations and allow for the searching and analysis of long documents.

OpenAI developers said GPT-4 was more likely to provide factual responses and less likely to refuse harmless requests

Duolingo, the language learning app, has already used GPT-4 to introduce new features, such as an AI conversation partner and a tool that tells users why an answer was incorrect.

The company did not share evaluations around bias that have become increasingly common after pressure from AI ethicists.

GPT-4 will have competition in the growing field of multisensory AI. DeepMind, an AI firm owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, last year released a “generalist” model named Gato that can describe images and play video games. And Google this month released a multimodal system, PaLM-E, that folded AI vision and language expertise into a one-armed robot on wheels: If someone told it to go fetch some chips, for instance, it could comprehend the request, wheel over to a drawer and choose the right bag.

The systems, though — as critics and the AI researchers are quick to point out — are merely repeating patterns and associations found in their training data without a clear understanding of what it’s saying or when it’s wrong.

GPT-4, the fourth “generative pre-trained transformer” since OpenAI’s first release in 2018, relies on a breakthrough neural-network technique in 2017 known as the transformer that rapidly advanced how AI systems can analyze patterns in human speech and imagery.

The systems are “pre-trained” by analyzing trillions of words and images taken from across the internet: news articles, restaurant reviews and message-board arguments; memes, family photos and works of art.

Giant supercomputer clusters of graphics processing chips are mapped out their statistical patterns — learning which words tended to follow each other in phrases, for instance — so that the AI can mimic those patterns, automatically crafting long passages of text or detailed images, one word or pixel at a time.

In 2019, the company refused to publicly release GPT-2, saying it was so good they were concerned about the “malicious applications” of its use, from automated spam avalanches to mass impersonation and disinformation campaigns.

Altman has also marketed OpenAI’s vision with the aura of science fiction come to life. In a blog post last month, he said the company was planning for ways to ensure that “all of humanity” benefits from “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — an industry term for the still-fantastical idea of an AI superintelligence that is generally as smart as, or smarter than, the humans themselves.

We need not wonder what the basic objections will be: Third Wave Antiracism isn’t really a religion; I am oversimplifying; I shouldn’t write this without being a theologian; it is a religion but it’s a good one; and so on

It is not an argument against protest

I am not writing this thinking of right-wing America as my audience.

This is not merely a complaint.

Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy in missing the futility of “dialogue” with them. Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher.

our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it?

My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matte

We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence.

they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.

“The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction.

But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are

Following the religion means to pillory people for what, as recently as 10 years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all; to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists;

o pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism; and to almost hope that it doesn’t because this would deprive you of a sense of purpose.

many corporate technology chiefs have taken a wait-and-see approach to the technology, which has developed a reputation for producing false, misleading and unintelligible results—dubbed AI ‘hallucinations’. 

Though ChatGPT, which is available free online, is considered a consumer app, OpenAI has encouraged companies and startups to build apps on top of its language models—in part by providing access to the underlying computer code for a fee.

here are “certain spaces where it’s clearly directly applicable,” such as summarizing documents or responding to customer queries. Many startups are racing to apply the technology to a wider set of enterprise use case

“I think it’s going to creep into our lives in ways we least expect it,” Mr. Casado said.

An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.

black and white squares also can make weird nonperiodic patterns, in addition to the familiar, periodic checkerboard pattern. “It’s really pretty trivial to be able to make weird and interesting patterns,” he said. The magic of the two Penrose tiles is that they make only nonperiodic patterns — that’s all they can do.“But then the Holy Grail was, could you do with one — one tile?” Dr. Goodman-Strauss said.

now a new paper — by Mr. Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise — proves Mr. Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,

“The most significant aspect for me is that the tiling does not clearly fall into any of the familiar classes of structures that we understand.”

“I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Mr. Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.

Sir Roger found the proofs “very complicated.” Nonetheless, he was “extremely intrigued” by the einstein, he said: “It’s a really good shape, strikingly simple.”

The simplicity came honestly. Mr. Smith’s investigations were mostly by hand; one of his co-authors described him as an “imaginative tinkerer.”

When in November he found a tile that seemed to fill the plane without a repeating pattern, he emailed Craig Kaplan, a co-author and a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo.

“It was clear that something unusual was happening with this shape,” Dr. Kaplan said. Taking a computational approach that built on previous research, his algorithm generated larger and larger swaths of hat tiles. “There didn’t seem to be any limit to how large a blob of tiles the software could construct,”

The first step, Dr. Kaplan said, was to “define a set of four ‘metatiles,’ simple shapes that stand in for small groupings of one, two, or four hats.” The metatiles assemble into four larger shapes that behave similarly. This assembly, from metatiles to supertiles to supersupertiles, ad infinitum, covered “larger and larger mathematical ‘floors’ with copies of the hat,” Dr. Kaplan said. “We then show that this sort of hierarchical assembly is essentially the only way to tile the plane with hats, which turns out to be enough to show that it can never tile periodically.”

some might wonder whether this is a two-tile, not one-tile, set of aperiodic monotiles.

Dr. Goodman-Strauss had raised this subtlety on a tiling listserv: “Is there one hat or two?” The consensus was that a monotile counts as such even using its reflection. That leaves an open question, Dr. Berger said: Is there an einstein that will do the job without reflection?

“the hat” was not a new geometric invention. It is a polykite — it consists of eight kites. (Take a hexagon and draw three lines, connecting the center of each side to the center of its opposite side; the six shapes that result are kites.)

“It’s likely that others have contemplated this hat shape in the past, just not in a context where they proceeded to investigate its tiling properties,” Dr. Kaplan said. “I like to think that it was hiding in plain sight.”

Incredibly, Mr. Smith later found a second einstein. He called it “the turtle” — a polykite made of not eight kites but 10. It was “uncanny,” Dr. Kaplan said. He recalled feeling panicked; he was already “neck deep in the hat.”

Dr. Myers, who had done similar computations, promptly discovered a profound connection between the hat and the turtle. And he discerned that, in fact, there was an entire family of related einsteins — a continuous, uncountable infinity of shapes that morph one to the next.

this einstein family motivated the second proof, which offers a new tool for proving aperiodicity. The math seemed “too good to be true,” Dr. Myers said in an email. “I wasn’t expecting such a different approach to proving aperiodicity — but everything seemed to hold together as I wrote up the details.”

Mr. Smith was amazed to see the research paper come together. “I was no help, to be honest.” He appreciated the illustrations, he said: “I’m more of a pictures person.”

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina

states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).

“Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned

The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.

The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”

Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.

In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.

The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,

cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”

The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive

My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.

Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.

Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.

If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?

Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?

As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals

She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals

Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.

Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.

Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values

conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”

Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.

For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).

Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.

We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)

Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.

A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.

What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them

Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.

Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:

I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).

Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world

Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.

I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?

There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio

I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”

Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:

t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier

They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.

Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.

Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?

It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”

While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.

there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:

While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments

For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.

Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.

We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”

In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”

Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.

“political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective

In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:

society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.

The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”

The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.

or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio

Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio

Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.

Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.

The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges

— or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.

There were plenty of books about Black people, but they tended to be about poor or working-class Black people and often depicted Black lives proscribed by discrimination and inequality

I was aware of two instances of myself in fiction of the time. One was the nerdy teenage middle-class Black girl in Louise Fitzhugh’s “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change.” Then there was “Sarah Phillips” by Andrea Lee in 1984. That one was a near-sacred experience for me, in depicting a middle-class Black girl who grew up outside Philadelphia, went to Harvard and then moved to Europe. Here was someone I could have been, a variation on some people I knew

But I neither needed nor sought out more such books. How much me did I need? I read to learn about what I didn’t know.

when I started my graduate study, I explicitly did not want to study Black English. It was too close to home.

What fascinated me, and still does, are languages utterly unlike the one I grew up with. This is what I do my academic work on. I am happy to write about Black English, but I do it out of civic duty. What first hooked me on languages was hearing someone speak Hebrew

This idea that one, if brown, is to seek one’s self in what one reads and watches gets around quite a bit.

But still, the idea that Black people are deprived in not exploring what they already relate to is not as natural as it sounds.

This position is rooted, one suspects, as a defense against racism, in a sense that learning most meaningfully takes place within a warm comfort zone of cultural membership. But it’s a wide, wide world out there, and this position ultimately limits the mind and the soul.

I question its necessity in 2023. The etymology of the word “education” is related to the Latin “educere,” meaning to lead outward, not inward.

It can be especially ticklish to hear white people taking up the idea that Black people stray from their selves when taking up things beyond Blackness

I sense the idea that real Blackness means ever seeking yourself in your reading and viewing is a post-1966 thing, to refer to what I wrote here last week.

W.E.B. Du Bois had no such idea. He wrote: “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

Du Bois adapted these “white” works to his own needs and predilections. Even the naked racism he lived with daily did not lead him to draw a line around “white” things as something alien to his essence

Rather, he insisted that these works were, in fact, part of his self, regardless of how wider society saw that self or how figures like Shakespeare and Aristotle would have seen him.

Du Bois, in this, was normal. Today I sit with “Succession,” Steely Dan and Saul Bellow, and they wince not. I see myself in none of them. Yes, Bellow had some nasty moments on race, such as a gruesomely prurient scene in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” But I’m sorry: I cannot let that one scene — or even two — deprive me of the symphonic reaches of “Herzog” and “Humboldt’s Gift.” What they offer, after all, becomes part of me along with everything else.

the truth is that characters I can see as me are now not uncommon on television in particular. Andre Braugher’s Captain Holt on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” was about as close to me as I expect a sitcom character ever to be, for example. That was fun. But honestly, I didn’t need it. I live with me. I watch TV to see somebody else.

The simple truth is that building something valuable — whether that’s knowledge, experience or a network worth participating in — is really, really hard. But tearing it all down is piss easy.

It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot.

In the summer of 2020, “public-health experts” decided that racism is a public-health crisis comparable to the coronavirus pandemic. It was therefore, they claimed, within their purview to express public support for the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and to argue that the benefits of such protests outweighed the increased risk of spreading the disease. Those supposed experts actually knew nothing about the likely effects of the protests. They made no concrete predictions about whether they would in any way ameliorate racism in America, just as Nature can make no concrete predictions about whether its political endorsements will actually help a preferred candidate without jeopardizing its other important goals. The political action was expressive, not evidence-based...

as is often the case, a debate which appears to be about the neutrality of institutions is not really about neutrality at all... Rather, it is about whether there is any room left for soberly weighing our goals and values and thinking in a measured way about the consequences of our actions rather than simply reacting to situations in an impulsive and expressive manner, broadcasting our views to the world so that people know where we stand.

Our goals and values might not be “neutral” at all, but they might still be best served by procedures, institutions, and even individuals that follow neutral principles.

The same person who, on his own, wouldn’t ‘hurt a fly’ will not hesitate to set a government building on fire or rob a liquor store when part of an angry mass. The most mild-mannered of us can make the meanest comments as part of an online mob.

Once caught up in the maelstrom, it is extremely difficult to hold back: you see it as your duty to participate. Any act of lynching, ancient or modern, literal or on social media, displays this feature. ‘A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the great majority of men,’ writes Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960).

The herd can also give its members a disproportionate sense of personal worth. No matter how empty or miserable their individual existence may otherwise be, belonging to a certain group makes them feel accepted and recognised – even respected. There is no hole in one’s personal life, no matter how big, that one’s intense devotion to one’s tribe cannot fill, no trauma that it does not seem to heal.

to a disoriented soul, they can offer a sense of fulfilment and recognition that neither family nor friends nor profession can supply. A crowd can be therapeutic in the same way in which a highly toxic substance can have curative powers.

Herding, then, engenders a paradoxical form of identity: you are somebody not despite the fact that you’ve melted into the crowd, but because of it

You will not be able to find yourself in the crowd, but that’s the least of your worries: you are now part of something that feels so much grander and nobler than your poor self

Your connection with the life of the herd not only fills an inner vacuum but adds a sense of purpose to your disoriented existence.

The primatologist Frans de Waal, who has studied the social and political behaviour of apes for decades, concludes in his book Mama’s Last Hug (2018) that primates are ‘made to be social’ – and ‘the same applies to us.’ Living in groups is ‘our main survival strategy’

we are all wired for herding. We herd all the time: when we make war as when we make peace, when we celebrate and when we mourn, we herd at work and on vacation. The herd is not out there somewhere, but we carry it within us. The herd is deeply seated in our mind.

As far as the practical conduct of our lives and our survival in the world are concerned, this is not a bad arrangement. Thanks to the herd in our minds, we find it easier to connect with others, to communicate and collaborate with them, and in general to live at ease with one another. Because of our herding behaviour, then, we stand a better chance to survive as members of a group than on our own

The trouble starts when we decide to use our mind against our biology. As when we employ our thinking not pragmatically, to make our existence in the world easier and more comfortable in some respect or another, but contemplatively, to see our situation in its naked condition, from the outside.

In such a situation, if we are to make any progress, we need to pull the herd out of our mind and set it firmly aside, exceedingly difficult as the task may be. This kind of radical thinking can be done only in the absence of the herd’s influence in its many forms: societal pressure, political partisanship, ideological bias, religious indoctrination, media-induced fads and fashions, intellectual mimetism, or any other -isms, for that matter.

a society’s established knowledge is the glue that keeps it together. Indeed, this unique concoction – a combination of pious lies and convenient half-truths, useful prejudices and self-flattering banalities – is what gives that society its specific cultural physiognomy and, ultimately, its sense of identity

By celebrating its established knowledge, that community celebrates itself. Which, for the sociologist Émile Durkheim, is the very definition of religion.

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.”

The word for ‘philosophy’ in Korean is 철학, pronounced ch’ŏrhak. It literally means the ‘study of wisdom’ or, perhaps better, ‘how to become wise’, which reflects its more dynamic and proactive implications

At night, in the darkness of the cave, he drank water from a perfectly useful ‘bowl’. But when he could see properly, he found that there was no ‘bowl’ at all, only a disgusting human skull.

Our lives and minds are affected by others (and their actions), as others (and their minds) are affected by our actions. This is particularly true in the Korean application of Confucian and Buddhist ideas.

Wŏnhyo understood that how we think about things shapes their very existence – and in turn our own existence, which is constructed according to our thoughts.

In the Korean tradition of philosophy, human beings are social beings, therefore knowing how to interact with others is an essential part of living a good life – indeed, living well with others is our real contribution to human life

he realised that there isn’t a difference between the ‘bowl’ and the skull: the only difference lies with us and our perceptions. We interpret our lives through a continual stream of thoughts, and so we become what we think, or rather how we think

As our daily lives are shaped by our thoughts, so our experience of this reality is good or bad – depending on our thoughts – which make things ‘appear’ good or bad because, in ‘reality’, things in and of themselves are devoid of their own independent nature

We can take from Wŏnhyo the idea that, if you change the patterns that have become engrained in how you think, you will begin to live differently. To do this, you need to change your mental habits, which is why meditation and mindful awareness can help. And this needs to be practised every day

Wŏnhyo’s most important work is titled Awaken your Mind and Practice (in Korean, Palsim suhaeng-jang). It is an explicit call to younger adherents to put Buddhist ideas into practice, and an indirect warning not to get lost in contemplation or in the study of text

While Wŏnhyo had emphasised the mind and the need to ‘practise’ Buddhism, a later Korean monk, Chinul (1158-1210), spearheaded Sŏn, the meditational tradition in Korea that espoused the idea of ‘sudden enlightenment’ that alerts the mind, accompanied by ‘gradual cultivation’

we still need to practise meditation, for if not we can easily fall into our old ways even if our minds have been awakened

his greatest contribution to Sŏn is Secrets on Cultivating the Mind (Susim kyŏl). This text outlines in detail his teachings on sudden awakening followed by the need for gradual cultivation

hinul’s approach recognises the mind as the ‘essence’ of one’s Buddha nature (contained in the mind, which is inherently good), while continual practice and cultivation aids in refining its ‘function’ – this is the origin of the ‘essence-function’ concept that has since become central to Korean philosophy.

These ideas also influenced the reformed view of Confucianism that became linked with the mind and other metaphysical ideas, finally becoming known as Neo-Confucianism.

During the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), the longest lasting in East Asian history, Neo-Confucianism became integrated into society at all levels through rituals for marriage, funerals and ancestors

Neo-Confucianism recognises that we as individuals exist through plural relationships with responsibilities to others (as a child, brother/sister, lover, husband/wife, parent, teacher/student and so on), an idea nicely captured in 2000 by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy when he described our ‘being’ as ‘singular plural’

Corrupt interpretations of Confucianism by heteronormative men have historically championed these ideas in terms of vertical relationships rather than as a reciprocal set of benevolent social interactions, meaning that women have suffered greatly as a result.

Setting aside these sexist and self-serving interpretations, Confucianism emphasises that society works as an interconnected set of complementary reciprocal relationships that should be beneficial to all parties within a social system

Confucian relationships have the potential to offer us an example of effective citizenship, similar to that outlined by Cicero, where the good of the republic or state is at the centre of being a good citizen

There is a general consensus in Korean philosophy that we have an innate sociability and therefore should have a sense of duty to each other and to practise virtue.

The main virtue of Confucianism is the idea of ‘humanity’, coming from the Chinese character 仁, often left untranslated and written as ren and pronounced in Korean as in.

It is a combination of the character for a human being and the number two. In other words, it signifies what (inter)connects two people, or rather how they should interact in a humane or benevolent manner to each other. This character therefore highlights the link between people while emphasising that the most basic thing that makes us ‘human’ is our interaction with others.

Neo-Confucianism adopted a turn towards a more mind-centred view in the writings of the Korean scholar Yi Hwang, known by his pen name T’oegye (1501-70), who appears on the 1,000-won note. He greatly influenced Neo-Confucianism in Japan through his formidable text, Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (Sŏnghak sipto), composed in 1568, which was one of the most-reproduced texts of the entire Chosŏn dynasty and represents the synthesis of Neo-Confucian thought in Korea

with commentaries that elucidate the moral principles of Confucianism, related to the cardinal relationships and education. It also embodies T’oegye’s own development of moral psychology through his focus on the mind, and illuminates the importance of teaching and the practice of self-cultivation.

He writes that we ourselves can transform the unrestrained mind and its desires, and achieve sagehood, if we take the arduous, gradual path of self-cultivation centred on the mind.

Confucians had generally accepted the Mencian idea that human nature was embodied in the unaroused state of the mind, before it was shaped by its environment. The mind in its unaroused state was taken to be theoretically good. However, this inborn tendency for goodness is always in danger of being reduced to passivity, unless you cultivate yourself as a person of ‘humanity’ (in the Confucian sense mentioned above).

You should constantly try to activate your humanity to allow the unhampered operation of the original mind to manifest itself through socially responsible and moral character in action

Humanity is the realisation of what I describe as our ‘optimum level of perfection’ that exists in an inherent stage of potentiality due our innate good nature

This, in a sense, is like the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, which suggests we are already enlightened and just need to recover our innate mental state. Both philosophies are hopeful: humans are born good with the potential to correct their own flaws and failures

this could hardly contrast any more greatly with the Christian doctrine of original sin

The seventh diagram in T’oegye’s text is entitled ‘The Diagram of the Explanation of Humanity’ (Insŏl-to). Here he warns how one’s good inborn nature may become impaired, hampering the operation of the original mind and negatively impacting our character in action. Humanity embodies the gradual realisation of our optimum level of perfection that already exists in our mind but that depends on how we think about things and how we relate that to others in a social context

For T’oegye, the key to maintaining our capacity to remain level-headed, and to control our impulses and emotions, was kyŏng. This term is often translated as ‘seriousness’, occasionally ‘mindfulness’, and it identifies the serious need for constant effort to control one’s mind in order to go about one’s life in a healthy manner

For T’oegye, mindfulness is as serious as meditation is for the Buddhists. In fact, the Neo-Confucians had their own meditational practice of ‘quiet-sitting’ (chŏngjwa), which focused on recovering the calm and not agitated ‘original mind’, before putting our daily plans into action

These diagrams reinforce this need for a daily practice of Confucian mindfulness, because practice leads to the ‘good habit’ of creating (and maintaining) routines. There is no short-cut provided, no weekend intro to this practice: it is life-long, and that is what makes it transformative, leading us to become better versions of who were in the beginning. This is consolation of Korean philosophy.

Seeing the world as it is can steer us away from making unnecessary mistakes, while highlighting what is good and how to maintain that good while also reducing anxiety from an agitated mind and harmful desires. This is why Korean philosophy can provide us with consolation; it recognises the bad, but prioritises the good, providing several moral pathways that are referred to in the East Asian traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) as modes of ‘self-cultivation’

As social beings, we penetrate the consciousness of others, and so humans are linked externally through conduct but also internally through thought. Humanity is a unifying approach that holds the potential to solve human problems, internally and externally, as well as help people realise the perfection that is innately theirs

Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.

When he looked at 5,000 creative individuals over 127 generations in European history, he found that significant creative breakthroughs were less likely during periods of political crisis and instability.

Victor H Mair, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that in fact the Chinese word for crisis, wēijī, refers to a perilous situation in which you should be particularly cautious

“Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ is composed of elements meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society,” he writes. “It lulls people into welcoming crises as unstable situations from which they can benefit.” Revolutionaries, billionaires and politicians may relish the chance to profit from a crisis, but most people world prefer not to have a crisis at all.

A common folk theory is that times of great crisis also lead to great bursts of creativity.

The first world war sparked the growth of modernism in painting and literature. The second fuelled innovations in science and technology. The economic crises of the 1970s and 80s are supposed to have inspired the spread of punk and the creation of hip-hop

psychologists have also found that when we are threatened by a crisis, we become more rigid and locked into our beliefs. The creativity researcher Dean Simonton has spent his career looking at breakthroughs in music, philosophy, science and literature. He has found that during periods of crisis, we actually tend to become less creative.

psychologists have found that it is what they call “malevolent creativity” that flourishes when we feel threatened by crisis.

during moments of significant crisis, the best leaders are able to create some sense of certainty and a shared fate amid the seas of change.

These are innovations that tend to be harmful – such as new weapons, torture devices and ingenious scams.

A 2019 study which involved observing participants using bricks, found that those who had been threatened before the task tended to come up with more harmful uses of the bricks (such as using them as weapons) than people who did not feel threatened

Students presented with information about a threatening situation tended to become increasingly wary of outsiders, and even begin to adopt positions such as an unwillingness to support LGBT people afterwards.

during moments of crisis – when change is really needed – we tend to become less able to change.

When we suffer significant traumatic events, we tend to have worse wellbeing and life outcomes.

, other studies have shown that in moderate doses, crises can help to build our sense of resilience.

we tend to be more resilient if a crisis is shared with others. As Bruce Daisley, the ex-Twitter vice-president, notes: “True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we’re united with those around us in a shared endeavour.”

Crises are like many things in life – only good in moderation, and best shared with others

The challenge our leaders face during times of overwhelming crisis is to avoid letting us plunge into the bracing ocean of change alone, to see if we sink or swim. Nor should they tell us things are fine, encouraging us to hide our heads in the san

Waking up each morning to hear about the latest crisis is dispiriting for some, but throughout history it has been a bracing experience for others. In 1857, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter that “the crisis will make me feel as good as a swim in the ocean”. A hundred years later, John F Kennedy (wrongly) pointed out that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters, “one representing danger, and the other, opportunity”. More recently, Elon Musk has argued “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”.

This means people won’t feel an overwhelming sense of threat. It also means people do not feel alone. When we feel some certainty and common identity, we are more likely to be able to summon the creativity, ingenuity and energy needed to change things.

What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”

Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)

Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”

He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”

That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.

Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.

Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.

The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”

Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.

Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”

“Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”

To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”

He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education

I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”

University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”

56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.

This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”

Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”

The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”

something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.

“this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”