TOK Friends

Imagine if Rogan were to use his incredibly powerful voice — he has some 11 million listeners per episode — to talk productively about all of this, to counter some of the destructive bilge instead of adding to it.

Imagine if Spotify recognized that a platform is essentially a publisher, and that media organizations of all kinds constantly have to make decisions about what’s appropriate to put on the air, in their pages or on their websites.

Imagine if its leadership chose not to shrug off their responsibility about promulgating dangerous and false content while making lofty-sounding noises about avoiding censorship.

What do these examples have in common? As Thomas Hobbes could have told you, human beings can only flourish, can only avoid a state of nature in which lives are “nasty, brutish and short,” if they participate in a “commonwealth” — a society in which government takes on much of the responsibility for making life secure.

Thus, we have law enforcement precisely so individuals don’t have to go around armed to protect themselves against other people’s violence.

Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health, when they can; but the nature of infectious disease means that there is an essential role for collective action

one major downside to all this quantification: It can interfere with our ability to know our own bodies. Once you outsource your well-being to a device and convert it into a number, it stops being yours.

With my smart watch, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and check my app to see how I slept — instead of just taking a moment to notice that I was still tired

It’s an extension of our hustle-oriented culture, said the executive coach and performance expert Brad Stulberg, author of “The Practice of Groundedness.” “Our culture promotes the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the predominant arbiter of success, and these devices play right into that,

my daughter said: “When the pandemic started, I was only 7, and I wasn’t scared. Now I’m 9 and I really understand.”

I called Sally Beville Hunter, a clinical associate professor of child and family studies at the University of Tennessee, to see if this kind of philosophical musing was typical for a young tween. “There’s a huge cognitive transition happening” around this age, Hunter told me.

It’s the stage when children develop the capacity for abstract thought, she said. The pioneering developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this transition the “formal operational stage,” and in his research he found it began around age 11, but Hunter said subsequent research has found that it may begin earlier. “It’s the first time children can consider multiple possibilities and test them against each other,” she said. Which helps explain why my daughter has begun thinking about whether Covid will linger into her college years, a decade from now.