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Information Overload

How Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, an evil king,
was condemned to Hades to forever roll a big rock to the top of a mountain,
and then the rock always rolled back down again.
Similar version of Hell is suffered every day by people
managed by micromanagers and control freaks.

News Books Recommended Links Obsession with Computers and Internet Drinking from a firehose Surviving a Bad Performance Review Mental overload Email Overload
IT Staff Health Issues Health insurance Sleep Deprivation Obsessive-compulsive disorder Burnout Slackerism Coping with the toxic stress in IT environment Learned helplessness
Signs that you might be dismissed soon Toxic managers Micromanagers and Control Freaks Stoisim Over 50 and unemployed Humor Random Findings Etc

"Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving." �

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1951

"It is not only information that they need-in the age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it�.What they need , and what they feel they need , is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves."

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

Internat now means information overload. It has several dimentions:

Combination of information overload with the prolonged exposure to stress is especially toxic

A thunderstorm is God's way of saying that you
spend too much time in front of the computer.

Prolonged exposure to stress (Working for a corporate psychopath) increase the level of overload and contribute to the level of stress you experience.

Prolonged exposure to information overload produces so called information fatigue syndrome. Symptoms include paralysis of analytical capacity, increased anxiety, greater self-doubt, and a tendency to blame others. Long exposure produces symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress syndrome and in milder form is intrinsically connected with demoralization and burnout. Here the most helpful page is probably Softpanorama Humor Archive. Unique Collection of Open Source Related Humor. Humor is one of the most affecting methods of fighting stress and overload. It helps a person to remain positive in difficult situations more effectively that most drugs.

When people are faced with more information than they can process, they become unable to make decisions or take action. There are two important aspects of this problem:

Often information overload is typical for high-tech startups. "Technology has changed, but human nature hasn't. Whether it's the Gold Rush of 1849 or the Web Rush of l999, people are people. More often than not, they're miserable, nasty, selfish creatures, driven by vanity and greed, doing whatever they can to get ahead, even if it means stepping on the person next to them, crushing the weak, and destroying themselves in the process." Actually this is not true. The IT industry is a unique environment; we are truly given a more choice as to where our priorities lie than in many other jobs. But there is no free lunch. You want a cool job? Don't expect to work for a huge company and get paid the big bucks. You want to make good money? Don't expect to be able to leave the office in the middle of the day just to sit in the park and drink coffee. You want to make great money? Don't expect to work 40 or even 50 hours a week...

Actually startups aren't about the paradise, nor are they viable for those who crave security. They are about risk, not just financial but also emotional and intellectual. Some think that the rewards for success are worth it, some not... It's true that some startups hire, than harass and inflict burnout on programmers and sys-admins. Life in the fast lane can be brutal - long hours, almost no employer-employee loyalty, greed and moral cowardice, back-stabbing, pressure, etc. If you don't want to do what your boss want, a startup can probably find immigrant that will do it for less money. That is the Silicon Valley Way (TM).

Many visitors to this page are probably system administrators. And it's sad to say but sysadmins are often the janitors of e-business. To clean up the messes from the ugly packages superfast growth and unrealistic schedules they often work long, late hours. It's a thankless job (although not the only one and not the most miserable one...) Anyway the reality is that sysadmins/programmers in startups and small companies that are struggling to survive. Sometimes are also put under substantial stress... I'm surprised most of them aren't more neurotic from sleep deprivation.

At the same time many sysadmins in established companies working with "Gold" coverage from Sun or HP can surf the WEB for 80% of the day... And if you can rarely showed up before 11 a.m., sometimes it is just a survival skill to stay past midnight once in a while... In large companies most sysadmin roles aren't always firefighting, and not so much stress, but there is little of no traning and unless you engage is self-stude you dequlify and the routine tends to wear on a capable person pretty quickly.

Sometimes it is really look like a cleaning job with slightly better pay (not by much if you calculate the total number of hours worked per year and the fact that many sysadmin has no real replacement and are always "on call"). You clean it today, but in a month everything return to the same state. Sometimes it make sense to play an idiot in large company in best traditions of Peter Principle. Officially recognized low-performers often can spend 90% of their time addressing only 10% of problems that high-performer needs to address. The most valued employees in large companies are often on the verge of burn-out because they are too overloaded and have way too many pressures, conflicts and demands combined with too few rewards, acknowledgments and successes.

For IS top guns it might make sense to stop for a moment to dig infodirt and ask themselves a simple question "Does working with the fancy hardware and software (let's assume for a moment that Unix can be fancy first five years or so ;-) worth 60 hours a week or even 40 hours of cleaning infodirt?". Independent of your answer thinking about this may help to adjust your priorities :-).

Pseudo-Attention Deficit Disorder

Some programmers are perversely wired. It is not uncommon for them to be sitting in a meeting and using a hand-held device to exchange instant messages surreptitiously - with someone in the same meeting. In such cases we can talk about Pseudo-attention deficit disorder. Some signs:

Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov


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[Jun 26, 2021] One trick to deal with work burnout, psychologist suggests by Thomas Hum

Notable quotes:
"... With the boundaries between home and the workplace blurred as the result of many people working from home, Friedman describes work burnout as a "pandemic within a pandemic." ..."
"... "It's quite natural to feel burnt out right now," Friedman said. "And it's because of the decimation between work and life boundaries and the fact that we're all juggling our kids on top of our basic work responsibilities." ..."
"... The better approach, he said, is to learn more rather than working less in order to increase your energy. Learning new things will provide a mood and confidence boost, while also fulfilling one's "basic psychological need for growth." ..."
"... "What we know from the research is that when you take care of the entire employee by fulfilling their basic human psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they tend to be more productive," Friedman said. "So this is something that should be top of mind for any leader hoping to motivate their staff." ..."
"... "[Employees are] having the ability to focus in a way that just isn't available to them in the office," Friedman said. "And I'm heartened by the fact that I think more organizations are aware of those biological needs." ..."
Jun 21, 2021 | www.kucancercenter.org

Changes to the workplace brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic will cause "a revolution in the way that organizations operate," Dr. Ron Friedman, social psychologist and author of " Decoding Greatness ," told Yahoo Finance Live .

With the boundaries between home and the workplace blurred as the result of many people working from home, Friedman describes work burnout as a "pandemic within a pandemic."

"It's quite natural to feel burnt out right now," Friedman said. "And it's because of the decimation between work and life boundaries and the fact that we're all juggling our kids on top of our basic work responsibilities."

Amid a nationwide labor shortage , many Americans are returning to work in person, with the CDC reporting that 52.6% of the population is inoculated with at least one dose and 43.9% are considered fully vaccinated. However, a recent study found that 73% of U.S. workers have some anxiety about returning to in-person work. And although some believe these concerns will ease over time , working from home has taken a mental toll on many in the workforce.

Friedman, who has consulted for Fortune 500 companies, political leaders, and global non-profits, describes burnout as a situation in which the requirements of an individual's tasks consistently outstrip the amount of energy they have available.

According to Friedman, there are two main ways of alleviating burnout. One of the strategies is to reduce the demands of work, which may be difficult for many. Friedman admitted that a pitfall of this strategy is to attempt to cram more work into less time when trying to work less, which ultimately elevates stress levels in the end.

The better approach, he said, is to learn more rather than working less in order to increase your energy. Learning new things will provide a mood and confidence boost, while also fulfilling one's "basic psychological need for growth."

As for how companies and other organizations should approach the issue of burnout among their staff, Friedman argued that leaders must take a more holistic approach to caring for employees. He stressed the need to care for the "entire employee," rather than just the "sliver of them" who is in the office from 9 to 5.

"What we know from the research is that when you take care of the entire employee by fulfilling their basic human psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they tend to be more productive," Friedman said. "So this is something that should be top of mind for any leader hoping to motivate their staff."

Fritedman cited realizations among workplaces that leaders must take additional steps to meet employees' biological needs if they wish to fulfill their basic psychological needs. Because people have been doing things such as taking naps and going for walks during the day, he suggested that peoples' biological needs have been better satisfied during the pandemic than they have been in generations. These things allow for better focus that would not be possible in an office setting, according to Friedman.

"[Employees are] having the ability to focus in a way that just isn't available to them in the office," Friedman said. "And I'm heartened by the fact that I think more organizations are aware of those biological needs."

Thomas Hum is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter: @thomashumTV

[Apr 27, 2021] Bank IT worker's heart attack prompts viral post about -spending all day on Zoom- - CBS News

Apr 27, 2021 | www.cbsnews.com

Jonathan Frostick, who does information technology work for financial services firm HSBC, wrote on LinkedIn that his first thought while having a heart attack was "this isn't convenient" for a meeting with his manager the next day. His second thought: "How do I secure the funding for X (work stuff)."

His wife was fourth on the list of concerns, following worries about updating his will. But since recovering in the hospital, he said he has re-evaluated his goals, outlining his overhauled goals in a post that's gone viral on the business-focused social network.

No more days packed with Zoom calls, for starters, the U.K.-based worker wrote. "I'm restructuring my approach to work," Frostick continued. "I'm really not going to be putting up with any s#%t at work ever again â€" life literally is too short."

Frostick's post is striking a chord at a time when the boundaries between work and home life have all but disappeared for millions of white-collar workers. With more than 203,000 likes and more than 10,000 comments on LinkedIn, people are posting their own experiences with work, health setbacks as well as sending him well-wishes.

Frostick updated his post to say that he's "up and walking."

"I never expected this post to hit home the message it did â€" but I'm pleased as it has seemingly helped a lot of people," he wrote early on Wednesday.

... ... ...

Frostick, who didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, told Bloomberg that his work days stretched to 12 hours, with him and his colleagues spending long amounts of time on Zoom. The 45-year-old, who has three children, said he took responsibility for blurring the line between work and home life.

"Whereas before I would finish sensibly anywhere between five and half six, I'd be finding myself there on a Friday at 8 o'clock at night exhausted, thinking I need to prep up something for Monday and I haven't got time, and I started then to actually work weekends," Frostick told the publication. "That's my responsibility. I think that was probably for me where it was those blurring of boundaries."

Many people have developed a love-hate relationship with Zoom during the pandemic . While it makes remote work possible, it can also lead to burnout , with Citibank CEO Jane Fraser last month designating Fridays as a Zoom-free day to battle video-call fatigue. She also urged workers to set "healthy work boundaries" and avoid scheduling calls outside business hours. "[T]he blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday have taken a toll on our well-being," she said in a memo to employees.

In the meantime, Frostick said in a LinkedIn update that he has an excellent manager, and added that he wasn't forced to work on weekends.

"Yes I shouldn't have, but I wasn't forced to. I am deeply passionate about what I do. I'm a (fortunate) living example of getting the mix wrong," he noted. "You are in charge of YOUR life â€" make changes.

[Apr 27, 2021] Coronavirus- HSBC manager Johnny Frostick’s heart attack prompts viral LinkedIn post about overwork amid COVID-19

Apr 27, 2021 | www.afr.com

When Jonny Frostick realised he was having a heart attack this month, the first thing that occurred to the HSBC contractor was: “I needed to meet with my manager tomorrow, this isn’t convenient.”

Then he thought about funding for a project, his will, and finally, his wife.

Frostick, who manages more than 20 employees working on regulatory data projects, chronicled his near-death experience in a viral LinkedIn post that had been viewed almost 8 million times. The 45-year-old Briton is the latest financial employee to weigh in on the work-till-you-drop culture during a pandemic that’s obliterated the lines between office and home life for droves of workers.

“Whereas before I would finish sensibly anywhere between five and half six, I’d be finding myself there on a Friday at 8 o’clock at night exhausted, thinking I need to prep up something for Monday and I haven’t got time, and I started then to actually work weekends,” Frostick said in a phone interview from his home in Dorset, England. “That’s my responsibility. I think that was probably for me where it was those blurring of boundaries.”

Jonny Frostick and his wife, Adel.

“We all wish Jonathan a full and speedy recovery,” said HSBC spokeswoman Heidi Ashley. “The response to this topic shows how much this is on people’s minds and we are encouraging everyone to make their health and wellbeing a top priority.”

Isolation and hours of Zoom calls

Frostick said he and colleagues spend a disproportionate amount of time on Zoom calls, and work days can stretch to 12 hours. The isolation of remote work also takes a toll, he said.

“We’re not able to have those other conversations off the side of a desk or by the coffee machine, or take a walk and go and have that chat,” he said. “That has been quite profound, not just in my work, but across the professional-services industry.”

The former construction worker took a different path into finance to many of his peers. A native of Bournemouth, an English coastal town, he worked in his father’s building business and didn’t get a bachelor’s degree until he was 29.

https://0d848a6aa1fc6bab7b5a3d2560d757f2.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html Advertisement

When he arrived in London, the self-described country boy had to learn how to use the Underground subway system, and mixed for the first time with ballet and theatre aficionados. From there, he went down a path of intense work that included stints at Accenture, JPMorgan, UK government ministries and Deutsche Bank. He cultivated a so-called mask to fit into corporate culture.

Frostick, who has three young children, said he is responsible for the overwork and neglect of his health that culminated in the heart attack. Now he wants to share his wake-up call with others.

‘This could happen to you’

“I owe a responsibility to myself and other people,” Frostick said. “This happened to me, this could happen to you. You need to change that.”

He wants to drive conversation about the post-pandemic work culture and hopes employers will implement a more flexible approach. In the post, Frostick vowed to make changes, including limiting Zoom calls, restructuring his approach to work and spending more time with family. The post received more than 201,000 likes and generated thousands of messages from people who are rethinking their attitudes.

Frostick is still recovering from his hospital stay, and only has enough energy to get out of bed for a couple of hours at a time. He’s enjoying time with his wife and children, and eventually wants to do more work on a dilapidated Mercedes. There’s some talk about non-executive director roles or advisory work. Someone suggested he write a book.

The decision to write the raw LinkedIn post comes at a precarious time in his life and finances, said Frostick. He’s racked up costs from court proceedings with his ex-wife over child-care arrangements for their daughter.

“My back’s against the wall,” he said.

Still, he doesn’t blame HSBC for his health problems and is bullish about future prospects.

“I don’t think this should reflect badly on the place where I work, I think it’s fairly consistent across the industry, and I think that’s why it’s resonated with so many people,” he said. “If an organisation didn’t want to employ me because I’d actually taken a moment to reflect, and capture this, then that’s probably not the right place for me to be working.”

�" Bloomberg

[Jul 04, 2020] Social Media, the Dopamine Loop, and the Role of the Software Engineer naked capitalism

Not only social media, but also regular MSM web sites create a "dopamine loop" when the users spend unordinary amount of time browsing for news.
Notable quotes:
"... Thanks to neuroscience, we're beginning to understand that achieving a goal or anticipating the reward of new content for completing a task can excite the neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain's pleasure centers. ..."
"... Twitter is wonderful because a lot of journalists, writers, scientists, artists, and activists frequent it, so I get many fascinating links and insights from all over the world that I would never find otherwise. Twitter is horrible because it takes every aspect of American politics that is currently horrible, and amplifies it, and the short form may itself encourage more horribleness. ..."
"... Of course, neoliberalism produces plenty of desperation. "The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace" –Frank Herbert, Children of Dune . ..."
"... I think that if one honestly mined the user population, they would find that dopamine rushes apply to only a segment of users – the socially insecure, which accounts for most children and many young adults. There is also the cofactor of the smartphone, which for some has become the technological equivalent of Linus' blue blanket. ..."
"... I find social media to be most useful to keep up with old friends scattered all over the world because smartphones make their sharing spontaneous ..."
"... Addiction is rarely likely to be the case, because craving is only one part of addiction. The other part is getting physically ill when you stop. Being cranky or preoccupied when deprived of social media is not illness – it is just annoying to others. ..."
"... Regardless, getting users addicted to running in the dopamine hamster wheel is exactly what the social media engineers have been designing to achieve on purpose. Because every turn of the wheel generates more money for the social media platform owners who pay the social media engineers to do the engineering. Except for those founding social media engineers who founded the platforms themselves, like Zuckerberg. Their incentive to addict as many hamsters as possible to running in the dopamine wheel is even stronger. ..."
"... We live in a society where people are lonely, isolated and insecure, and where they are officially encouraged to fight each other for financial or social/identity advantage. ..."
"... But people don't actually like doing this, and would rather be members of communities than be good liberal autonomy maximizers. But if you haven't got a real community any more, you're much more likely to adopt, and even use to excess, something that has the outward trappings of one. ..."
"... "Dopamine" is just a trendy term for "reinforcement" or, before that, "pleasure." So an important reminder: we're always – ALWAYS – "manipulating human nervous tissue." That's what it means to be an obligate social animal. ..."
"... i am addicted to Naked Capitalism, and proud of it. Both articles and comments. ..."
"... Another industry that has been in this business a long time is the gambling and casino industry. Slot machines, video poker, etc., are also software constructions explicitly designed to engage users as strongly as possible and keep them engaged for as long as possible, in order to generate as much profit as possible. ..."
"... I have to say that many programmers are very young, and mostly male, and when in groups, for whatever reason, I've observed among them a distinct lack of empathy, a lack of worldly wisdom and questioning, and an inability to imagine any other kind of life experience than what the engineer has personally known, no matter how well intentioned the individual is (and they are sometimes rather the opposite). Meanwhile the much more experienced, worldly and wise managers stand over the coding team, giving direction and applause and monetary rewards for every bit of "cleverness" the team comes up with, no matter how deranged. Every incentive is in favor of sociopathic mindless greed. And who goes to prison when something goes wrong? The engineer. ..."
Jan 16, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

The existence of a "dopamine loop" created by social media likes and clicks is conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley, but I haven't been able to find the original science behind it. (It is possible that it's a phrase that is used because it sticks in the mind and makes the user sound authoritative, like "kompromat .") The Atlantic describes the dopamine loop as "neuroscience" (hmm) in 2012:

Thanks to neuroscience, we're beginning to understand that achieving a goal or anticipating the reward of new content for completing a task can excite the neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain's pleasure centers. This in turn causes the experience to be perceived as pleasurable. As a result, some people can become obsessed with these pleasure-seeking experiences and engage in compulsive behavior such as a need to keep playing a game, constantly check email, or compulsively gamble online. A recent Newsweek cover story described some of the harmful effects of being trapped in the compulsion loop.

... ... ...

And so let me circle round to the programmer. Here's an example of manipulating human nervous tissue at Instagram (owned by Facebook). From the Toronto Globe and Mail :

The makers of smartphone apps rightly believe that part of the reason we're so curious about those notifications is that people are desperately insecure and crave positive feedback with a kneejerk desperation. Matt Mayberry, who works at a California startup called Dopamine Labs, says it's common knowledge in the industry that Instagram exploits this craving by strategically withholding "likes" from certain users . If the photo-sharing app decides you need to use the service more often, it'll show only a fraction of the likes you've received on a given post at first, hoping you'll be disappointed with your haul and check back again in a minute or two. "They're tying in to your greatest insecurities," Mr. Mayberry said.

NOTES

[1] I have a carefully curated list. Twitter is wonderful because a lot of journalists, writers, scientists, artists, and activists frequent it, so I get many fascinating links and insights from all over the world that I would never find otherwise. Twitter is horrible because it takes every aspect of American politics that is currently horrible, and amplifies it, and the short form may itself encourage more horribleness. On the whole, however, I prefer Twitter because I curate my news feed -- I suppose it could be said that I titrate my dosage -- and not Facebook's faceless engineers.

[2] Of course, neoliberalism produces plenty of desperation. "The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace" –Frank Herbert, Children of Dune .

Lee , January 14, 2018 at 3:51 pm

The fact that people can't stop staring at and interacting with their phone screens while driving, walking, conversing, or even having sex, if news reports are to be believed, are indicative of the addictive nature of the technology. Or would "format" as opposed to "technology" be the more appropriate term? The "Technology" section on Google news page seems to consist largely of infomercials for social media.

Thomas Hilton , January 14, 2018 at 3:55 pm

I think this story raises an interesting, albeit fictional, account of why people use social media so much. I think that if one honestly mined the user population, they would find that dopamine rushes apply to only a segment of users – the socially insecure, which accounts for most children and many young adults. There is also the cofactor of the smartphone, which for some has become the technological equivalent of Linus' blue blanket.

You do see evidence from posts on FB that some people are seeking approval of their daily lifestyle. "Here I am at this club, this restaurant, this event, with this person." If they do not get many likes, do they patronize alternatives? Perhaps they seek reassurance that they are tasteful, "in," cool, not overdoing, etc.

As an elderly FB user, I grew up with computers (DARPANet, BITNET, the Internet), PCs, laptops, tablets, cellphones, palm pilots, smartphones, etc. These are tools for various purposes. When working, I would not tolerate people putting their smartphones on the meeting room table – it was/is a rude distraction. It was okay to use them for scheduling the next meeting date, or making a note of a new task. It was/is handy to have my rolodex IN my phone now, and a diary that vibrates to remind me of my next appointment – even in retirement! None of those uses smack of abusive use, and the vibration in my pocket does not produce a dopamine rush.

I find social media to be most useful to keep up with old friends scattered all over the world because smartphones make their sharing spontaneous. "Likes" for my peers are often ratifications that grandparenting is indeed gratifying, isn't it nice that we can travel, or sharing in the glee of a new puppy. Passe email, is still a wonder because we can daily share private ideas, experiences, new theories, or discuss world events just like when we were teens or in college. Lastly, there is blogs. Like NC, I learn more and faster what is going on in my world, and I can adjust the diversity of my input (which for me is quite high).

Lastl, from a neuroscience perspective, dopamine is often characterized as if it were an addictive neurotoxin like heroin or cocaine. We hear rants about how people are addicted to their iPhones (a metaphor of sorts for social media). Addiction is rarely likely to be the case, because craving is only one part of addiction. The other part is getting physically ill when you stop. Being cranky or preoccupied when deprived of social media is not illness – it is just annoying to others.

Toske , January 14, 2018 at 4:09 pm

""The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works," he said, referring to online interactions driven by "hearts, likes, thumbs-up." "No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth."

Likes makes right. Those posts with fewer likes become invisible compared to those with more. Having a discussion might lead one or both sides to learn something and come to a place of mutual understanding, if not agreement, but why bother with all that when it's a million times easier to simply block out disagreeing voices? Hell, the apps do that for you.

If you want likes, keep it simplistic, feel-good and humorous. Posting anything thought-provoking causes the dopamine machine gun to stutter, and that's poor form.

drumlin woodchuckles , January 14, 2018 at 4:33 pm

I remember reading/hearing that the "pleasure center" in the brain is supposed to be a real bunch of neurons which really exists. Dopamine is supposed to be one of the neurotransmitters secreted therein. Various other braincell fiber pathways are supposed to connect to it such that when survival-necessary activities send related sensory-stimulus impulses through those pathways, that some dopamine is secreted which makes the pleasure center make the brain-at-large feel good. The brain will seek more such feel-good dopamine-pellet rewards by driving the body to engage in more such survival-prolonging activities such as eating food or having procreational sex.

It is so much easier to use and to hear the 3-word-phrase "dopamine feedback loop".
Perhaps "dopamine feedback loop" is a metaphorical word-model for the whole process alluded to above, just as Niels Bohr's little solar system model was a metaphorical diagram-model for an "atom".

Regardless, getting users addicted to running in the dopamine hamster wheel is exactly what the social media engineers have been designing to achieve on purpose. Because every turn of the wheel generates more money for the social media platform owners who pay the social media engineers to do the engineering. Except for those founding social media engineers who founded the platforms themselves, like Zuckerberg. Their incentive to addict as many hamsters as possible to running in the dopamine wheel is even stronger.

Their statements of dismay are so much virtue signalling and mutual back patting. Their actions all say: more hamsters, please. And spin the wheels faster.

( I don't have a cell phone because cell phones cause cancer. I don't do facebook because facebook was never anything but a clever conspiracy to trick people into building dossiers on themselves. I don't do twitter because I don't have the energy or the desire to be known and followed. Reading and commenting on 3 or so blogs is the closest I come to running in the dopamine hamster wheel).

David , January 14, 2018 at 4:55 pm

I'm as anti these social media companies as anyone, and never use their products. But I wonder if some of their success doesn't come from kicking into an open goal.

We live in a society where people are lonely, isolated and insecure, and where they are officially encouraged to fight each other for financial or social/identity advantage.

But people don't actually like doing this, and would rather be members of communities than be good liberal autonomy maximizers. But if you haven't got a real community any more, you're much more likely to adopt, and even use to excess, something that has the outward trappings of one.

Oregoncharles , January 15, 2018 at 1:29 am

"Dopamine" is just a trendy term for "reinforcement" or, before that, "pleasure." So an important reminder: we're always – ALWAYS – "manipulating human nervous tissue." That's what it means to be an obligate social animal.

However, I have only a "dumb" phone (a lot of us, here on NC), and minimize my involvement with Facebook; not on Twitter at all.

Of course, with a recent rash of babies in my family (my siblings are suddenly grandparents – long generations in my family), I've been introduced to "23snaps," a picture-sharing platform. It's annoying, no matter how cute the babies are.

Disturbed Voter , January 15, 2018 at 9:27 am

i am addicted to Naked Capitalism, and proud of it. Both articles and comments.

DJG , January 15, 2018 at 9:35 am

I read Jaron Lanier's books, You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future?, when they came out. He has been skeptical of Facebook all along. He is also highly skeptical of EULA agreements–the idea that software is licensed to you and that the licenser then has access to your computer because you are not the owner. He also pointed out several years ago that certain assumptions about software, for instance, that text should go into a "file," have frozen innovation. As a musician, he is definitely not keen on musical software (neither the software for storing / playing music nor composition software).

The dopamine connection sounds like a bunch of quant majors searching for something from their required bio course. The problem with Facebook is that it is Pavlovian–you get approval and go back for more approval. Ding, ding, ding. The reason that the dopamine connection is popular is that it reinforces some currently received ideas about the chemical brain. Pavlov was about behavior: But criticizing behavior is so darn patriarchal and judgmental and old fashioned. With chemicals, no one has to answer for behavior. It's the fault of covalent bonding.

drumlin woodchuckles , January 15, 2018 at 8:18 pm

The brain either has chemicals in it or it doesn't. If it does, the people who understand that fact and figure out how to study what those chemicals have to do with what will know more than those people who don't understand that fact and don't study anything to do with that fact or how it operates.

JEHR , January 15, 2018 at 12:11 pm

I made a conscious decision to not belong to Facebook, to cancel Twitter, and to not use a cell-phone except for its communication as a phone-thing. If we human beings had used our techno time to help solve some of earth's problems (pollution, climate change, over-population, poverty, inequality, etc.) we would have been on the path of solving these most important problems already. Technology of the type named basically keeps us from confronting and resolving these most important problems. Another fear I have of the overuse of technology (along with a world run by billionaires) is the weakening and finally the breaking down of democracy itself.

lyman alpha blob , January 15, 2018 at 2:12 pm

I will just say thank you for not having any type of 'likes' on NC. I enjoy the fact that here, people's words stand on their own and people can make up their own minds what to think.

And these days, how many 'likes' or 'followers' or whatever are from real human beings as opposed to bots? Seem to remember reading about a whole cottage industry where one could purchase followers to make themselves seem more popular.

XXYY , January 15, 2018 at 3:26 pm

But what about the software engineers who also "did it anyway"? That horrid little piece of manipulation -- "strategically withholding 'likes'" -- was implemented by a team. There was a manager, there was a whiteboard, there were design sessions, there was testing, there was coding, all for software engineered to treat humans like cattle.

Another industry that has been in this business a long time is the gambling and casino industry. Slot machines, video poker, etc., are also software constructions explicitly designed to engage users as strongly as possible and keep them engaged for as long as possible, in order to generate as much profit as possible.

By Facebook standards, gaming machines are quite crude: perform some physical act, then get monetary reimbursement (or not), repeat. It's straight variable-ratio reinforcement, as the behaviorists used to say. But it seems to work quite well, and no one can say it isn't intentional.

False Solace , January 15, 2018 at 6:29 pm

A few things leap to mind:

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

-- quoting Nathaniel Borenstein here

Also this post from Clean Coder, about the VW diesel fraud and the engineer who's going to prison for "just following orders":

Imagine the scene in that meeting room. What was said? What was agreed to? We may never know all the details; but it's clear that the executives asked the engineers to find a way to defeat the emission tests.

Now think of the engineers. What a cool problem to have to solve? No, really! Imagine how much fun it would be to figure out some sneaky way to bypass the emission test. [snip]

Imagine the brainstorming, the "good" ideas. The coolness of knowing that there's a really nifty solution to this problem.

Imagine how pleased the executives would be with this really cool engineering solution. Imagine how proud the engineers were.

I have to say that many programmers are very young, and mostly male, and when in groups, for whatever reason, I've observed among them a distinct lack of empathy, a lack of worldly wisdom and questioning, and an inability to imagine any other kind of life experience than what the engineer has personally known, no matter how well intentioned the individual is (and they are sometimes rather the opposite). Meanwhile the much more experienced, worldly and wise managers stand over the coding team, giving direction and applause and monetary rewards for every bit of "cleverness" the team comes up with, no matter how deranged. Every incentive is in favor of sociopathic mindless greed. And who goes to prison when something goes wrong? The engineer.

Robert Martin's speech "The Scribes' Oath" from GOTO 2017 also comes to mind. (The video is very easy to find on Youtube, but the URL is blocked where I work so I'm not able to provide it.) I've only read his "code of conduct" so I'm not certain whether his speech goes into the ethics of certain programming decisions, as opposed to strictly technical decisions. If there were some sort of "oath" required for the programming profession, I would hope it placed ethical and moral considerations much more highly than merely technical ones like requiring unit tests or not blocking other people's commits. While the scribes in ancient Egypt were highly valued and technically skilled, they fundamentally served autocratic power. And it is the same for us.

False Solace , January 15, 2018 at 6:33 pm

From another post by Clean Coder:

If we had a real profession, those programmers would be brought before that profession, investigated, and if found guilty, drummed out of the profession in disgrace.

-- "VW" 14 October 2015

Of course, we don't have a real profession. Just some mystique stolen from actual engineers.

jrs , January 15, 2018 at 11:01 pm

Well if it was a profession there would be some kind of job protections as well maybe. But haha. So maybe people just do it because if they don't some H1B will.

How actual weakening of peoples morality goes is: one may start out all idealistic and moral, but in order to stay employed or get employment one gradually must compromise more and more and one HAS TO deaden themselves to the effect of this compromising. So one may start out idealistic at 20 but chances are one isn't going to be such an idealist by the time they reach 50, oh heck one would sell their soul several times over just to get a job by the time they reach 50

Tuan , January 15, 2018 at 7:21 pm

So if we can do this affirmation gig ad infinitum on FB, why can't we do it in the flesh then???

Feeling puzzled .

Anonymous Coward , January 15, 2018 at 10:40 pm

Nir Eyal wrote a whole book in this topic called Hooked.

There is a ton of skepticism here, but keeping people in anticipation of the next hit is why there is endless scroll on the most time sucking applications

[Jul 04, 2020] The Attention Deficit Society What Technology Is Doing to Our Brains

Notable quotes:
"... There is undoubtedly a habit-forming component where the lever pressing becomes compulsive at some point. B ..."
"... When I grew up, there was the concept of "substitute gratification" ranging over thumbsucking, substance use, casual TV watching, and other compulsive behaviors, all of which emerge in response to frustration and are magically absent when a better gratification is available, whether intellectual stimulation of otherwise. ..."
May 07, 2011 | Economist's View

cm:

There is undoubtedly a habit-forming component where the lever pressing becomes compulsive at some point. But I have found myself as well as heard the same from peers, that especially in a workplace setting there is a large boredom-killing aspect.

As engineers, we do get opportunity to work on interesting or at least intellectually challenging and satisfying things. When you are on something like this, there is no urge to text, check updates, etc. But as soon as you get stuck on some issue and frustration sets in, or you are made to partake in office bureaucracy and other unpleasantries, boredom kicks in.

When I grew up, there was the concept of "substitute gratification" ranging over thumbsucking, substance use, casual TV watching, and other compulsive behaviors, all of which emerge in response to frustration and are magically absent when a better gratification is available, whether intellectual stimulation of otherwise.

[May 17, 2020] The Online Double-bind by Edward Curtin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The trap was set at least twenty-five years ago and the mice jumped at the smell of the cheese. I am referring to the introduction of the computer as a mass necessity and the Internet that followed. I was slow to enter the trap, "forced" finally in 2007 by the college where I was teaching. ..."
"... In 1960 the sociologist C. Wright Mills said that there was far too much information for people to assimilate and make sense of and that lucid summations were needed. He was echoing Thoreau who in 1854 said: ..."
"... If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?" ..."
"... The Internet is a double-bind because we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. News, writing, and information of all sorts is now often not available any other way. The era of paper newspapers is coming to an end. This was meant to be. ..."
"... To put you into a state of frenetic passivity while whispering in your ear that there is no escape, while allowing elements of truth to emerge to keep you addicted. ..."
May 17, 2020 | off-guardian.org

The trap was set at least twenty-five years ago and the mice jumped at the smell of the cheese. I am referring to the introduction of the computer as a mass necessity and the Internet that followed. I was slow to enter the trap, "forced" finally in 2007 by the college where I was teaching.

Up to that point, I was just a member of The Lead Pencil Club, whose motto was "a speed bump on the information superhighway" and whose membership list numbered twenty-three and a half people worldwide. When I slowly and reluctantly reached for the cheese the trap snapped, not on my neck to finish me, but on my head that was half in and half out.

The out part kept thinking.

What follows are that half-head's musings on why I didn't follow my intuition, the whole damn sorry situation we are all in, and what we might do to spring the trap and run free. I don't like this trapped feeling. And, by the way, the cheese was American, which is not exactly real cheese.

In 1960 the sociologist C. Wright Mills said that there was far too much information for people to assimilate and make sense of and that lucid summations were needed. He was echoing Thoreau who in 1854 said:

If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?"

Mills said people needed to develop what he called the sociological imagination that would allow them to condense and simplify news and to connect personal and social matters within historical and structural contexts.

That was the long-lost era of newspapers, long-form paper magazines, the reading of books, and minimal television stations. To think that there was far too much information then can only make one laugh, now that the digital revolution has buried us in data, information, and "breaking news" at warp speed, usually contradictory and lacking context.

The internet has literally made people crazy, created schizoid or split personalities who don't know whether they are coming or going or what world they are in, physical or virtual. This is the era of social schizophrenia. It is also the era of Covid-19 lockdowns when a far greater online life is promoted as the necessary future.

If people once felt that all the information was too confusing and they were ending up thinking and doing things ass-backwards as a result, back then they might have understood it if you told them that the only way you can do anything is ass-backwards. Today, many would probably greet you with a look of bewilderment as they googled it to see if there was a way to swivel their asses to the front to get adjusted to the way they feel while waiting online for clear directions to emerge. Which way does an ass go?

They will be waiting for a long, long time.

The Internet is a double-bind because we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. News, writing, and information of all sorts is now often not available any other way. The era of paper newspapers is coming to an end. This was meant to be.

Other sources of fact and fiction have gradually been eliminated, while the content on the Internet has been dramatically increased and progressively censored. The dream of an open Internet is turning into a nightmare.

If you look at the Internet's creation and development by the US military-intelligence-Silicon Valley network as a tool for social control, propaganda, and total spying, if you grasp this nexus and their intentions, you will come away realizing that the Internet and the total integrated digital world is a dystopian tool designed to make you crazy. To sow confusion and endless contradictory information from minute to minute. To "flood the zone" (see Event 201) with propaganda and disinformation. To give you a headache, keep you agitated, destroy your genuine human experience in the physical world.

To put you into a state of frenetic passivity while whispering in your ear that there is no escape, while allowing elements of truth to emerge to keep you addicted.

This is the double-bind. It is what Jacques Ellul in 1964 called the technological society that is ruled by technique in every aspect of its life. Technique is a way of thinking that emphasizes efficiency; it is a way of thinking that emphasizes order and standardized means to a predetermined end. It is rational, deliberate, and focused on results. It is a way of thinking that has penetrated deep into the psychic structures of society and opposes spontaneity and unreflective action.

Machines grow out of technical thinking, and today the computer, the internet, and artificial intelligence are the ideal manifestations of such thinking. They are the result, not the cause.

As such, digital technology satisfies the technical mindsets that have been created over the decades, which includes regular people who have been gradually softened up to believe these machine dreams. Efficiency, results, practicality, and speed. The human body as a wonderful machine.

We have all been so conditioned, even those of us old enough to have lived before the computer era. Starting particularly in the early 1990s with the rat-a-tat electronic frenzy of the U.S. televised aggressive war against Iraq, euphemistically called the Gulf War and presented live with round-the-clock television coverage by ghoulish announcers more excited than 13-year-old boys with a porn magazine, the speed of everyday life has increased.

If you lived through those years and were sensitive to the social drift, you could feel the pace of life pick up year-to-year, as everyone was induced to get in the fast lane. On the information superhighway, it is the only lane.

Paul Virilio, a French thinker, has focused on this issue of speed in his studies of dromology, from dromos: a race, running. While his language is perhaps too academic, his insights are profound, as with the following point:

The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world's extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.

This is the world of teleconferencing and the online life, existence shorn of physical space and time and people. A world where shaking hands is a dissident act. A haunted world of specters, words, and images that can appear and disappear in a nanosecond. A magic show. A place where, in the words of Charles Manson, you can "get the fear," where fear is king. A locus where, as we sit at home "sheltering in place," we are no longer there.

Ernest Hemingway sniffed the future when in The Sun Also Rises , he has the protagonist Jake Barnes say no to Robert Cohn, who wants him to travel to South America with him, with these words: "All countries look like the moving pictures."

That was 1926.

Things have changed a wee bit since then. But the essence of propaganda and social control remains the same. "All those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people," wrote R.D. Laing, in The Politics of Experience . "Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways."

Mystification takes place when people can be convinced that a social construction – e.g. the Internet and the digital life – is part of "the natural order of things," like the air we breathe. And that life online is real life, better and more real than physical existence.

I believe the digital revolution has gone a long way toward destroying our experience as persons. It is the endless magical mystery tour that goes nowhere. It is the ultimate psychodrama conjured by a satanic magician.

Do I exaggerate? Perhaps. But how else explain the spell this medium has cast on billions of people worldwide? Did the human race suddenly get smart? Or are many more people crazy?

I ask myself this question, and now I ask you. Has the Internet and the devices to access it made your life better or worse? Has it made the life of humanity better or worse? Has its essential role in globalization made for a better world?

Obviously, there are pluses to the Internet, just as there are pluses to almost everything. I don't deny that. The plus side of death is that the thought of it reminds you that you are alive. The plus side of television is you don't have to turn it on. Like you, I could rattle off many good things about the Internet (not cell phones, sorry). But on the scale of good and bad, where do you come down? Where do I?

Or is it possible we can't decide because we are too conflicted and caught in a double-bind?

I am of two minds, or more accurately, two half-heads. The upper part, pinned in the trap and dead to my situation, can only answer yes, sir, now that I am trapped, my life is better.

I can debate endlessly the minutiae of every issue thrown out like pieces of meat for caged lions. I can check the weather forecast for every hour of every day of the week, even though I know they will probably be wrong. I can get directions even though I know you don't need a director to know which way the roads go. I can research issues quickly and pontificate as if I were an expert on every matter from a to z. I can feel I am informed while feeling deformed by the contradictory information that appears and disappears every few minutes.

Essentially, I can feel in-touch and worthy of respect from friends and neighbors because I can exchange empty words with them about nothing. I can feel so very normal and rejoice in that. I can feel sane.

On the negative side, well, my lower half-head, the one that's still thinking lead-pencil thoughts, the slow and easy stuff, the calm cool breeze oh what a lovely daydreams – you don't really need to hear what it has to bitch about the Internet. You can probably guess.

In a fine article, Vicious Cycles: Theses on a philosophy of news , in Harper's Magazine, Greg Jackson writes the following about our addiction to so-called "news" (the Internet):

When we turn away from the news, we will confront a startling loneliness. It is the loneliness of life. The loneliness of thinking, of having no one to think for us, and of uncertainty.

It is a loneliness that was always there but that was obscured by an illusion, and we will miss the illusion . And we will miss tuning in each day to hear that voice that cuts boredom and loneliness in its solution of the present tense, that like Scheherazade assures us the story is still unfolding and always will be.

I don't know whether we can give it up.

Nor do I.

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Doctortrinate ,

so the tech monster is taking over our lives .but who has control over it ? I think the illusion is the belief that we control it, when in truth, we're being played, led deeper into its web, trapped in its net and held under its power, restricted through dependence , slowly vulgarized into ineffectual hollowness, deteriorated until so manipulated by it that folk won't know of or care for a life in any other way but artificial – so where are the calls restrict Its influence – to question those who built it and that would use it against us .those who's continuation is reliant on it taking them to a managed repeat, sustaining their control, and completing the apparatuses infinite circle of physical dominion.

this thing, this game, this performance – even to my lesser intermediate self , all is Insignificant.

TrueNorth ,

"The calm cool breeze" is exactly how it feels. It feels refreshing to be able to think independently.

tonyopmoc ,

I have always liked Italians but Sara Cunial is Something Else

Che coraggio. Che coraggio !!!!

BRILLANTE!!!!!!!

"Italian MP,Sara Cunial,Blasts Bill Gates in the Italian Parliament"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyH2ZCrBSQ0

Tony

Daniel Spaniel ,

I love that woman. I don't care if someone says she's right-wing or this or that blah blah blah

tonyopmoc ,

"Hobbes said that absolute power does not come from an imposition from above but by the choice of individuals who feel more protected renouncing to their own freedom and granting it to a third party. With this, you are going on anesthetizing the minds with corrupted Mass Media with Amuchina (a brand of disinfectant promoted by Mass Media) and NLP, with words like "regime", "to allow" and "to permit", to the point of allowing you to regulate our emotional ties and feelings and certify our affects.

So, in this way, Phase 2 is nothing else than the persecution/continuation of Phase 1 – you just changed the name, as you did with the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). We have understood people, for sure, don't die for the virus alone. So people will be allowed to die and suffer, thanks to you and your laws, for misery and poverty. And, as in the "best" regimes, the blame will be dropped only on citizens. You take away our freedom and say that we looked for it. Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule).

It is our children who will lose more, who are 'raped souls', with the help of the so-called "guarantor of their rights" and of CISMAI (Italian Coordination of Services against Child Abuse). In this way, the right to school will be granted only with a bracelet to get them used to probation, to get them used to slavery – involuntary treatment and to virtual lager. All this in exchange for a push-scooter and a tablet. All to satisfy the appetites of a financial capitalism whose driving force is the conflict of interest, conflict well represented by the WHO, whose main financier is the well-known "philanthropist and savior of the world" Bill Gates.

Hobbes said that absolute power does not come from an imposition from above but by the choice of individuals who feel more protected renouncing to their own freedom and granting it to a third party. With this, you are going on anesthetizing the minds with corrupted Mass Media with Amuchina (a brand of disinfectant promoted by Mass Media) and NLP, with words like "regime", "to allow" and "to permit", to the point of allowing you to regulate our emotional ties and feelings and certify our affects.

So, in this way, Phase 2 is nothing else than the persecution/continuation of Phase 1 – you just changed the name, as you did with the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). We have understood people, for sure, don't die for the virus alone. So people will be allowed to die and suffer, thanks to you and your laws, for misery and poverty. And, as in the "best" regimes, the blame will be dropped only on citizens. You take away our freedom and say that we looked for it. Divide et Impera (Divide and Rule).

It is our children who will lose more, who are 'raped souls', with the help of the so-called "guarantor of their rights" and of CISMAI (Italian Coordination of Services against Child Abuse). In this way, the right to school will be granted only with a bracelet to get them used to probation, to get them used to slavery – involuntary treatment and to virtual lager. All this in exchange for a push-scooter and a tablet. All to satisfy the appetites of a financial capitalism whose driving force is the conflict of interest, conflict well represented by the WHO, whose main financier is the well-known "philanthropist and savior of the world" Bill Gates.

We all know it, now. Bill Gates, already in 2018, predicted a pandemic, simulated in October 2019 at the "Event 201", together with Davos (Switzerland). For decades, Gates has been working on Depopulation policy and dictatorial control plans on global politics, aiming to obtain the primacy on agriculture, technology and energy.

Gates said, I quote exactly from his speech:

"If we do a good job on vaccines, health and reproduction, we can reduce the world population by 10-15%. Only a genocide can save the world".

With his vaccines, Gates managed to sterilize millions of women in Africa. Gates caused a polio epidemic that paralyzed 500,000 children in India and still today with DTP, Gates causes more deaths than the disease itself. And he does the same with GMOs designed by Monsanto and "generously donated" to needy populations. All this while he is already thinking about distributing the quantum tattoo for vaccination recognition and mRNA vaccines as tools for reprogramming our immune system. In addition, Gates also does business with several multinationals that own 5G facilities in the USA.

On this table there is the entire Deep State in Italian sauce: Sanofi, together with GlaxoSmithKline are friends of the Ranieri Guerra, Ricciardi, and of the well-known virologist that we pay 2000 Euro every 10 minutes for the presentations on Rai (Italian state TV. She's probably talking about Burioni). Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline sign agreements with medical societies to indoctrinate future doctors, making fun of their autonomy of judgment and their oath.

Hi-Tech multinationals, like the Roman Engineering which is friend of the noble Mantoan, or Bending Spoons, of Pisano, which are there for control and manage our personal health datas in agreement with the European Agenda ID2020 of electronic identification, which aims to use mass vaccination to obtain a digital platform of digital ID. This is a continuation of the transfer of data started by Renzi to IBM. Renzi, in 2016, gave a plus 30% to Gates Global Fund.

On the Deep State table there are the people of Aspen, like the Saxon Colao, who with his 4-pages reports, paid 800 Euros/hour, with no scientific review, dictates its politics as a Bilderberg general as he is, staying away from the battlefield. The list is long. Very long. In the list there is also Mediatronic, by Arcuri and many more.

The Italian contribution to the International Alliance Against Coronavirus will be of 140 million Euros, of which 120 million Euros will be given to GAVI Alliance, the non-profit by Gates Foundation. They are just a part of the 7.4 billion Euro fund by the EU to find a vaccine against Coronavirus – vaccines which will be used as I said before.

No money, of course for serotherapy, which has the collateral effect of being super cheap. No money for prevention, a real prevention, which includes our lifestyles, our food and our relationship with the environment.

The real goal of all of this is total control. Absolute domination of human beings, transformed into guinea pigs and slaves, violating sovereignty and free will. All this thanks to tricks/hoax disguised as political compromises. While you rip up the Nuremberg code with involuntary treatment, fines and deportation, facial recognition and intimidation, endorsed by dogmatic scientism – protected by our "Multi-President" of the Republic who is real cultural epidemic of this country.

We, with the people, will multiply the fires of resistance in a way that you won't be able to repress all of us.

I ask you, President, to be the spokesperson and give an advice to our President Conte: Dear Mr. President Conte, next time you receive a phone call from the philanthropist Bill Gates forward it directly to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. If you won't do this, tell us how we should define you, the "friend lawyer" who takes orders from a criminal."

Thank you.

nondimenticare ,

The daily double-bind I face with the Internet, while I long for the days without it, lost to me forever: I need it to find information – the "truth" – I am denied by mass media, and was denied even in their better times. How much earlier I could have learned the sordid background of the Vietnam War, JFK's assassination, 9/11 – even the origins of World War I – without devoting most hours of my day to the task!

Yet all the truths I search for are only tentatively available to me, come with extraneous negative baggage, and are in the process of being gradually withdrawn. Thus the trap is sprung.

In relation to COVID, I know more than I could have hoped to know (thanks in great part to OffG) owing to my digital link to others. But the irony is that the most frightful plans for our futures, referenced by Curtin, would not be possible without that digital world.

John Ervin ,

Problem is, how much of the truth you have found about JFK at Al. is not just limited hangout.

I know, I take what they give us and triangulate, and Intuit, and shake and bake, but the fact is they litter the landscape with endless red herring.

I was at an ROTC school in N. Hollywood in my teens and though I never spoke to him, he was a star student and asked to give a number of talks.

He's become a world expert on "true" JFK and as a publisher, or editor, is a major gatekeeper for, wow, most of the anti-Warren Conspiracy Realists.

I remember making a note on him at 16 years old that I really didn't trust his vibe. He edited our school mag, so I started an underground, very successful, til they kicked us both out in June 1969. My dismiss was real, but
I often mused that they were crafting a legend for him, like LHO. I'm dammed if I can prove he's real.

That was all fifty years ago, but he almost rules the roost of the Oliver Stone side of things. He could all be smoke and mirrors. Our school was a hotbed, as a rich rich Army school, of future CIA. How could he advance so well against the CIA without them putting more of a drag.

Reminds me of most of these former spooks turned whistleblowers. None of them could be so real. None.

He wrote "The Devil's Chessboard" about Allen Dulles being the party who killed JFK.

But he was only a puppet. I believe the Kennedy's were hit because they were putting down solid wonderful diplomatic roots with the Vatican, and going through the Pope via the Kremlin to walk the world back from Nuclear Holocaust.

But that alone is enough to put ANYONE on the Hit Parade if the Freemasons, who are sworn to the death to destroy as much of Catholicism as they possibly can, just read the history of the CRISTERO WAR in Mexico 95 years ago. The Mexican lodges of the Scottish Rite Freemasons gave President Plutarco Called a shining medal for his "work against the Catholic Church" in Mexico (work that got 100,000 people murdered in what Graham Greene called "the fiercest persecution of religion since Elizabeth")

dil pickles ,

Shit eff and other expletives
Beautifully put.
We are so many of us terrified of aloneness.
Loneliness is the name we give to the feeling we have when we are scared of aloneness.
Aloneness, when apprehended and experienced with brave abandon, may yield a new person, or a person where there was not one before?

bob ,

no explanation necessary

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gn9nTvjbTDE?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

IANA ,

Very brave women and a fantastic speech. She nailed it. Interesting that the bell chimed just as she mentioned 'Bilderberg'. Coincidence?

when not if ,

10 years at the helm of Google and currently a chair of the US Department of Defense's Defense Innovation Advisory Board, Eric Schimdt stated that Google does not cross the creepy line in their use of our personal information. The Creepy Line is the point where people are pushed into madness. While Schmidt is saying Google does not cross the creepy line, it is an admission that Google, glaringly, is constantly placing people at the edge of a thin line near insanity.

No wonder, people are feeling insane as they are indeed constantly driven into madness by an ever creepy algorithm. An algorithm that is impossible to quit as many people's livelihood depends on.

Calamity Jane ,

The news( propaganda) was on paper before the internet.
The internet has made the crazy louder as every mad bugger can get their ideas propagated.

The ideas desired by the occult mind controllers get made" viral" through monopoly search engine + " social media"( internet news).
The internet did not make people mad, who was mad was crazy before internet they are just making more noise the ego minds love creating false images of themselves and the internet is the petri dish for a new fake identity.One that is better than others, one that totally identifys with thoughts and fights to defend them as though it is their very selves they are defending.
If we do not know who we are and so are run by the egomind (conditioned)we are skitzofr3nic .
You don't have to give up the internet, you can use it to do what you need to do.

But in saying that most people are addicted to internet, computers and phones and are on it to try to build their egos 24/7 twitters.
Screen free days are a good idea as are news/propaganda free days/weeks/years .

when not if ,

Exactly my thoughts, from the start [of the article] to finish. Thanks Edward Curtin!

Has the Internet and the devices to access it made your life better or worse?

Each device makes certain tasks better and easier However all the devices and tasks combined are making life worse and much more difficult. It is negative synergy that in the wrong hands can become destructive.

Insanity is not only becoming the new normal, it is fast becoming celebrated and rewarded.

Dungroanin ,

But how can you leave out Marshall MacLuhan?

The Medium Is The Message.

I ask myself this question, and now I ask you. Has the Internet and the devices to access it made your life better or worse? Has it made the life of humanity better or worse? Has its essential role in globalization made for a better world?

Since Edward asks, my opinion is that it has made life of humanity better.

Now the message can be resisted.

From and by anyone willing to RESIST.

¡No Pasaran!

tonyopmoc ,

Dungroanin,

About time you woke up, and recognised, and maybe even began to understand, why hardly anyone wants to go back to work, whilst I want to write again on Facebook

GET BACK TO WORK you lazy sods

As you can imagine, that did not go down too well, so I have kept quiet. I started off with -well we were all still going down the pub, and hugging and kissing (like we do) – and I looked at the numbers Far less people had died than normal. This would not go down too well now, either. Not everyone shares my sense of humour, and reality, so I have banned myself from social media. I do not yet know how to unbrainwash brainwashed people, but I am working on a few ideas, and kind of testing them a bit, socially. No one has given me a hard time yet. I always try to be helpful and friendly.

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Bring Out Your Dead"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcbR1J_4ICg

Tony

Dungroanin ,

Compo you never replied!
Now I understand

I have banned myself from social media.

Yeah don't think you've quite thought that through – you are using it!

As i say (or McLuhan did) "The Medium is the message'

The medium is the internet not any particular flavour of it.

But I don't need to tell you that surely?

tonyopmoc ,

Dungroanin,

Stop trying to be clever, whilst I do like you – I still don't know if you are a boy or a girl. Dunno about you, but mine still works.

Tony

bob ,

what, thisMarshall MacLuhan?

https://player.vimeo.com/video/114022336

check out the Glasgow Media Group – their media work is exemplary

Dungroanin ,

Oi cant spellz 😉

Herbert Marshall McLuhan CC was a Canadian philosopher. His work is one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory.

tonyopmoc ,

I am 66. I have kept the child alive inside my mind, by reading books – of all kinds. We didn't have a lot of money, but my Mum gradually weaned me off The Beano and Dandy, by every week, buying Mind Alive – it was a magazine, that you could compile into an encyclopedia. (Still in my attic)

Even when thrown into the deep end many years later, and being introduced by my new boss, who immediately went off on 2 weeks holiday – to my new team, I told them truth. I couldn't bullshit this

They slung me a book

"UNIX 101 for Dummies"

We got on really well.

I learn from clever people. I do not tell them how to do it, when I have not got a clue, or they won't tell me or show me anything, and we will not be a team.

Asking questions is good, even if you think, they might think, you didn't quite understand.

Tony

Lost in a dark wood ,

Re: Mind Alive – it was a magazine, that you could compile into an encyclopedia. (Still in my attic)

Try looking up words which have now become commonplace, such as "autism". You can do the same with old dictionaries.
--

1988: Introducing autism to the general public

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ioMspoSNgmw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Daniel Spaniel ,

It's Erik Satie's birthday today. He said: "I came into this world very young.. at a very old time" also.. "Although our information is incorrect, we do not vouch for it" that rings a few bells.

Dennis Brown ,

This is a very thought provoking article by Mr. Curtin , which should be widely shared!!! And once again a sterling example of the quality of the Off Guardian website.

I'd only add that we should pause to consider that technology–per se–is not necessarily evil in itself. Rather it is the social relations that lurk behind the use of technology that can pose a potential threat to human well being.

For those not frightened by the name of Karl Marx it is worth noting that he addressed many of Mr. Curtin's concerns in Das Kapital 150 years ago.

In Vol One of Capital, in a fairly obscure footnote, Marx made a passing reference to how he personally viewed his intellectual quest. It was , indeed,to write the social history of the evolution of technology. He equated his goal to being similar to that of Sir Charles Darwin's history of natural life, In the Origin of Species.

To wit, Marx observed that technology is an extension of all human activity and therefore all human relationships. Technology shapes and conditions what we do , where we live ,how we live , how we treat one another, how we treat the earth etc. It is those social relationships that in turn determine whether technology can be judged either "good" or "bad" .

Societies and economies that are organized capitalistically–i.e. for the production of commodities for exchange value and private profit, as opposed to use values and common social well being -- are by definition based on exploitation , planetary destruction,social domination and control.

The world is on the cusp of an unprecedented epochal paradigm shift, as so many of the intelligent commentators on this site have already noted. We can respond to this fact and relentlessly inquire as to why that might be so. Or we can accept the narrative of the dominant elites that this is an unprecedented biological event and that are leaders, with their superior wisdom are simply trying to protect us -- and that the suppression of basic liberties, free speech and the destruction of the livelihoods of ordinary people is all regrettable but unavoidably necessary.

Or we can do as Marx suggested and we can follow the money and see where it leads. We can note that under the smokescreen of this "pandemic emergency" that trillions of dollars are being transferred by the State to the One Percent. We can also note that large sections of the global workforce will be permanently rendered redundant,and be ultimately replaced by artificial intelligence and robotics in order to squeeze the last dregs of surplus value from what remains of the working class . All predicted in Volume one of Capital, and awaiting re-interpretation by those of us willing to take up the challenge in the contemporary context.

But there is a structural contradiction in all of this. If billions of people are marginalized from the workforce where will effective demand come from to buy all the junk the Capitalists produce?This is an issue Marx wrestled with incompletely in Vol 2 of Capital. Ironically,the elites need us as consumers , yet strive to eliminate us as workers in order to reduce labour costs and enhance profits.

That seems to me to be the central dilemma of our age. And that big transformative struggle is now being being played out under the convenient guise of the pandemic.

Their answer to the contradiction appears to be a form of cynical ,and ultimately penurious, form of"universal basic income." Best administered through a cashless, authoritarian cybernetic matrix. This prospect would be another example of Mr. Curtin's metaphor of cheese in a mousetrap. Once we fall for it there will be no escape!

Seems to me our only hope, and sadly it is a distant one, is to keep our eyes wide open and challenge in every way possible the Covid-19 pych-op. The truth in this regard is very rapidly emerging!!!

Beyond that we need to use this traumatizing event to question what kind of a society we wish to live in. One that is based on ever increasing exploitation, misery, and environmental degradation to benefit the profit seeking gluttony of a tiny minority replete with an arsenal of financial, technological, and military tools? Or one based on a sustainable economy focused on human need , meaningful employment for all,and the production use values instead of exchange value, within a democratic consensus .

(I know that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one!)

TrueNorth ,

Good comment. I like to analyze and understand the evolution of technology and how it is shaping how we live. Technology has become an extension of ourselves. Currently, technological advances are made by a small number of people who embue the products with their own values and ideas born from their very narrow human experience. For example, people who are submerged in the digital world might not appreciate the importance of diversity in the natural environment or diversity of cultural heritage simply because they have never experienced, and thus would not reflect any of it in their digital creations. Technological advances are accelerating and are irreversible. The problem is that they are in the control of the few and incomprehensible to majority of others who lack the tools to assess the quality and value of these changes to the future of our civilization. In order to avoid the technology replacing humans in the near future, majority of people need to get up to speed with it and steer the direction of innovation toward the greater good that would benefit this world.

wardropper ,

A marvellous article, which covers all the essential aspects of why actual human beings, along with their irrefutable experiences, are suffering in today's world. It is the author's broad, sweeping strokes which convince, and not the latest mainstream-media CoVid statistics which prove beyond a shadow of doubt that I died two months ago, because, yes, the virus is really THAT deadly

tonyopmoc ,

I know we are making progress. I even chatted to my next door neighbour today How big is your shed? I said, well I can't remember the numbers, (but whilst cleaning out our rainwater water barrel), I said I think I know where the plans are for my shed (built about 5 years ago – the builders needed access to her garden, and she was really nice about it). I really recommend them, and passed her the plans and final invoice )she must have looked and thought bloody hell that was cheap whilst wearing her rubber gloves, also digging the back garden – which I found very impressive. We did not talk politics, nor COVID, but when they lock themselves out, they come round. Have you got our spare key and we haven't, I do my best, cough cough, – to get them back in to their own home. They are lovely people too.

It is really easy to grow potatoes and tomatoes, but my wife's Spinach from last year, never stopped, even in midwinter.

Most peoples minds, have been scrambled, by the incessant propaganda

It is not easy to unscramble an egg, but we are making progress.

Check out the Italian MP.

Sara Cunial

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Cunial

She is awesome.

Tony

breweriana ,

Tony,
Another good year-rounder is Curly Kale. And it's dead easy to grow.

ame ,

BREAKING NEWS or is it
UK to invest up to 93 million pounds in new coronavirus vaccine center
By REUTERS MAY 17, 2020
The British government will invest up to 93 million pounds ($112 million) to accelerate construction of a new vaccines center, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said on Saturday.
The funding will ensure the new center opens in Summer 2021, a year ahead of schedule, the department said.The Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC), which is currently under construction, is a key component of the government's program to ensure that once a coronavirus vaccine is available it can be rolled out quickly in mass quantities, the department said.
https://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/UK-to-invest-up-to-93-million-pounds-in-new-coronavirus-vaccine-center-628282

Grafter ,

Oh good Billy Gates will be pleased. I would expect him and his family along with the buffoon Professor Ferguson to be front of the queue. As for myself you can gtf.

when not if ,

"UK to invest up to 93 million pounds in new coronavirus vaccine center"

The UK is also investing to train dogs to detect the new coronavirus in people. As the UK is obsessed about austerity, they could do well in combining the two investments together and train dogs to sniff the disease and deliver the vaccine at the same time. This fits the obnoxious ruling elites' ideologies perfectly.

IANA ,

O/t but interesting article in the mail questioning just who is running the govt lockdown policy.

Boris had to ask Sir Mark Sedwill about 'who is in charge' of the policy and re-iterated what seemed apparent when Boris was forced to u-turn over govt's initial policy response.

From that moment on he unfortunately was 'removed' due to his having caught cv19 not returning until well after the lockdown was in full swing. It seems from his question it is clear he doesn't think he is in charge which is enlightening about who really runs the UK. Very helpful of Sir Mark to defer in this situation that its he in fact who is in charge. Just in time for any fallout that may result from all the questions being raised by another guy who has fallen foul of the inner circle – Neil Ferguson.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8327655/Boris-Johnson-UKs-senior-civil-servant-Sir-Mark-Sedwill-clash-route-lockdown.html

Moneycircus ,

Sedwill seems to be running the show. Boris' question was in sarcastic frustration.
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/the-sunday-essay-sir-mark-his-minions-the-shadow-state-now-in-control-of-britain/

Moneycircus ,

Not OT at all. Extremely, extremely central to what's happening. The Mail's version is the only authorized one

bob ,

I'm sorry, yet another boring link to read this time about the british rothschild biowarefare conspiracy

https://aim4truth.org/2020/05/07/the-british-rothschild-biowarfare-conspiracy/

wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to do this andwe were free again?

also, i must recommend the Lionel Shriver interview on spiked – well worth an hour of your time

END THE LOCKDOWN NOW -IT IS INHUMAN AND DEHUMANISING

Howard ,

The internet does one thing perhaps better than anything else – and far better than the "real" world surrounding us: it shows us the fleetingness of permanence. In the old days, if you saw a book or a record or anything else you wanted, your biggest worry was that it would be gone by the time you were able to acquire it – that someone else will have beat you to it. There is no such worry on the internet.

There's no danger, for instance, that someone else might beat me to this article and I might miss the chance to read it. It is ensconced in a veneer of permanence. Yet it and every single trace of it could completely vanish in a heartbeat should the internet itself suddenly go off grid. We depend on the internet to be there; the corollary being that we exist in a perpetual state of anxiety lest we lose everything we cherish.

Arsebiscuits ,

Its also good at reinforcing ignorance and fear.

Calamity Jane ,

It is us that have become good at ignorance and fear through practice.
We can't blame the internet for what we have done.

The internet would be neutral, could be used for " good or bad" ( if it weren't for the censorship, privacy violations and monopoly search engine). Thats why agent Assange is MSM hero celeb poster boy for our "internet freedom"( haha )and CIA's whisleblower damage control trap "wikileaks".

tonyopmoc ,

Howard, Whilst I kind of agree with you, I am an old person, who likes old, well crafted, beautiful original things. I was extremely upset, when my favourite coffee mug, which I had loved, and which had served me well for many years lay broken on the ground. I have been searching for an identical replacement for 18 months, and I am almost certain I have found it. Yes, it was expensive, nearly £18 including delivery. Hopefully, it will turn up this week in one piece, if it survives being mangled through the delivery machine. I may be a sentimental old sod, but I really like my beautiful coffee mug. It really brightens things up in the morning, especially after a heavy one the night before.

"HUMBLE PIE Black Coffee 1973"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNoSmlnxwQ&feature=youtu.be&t=38

Tony

Calamity Jane ,

Learnt impermanence from the internet , thats something I have never considered.
What we truly cherish we can never loose.

Ort ,

I take your point, I think, but I also see a contradiction: it seems that you're actually saying that the Internet is an exception, or antidote, to the "fleetingness of permanence"– that it's like a vast, expanding, unbounded block of amber that traps all of its content for eternity, just as ancient sap flows trapped prehistoric insects.

Also, the "permanence" depends on how one punctuates Internet experience. It's true that virtual content is a "gift that keeps on giving", insofar as an infinite number of users can access a given item without depleting or exhausting it.

But there are devils in these details: links famously "die", i.e. are broken and useless when the target site becomes defunct; searching for elusive items can be labor-intensive, frustrating, and fruitless. It's for the "web" to know, and the hapless user to find out.

And "improved" website bells and whistles exemplify Virilio's "void of the quick" cited in the essay. I know I'm a dinosaur (age 65), but I became incensed and outraged when animated features became standard web page "eyeball grabbers" several years ago. I don't know the technical nomenclature, but I'm referring to, say, news sites that display a panel of "top stories" that continuously change in rotating slide-show fashion.

This deliberate virtual buzzing, blooming confusion celebrates the ephemeral; if one is not quick enough on the draw, an item of interest vanishes before one's eyes. The standard logical rebuttal is to assert "Aha! But if the user is patient, that item of interest will reappear momentarily– or alternatively, can easily be recovered."

But my experience says otherwise. I've often navigated away from a page, suddenly reconsidered and returned to pursue a featured item within seconds or minutes, and discovered that it is no longer there. Something new has replaced it.

FWIW, YouTube is particularly vexing in this regard; it stuffs my home page with unwanted "recommendations"; if I leave the page and return, or even refresh it, the page is involuntarily "updated" by the relentless YT algorithms. Worse yet, I have even done searches for a video I'd just seen and "lost", but even using keywords fails to retrieve it.

And then there are "innovations" like infinite page scrolling, or whatever it's called– pointlessly turning discrete pages into one "bottomless page" that is overwhelming. I have no doubt that these innovations are all imposed for some nefarious self-serving purpose, probably commercial– either variations of "clickbait" or making the page more suitable to hand-held devices like smartphones.

So the Internet's "permanence", such as it is, exists within a maddening perpetual kaleidoscopic flux.

Moneycircus ,

All a frightful mistake, old boy. No-one thought to check Ferguson's numbers. The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail are both railing against Ferguson's broken adding machine.

Mi6, oath/motto "Semper Occultus", employer of Alastair Crowley, public budget GBP 3 billion, black budget unknown simply didn't think to check Neil Ferguson's software or see how he was calculating his projection of deaths by Covid-19.

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) which employs hundreds of software development engineers, security and public safety specialists, IT operations specialists, mathematicians, and even medical technicians with a declared budget of GBP 1.7 forgot to put anyone on the case.

The BBC has a declared budget of GBP 3.7 billion (but that's just the license fee. Total budget is closer to 5 billion) and has 22,000 staff. None of them thought to ask how Neil Ferguson was arriving at his numbers.

Moneycircus ,

The Mi5 Guardian has already seeded the Ether with the idea that Neil Ferguson's fate could cross paths with that of Dr David Kelly, the weapons scientist found dead in suspicious circumstances in 2003 . All to be blamed on "sceptics", of course.

Published a week ago but I haven't seen it discussed yet: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/06/neil-ferguson-scientists-media-government-adviser-social-distancing

"A similar ordeal apparently caused Dr David Kelly to take his own life after the biological weapons expert was hounded for revealing that the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been exaggerated by Tony Blair's government.

[Scientists] are regularly attacked by many of the British media commentators who are currently joining the pile-on to Ferguson ."

John Pretty ,

I just looked at the background of the author of the piece you linked:

"Bob Ward is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics"

That's all I needed to know!

How is it that the average Guardian reader can't smell the bullshit?

wardropper ,

Because today's Guardian readers are not average people. The once-decent paper has lost the plot, so, naturally, its readers are mentally at risk.

Waldorf ,

Are they below average or above average? They could be very clever but insane.

John Pretty ,

The software issue is relevant to a degree, but it's still a case of "garbage in", "garbage out".

And it's still guessing

Lost in a dark wood ,

Due diligence is a well established concept. The incompetent failure to do due diligence may be a criminal offence (e.g. manslaughter). The calculated failure to do due diligence is complicity (e.g. treason, crimes against humanity, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_diligence

John Ervin ,

As a basis in crimimal law or tort, yes and yes. Here it looks like Willful Negligence, a million counts.

John Ervin ,

Hear ye, hear ye! And let it be known. I posted upstream, with time.stamps abundant, that as the news broke that Professor Lockdown had caught his projection in the wringer, it was the first domino that would bring down all the others, of this pathetic planetarylockdown.

As it begins to throb more and more and stick out like a sore, well, you know, that grim sight will be noticed by more and more outlets around the globe, no matter the CYA.

Now that's a pandemic that we can afford.

T Brites ,

The new Uman Animal

WWW is great for access to information. Of course NOT ALL BRAINS are equipped to navigate the WWW Ocean. Most just use it to publish selfies and moronic comments.

Arsebiscuits ,

And watch amateur pornography

John Ervin ,

Even for those who navigate with greatest dexterity, the triple W's are fraught with unparalleled peril, which I believe was Mr. Curtin's main point: the double bind.

Intrinsic to the medium, as eyestrain was to Gutenberg's first customers.

"The Medium *IS* the Message." –Marshall McLuhan

[Jan 10, 2020] America's Hamster Wheel of 'Career Advancement' by Casey Chalk

Notable quotes:
"... Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World ..."
"... The problem is further compounded by the fact that much of the labor Americans perform isn't actually good ..."
Jan 09, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

We're told that getting ahead at work and reorienting our lives around our jobs will make us happy. So why hasn't it? Many of those who work in the corporate world are constantly peppered with questions about their " career progression ." The Internet is saturated with articles providing tips and tricks on how to develop a never-fail game plan for professional development. Millions of Americans are engaged in a never-ending cycle of résumé-padding that mimics the accumulation of Boy Scout merit badges or A's on report cards except we never seem to get our Eagle Scout certificates or academic diplomas. We're told to just keep going until we run out of gas or reach retirement, at which point we fade into the peripheral oblivion of retirement communities, morning tee-times, and long midweek lunches at beach restaurants.

The idealistic Chris McCandless in Jon Krakauer's bestselling book Into the Wild defiantly declares, "I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one." Anyone who has spent enough time in the career hamster wheel can relate to this sentiment. Is 21st-century careerism -- with its promotion cycles, yearly feedback, and little wooden plaques commemorating our accomplishments -- really the summit of human existence, the paramount paradigm of human flourishing?

Michael J. Noughton, director of the Center for Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, and board chair for Reel Precision Manufacturing, doesn't think so. In his Getting Work Right: Labor and Leisure in a Fragmented World , Noughton provides a sobering statistic: approximately two thirds of employees in the United States are "either indifferent or hostile to their work." That's not just an indicator of professional dissatisfaction; it's economically disastrous. The same survey estimates that employee disengagement is costing the U.S. economy "somewhere between 450-550 billion dollars annually."

The origin of this problem, says Naughton, is an error in how Americans conceive of work and leisure. We seem to err in one of two ways. One is to label our work as strictly a job, a nine-to-five that pays the bills. In this paradigm, leisure is an amusement, an escape from the drudgery of boring, purposeless labor. The other way is that we label our work as a career that provides the essential fulfillment in our lives. Through this lens, leisure is a utility, simply another means to serve our work. Outside of work, we exercise to maintain our health in order to work harder and longer. We read books that help maximize our utility at work and get ahead of our competitors. We "continue our education" largely to further our careers.

Whichever error we fall into, we inevitably end up dissatisfied. The more we view work as a painful, boring chore, the less effective we are at it, and the more complacent and discouraged. Our leisure activities, in turn, no matter how distracting, only compound our sadness, because no amount of games can ever satisfy our souls. Or, if we see our meaning in our work and leisure as only another means of increasing productivity, we inevitably burn out, wondering, perhaps too late in life, what exactly we were working for . As Augustine of Hippo noted, our hearts are restless for God. More recently, C.S. Lewis noted that we yearn to be fulfilled by something that nothing in this world can satisfy. We need both our work and our leisure to be oriented to the transcendent in order to give our lives meaning and purpose.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that much of the labor Americans perform isn't actually good . There are "bad goods" that are detrimental to society and human flourishing. Naughton suggests some examples: violent video games, pornography, adultery dating sites, cigarettes, high-octane alcohol, abortifacients, gambling, usury, certain types of weapons, cheat sheet websites, "gentlemen's clubs," and so on. Though not as clear-cut as the above, one might also add working for the kinds of businesses that contribute to the impoverishment or destruction of our communities, as Tucker Carlson has recently argued .

Why does this matter for professional satisfaction? Because if our work doesn't offer goods and services that contribute to our communities and the common good -- and especially if we are unable to perceive how our labor plays into that common good -- then it will fundamentally undermine our happiness. We will perceive our work primarily in a utilitarian sense, shrugging our shoulders and saying, "it's just a paycheck," ignoring or disregarding the fact that as rational animals we need to feel like our efforts matter.

Economic liberalism -- at least in its purest free-market expression -- is based on a paradigm with nominalist and utilitarian origins that promote "freedom of indifference." In rudimentary terms, this means that we need not be interested in the moral quality of our economic output. If we produce goods that satisfy people's wants, increasing their "utils," as my Econ 101 professor used to say, then we are achieving business success. In this paradigm, we desire an economy that maximizes access to free choice regardless of the content of that choice, because the more choices we have, the more we can maximize our utils, or sensory satisfaction.

The freedom of indifference paradigm is in contrast to a more ancient understanding of economic and civic engagement: a freedom for excellence. In this worldview, "we are made for something," and participation in public acts of virtue is essential both to our own well-being and that of our society. By creating goods and services that objectively benefit others and contributing to an order beyond the maximization of profit, we bless both ourselves and the polis . Alternatively, goods that increase "utils" but undermine the common good are rejected.

Returning to Naughton's distinction between work and leisure, we need to perceive the latter not as an escape from work or a means of enhancing our work, but as a true time of rest. This means uniting ourselves with the transcendent reality from which we originate and to which we will return, through prayer, meditation, and worship. By practicing this kind of true leisure, well treated in a book by Josef Pieper , we find ourselves refreshed, and discover renewed motivation and inspiration to contribute to the common good.

Americans are increasingly aware of the problems with Wall Street conservatism and globalist economics. We perceive that our post-Cold War policies are hurting our nation. Naughton's treatise on work and leisure offers the beginnings of a game plan for what might replace them.

Casey Chalk covers religion and other issues for The American Conservative and is a senior writer for Crisis Magazine. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia, and a masters in theology from Christendom College.

[Dec 29, 2019] I'll often forgo other activities and even eating decently to get my online work done ." is a classic description of related set of manic behaviors

Dec 29, 2019 | rjsigmund.wordpress.com
  1. likbez December 27, 2019 7:30 pm

    @rjs

    December 26, 2019 9:21 pm

    Likbez, the psychology today article you cite does not match your characterization of it, ie, " Browsing Web for relevant articles" in that it is discussing the effects of "aimlessly using the Internet, to no specific end" one could hardly characterize the work involved in Mark Thoma's or Yves Smith's aggregations as "aimless" or "to no specific end"

    True, but psychological mechanisms involved are identical. and require identical psychological pre-disposition.

    on the other hand, i didn't have any problem with your characterization of the aggregator's behavior as "a compulsive self-destructive obsession"; i certainly see the obsessive-compulsive behavior in my own work, and there is a self-destructiveness to it as well, as i'll often forgo other activities and even eating decently to get my online work done .

    Yes, that's very apt description, thank you: "I'll often forgo other activities and even eating decently to get my online work done ." is a classic description of related set of manic behaviors.

    A modern version of the "labor of Sisyphus", maybe ?

    The thing is that, however, that "Internet hoarder" or "Internet pack rat" ( fuzzy and not very accurate terms for a person with such a disorder) inevitably tend to expand the scope of aggregation and that inevitably lead to the burnout.

    In other words, I would like to stress here this particular and more limited danger.

  2. rjs December 27, 2019 8:39 pm

    likbez, my impression from a quick read of the psychology today article was that they were talking about people like gamers or youtubers, those whose activity was "aimless" so i disagree that "the psychological mechanisms involved are identical" to those that drive someone like mark thoma or yves smith

    in re the obsessive-compulsiveness of my work, i understand that you are critical but i understand that it is who i am; i've always been a workaholic when i worked for a major corporation (years ago), i'd go in on weekends, and would often put in 12 hour days even as a teenager, working for myself (over 50 years ago), i'd put in successive 18 hour days at what i was working on, often to the abandonment of everything else .the thing is, even back then i understood the Sisyphean nature of my work and i never had a problem with that; it's those who don't understand that who get themselves in trouble

    anyhow, this thread is not about me; i am just using myself to suggest the type of person you'd need to take over running Economist's View and as i said in my first comment here, i'm not volunteering

[Dec 27, 2019] Blogs and Internet addition: I ll often forgo other activities and even eating decently to get my online work done

Dec 25, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , December 25, 2019 11:08 pm

Some random observations:

EconomistView deteriorated steadily during the last two years as Mark failed to update posts for several weeks, and comment threads became unmanageable, often exceeding 1K posts, but surprisingly the site still has a vibrant community of commenters.

Kind of the last refuge of retired persons still interested in both economics and politics. There is a special term for this category of people: "pikey vests" (playing on the fact that thermoregulation in older people is often broken and they prefer to put on more closing then younger people).

The meaning is similar to "armchair strategists" but with emphasis on the Dunning–Kruger effect -- a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive abilities as greater than they are. In other words, the complete inability of many people, especially seniors, to recognize their lack of ability (the effect quite visible in Trump ;-).

The term implies a verifiable tendency of the increase of the Dunning–Kruger effect with the age as it typically became really pronounced in many retired seniors, who become attracted to discussions about politics.

It looks to me that with time such blogs as Economist's View naturally become a refuge for pikey vests.

It is not that difficult to recreate a similar aggregator blog (may be on a better platform), but to launch it into the mainstream, you need to have your own strong personal or research interest in browsing Web for interesting links in which few people possess.

But for those two like browse the Web for interesting articles, this often became a compulsive self-destructive obsession that takes too much time and negatively affect their research work and their lives.

You also need a large dose of political correctness not to stray from neoliberal MSM views to much and be ostracized. Which kills the idea. So this is a delicate balancing act in which Thoma succeeded, but most wannabees might not.

Also, his status of a professor here helped with the patina of respectability and gave him a little bit more freedom than for mere mortals.

The problem here is how to attract meaningful commenters community which is difficult. Thoma post were at the beginning informative enough to accomplish this feat and attract many people. For the first several years his selections were interesting enough to browse his blog of a regular basis.

Later is became more questionable and many older commenters disappeared, but still comment threads were interesting.

in 2019 this community existed mainly due to inertia as quality of the blog deteriorated. Community also changed with very few survivors from earlier years (Paine, anne, ilism, Fred C. Dobbs).

The same process is observable in other blogs such as Naked Capitalism, which also had lost lion share of early commenters.

One unsolvable problems to un-moderated comment threads is that there are commenters who literally are powerful spam generators and who fill the threads with dozens of low quality posts. And you can do nothing about it.

At the same more heavy moderation like at http://crookedtimber.org creates animosity and makes the community an echo chamber of the blog owner views and more conformist then desirable. And as such far less interesting. Censored commenters often leave and never return.

The Economist's View blog recently became mostly political, not so much economic. The same trend can be observed with Naked Capitalism. That probably reflect that fact the economics in and by itself is mostly pseudo science (especially neoclassical economics with its mathiness and scholastic models which destroy students ability to think) and there is only political economy and econometrics

Another interesting effect is that most of active comments usually post their own links, which in some cases were much more interesting/ important then Thoma's links. So Thoma;'s links served as a catalyst for posting better links.

There were a couple of "super-reposters" and Anne was/is not much of a commenter as a "super-reposter". As run75441 correctly observed "Anne is fastidious" and simultaneously is an asset and the liability.

Another person with the same inclinations but without Anne tendency to post some useful statistical info from FED databases was/is Fred C. Dobbs. He actually reposted a useful article from NYT even in the last comment tread ( https://nyti.ms/34pZAbD )

Like is typical in such blogs commenting community was polarized with two or three distinct camps (neoliberals/neocons and anti-neoliberals/neocons plus libertarians who were all over the place)

An interesting thing about this blog is that Thoma posts with the list of links generate much more vibrant discussion that posts with his short review of some articles (often Krugman, whom for some reason he like). So the blog became the aggregator blog very early in its existence.

Lately as Thoma lost interest in its maintainance, he switched exclusively "recommended links" style of posts, which gradually became more and more rare,

It's a bit sad to see the blogging culture in general is now losing steam, with much of the discussion moving on to Twitter and other social platforms.

run75441 , December 26, 2019 10:38 am

likbez:

You could say so much more by saying less. What the hell is this string of descriptors "compulsive self-destructive obsession" of the subject? Could you pick one of the string to get your point across? I read your words and you appear to be obsessed with being heard or read.

likbez , December 26, 2019 8:18 pm

> You could say so much more by saying less.
That's always a good advice if one has time for editing. Thank you.
> What the hell is this string of descriptors "compulsive self-destructive obsession" of the subject?
You never run an aggregator blog and therefore is unable to understand what I am talking about:

1. Attracts a certain type of people who tend to overextend the scope of aggregation and then burn themselves doing so.

2. Browsing Web for relevant articles in and by itself can become self-reinforcing compulsive activity similar to addiction. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-change/201504/is-surfing-the-internet-addictive

In male internet users, who reported using the Internet for 42 hours per week, those who displayed more symptoms of Internet addiction, such as experiencing more negative consequences of their internet use, feeling withdrawal symptoms when not using the Internet and an inability to control their internet use had less brain (grey) matter volume in an area of the brain known as the right frontal pole.

This area of the brain is part of the prefrontal cortex, and under activation of the prefrontal cortex is strongly linked to poor decision-making, addictive behaviour and willpower.

The study linked further differences in other areas of brain circuitry and excessive Internet use, and this overall pattern of difference associated with the brains of excessive Internet users resembles the changes in brain seen in substance addictions. As with all cross-sectional studies, the cause and effect is not clear. The brain changes may be due to excessive Internet use, but equally, brain volume differences could be a precondition for excessive Internet use.

rjs , December 26, 2019 9:21 pm

Likbez, the psychology today article you cite does not match your characterization of it, ie, " Browsing Web for relevant articles" in that it is discussing the effects of "aimlessly using the Internet, to no specific end" one could hardly characterize the work involved in Mark Thoma's or Yves Smith's aggregations as "aimless" or "to no specific end"

on the other hand, i didn't have any problem with your characterization of the aggregator's behavior as "a compulsive self-destructive obsession"; i certainly see the obsessive-compulsive behavior in my own work, and there is a self-destructiveness to it as well, as i'll often forgo other activities and even eating decently to get my online work done .

Likbez Rls, Yes this is a very apt description: "i'll often forgo other activities and even eating decently to get my online work done .". But the problems here not only "labour of Sysphus' isse but also tendency to expand the scope of collection ("Internet pack rat" phenomenon) and this burden crashes the person leading to burnut .

[Sep 21, 2019] In Praise of Mediocrity by Tim Wu

Notable quotes:
"... I'm a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but -- at the risk of sounding grandiose -- I see it as a sign of a civilization in decline. The idea of leisure, after all, is a hard-won achievement; it presupposes that we have overcome the exigencies of brute survival. Yet here in the United States, the wealthiest country in history, we seem to have forgotten the importance of doing things solely because we enjoy them. ..."
"... But there's a deeper reason, I've come to think, that so many people don't have hobbies: We're afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation -- itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age -- that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our "hobbies," if that's even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be. ..."
"... If you're a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you're training for the next marathon. If you're a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby -- you're a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber -- you'd better be good at it, or else who are you? ..."
"... Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like "the pursuit of excellence" have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur. The population of our country now seems divided between the semipro hobbyists (some as devoted as Olympic athletes) and those who retreat into the passive, screeny leisure that is the signature of our technological moment. ..."
"... Liberty and equality are supposed to make possible the pursuit of happiness. It would be unfortunate if we were to protect the means only to neglect the end. ..."
"... Lest this sound suspiciously like an elaborate plea for people to take more time off from work -- well, yes. Though I'd like to put the suggestion more grandly: The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. ..."
Oct 10, 2018 | www.nytimes.com

I'm a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but -- at the risk of sounding grandiose -- I see it as a sign of a civilization in decline. The idea of leisure, after all, is a hard-won achievement; it presupposes that we have overcome the exigencies of brute survival. Yet here in the United States, the wealthiest country in history, we seem to have forgotten the importance of doing things solely because we enjoy them.

Yes, I know: We are all so very busy. Between work and family and social obligations, where are we supposed to find the time?

But there's a deeper reason, I've come to think, that so many people don't have hobbies: We're afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation -- itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age -- that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our "hobbies," if that's even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.

If you're a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you're training for the next marathon. If you're a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby -- you're a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber -- you'd better be good at it, or else who are you?

Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like "the pursuit of excellence" have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur. The population of our country now seems divided between the semipro hobbyists (some as devoted as Olympic athletes) and those who retreat into the passive, screeny leisure that is the signature of our technological moment.

I don't deny that you can derive a lot of meaning from pursuing an activity at the highest level. I would never begrudge someone a lifetime devotion to a passion or an inborn talent. There are depths of experience that come with mastery. But there is also a real and pure joy, a sweet, childlike delight, that comes from just learning and trying to get better. Looking back, you will find that the best years of, say, scuba-diving or doing carpentry were those you spent on the learning curve, when there was exaltation in the mere act of doing.

In a way that we rarely appreciate, the demands of excellence are at war with what we call freedom. For to permit yourself to do only that which you are good at is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment. Especially when it comes to physical pursuits, but also with many other endeavors, most of us will be truly excellent only at whatever we started doing in our teens. What if you decide in your 40s, as I have, that you want to learn to surf? What if you decide in your 60s that you want to learn to speak Italian? The expectation of excellence can be stultifying.

Liberty and equality are supposed to make possible the pursuit of happiness. It would be unfortunate if we were to protect the means only to neglect the end. A democracy, when it is working correctly, allows men and women to develop into free people; but it falls to us as individuals to use that opportunity to find purpose, joy and contentment.

Lest this sound suspiciously like an elaborate plea for people to take more time off from work -- well, yes. Though I'd like to put the suggestion more grandly: The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. But demanding excellence in all that we do can undermine that; it can threaten and even destroy freedom. It steals from us one of life's greatest rewards -- the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.

Tim Wu ( @superwuster ) is a law professor at Columbia, the author of "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads" and a contributing opinion writer. A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 30, 2018 , on Page SR 6 of the New York edition with the headline: In Praise of Mediocrity.

[Jun 29, 2019] Millennials Blame Unprecedented Burnout Rates On Work, Debt Finances

Jun 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

The issue of Millennial 'burnout' has been an especially hot topic in recent years - and not just because the election of President Trump ushered in an epidemic of co-occurring TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) that sent millions of American twenty somethings on a never-ending quest for a post-grad 'safe space'.

For those who aren't familiar with the subject, the World Health Organization recently described burnout as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." As birth rates plunge and so-called deaths from despair (suicides and overdoses) climb, sending the US left expectancy lower for multiple consecutive years for the first time since the 1960s, many researchers see solving the problem of burnout as critical to fixing many of our societal issues.

To try and dig deeper into the causes and impact of millennial burnout, Yellowbrick , a national psychiatric organization, surveyed 2,000 millennials to identify what exactly is making a staggering 96% of the generation comprising the largest cohort of the American labor force say they feel "burned out" on a daily basis.

The answer is, unsurprisingly, finances and debt: These are the leading causes of burnout (and one reason why Bernie Sanders latest proposal to wipe out all $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt might be more popular with millennial voters than many other Americans realize).

Anthony Aaron , 1 hour ago link

The average student loan is $30,000

At 6% interest with a 6-year amortization, that works out to monthly payments of $497 -- about what many of these folks spend on eating at restaurants or on tattoos or on drugs per month.

It's a matter or priority -- and repaying the student loans isn't a priority for them which is why a report in '17 showed that at 7 years after graduation, more than 45% of them hadn't paid even one dollar of principle on their student loans.

Deadbeats whiners

kikrlbs , 1 hour ago link

This is becoming exhausting. The boomers and the like simply don't want to admit that it is much harder today making ends meet than it was when they were younger. That is a fact, inflation and asset inflation has made the value of a dollar half of what is was 40 years ago. Meaning, you would have to work 80 hours in today's money to match 40 hours in money from the late 70's. Now, millenials don't get off easy either because they think they deserve that same standard and since it does not and cannot exist in our monetary system, they try to usurp personal responsibility, at any level, by finger pointing and apathy. Our society is slowly collapsing.

[Jun 25, 2019] The Human Cost Of Recovery We're Burning Out!

Jun 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

You can imagine them rubbing their hands with glee as they quote statistics such as: the 53 metropolitan areas in the U.S. with populations of 1 million or more accounted for two-thirds of the GDP growth and three-quarters of the job growth. A staggering 93% of the population growth in the U.S. in the past decade occurred in these urban centers.

And this asymmetry is even greater if we separate the top 10 metropolitan areas from the rest: super-cities with super-charged economies, fueled by enormous influxes of capital and people, which just so happen to make life unbearable as overcrowded, aging infrastructure breaks down and costs for housing, rent, taxes, utilities, fees etc. skyrocket out of reach of the bottom 95%.

The well-paid pundits viewing glowing statistics of growth never get around to examining the human costs of this lopsided "recovery": the "winners" in increasingly unlivable urban centers are cracking under the pressure-cooker stress, burning out, flaming out, crashing.

The residents of all the regions sucked dry of capital and talent--the "losers" of neoliberal globalization's concentrations of mobile capital and talent in a few favored megalopolises--are also cracking under the weight of a loss of dignity and secure livelihood, the two being intimately bound, much to the dismay of the supporters of "just pay them to go away and not bother us" Universal Basic Income (UBI).

In other words, the "winners" are losing, too. They're losing their sanity in 3-hour daily commutes on jammed freeways and equally jammed streets as thousands of other commuters seek a work-around to the endless congestion.

They're losing their dreams of a better life, as all the average-wage worker can afford to rent is a bed in a cramped living room that has been converted into sleeping quarters for two workers who don't make six-figure salaries and who don't have stock options in a Unicorn tech company.

They're fixated on FIRE--financial independence, retire early--because they hate their job, their career and the sector they toil in, and they count the days until they're free, free, free of the pressure, the stress, the BS work, and the insanity of daily life in a teeming rat-cage.

No wonder the FIRE movement is spreading like (ahem) wildfire. Nobody in their right mind wants to do their job for another 10 years, much less 20 or 25 years. Everybody is bailing out the moment they can, or if they burn out and crash, when they're forced to.

Let's say you want to start a business in a super-progressive city that fulfills all your most cherished ideals: paying your employees good wages, providing customers with value, and paying all your taxes and fees, of course, as a responsible progressive citizen.

Welcome to burnout and bankruptcy. This story is a microcosm of small-business reality in mega-cities choking on monumental asymmetries of wealth, income and power: Why San Francisco Restaurants Are Suffocating: What I witnessed during my two years in the industry .

Where do we start? How about the reality that virtually no one employed in the restaurant sector can afford to live in San Francisco unless they inherited a rent-controlled flat or scored one of the few subsidized housing openings?

The city's solution--mandating a $15/hour minimum wage--doesn't magically make healthcare or rent affordable; all it does is increase the burden on small businesses that are hanging on by a thread.

The writer doesn't even mention the sky-high rent she paid for her restaurant space. Rent alone drove this small food service business into the ground: Via Gelato owner plans to close Ward store, file for bankruptcy .

Working 100 hours a week couldn't compensate for the crushing rent.

Even the well-paid are burning out. Astronomical household incomes (say, $300,000 annually) aren't enough to buy a decayed bungalow for $1.3 million and pay for childcare, private-school tuition, healthcare, an aging parent and all the services the overworked wage-earners don't have the time or energy to do themselves. Oh, and don't forget the taxes. You're rich, people, so pay up.

No wonder people who can afford to retire are bailing at 55 or 60, on the first day they qualify. Life's too short to put up with the insane pressure and stress a day longer than you have to.

Not everybody feels it, of course. People who bought their modest house for $100,000 30 years ago can hug themselves silly that it's now worth $1,000,000 (but with a still-modest property tax), and if they're retired with a plump pension and gold-plated medical benefits, their biggest concern is finding ways to blow all the cash that's piling up.

These lucky retirees wonder what all the fuss is about. "We worked hard for what we have," etc. It's easy to overlook being a lucky winner of the housing-bubble lottery and the equally bubblicious pension lottery, and easy not to ask yourself how you'd manage if you arrived in NYC, San Francisco, et al. now rather than 35 years ago.

The asymmetries are piling up and we're cracking under the weight. When do we recover from the "recovery"? The answer appears to be "never."

* * *

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 ebook, $12 print, $13.08 audiobook ): Read the first section for free in PDF format. My new mystery The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake is a ridiculously affordable $1.29 (Kindle) or $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF) . My book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com . New benefit for subscribers/patrons: a monthly Q&A where I respond to your questions/topics.

[Jun 21, 2019] How Information is Like Snacks, Money, and Drugs To Your Brain

Everything in moderation, including information?
Jun 21, 2019 | science.slashdot.org
"To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it's useful," says Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu, a neuroeconomist. "And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful -- what some may call idle curiosity."

The paper, "Common neural code for reward and information value," was published this month by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Authored by Hsu and graduate student Kenji Kobayashi, now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, it demonstrates that the brain converts information into the same common scale as it does for money .

It also lays the groundwork for unraveling the neuroscience behind how we consume information -- and perhaps even digital addiction.

Jason Levine ( 196982 ) , Friday June 21, 2019 @03:44PM ( #58800986 ) Homepage

This Explains Wikipedia ( Score: 2 )

This explains Wikipedia. You start by looking up "just one article." After that hit, you click on a link to one more. And then another and another. Before you know it, ten hours have passed and you're sprawled out half-reading an article about cat foot fungus. You realize you should stop, but there's a link there about nails and your hand goes to click it without you telling it to.

[May 14, 2019] Burnout Nation

May 14, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

The economic and financial stresses will exceed the workforce's carrying capacity in the next recession.

A number of recent surveys reflect a widespread sense of financial stress and symptoms of poor health in America's workers, particularly the younger generations. There's no real mystery as to the cause of this economic anxiety:

These are just the highlights, not an exhaustive list of the common stresses experienced by American workers of all ages.

The inevitable result of these pressures over time is burnout , which anecdotally is reaching epidemic proportions in the U.S. and other nations.

While many of these stresses are unique to private-sector precariats in the gig economy or insecure positions in Corporate America, many public-sector workers in public safety and healthcare are also prone to burnout due to increasing workloads and understaffing.

... .. ...

But why should workers tolerate high levels of chronic stress? The alternative--quitting the source of the stress and finding a lower wage, lower pressure livelihood is an increasingly compelling alternative.

... ... ...

[Apr 28, 2019] Prisoners of Overwork A Dilemma by Peter Dorman

Highly recommended!
This is true about IT jobs. Probably even more then for lawyers. IT became plantation economy under neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... mandatory overwork in professional jobs. ..."
"... The logical solution is some form of binding regulation. ..."
"... One place to start would be something like France's right-to-disconnect law . ..."
"... "the situation it describes is a classic prisoners dilemma." ..."
Apr 28, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

The New York Times has an illuminating article today summarizing recent research on the gender effects of mandatory overwork in professional jobs. Lawyers, people in finance and other client-centered occupations are increasingly required to be available round-the-clock, with 50-60 or more hours of work per week the norm. Among other costs, the impact on wage inequality between men and women is severe. Since women are largely saddled with primary responsibility for child care, even when couples ostensibly embrace equality on a theoretical level, the workaholic jobs are allocated to men. This shows up in dramatic differences between typical male and female career paths. The article doesn't discuss comparable issues in working class employment, but availability for last-minute changes in work schedules and similar demands are likely to impact men and women differentially as well.

What the article doesn't point out is that the situation it describes is a classic prisoners dilemma.* Consider law firms. They compete for clients, and clients prefer attorneys who are available on call, always prepared and willing to adjust to whatever schedule the client throws at them. Assume that most lawyers want sane, predictable work hours if they are offered without a severe penalty in pay. If law firms care about the well-being of their employees but also about profits, we have all the ingredients to construct a standard PD payoff matrix:

There is a penalty to unilateral cooperation, cutting work hours back to a work-life balance level. If your firm does it and the others don't, you lose clients to them.

There is a benefit to unilateral defection. If everyone else is cutting hours but you don't, you scoop up the lion's share of the clients.

Mutual cooperation is preferred to mutual defection. Law firms, we are assuming, would prefer a world in which overwork was removed from the contest for competitive advantage. They would compete for clients as before, but none would require their staff to put in soul-crushing hours. The alternative equilibrium, in which competition is still on the basis of the quality of work but everyone is on call 24/7 is inferior.

If the game is played once, mutual defection dominates. If it is played repeatedly there is a possibility for mutual cooperation to establish itself, but only under favorable conditions (which apparently don't exist in the world of NY law firms). The logical solution is some form of binding regulation.

The reason for bringing this up is that it strengthens the case for collective action rather than placing all the responsibility on individuals caught in the system, including for that matter individual law firms. Or, the responsibility is political, to demand constraints on the entire industry. One place to start would be something like France's right-to-disconnect law .

*I haven't read the studies by economists and sociologists cited in the article, but I suspect many of them make the same point I'm making here.

Sandwichman said...
"the situation it describes is a classic prisoners dilemma."

Now why didn't I think of that?

https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/04/zero-sum-foolery-4-of-4-wage-prisoners.html April 26, 2019 at 6:22 PM

[Dec 31, 2018] The psychological importance of wasting time by Olivia Goldhill

Highly recommended!
Wasting time is about recharging your battery and de-cluttering
Apr 30, 2017 | qz.com

There will always be an endless list of chores to complete and work to do, and a culture of relentless productivity tells us to get to it right away and feel terribly guilty about any time wasted. But the truth is, a life spent dutifully responding to emails is a dull one indeed. And "wasted" time is, in fact, highly fulfilling and necessary.

Don't believe me? Take it from the creator of "Inbox Zero." As Oliver Burkeman reports in The Guardian , Merlin Mann was commissioned to write a book about his streamlined email system. Two years later, he abandoned the project and instead posted a (since deleted) blog post on how he'd spent so long focusing on how to spend time well, he'd ended up missing valuable moments with his daughter.

The problem comes when we spend so long frantically chasing productivity, we refuse to take real breaks. We put off sleeping in, or going for a long walk, or reading by the window -- and, even if we do manage time away from the grind, it comes with a looming awareness of the things we should be doing, and so the experience is weighed down by guilt.

Instead, there's a tendency to turn to the least fulfilling tendency of them all: Sitting at our desk, in front of our computer, browsing websites and contributing to neither our happiness nor our productivity.

"There's an idea we must always be available, work all the time," says Michael Guttridge, a psychologist who focuses on workplace behavior. "It's hard to break out of that and go to the park." But the downsides are obvious: We end up zoning out while at the computer -- looking for distraction on social media, telling ourselves we're "multitasking" while really spending far longer than necessary on the most basic tasks.

Plus, says Guttridge, we're missing out on the mental and physical benefits of time spent focused on ourselves. "People eat at the desk and get food on the computer -- it's disgusting. They should go for a walk, to the coffee shop, just get away," he says. "Even Victorian factories had some kind of rest breaks."

[Nov 12, 2018] 57% of Tech Workers Are Suffering From Job Burnout, Survey Finds

Notable quotes:
"... Try working construction for minimum wage and not knowing where your next job will come from. Then have your blood pressure tested. ..."
"... I've watched it drive many people out. My own mentor told me when I first started "I'll tell you the first thing my Mentor told me, 'Get out now'". A bit much for a new engineer to take in, but now I know why he said it. Right before he left the company, he started telling me he wasn't sure how much longer he could handle the pressure. ..."
"... I find most of the stress in this industry is self induced by clueless fucks being in charge. ..."
"... I work with people who proudly complain about "working until 2 am" or willingly take on all kinds of client work at ridiculous times because it burnishes their reputation. ..."
"... My understanding would be Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. although I've only really heard from people that have worked at Amazon. They hire new young and eager workers who they can work and fire them when they burn out. However, just as many leave before that. It's all part of an understood system where new workers agree to be overworked while padding their resume and looking for a new job. This lasts for an average of 18 months before they have found a new job or get laid off. ..."
"... The no vacation thing pisses me off. My entire adult life, I've only had one "real" vacation if you define it as a whole week off. ..."
Nov 12, 2018 | tech.slashdot.org

An anonymous reader writes: A survey conducted among the tech workers, including many employees of Silicon Valley's elite tech companies, has revealed that over 57% of respondents are suffering from job burnout . The survey was carried out by the makers of an app that allows employees to review workplaces and have anonymous conversations at work, behind their employers' backs. Over 11K employees answered one question -- if they suffer from job burnout, and 57.16% said "Yes."

The company with the highest employee burnout rate was Credit Karma, with a whopping 70.73%, followed by Twitch (68.75%), Nvidia (65.38%), Expedia (65.00%), and Oath (63.03% -- Oath being the former Yahoo company Verizon bought in July 2017). On the other end of the spectrum, Netflix ranked with the lowest burnout rate of only 38.89%, followed by PayPal (41.82%), Twitter (43.90%), Facebook (48.97%), and Uber (49.52%).

110010001000 ( 697113 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:14AM ( #56847422 ) Homepage Journal
Re:I just landed my first career IT gig ( Score: 4 , Insightful)

Try working construction for minimum wage and not knowing where your next job will come from. Then have your blood pressure tested.

Jfetjunky ( 4359471 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:38AM ( #56847554 )
Re:I just landed my first career IT gig ( Score: 5 , Interesting)

This is usually the type of thing I tell myself to keep perspective. But the truth is that tech jobs can be stressful too. I imagine people in blue collar jobs believe we are living high on the hog with not a care in the world, but it's not really that way. But I also have two brothers that work jobs requiring much more manual labor. It absolutely takes a toll on your body.

We've recently had a few people come over to hardware management (I am a hardware developer). Both my manager and I told them, hardware projects change EVERY DAY. Every day its, "so and so (big customer) just had issues with this", or "The market is way behind on these parts and we are short", or "The product you just designed is failing ____ test right now, what are we doing to fix it".

I've watched it drive many people out. My own mentor told me when I first started "I'll tell you the first thing my Mentor told me, 'Get out now'". A bit much for a new engineer to take in, but now I know why he said it. Right before he left the company, he started telling me he wasn't sure how much longer he could handle the pressure.

Honestly, I don't care as much about the pay, the fancy benefits, or any of the fluff. What has nearly drove me out is when I feel like every day is just another barrage of unbounded problems. Like you're the guy on the track, your problem is the chains holding you there, and management is driving the train and they aren't slowing it down. You better get those chains undone.

I've been an auto mechanic, welder, machinist, and now EE. My back-up plan / exit strategy is machining. I enjoy it, it is so much more bounded (in my opinion), and still presents good challenges to keep me engaged. I already have a colleague in another company on his way. We've talked at length about it.

Re:I just landed my first career IT gig ( Score: 4 , Insightful) by Shotgun ( 30919 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @05:10PM ( #56849950 )

I worked for a large company that made networking equipment. My job was to run a sanity test framework for their operating system. Developers load the images in a queue, the system pulls them, loads them on real hardware, and executes a body of tests.

The problem was that a bad image would hose the system to where it couldn't reboot, and then it would not be able to correct itself. Every image after that would fail. My job was to come in, clean up the mess, and apologize to each developer. It was actually stressful.

I repeatedly told the manager how I could fix it, and he always said we didn't have time. I waited for him to travel for a week, I shut down the system, and fixed it so that the system got completely initialized between every run. From that point on, every failure was a real failure cause by that developer's changes.

My job became a cake walk. I find most of the stress in this industry is self induced by clueless fucks being in charge.

Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @03:57PM ( #56849582 )
Re:I just landed my first career IT gig ( Score: 5 , Insightful)
But the truth is that tech jobs can be stressful too. I imagine people in blue collar jobs believe we are living high on the hog with not a care in the world, but it's not really that way.

I was pulling long hours one week to try and finish a software update in time. The deadline was fast approaching and the outlook was grim. As usual, the cleaning lady came by to collect the trash that evening and we got to chit-chatting like we usually did (I arrived late and stayed late back then, so my being there when she did her rounds was perfectly normal). Part way through the conversation she paused for a moment, then said something to the effect of, "You know, before I started working here I used to think that you guys all had it easy with your cushy jobs and nice offices. But then I see people here with the look that you have in your eyes right now and I realize I was wrong. It's just as tough. Different, but just as tough, if not tougher."

I think I mustered a tired "Thanks?" in response.

I don't make any claim to having it tougher than anyone else (I have a MASSIVE appreciation for manual workers, among many other fields, since I couldn't do that work), but the only people I find suggesting that tech work is easy are those who either aren't in the field and have no awareness of what it entails, or those who are a burden on everyone else around them in the field.

Strawmen galore! ( Score: 5 , Insightful) by sjbe ( 173966 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @11:16AM ( #56847726 )
Yes, but the stress that tech people experience is completely fake. It REALLY doesn't matter if your work is done on time.

It does if you want to remain employed with your current company. If that doesn't matter to you then you probably aren't stressed to begin with. If anyone who worked for me expressed that attitude they would be "succeeding elsewhere" in short order.

No one is going to die if your software or network doesn't work.

I'd like to introduce you to some folks who work in medical IT who will disagree with you rather strongly. Same thing with software that controls/drives cars or airplanes or manned rockets or traffic signals or ocean navigation or food safety or electrical grids or nuclear reactor controls or.... The list is very long for things that actually do matter. Yeah, nobody probably cares if your word processor crashes but more than a few of us do things that have serious consequences.

Amazingly humans survived for thousands of years without IT or computers.

Ok we're done here. Claiming people shouldn't have stress because computers didn't exist 200 years ago is irrelevant and stupid.

Surprise, working people to death leads to burnout ( Score: 5 , Insightful) by sinij ( 911942 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:12AM ( #56847414 )

Tech work culture is seriously broken when 80 hour weeks and never going on vacation for any reason is encouraged and celebrated. Burnout under such conditions is inevitable .

swb ( 14022 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @11:59AM ( #56848012 )
Re:Surprise, working people to death leads to burn ( Score: 4 , Informative)

I work with people who proudly complain about "working until 2 am" or willingly take on all kinds of client work at ridiculous times because it burnishes their reputation.

Some after hours work is unavoidable in IT, but I just refuse to work those kinds of hours regularly without added compensation of some kind (added vacation days without strings and/or more money).

As a more skilled/experienced/older worker, I think I can get away with it but I'm not gonna lie, the people who do it seem to have more street cred in the organization because they are willing to bend over.

I think it's highly organization dependent and sometimes individually dependent (ie, can you get done what needs doing in normal work hours). And I think there are definitely orgs where if you're not doing that, you might as well resign now because you will get shuffled to the shit work.

110010001000 ( 697113 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

Nobody really does. Drama queens. If you are regularly working 80 hour weeks in IT, you are dumb or you just really like to work.

Kjella ( 173770 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

I worked 55-60 hours a week for most of a year, mainly due to two senior people leaving with a month's difference and a third knocked his head pretty bad leaving me and a few juniors to sort it out. That was as an IT consultant job though so I had a billing bonus that gave me pretty good kickback. If I recall correctly it kicked in at about 2/3rd = 67% billable time and the company average was 75-80% somewhere, so your average consultant would get bonus for like 10% while I could hit 50%+. Normally they wouldn't'

painandgreed ( 692585 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 3 )
I hear this all the time but WTH actually does this? Anyone here at slashdot? Even when I was younger I did an all nighter just once or twice. I've been working 8 hour days the last 15 years.

My understanding would be Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. although I've only really heard from people that have worked at Amazon. They hire new young and eager workers who they can work and fire them when they burn out. However, just as many leave before that. It's all part of an understood system where new workers agree to be overworked while padding their resume and looking for a new job. This lasts for an average of 18 months before they have found a new job or get laid off. They hopefully hop to

greenwow ( 3635575 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

The no vacation thing pisses me off. My entire adult life, I've only had one "real" vacation if you define it as a whole week off.

One reason there's such a lack of vacation time here in Seattle is that in Washington state, the law only requires less than 2/3 be paid out. In CA, we have to pay out 100%. That's why in CA we require employees to take PTO to get it off of the books, but in WA we basically don't allow vacation time. No company I've ever worked for let programmers take even a fifth (as a guess)

rnturn ( 11092 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

I worked for a companies where IT people used to look for places to go on vacation that had no phones or pager service. For one co-worker's rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon started a trend among the IT staff: where can I go where the phone/pager coverage is really poor or non-existent? Far, far North Canadian fishing trips started getting considered. Can't have people actually having an outside-of-work life so the companies bought satellite phones. No more vacations for you withou

Anonymous Coward writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 , Informative)
If you work under such conditions by choice then it is on your shoulders alone.

No, you're wrong. Those working conditions are spreading everywhere. Companies have figured out that instead of hiring more people, they can force others to work more for the same pay.

Don't

sinij ( 911942 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @11:41AM ( #56847866 )
Re:Manage your choices wisely ( Score: 5 , Insightful)

It is very nice to be independently wealthy and not have to worry about getting a paycheck, but for the rest of us we have to do it for a paycheck or face homelessness and possibly starvation.

If all available work is under such conditions, is that really a choice?

sjbe ( 173966 ) writes:
Options ( Score: 3 )
It is very nice to be independently wealthy and not have to worry about getting a paycheck, but for the rest of us we have to do it for a paycheck or face homelessness and possibly starvation.

You don't have to be independently wealthy to make a living doing something that you don't enjoy. If you hate IT work then go find something else to do. It's a big world with lots of opportunity.

If all available work is under such conditions, is that really a choice?

Are you seriously claiming that someone who is bright enough to find work in the tech sector will find it impossible to do something else if they put their mind to it? Possibly even something they actually enjoy doing with reasonable hours and adequate pay. Point is very few people are forced to work in IT. Arg

Re: ( Score: 2 ) by sinij ( 911942 ) writes:
It's a big world with lots of opportunity.

Old timer, this is no longer the case. It may have been true when you were young, but these days it is IT, gigs, or unemployment. Too many people in a globally connected world competing for the same few jobs.

Re: ( Score: 3 ) by apoc.famine ( 621563 ) writes:

That's hilarious. Do you have any idea how many jobs there are available in academia? Not many. The issue is that if you do what you love, what's the incentive to stop? There's a reason that the average age of professors always hovers in the 50s and 60s. It's not uncommon to find semi-retired professors still kicking around well into their 70s teaching one or two classes they love.

sjbe ( 173966 ) writes:
More than just money ( Score: 2 )
Who ISNT working for a paycheck?

Do I really have to explain that some people don't really give a shit about what they are doing? Sure everyone works to get paid but some people actually try to enjoy what they are doing along the way so that the job is more than just a means to get money.

registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )
I've taken 4 weeks of vacation in 30 years. One week when my dad died. One week for a camping trip, and the remaining two weeks were for things like my children being born.

Then you've been suckered, or have different priorities. One year, I took 6 weeks off to travel around the country. Another year, I took 4 weeks off and went to Australia. Another year, I took 6

Gee, I can't imagine why? ( Score: 5 , Insightful) by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:12AM ( #56847416 )

Long on call hours. Declining inflation adjusted wages. Having to spend hours and hours of your own time training because companies don't train anymore. Constant threats of outsourcing or being replaced by an H1-B applicant (despite the fact that that is explicitly illegal).

so... ( Score: 5 , Informative) by buddyglass ( 925859 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:50AM ( #56847618 )

Does this result argue for wider adoption of Netflix's H.R. model, as expressed in the manifesto [slideshare.net] that went viral a few years back? Namely:

1. Hire "A" players, because the competence of one's coworkers is a large contributor to employee satisfaction.
2. Don't use golden handcuffs as a means of mitigating hiring churn; you want employees to stay at the company because they want to be there. Employees choose how much stock they want vs. cash.
3. Don't use performance based bonuses; high performance is the base level expectation, not something to be singled out and rewarded.
4. "We're a team, not a family." You don't "cut" people from a family; you do "cut" people from a pro sports team.
5. "Hard work - Not Relevant". They care about productivity, not how hard you worked to be productive.
6. Low tolerance for "brilliant jerks".
7. Pay "top of market" wages. "One outstanding employee gets more done and costs less than two 'adequate' employees." "Employees should feel they are being paid well relative to other options in the market."

meaningless wanking ( Score: 5 , Interesting) by argStyopa ( 232550 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @11:25AM ( #56847766 ) Journal

A single data point is statistically meaningless "woe is us" wanking UNLESS other industries are surveyed.

If the "burnout" rate for tech workers is 57%, but for medical workers is 75%, factory line workers is 62%, and teachers is 60%, then the rate for tech workers is really not bad.
If OTOH other industries scale at 20-30%, then the tech sector really is dire.

In short: I suspect that everyone feels like they are underappreciated, underpaid, and is "fed up with all the bullshit at work"...like everyone else.

The office ( Score: 4 , Interesting) by Anonymous Coward writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:50AM ( #56847616 )

I've done a lot of Peopleware like consulting, mostly for software development teams. The IT office space is in general the enemy of these teams. They are noisy and destroy your concentration. You can only break someones concentration for a finite number per day, certainly with introverts, after that the dev is just excausted. As a rule of thumb, the correlation is more people wearing headphones -> more burnout. It's fucked up that people need to wear headphones to attempt to do their work, and a clear sign the environment is poison to their jobs. Of course they put all these people in the same space, to save money. Hardly ever do they do the math, and contemplate how much it costs them in burnout and turnover.

so... ( Score: 5 , Informative) by buddyglass ( 925859 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:50AM ( #56847618 )

Does this result argue for wider adoption of Netflix's H.R. model, as expressed in the manifesto [slideshare.net] that went viral a few years back? Namely:

1. Hire "A" players, because the competence of one's coworkers is a large contributor to employee satisfaction.
2. Don't use golden handcuffs as a means of mitigating hiring churn; you want employees to stay at the company because they want to be there. Employees choose how much stock they want vs. cash.
3. Don't use performance based bonuses; high performance is the base level expectation, not something to be singled out and rewarded.
4. "We're a team, not a family." You don't "cut" people from a family; you do "cut" people from a pro sports team.
5. "Hard work - Not Relevant". They care about productivity, not how hard you worked to be productive.
6. Low tolerance for "brilliant jerks".
7. Pay "top of market" wages. "One outstanding employee gets more done and costs less than two 'adequate' employees." "Employees should feel they are being paid well relative to other options in the market."

TFlan91 ( 2615727 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @11:36AM ( #56847834 )
Re:so... ( Score: 5 , Insightful)

Then refuse to work, yes you may get fired, but what's worse than getting fired? Working for free.

My boss is lucky if I even look at my phone off-business-hours, let alone pick it up and respond.

Sure, if an email is prefixed with "URGENT" or whatever, I take a look, but then I lazily come in the next day an hour or two "late".

It's all about the contract you signed with your employer. Don't sign shit you haven't read, and don't sign away your youth for pennies.

Am I surprised? ( Score: 4 , Insightful) by whitroth ( 9367 ) writes: < whitroth@5-ce[ ]us ['nt.' in gap] > on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @12:35PM ( #56848258 ) Homepage

Yep, so many folks LOOOVVVVEEE 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, and having to respond to the boss 24x7x365.25. Who needs a life?

UNIONS are why we have benefits, weekends, holidays and vacations. No company did that out of the alleged kindness of their hearts.

But none of you here need them, they're *so* "ancient", never mind they could get you a 40 hour week and no being bothered off hours, no, enjoy your (non-) life.

b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes: on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:24AM ( #56847470 )
Re:Demand vaca time and use it. ( Score: 5 , Insightful)

Always take it. Every year -- don't set a precedent that you're overly hard-working...

b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

What's wrong with not being promoted -- just do your job well, take your pay and vacation time. Work to live, don't live to work. A snazzy job title isn't the pinnacle of human achievement.

Hydrian ( 183536 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 3 )

Because US's annual raises rarely meet the US's annual inflation rates. So you are forced to move up the salary chain or effectively get a pay cut ever year.

Re: ( Score: 2 ) by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes:

That's when you job-jump laterally between companies... loyalty is a cruel joke in IT.

ranton ( 36917 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )
What's wrong with not being promoted -- just do your job well, take your pay and vacation time. Work to live, don't live to work. A snazzy job title isn't the pinnacle of human achievement.

While I agree with the sentiment that most people shouldn't feel pressured into living to work, the pinnacle of human achievement in any discipline is nearly always achieved through an insane devotion to the task. The people responsible for this level of excellence generally live to work.

There is nothing wrong with working to live, but there often is nothing wrong with living to work as long as it is a decision made freely.

b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

The medical field in the US still values its employees, unlike IT.

b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 3 )

Or at least raise the wage floor where overtime == time and a half. Obama tried this, Trump unfortunately rolled it back. Also, sometimes you need to work overtime two weeks in a row, crunch time to finish a project. I'd change that requirement to get the time back to something like a 2-3 month period.

Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

In my field, year-long spikes are common.

I'd support having all such things (including scheduled days off, vacation, overtime/comp time, etc.) kept indefinitely, with maximum caps for each kind. If an employee leaves for any reason, including being fired, they get paid out whatever they haven't used.

I'm quite happy to help my team meet their goals and go the extra mile to deliver a quality product to our customer..... but I certainly expect that once that's done, I'll get to go spend time with my family.

b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

If the spike is a year long, time to hire more people vs abusing your own workers.

Re: ( Score: 2 ) by Sarten-X ( 1102295 ) writes:

Then in the off years, we'd have layoffs.

People tend to like that even less.

Re: ( Score: 2 ) by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes:

Hire people as term-contract workers with the understanding that they're temporary unless otherwise informed.

Chrisq ( 894406 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )
40 hour work weeks, enforced. 30 days paid vacation per year, plus holidays and weekends.

Par for the course in the UK.

If you work overtime one week, you get those hours back the next week.

Not par for the course, but it's pretty common the you will get it back sometime. A busy period coming up to a deadline could cover a few weeks.

Everyone gets two days off in a row every week.

.. usually happens

If you give up those days for some special reason, you get comp vacation time to be used within the next month.

You would usually get this, but may have to wait until the peak is over before taking the time back. Alternatively you could be paid - time and a half is quite common

Everyone takes all their vacation, every year.

In the UK it's exceptional for anyone not to take all their time. A company I worked for switched the "holiday year" from a fixed January-December to a ye

b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 , Insightful)

$250k/yr if you have no time to enjoy it is worthless unless you plan to work for a few years, live like a miser, and invest enough of it in rental property so you never have to work again.

greenwow ( 3635575 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

I work with several devs making nearly that much, and they most certainly are burned out. When you work constant death marches with Seattle Hundreds (16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun) that almost always happens. I work almost that much, and I moved over a year ago and still haven't even unpacked yet. High pay helps, but you still have a breaking point. There just aren't enough programmers to meet demand.

djinn6 ( 1868030 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )

How does the company even end up with 100 hours of work per week for everyone? Is that all essential work, or just busywork? If burnout rate is super high, wouldn't you end up with even more work and fewer people to do it?

greenwow ( 3635575 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )
...end up with even more work and fewer people to do it?

The part I find fascinating about that is that the junior/recent college grads stick with jobs despite the long hours for the experience and the most experienced people stick with jobs because they know it's the same most everywhere else. I guess it's the devil you know. The guys in the middle with five to fifteen years experience are the ones that keep jumping ship to try to find somewhere better.

My company has about eighty people with less than three years experience and around twenty with more than tw

registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 )
I work with several devs making nearly that much, and they most certainly are burned out. When you work constant death marches with Seattle Hundreds (16 hours a day Mon-Thu and 12 hours a day Fri-Sun) that almost always happens. I work almost that much, and I moved over a year ago and still haven't even unpacked yet. High pay helps, but you still have a breaking point. There just aren't enough programmers to meet demand.

I've never worked anywhere with that kind of schedule....or known anyone who has. Then again, I have never lived in shit holes like Seattle or California.

I simply wouldn't work like that. If it were that, or go on welfare, I'd say fuck it and go on welfare, or just rob houses for a living - leaving that kind of schedule to the suckers.

If my employer required me to work more than 50 hours per week on anything other than a rare occasion, I'd find a new employer. ASAP.

Anonymous Coward writes:
Re: ( Score: 2 , Funny)
Too many tech jobs are just cleaning up after Indian disaster after Indian disaster. And not in any sort of permanent way, just putting out the same fires over and over.

There are two kinds of IT people. Those who create. And those who fix creations. If you're tired of doing one, then figure out how to get paid doing the other, and feel good knowing you'll be working to fix

[Nov 08, 2018] Technology Detox The Health Benefits of Unplugging Unwinding by Sara Tipton

Notable quotes:
"... Another great tip is to buy one of those old-school alarm clocks so the smartphone isn't ever in your bedroom. ..."
Nov 07, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Sara Tipton via ReadyNutrition.com,

Recent studies have shown that 90% of Americans use digital devices for two or more hours each day and the average American spends more time a day on high-tech devices than they do sleeping: 8 hours and 21 minutes to be exact. If you've ever considered attempting a "digital detox", there are some health benefits to making that change and a few tips to make things a little easier on yourself.

Many Americans are on their phones rather than playing with their children or spending quality family time together. Some people give up technology, or certain aspects of it, such as social media for varying reasons, and there are some shockingly terrific health benefits that come along with that type of a detox from technology. In fact, more and more health experts and medical professionals are suggesting a periodic digital detox; an extended period without those technology gadgets. Studies continue to show that a digital detox, has proven to be beneficial for relationships, productivity, physical health, and mental health. If you find yourself overly stressed or unproductive or generally disengaged from those closest to you, it might be time to unplug.

DIGITAL ADDICTION RESOLUTION

It may go unnoticed but there are many who are actually addicted to their smartphones or tablet. It could be social media or YouTube videos, but these are the people who never step away. They are the ones with their face in their phone while out to dinner with their family. They can't have a quiet dinner without their phone on the table. We've seen them at the grocery store aimlessly pushing around a cart while ignoring their children and scrolling on their phone. A whopping 83% of American teenagers claim to play video games while other people are in the same room and 92% of teens report to going online daily . 24% of those users access the internet via laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Addiction therapists who treat gadget-obsessed people say their patients aren't that different from other kinds of addicts. Whereas alcohol, tobacco, and drugs involve a substance that a user's body gets addicted to, in behavioral addiction, it's the mind's craving to turn to the smartphone or the Internet. Taking a break teaches us that we can live without constant stimulation, and lessens our dependence on electronics. Trust us: that Facebook message with a funny meme attached or juicy tidbit of gossip can wait.

IMPROVE RELATIONSHIPS AND BE MORE PERSONABLE

Another benefit to keeping all your electronics off is that it will allow you to establish good mannerisms and people skills and build your relationships to a strong level of connection. If you have ever sat across someone at the dinner table who made more phone contact than eye contact, you know it feels to take a backseat to a screen. Cell phones and other gadgets force people to look down and away from their surroundings, giving them a closed off and inaccessible (and often rude) demeanor. A digital detox has the potential of forcing you out of that unhealthy comfort zone. It could be a start toward rebuilding a struggling relationship too. In a Forbes study , 3 out of 5 people claimed that they spend more time on their digital devices than they do with their partners. This can pose a real threat to building and maintaining real-life relationships. The next time you find yourself going out on a dinner date, try leaving your cell phone and other devices at home and actually have a conversation. Your significant other will thank you.

BETTER SLEEP AND HEALTHIER EATING HABITS

The sleep interference caused by these high-tech gadgets is another mental health concern. The stimulation caused by artificial light can make you feel more awake than you really are, which can potentially interfere with your sleep quality. It is recommended that you give yourself at least two hours of technology-free time before bedtime. The "blue light" has been shown to interfere with sleeping patterns by inhibiting melatonin (the hormone which controls our sleep/wake cycle known as circadian rhythm) production. Try shutting off your phone after dinner and leaving it in a room other than your bedroom. Another great tip is to buy one of those old-school alarm clocks so the smartphone isn't ever in your bedroom. This will help your body readjust to a normal and healthy sleep schedule.

Your eating habits can also suffer if you spend too much time checking your newsfeed. The Rochester Institute of Technology released a study that revealed students are more likely to eat while staring into digital media than they are to eat at a dinner table. This means that eating has now become a multi-tasking activity, rather than a social and loving experience in which healthy foods meant to sustain the body are consumed. This can prevent students from eating consciously, which promotes unhealthy eating habits such as overeating and easy choices, such as a bag of chips as opposed to washing and peeling some carrots. Whether you're an overworked college student checking your Facebook, or a single bachelor watching reruns of The Office , a digital detox is a great way to promote healthy and conscious eating.

IMPROVE OVERALL MENTAL HEALTH

Social media addicts experience a wide array of emotions when looking at the photos of Instagram models and the exercise regimes of others who live in exotic locations. These emotions can be mentally draining and psychologically unhealthy and lead to depression. Smartphone use has been linked to loneliness, shyness, and less engagement at work. In other words, one may have many "social media friends" while being lonely and unsatisfied because those friends are only accessible through their screen. Start by limiting your time on social media. Log out of all social media accounts. That way, you've actually got to log back in if you want to see what that Parisian Instagram vegan model is up to.

If you feel like a detox is in order but don't know how to go about it, start off small. Try shutting off your phone after dinner and don't turn it back on until after breakfast. Keep your phone in another room besides your bedroom overnight. If you use your phone as an alarm clock, buy a cheap alarm clock to use instead to lessen your dependence on your phone. Boredom is often the biggest factor in the beginning stages of a detox, but try playing an undistracted board game with your children, leaving your phone at home during a nice dinner out, or playing with a pet. All of these things are not only good for you but good for your family and beloved furry critter as well!

[May 26, 2018] Sex and the Brain by James Thompson

May 26, 2018 | www.unz.com

Pity the poor blogger's lot: there are more interesting papers being published every week than any essayist, however diligent, can possibly cope with. And there will be more, as the vast genetic databases give up their secrets. No sooner does one team scoop the others with a savage novelty than their rivals counter-attack with their own surprising findings. If you are curious about mankind, it is the best time to be alive. We are likely to learn more about ourselves in the next few decades than was possible in the last few centuries.

[Mar 27, 2018] Nearly Half of Parents Worry Their Child Is Addicted To Mobile Devices, Study Finds

Mar 27, 2018 | science.slashdot.org

(usatoday.com) BeauHD on Thursday February 22, 2018 @06:50PM from the welcome-to-2018 dept. According to a new survey from Common Sense Media and SurveyMonkey, 47% of parents worry their child is addicted to their mobile device . By comparison, only 32% of parents say they're addicted themselves. USA Today reports: Half of parents also say they are at least somewhat concerned about how mobile devices will affect their kids' mental health. Nearly one in five say they're "extremely" or "very" concerned. According to the survey, 89% of parents believe it's up to them to curb their children's smartphone usage. The survey conducted between Jan. 25 and Jan. 29 included a sample of 4,201 adults, including 1,024 parents with children under age 18. Data was weighted to reflect the demographic composition of the U.S. for adults over 18, based on Census data. Many devices and services feature parental controls, but some parents may not be aware they exist. The Common Sense-SurveyMonkey survey found 22% of parents did not know YouTube -- which has faced scrutiny over how easy it is for kids to find inappropriate videos -- offered parental controls. Also, 37% have not used the controls before. Among parents surveyed who say their kids watch YouTube videos, 62% said their kids have seen inappropriate videos on the site. Most, or 81%, said it's the parents' job to prevent kids from seeing these videos.

[Oct 16, 2017] 3 Reasons Why We Are Addicted To Smartphones

Oct 16, 2017 | www.msn.com

So, what draws people to these phones? Surely, it is not just the groundbreaking design or the connection with a community. As a minister, psychotherapist and scholar studying our relationship with hand-held devices, I believe there is much more going on.

In fact, I'd argue, as I do in my book "Growing Down: Theology and Human Nature in the Virtual Age," the phones tap into our basic yearnings as humans.

Here are my three reasons why we love our phones.

1. Part of an extended self

Our sense of self is shaped while we are still in the womb. The development of the self, however, accelerates after birth . A newborn, first and foremost, attaches herself to the primary caregiver and later to things – acquiring what has been called an "extended self."

The leading 20th-century American psychologist William James was among the first to argue for an extended self. In his "Principles of Psychology," James defined the self as "the sum total of all that a man can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children." Losing any of this extended self, which could include money or another prized object, as he explained, could lead to a sense of great loss. In early childhood, for example, babies and toddlers cry if they suddenly lose their pacifier or favorite soft toy, objects that become part of their extended selves.

Phones, I argue, play a similar role. It is not uncommon for me to feel a sudden onset of anxiety should I drop my phone or am unable to find it. In my experience, many individuals feel the same way. It is also reflected in how often many of us check our devices.

Psychologist Larry Rosen and his colleagues at California State University found that 51 percent of individuals born in the 1980s and 1990s experienced moderate to high levels of anxiety when they were kept from checking in with their devices for more than 15 minutes . Interestingly, the percentage drops slightly – to 42 percent – for those born between 1965 and 1979.

This is primarily because they came into being during a time where hand-held technologies were only beginning to make their entry. For this group, phones became part of their extended self only as late teens or as young adults.

[Sep 17, 2017] Colleagues Addicted to Tech

Notable quotes:
"... dwelling on the negative can backfire. ..."
"... It's fine to acknowledge a misstep. But spin the answer to focus on why this new situation is such an ideal match of your abilities to the employer's needs. ..."
Apr 20, 2015 | NYTimes.com

Discussing Bad Work Situations

I have been in my present position for over 25 years. Five years ago, I was assigned a new boss, who has a reputation in my industry for harassing people in positions such as mine until they quit. I have managed to survive, but it's clear that it's time for me to move along. How should I answer the inevitable interview question: Why would I want to leave after so long? I've heard that speaking badly of a boss is an interview no-no, but it really is the only reason I'm looking to find something new. BROOKLYN

I am unemployed and interviewing for a new job. I have read that when answering interview questions, it's best to keep everything you say about previous work experiences or managers positive.

But what if you've made one or two bad choices in the past: taking jobs because you needed them, figuring you could make it work - then realizing the culture was a bad fit, or you had an arrogant, narcissistic boss?

Nearly everyone has had a bad work situation or boss. I find it refreshing when I read stories about successful people who mention that they were fired at some point, or didn't get along with a past manager. So why is it verboten to discuss this in an interview? How can the subject be addressed without sounding like a complainer, or a bad employee? CHICAGO

As these queries illustrate, the temptation to discuss a negative work situation can be strong among job applicants. But in both of these situations, and in general, criticizing a current or past employer is a risky move. You don't have to paint a fictitiously rosy picture of the past, but dwelling on the negative can backfire. Really, you don't want to get into a detailed explanation of why you have or might quit at all. Instead, you want to talk about why you're such a perfect fit for the gig you're applying for.

So, for instance, a question about leaving a long-held job could be answered by suggesting that the new position offers a chance to contribute more and learn new skills by working with a stronger team. This principle applies in responding to curiosity about jobs that you held for only a short time.

It's fine to acknowledge a misstep. But spin the answer to focus on why this new situation is such an ideal match of your abilities to the employer's needs.

The truth is, even if you're completely right about the past, a prospective employer doesn't really want to hear about the workplace injustices you've suffered, or the failings of your previous employer. A manager may even become concerned that you will one day add his or her name to the list of people who treated you badly. Save your cathartic outpourings for your spouse, your therapist, or, perhaps, the future adoring profile writer canonizing your indisputable success.

Send your workplace conundrums to [email protected], including your name and contact information (even if you want it withheld for publication). The Workologist is a guy with well-intentioned opinions, not a professional career adviser. Letters may be edited.

[Sep 17, 2017] Smartphone is a curse not only a technical miracle

Notable quotes:
"... To my generation computer games seem crazy but incredible amounts of money are spent developing each new game. Man's ingenuity has been turned against himself as mental addiction takes its place next to chemical addiction. ..."
"... You need to use AdBlock and NoScript (or the equivalent for whatever OS and browser you're using.) I don't see ads hardly anywhere. The main reason for using these tools is not only to get rid of ads, it's to enhance the security of your computer. ..."
Sep 04, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com
wisedupearly , 04 September 2017 at 03:39 PM
Death of education by smartphones is a recent meme worrying educators. The ads, news bites, and apps are crafted specifically to attract attention. They are the end result of marrying Madison Avenue with Silicon Valley and only the most effective/annoying/distracting survive to become the template for the next generation.

To my generation computer games seem crazy but incredible amounts of money are spent developing each new game. Man's ingenuity has been turned against himself as mental addiction takes its place next to chemical addiction.

Richardstevenhack , 04 September 2017 at 07:38 PM
"If I look up a news article on the Web, swarms of ads descend to interrupt, and we spend precious time trying to delete them and move on as even as more continue to appear. The volume of ads are so asphyxiating these days that it isn't worth the effort to get rid of them, and so I turn them off., annoyed and exasperated."

You need to use AdBlock and NoScript (or the equivalent for whatever OS and browser you're using.) I don't see ads hardly anywhere. The main reason for using these tools is not only to get rid of ads, it's to enhance the security of your computer.

[Sep 17, 2017] Sic Semper Tyrannis How We Die by Richard Sale

Notable quotes:
"... Today, we learn in snatches or in brief bites. We don't settle down to learn comprehensively. We can't concentrate. Our life is one of incessant interruptions. If I look up a news article on the Web, swarms of ads descend to interrupt, and we spend precious time trying to delete them and move on as even as more continue to appear. The volume of ads are so asphyxiating these days that it isn't worth the effort to get rid of them, and so I turn them off., annoyed and exasperated. ..."
"... News items are intruders. Their origin is external to our thought. If outside events are always being dumped on our brains, it is hard to take the time to grade them in terms of our general knowledge. We do we really know? It takes a lot of reflection to answer that. Only by looking at our own knowledge from all sides, do we get a grasp of the insights that come from experience rather than the knowledge that come from foreign impressions. Schopenhauer once said that real thinking means "comparing truth with truth." To me that means deciding which truth had more meaning and priority in my own mental life? ..."
"... The ability to focus on a subject for a long time without fatigue was one of Napoleon's mottos. Who today can do that? What benefit to we get from blotting out distractions and learning to reason carefully for a long time without getting tired? It becomes harder for us to do everyday. Topics flock to our brains. The Middle East, President Trump, North Korea. Are these things really interesting? If we buckle down and concentrate on them, what will be the reward? To me, the rewards are always meager. There is a lot of competition when it comes to current affairs. If we fall behind, we suffer a pang of regret � some neighbor knows more about current affairs than I do. But so what? I want to ponder things that are unique to my own temper and mental capacity. I don't want to become a replica of my neighbor. There are few worse fates than that. I want to ponder things that are appropriate to my nature and experience. I want to encourage thoughts that have truth and life in them that occur naturally, not from without. ..."
"... Let's face it. Today we are all the junkies of daily news. "The Daily Fix" phrase is perhaps the most appropriate. ..."
"... One of the main villains of modern life is opinion. Popular opinion has replaced thought and reflection. Opinions are the product of ignorant hearsay. All of us see or view something and, without considering what it means, we rush to bray our reactions to anyone who can hear it. But is our reaction valid? Insightful? Useful? Enlightening? Opinions are unstable; they become outmoded, lacking in pertinence or validity and over time, are discarded. An opinion is the prisoner of the moment, a prisoner of the thoughtless and automatic the commonplace. For every thousand people cry a thing up only a pitiable few cry it down and their voices are drowned out. ..."
"... New York Times' ..."
"... You need to use AdBlock and NoScript (or the equivalent for whatever OS and browser you're using.) I don't see ads hardly anywhere. The main reason for using these tools is not only to get rid of ads, it's to enhance the security of your computer. ..."
"... Most people (68%) have an IQ that is within 1 standard deviation of average. These people are mediocre; functional, but mediocre. Of the remaining 32% we have 16% on the far left side of the bell curve. These people are truly stupid. That leaves only 16% (16 out of every hundred people you meet) that have some spark of intelligence above mediocrity. Of those, only 2% are truly bright. ..."
"... This, I think, is the root of the problems you discuss. Most people simply do not have the ability to do more than absorb and rote repeat the shallow informational garbage that is tossed at them. Their stunted intellectual capacities don't permit them to gain satisfaction from deep meditations. Rather, they prefer the gross pleasures of food, drink, slapstick and gossip. ..."
"... I think much of what is "modern life" is soul stifling. There are many ways to sidestep or repudiate the crassness and incivility of the world today, but for me, it has been to exit the metropolitan life. Going to my farm, where there is no cell service, no big highways and people still ride their horses down the roadways - I feel a palpable release and relief just driving into the area. ..."
"... The key to things, as has been taught throughout time, is to do things in moderation - and the internet and smartphones are no exception. However, the addictive appeal of instant everything is apparent to us here commenting, and is to be understood and moderated. In that vein, I want to thank the Colonel for giving us the opportunity to enjoy this little nook of cyberspace - thank you! ..."
Sep 17, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Triviality

Today, we learn in snatches or in brief bites. We don't settle down to learn comprehensively. We can't concentrate. Our life is one of incessant interruptions. If I look up a news article on the Web, swarms of ads descend to interrupt, and we spend precious time trying to delete them and move on as even as more continue to appear. The volume of ads are so asphyxiating these days that it isn't worth the effort to get rid of them, and so I turn them off., annoyed and exasperated.

The chief point is that we cannot sit and think and read or reflect in peace any more. Everything calls to us, tempts us, distracts us, befuddles and annoys us. Our brains are not what they once were, not because of age, but because our culture works differently on them and hinders their further development.

News items are intruders. Their origin is external to our thought. If outside events are always being dumped on our brains, it is hard to take the time to grade them in terms of our general knowledge. We do we really know? It takes a lot of reflection to answer that. Only by looking at our own knowledge from all sides, do we get a grasp of the insights that come from experience rather than the knowledge that come from foreign impressions. Schopenhauer once said that real thinking means "comparing truth with truth." To me that means deciding which truth had more meaning and priority in my own mental life?

The ability to focus on a subject for a long time without fatigue was one of Napoleon's mottos. Who today can do that? What benefit to we get from blotting out distractions and learning to reason carefully for a long time without getting tired? It becomes harder for us to do everyday. Topics flock to our brains. The Middle East, President Trump, North Korea. Are these things really interesting? If we buckle down and concentrate on them, what will be the reward? To me, the rewards are always meager. There is a lot of competition when it comes to current affairs. If we fall behind, we suffer a pang of regret � some neighbor knows more about current affairs than I do. But so what? I want to ponder things that are unique to my own temper and mental capacity. I don't want to become a replica of my neighbor. There are few worse fates than that. I want to ponder things that are appropriate to my nature and experience. I want to encourage thoughts that have truth and life in them that occur naturally, not from without.

I do not understand why so many people strive so hard to be up to date. They are always in a race to try and announce headlines before their neighbors. They rarely study or master the stories the headlines advertize. They evade the labor of memorizing. All they can recapitulate are the headlines. If you ask about the stories, they hesitate then falter out, "I only saw the headlines." I am sometimes eager to have them summarize what they've read, but there is no there, there as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, CA.

Let's face it. Today we are all the junkies of daily news. "The Daily Fix" phrase is perhaps the most appropriate. It is really shameful if you think about it, but no one does, or if you protest about the meaningless deluge of daily news, you are labeled over-sensitive or nit-picking. Most of us awake to news headlines. There is a hurricane, an accident that kills sailors, a helicopter crashes, a new threat of annihilation from an Asian punk regime.

But do we learn anything from these? We are like those toy birds that dip their beaks into a dish of water. They look as if they're drinking, but they don't. They are not built to absorb anything. Their dipping looks like activity, but it is all counterfeit. Unfortunately the breathless topics of today are not of permanent interest nor do they enrich the mind. They are transitory, destined not to last. They keep us floating on the surface of life, preventing us from diving deep and discovering something new and valuable and priceless.

We see lists of notable books on the Civil War, the downfall of the Soviet Union, the Fall of the Bastille. We see new books on the French Revolution or the fall of Paris in 1870. We see histories of the Balkans or the Ottoman Empire. We see books about the nature of power, religious or corporate or military. Do we read them, study them?

As we get older, our minds get more introspective. We want to seize the enduring truths that reside in our nature or our close friends. Such things sharpen the mind; help expand the range of our inner insight. Worthless Opinions

One of the main villains of modern life is opinion. Popular opinion has replaced thought and reflection. Opinions are the product of ignorant hearsay. All of us see or view something and, without considering what it means, we rush to bray our reactions to anyone who can hear it. But is our reaction valid? Insightful? Useful? Enlightening? Opinions are unstable; they become outmoded, lacking in pertinence or validity and over time, are discarded. An opinion is the prisoner of the moment, a prisoner of the thoughtless and automatic the commonplace. For every thousand people cry a thing up only a pitiable few cry it down and their voices are drowned out.

We suffer from an increasingly lack of sound judgment.

... ... ...

Isolation

Isolation plays a large part in retarding study. The pleasure of learning is a noble pleasure, and like all good things, sharing what we learn with others increases its value. We are social creatures, and it is part of our nature to share the excellent. But most of the time we lack people to share the joy of our discoveries with. We are victims of the addicts of the mental lightweights who confine their reading to New York Times' bestsellers, people who lack the means to judge the merit of what they're reading, who lack the talent to articulate its virtues. They lack the standards of taste and the critical spirit required to evaluate them correctly.

Isolation has killed a lot of thinkers. I remember How Hume's book on Reelections on Human Nature fell absolutely flat after it was published yet, over time, became a classic. But popularity can kill as well. We think of how Mozart's amazing genius wowed and fascinated his audiences and followers and yet his fame resulted in him buried in an unmarked grave for the poor. Crowds are dismayingly fickle. Their interest lacks stamina.

Apparently it is the task of modern culture is to herd all of us on well traveled roads, never taking the road less traveled. Few of us explore and the few who do are not met with enthusiasm or praise or appreciation but by polite indifference mainly because your knowledge is not current or popular.

Popularity is a trap. It retains a viselike grip on the ignorant. It is sinister because it is addictive. If something is popular and makes money, then it must be successful, and if successful, it must be superior. No one asks the fans of the popular why they admire as they do. Because they assume that everyone else thinks just as they do and everyone else suffers from the same mediocre qualities of taste and narrowness of mind.

It is a hard truth that people of more talented intellectual capacity seek out people with similar temperaments and natures. That is the key to all friendship. With the right people, they come alive. They speak freely and honestly, relating facts that stimulate their listeners who then come forward with their own treasured items of memory and knowledge that stimulate and reinforce the conversation. Both sides leave the discussion strengthed and invigorated. Both are eager to hear more, learn more. Both return feeling less isolated from the ephemeral l thing tat matter so much in the world.

Divas

The purpose is to learn and share our knowledge for its own sake not because we want to not to become the center of attention. A neighbor's kid came to visit his parents. He was obsessed with learning about Rubik Cube. One the night of his arrival, there was a dinner in progress, but no sooner had the guests entered in the hallway, than this kid was putting on an exhibition, wresting with his cube, blocking the entering hallway, of course earning automatic applause from his audience. A short time later, he then went down to Miami to attend an international competition, and after all his self display his scores were mediocre, resting stolidity in the middle of the pack. I wondered if his interest was merely a desire to attract cheap applause, or whether he was serious student determined to become an expert, putting in those long hours of concentrated focus to improve his skill. Of course, my hopes were mislaid. He moved onto so something else where he would be the center of attention and hog the spotlight.

How We Die

Am reading an excellent book, How We Die ? The author, Sherwin Nuland, is a doctor, a surgeon, who is a well educated and deeply cultured man. He writes with eloquence. His prose is not for the squeamish. He retails very grisly details about how we lose our lives. Each chapter documents the chief causes of death in America, heart disease, Alzheimer's, accidents, suicides, "Murder and Serenity", etc.

One death he documents was that of James McCarty who died of a heart attack. He was a successful construction executive who led a "suicidal" life. He smoked, ate rich food, consumed a lot of red meat, and grew flabby and overweight and never exercised. He arrived at the emergency room at 8 p.m., on a hot and humid Sept. evening. He complained of "a constrictive pressure behind the breastbone" that radiated up into his throat and down his left arm. The pressure had begun after his usual heavy dinner. His face was ashen and sweaty. His heartbeat was irregular but improved after initial treatment.

At 11:00 p.m., Nuland arrived. McCarty wasn't pleased to see him. McCarty greeted him with a thin, forced smile. Nuland was 22 years of age at the time and this was one of his first cases. As Nuland sat down, McCarty suddenly threw his head back and "bellowed a wordless roar that came out of his throat from somewhere deep in his stricken heart." He hit his balled fists with surprising force up against his chest as his face became swollen and purple.

Nuland explains how he opened up the chest cavity to massage the man's heart. The heart felt like "an uncoordinated squirming, a jellylike bagful of hyperactive worms." The heart was wriggling under his fingers, and he began a series of firm, syncopated compressions.

Then Nuland writes "Suddenly a something stupefying in its horror took place." (Excellent sentence.) McCarty "threw back his head once more, and staring at the ceiling with his glassy, unseeing gaze of open, dead eyes, roared at the distant heavens a hoarse, rasping whoop that sounded as if the hounds of hell were barking." (Pat described this as McCarty's "last hurrah." McCarty, of course, was already dead when this happened.

The book is written in this effective pictorial style. It spares the reader nothing.

Of course, we all die from lack of oxygen. We cease breathing and our esophagus muscles can constrict and make us bark as we die or there can be seen great heaving as our lungs fail. The myths that our nails or hair grow after our death are simply myths. After we die, nothing grows. The lively energetic spirit that was one our deepest being had fled, leafing a pathetic shell behind that is not pleasant to look at. The eyes, at first unfocused and glassy, soon become covered ay a gray film that has no expression at all. The body beings to shrink. We have become mere luggage. What will survive of us has already been done. There is nothing else to look forward to.

I learned enough of New Testament Greek to read St. Paul's letters, which were outstandingly articulate in every way. But when I came to the Resurrection, I became skeptical. It was a lovely wish � to be restored to your parents, your wife, and your friends. But St. Paul's belief had its antecedents Zoroaster, the great Persian religious leader, was said to have been torn to pieces by his followers, but rose after three days. I don't like coincides. Of course, Jesus appeared to his followers but there was little to record of him after that. Was he resurrected a second time? There is little information.

... ... ...

Posted at 01:01 PM in Richard Sale Permalink

Murali , 04 September 2017 at 01:33 PM

You are spot on. The biggest problem we face is our own self and the delusion in search of non-existing knowledge out side of us. As you say if we sit comfortably and contemplate our own experiences both good and bad, there will be a greater awakening to the world outside of us. But as we search for knowledge outside of us be it internet or other mediums we are bombarded with irrivelent information such as the pop us ads etc. I have to plead guilty of the later but sometimes I do practice the former!
dilbert dogbert -> Murali... , 04 September 2017 at 10:27 PM
In my early years I marched along the trail knowing that in the mist dimly seen was "The Wall". Now at 81 "The Wall" is clear, spotlighted in bright sunlight.
Linda , 04 September 2017 at 02:42 PM
I am overwhelmed by this gift of your constant thinking. I agree with you about not wanting to live if my wits are gone, but I fear that it will be impossible for me to tell what that moment might be. I am I guess still afraid of death even though I strive to overcome this feeling. We would all like to die peacefully in our sleep one night but I think this rarely happens.
wisedupearly , 04 September 2017 at 03:39 PM
Death of education by smartphones is a recent meme worrying educators. The ads, news bites, and apps are crafted specifically to attract attention. They are the end result of marrying Madison Avenue with Silicon Valley and only the most effective/annoying/distracting survive to become the template for the next generation. To my generation computer games seem crazy but incredible amounts of money are spent developing each new game. Man's ingenuity has been turned against himself as mental addiction takes its place next to chemical addiction.
Richardstevenhack , 04 September 2017 at 07:38 PM
"If I look up a news article on the Web, swarms of ads descend to interrupt, and we spend precious time trying to delete them and move on as even as more continue to appear. The volume of ads are so asphyxiating these days that it isn't worth the effort to get rid of them, and so I turn them off., annoyed and exasperated."

You need to use AdBlock and NoScript (or the equivalent for whatever OS and browser you're using.) I don't see ads hardly anywhere. The main reason for using these tools is not only to get rid of ads, it's to enhance the security of your computer.

readerOfTeaLeaves , 04 September 2017 at 10:59 PM
Having watched my father pass away in recent months, after several years confined to a wheelchair and in the care of gifted, compassionate immigrants, I sincerely appreciate this post.

In those last weeks, the most help that I could offer was to play him any opera, musical, jazz, or orchestral piece that he requested -- all via a quick search on my iTunes account. In the last hours, when he could no longer speak, Indian Chakra music (also via iTunes) helped his breathing and was a balm beyond what words could ever express.

What he taught me is that it is not how we die -- in his case, stoic, uncomplaining, loved, and treasured -- but how we live, that matters.

His life, like so many of his generation, was shaped by several years spent in the US Army between 1943 - 45, much of it in the South Pacific, then Japan. The catastrophic destruction that he witnessed, which he did not share with me until he was well into his 80s, shaped the way that he lived his life, and sharpened his priorities, his beliefs, his politics, his ethics, and his capacity for friendship. Also, his capacity for making a decision, then sticking to it.

He once told me that after watching 'so many bodies stacked up like cordwood' in the cleanup of Yokohoma after it had been firebombed, he promised himself that he would never, ever remain in any job if he was miserable after 72 hours. He kept that promise to himself, and helped countless others also try to find meaningful work, be productive, and laugh through job losses, down cycles, and lawsuits.

In other words, his military experiences in WWII seemed to liberate him in a sense to live his life as fully as he possibly could, and he always felt grateful to have had a solid education, a superb local library, and -- much later -- The Internet to help him reconnect with friends strewn across the country.

Today, he would be called 'resilient'. Many of the traits that helped him be successful in a long career were sharpened in the US Army, and he felt that 'kids today' would have enormous benefits from some kind of national service. That generation knew how to pull together. Whether today's kids can figure it out remains to be seen.

EvanHP , 04 September 2017 at 11:57 PM
I'm in my 40's. I had a heart attack (MI) 3 years ago and a stroke 2 weeks ago. The MI felt like 1000-lbs of compressed air was shot into my lungs. When I had the stroke I was typing a report at my desk around 7 pm. My wife was still at work. My right arm went completely numb and the right side of my face felt partially numb. I was rushed to the ER at a local hospital outside Boston.

No major long-term effects. In both cases (MI and stroke) I was a bit freaked out because I was conscious and knew that what was happening was grave. In both cases my overwhelming thought (fear) was that I was about to enter eternity and I wondered if I had lead a good enough life to avoid eternal isolation from God. During the stroke they were ready to use a very aggressive treatment called TPA, which, the ER doctor told me, could result in bleeding in the brain and fatality. I was frightened of death for the first time in my life. Because it was real. I asked my wife if we might need to call a priest. She said I would be ok. The decision to not go forward with TPA was made by a brother and sister-in-law (one a Harvard Med cardiologist and the other a professor of medicine) who talked with the ER doctor by phone as this was going down (I'm sure a first for him).

Anyway, crazy stuff. I will be changing my lifestyle in many ways-- body, mind, and spirt. I'm practicing my faith more diligently and plan to go to confession at least once per month and say the rosary daily. A view these events as a wake up call for my health and a severe mercy for my eternal soul.

Bill H , 05 September 2017 at 01:27 AM
I was undergoing some sort of medical test and the technician noticed I was reading a book, one of the Patrick O'Brian series which includes Master and Commander which was such a good movie. I told him I was reading the series for what I thought was the sixth time and he was stunned. He could not believe that anyone would read a book twice, let alone a series of twenty books six times. I think Richard Sale understands why I'm reading it yet again.
Eric Newhill , 05 September 2017 at 05:35 AM
Nice article, Richard.

I volunteer at a hospice home in my community. It's a nice place and people in the community can spend their final days there, for free, well taken care of, with their families and friends, in a clean, peaceful, respectful environment. The goal of the home is provide as much dignity in death as possible. I've seem a lot of people go through the dying process and have been there at the final moment for some of them.

You'd be surprised at how many residents pass their last week and day and even moment with some banal game show blaring away on the television. You might be surprised at how few conversations there are about spiritual matters, how few reflections on what was learned during life, how few conversations regarding great adventures, joys, loves, sorrows.

For most, death comes painlessly. There is a sigh and, perhaps, a brief rattle and then the resident is gone. Quite uneventful. Quite mundane.

Most people (68%) have an IQ that is within 1 standard deviation of average. These people are mediocre; functional, but mediocre. Of the remaining 32% we have 16% on the far left side of the bell curve. These people are truly stupid. That leaves only 16% (16 out of every hundred people you meet) that have some spark of intelligence above mediocrity. Of those, only 2% are truly bright.

This, I think, is the root of the problems you discuss. Most people simply do not have the ability to do more than absorb and rote repeat the shallow informational garbage that is tossed at them. Their stunted intellectual capacities don't permit them to gain satisfaction from deep meditations. Rather, they prefer the gross pleasures of food, drink, slapstick and gossip.

David E. Solomon -> Eric Newhill... , 05 September 2017 at 09:25 AM
Sorry Eric but I don't buy your assumptions at all. I think if you were to look carefully and without bias, you will find that the mediocrity you have perceived is almost entirely the result of a very poor national (at least in the USA) public education system.
gaikokumaniakku , 05 September 2017 at 08:54 AM
"Are these things really interesting? If we buckle down and concentrate on them, what will be the reward? To me, the rewards are always meager. There is a lot of competition when it comes to current affairs. If we fall behind, we suffer a pang of regret � some neighbor knows more about current affairs than I do. But so what? I want to ponder things that are unique to my own temper and mental capacity."

Dear sir, thank you for your essay. You are very right in your principles. One should meditate and think deeply. One should not be distracted by passing fads and foolish fancies. I am a foolish fellow. I fritter my time away on distractions. I know that I should say "no" to exciting projects and focus on just one useful enterprise, but in general I fail.

One thing that I do focus on is putting together aggregated news of police misconduct, government corruption, and conspiracy theories. Up through 2016, I thought it was just another foolish habit. I had perhaps two dozen readers every day - I got no money for keeping them abreast of the headlines.

And then, in 2016, John Podesta was accused of human trafficking. If the allegations - known as Pizzagate - are even close to true, then the entire USA government will be shaken when the truth comes out. I reported on Pizzagate when it was news, just like I report on every other report of government misconduct. And instead of two dozen visitors, I got thousands. For just one day, or just one month, there were thousands of people who wanted to read the allegations, and I played a very small role in delivering the truth that had been exposed by much braver and abler men. I hope the corruption will be exposed, and then everyone will wake up, and my blogging efforts will be obsolete. I would very much like to feel that I can ignore the news in good conscience.

Oilman2 , 05 September 2017 at 10:50 AM
I think much of what is "modern life" is soul stifling. There are many ways to sidestep or repudiate the crassness and incivility of the world today, but for me, it has been to exit the metropolitan life. Going to my farm, where there is no cell service, no big highways and people still ride their horses down the roadways - I feel a palpable release and relief just driving into the area.

My recommendation is simply to limit your drinking. Nobody gets drunk every day except alcoholics, who have a sickness. My sense of things on the internet and in smartfone-land is similar - it's like a drunk who needs to drink. If you have a little, it is fine, although you don't always need it. If you have a lot, then you are like a drunk - because knowing things does not mean you can affect them, and worrying over things you cannot affect is a recipe for many ills.

The craziness of the world will recede in the future - so much of what is considered 'normal' now is not so, when viewed from the lens of history. Things go in cycles, and the current world is the most technologically complex one in known history - and thus it has more innate vulnerabilities than any other previous human existence. Simplification will come, and is likely on its way in our children's or grandchildren's times here on Earth.

Concurrently, my focus has been on building the farm so that my children and possibly their own, have a place to go that is not the city, that is simpler, that is closer to the Earth and provides them with things impalpable. This has and is a great source of happiness in this life for me.

I haven't subscribed to the Judeo-Christian faith since I was originally indoctrinated in my early teens via catechism. I never grokked a God that delivers binary choice - this world would be anathema to that type of being. I believe reliving the wheel of life a far more likely and positive possibility for souls. Polishing ones soul in repeated attempts has an appeal much greater than burning in hell eternally or playing a harp among identically blissful angels - the binaries offered by many religions are not reflective of what humanity is, IMHO. I guess in the next years I will discover what the truth of things is, and take comfort in my offspring moving through time beyond my own.

The key to things, as has been taught throughout time, is to do things in moderation - and the internet and smartphones are no exception. However, the addictive appeal of instant everything is apparent to us here commenting, and is to be understood and moderated. In that vein, I want to thank the Colonel for giving us the opportunity to enjoy this little nook of cyberspace - thank you!

And for this essay - thank you. I surely needed to be written, as it is something we all should acknowledge. Death is something natural, normal and inevitable. Easing the burden of loss to your loved ones is an important responsibility as we pass through the veil.

[Sep 17, 2017] Inside the rehab saving young men from their internet addiction by Joanna Walters

Jun 16, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

At a cabin in the Washington state woods, the reSTART center helps residents withdraw from technology that has consumed their lives in Redmond, Washington.

By the time Marshall Carpenter's father broke down the barricaded door of his son's apartment and physically ripped him away from his electronic devices, the 25-year-old was in a bad way. He could not bear to live a life that didn't involve hours upon hours of uninterrupted screen time.

"I was playing video games 14 or 15 hours a day, I had Netflix on a loop in the background, and any time there was the tiniest break in any of that, I would be playing a game on my phone or sending lonely texts to ex-girlfriends," Carpenter says.

We are sitting in a small, plain apartment in a nondescript condo complex in Redmond, Washington, on the outskirts of Seattle. Marshall shares the apartment with other men in their 20s, all of whom have recently emerged from a unique internet addiction rehab program called reSTART Life.

"I was basically living on Dr Pepper, which is packed with caffeine and sugar. I would get weak from not eating but I would only notice it when I got so shaky I stopped being able to think and play well," he adds. By then, he'd already had to drop out of university in Michigan and had lost his sports scholarship.

His new friends Charlie and Peter nod sagely. Charlie Bracke, 28, was suicidal and had lost his job when he realized his online gaming was totally out of control. He can't remember a time in his life before he was not playing video games of some kind: he reckons he began when he was about four and was addicted by the age of nine.

Marshall and Charlie at reSTART, an internet addiction center.

Marshall and Charlie at reSTART, with Charlie's dog, Minerva. Photograph: Rafael Soldi for the Guardian

For Peter, 31, who preferred to withhold his last name, the low came when he had been homeless for six months and was living in his car.

"I would stay in church parking lots and put sunshades up on the windows and spend all day in my car on my tablet device," he says.

He was addicted to internet porn, masturbating six to 10 times a day, to the point where he was bleeding but would continue.

When he wasn't doing that, he was so immersed in the fantasy battle game World of Warcraft that in his mind, he was no longer a person sitting at a screen, but an avatar: the bold dwarvish hero Tarokalas, "shooting guns and assassinating the enemy" as he ran through a Tolkien-esque virtual realm.

And when he wasn't doing that, he would read online news reports obsessively and exercise his political opinions and a hair-trigger temper in the comment section of The Economist, projecting himself pseudonymously as a swaggering blogger-cum-troll.

"I was a virgin until I was 29. Then I had sex with a lap dancer at a strip club. That's something I never thought I would do," he says.

After completing the initial $25,000, 45-day residential stage at the main "campus" a few miles away, clients move into the cheaper, off-site secondary phase. Here they get to share a normal apartment, on the condition that they continue with psychotherapy, attend Alcoholics Anonymous-style 12-step meetings, search for work and avoid the internet for a minimum of six months.

Marshall, Charlie and Peter successfully completed the second phase and have graduated from the reSTART program, but they have chosen to stay in the same apartment complex and rent with other recovering gamers as they continue to reboot their lives.

Mostly they carry only flip phones and have to go to the library when they want to check email.

"I'm taking my life in six-month chunks at this stage. So far I haven't relapsed into gaming and I'm feeling optimistic," says Bracke.

An addiction overwhelmingly afflicting men

A climbing wall at the main ReStart campus, deep in the woods.

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A climbing wall at the main reSTART campus, deep in the woods. Photograph: Rafael Soldi for the Guardian

Nine miles east, down a dirt track off a country road that winds through forests, six young men are sitting in a wooden cabin amid a cluster of moss-draped trees � the reSTART campus.

Spring sunshine is flooding through the windows and the only sounds are birds singing and the men cracking their knuckles as they stare at the floor.

They have recently arrived at rehab.

Hilarie Cash, a psychotherapist and the chief clinical officer at reSTART, asks the guys to begin a communication exercise.

Philip, 22, steps into the middle of the group. He's been here for three weeks and is on a year's medical leave from Duke University after getting hooked on Dota 2, the sequel to the fantasy battle game Defense of the Ancients. He asks Adam, who only arrived four days ago and is fidgeting awkwardly, to stand up and face him. (The real names of those currently in the residential program have been withheld.)

Kevin, who has been here for four weeks, coaches them through an exercise known in counseling circles as the "listening cycle", designed to facilitate emotional conversations in relationships.

It's a basic introduction for the new guy.

Fears grow for children addicted to online games

Read more

Philip, who was underweight when he arrived, says to Adam, who is overweight: "I'm worried that you're not eating healthily. I noticed you've been skipping dinner."

Adam is meant to repeat back to Philip what he heard him say the problem is. He mumbles, barely audible, and can't seem to remember what he's just been told.

He's unable to focus, and the air is thick with reluctance and embarrassment.

Stephen, another newbie, is gazing at the ceiling, yawning, sighing, then looking mildly irritated.

Alex, 20, comes to the rescue. He arrived at rehab in January but has popped back to visit the group and explains: "It's so hard at the beginning. Day one here, I was a wreck, and the first two weeks I was backsliding."

His games of choice were The Legend of Zelda, a solo action adventure series, where "instead of being the depressed piece of shit I was in real life" he could exist as a swashbuckling hero.

Adapting to a tech-free world structured around rural communal living and social skills was a nightmare, he says. "I wouldn't join in at first and I got called out for it by the others."

[Sep 17, 2017] Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg -- Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week

The problem is that you can't learn IT well working 40 hours a week. This is too complex specilaty and it does rtequre long hours. So only people who can put long hours can survive in IT.
Notable quotes:
"... There's been a flurry of recent coverage praising Sheryl Sandberg , the chief operating officer of Facebook, for leaving the office every day at 5:30 p.m. to be with her kids. Apparently she's been doing this for years, but only recently "came out of the closet," as it were. ..."
"... They discovered that the "sweet spot" is 40 hours a week � and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative. ..."
"... Anyone who's spent time in a corporate environment knows that what was true of factory workers a hundred years ago is true of office workers today. People who put in a solid 40 hours a week get more done than those who regularly work 60 or more hours. ..."
"... However, the facts don't bear this out. In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week . You simply don't see the 50-, 60-, and 70-hour work weeks that have become de rigeur in some parts of the U.S. business world. ..."
"... In other words, nobody should be apologizing for leaving at work at a reasonable hour like 5:30 p.m. In fact, people should be apologizing if they're working too long each week�because it's probably making the team less effective overall. ..."
Apr 28, 2012 | Inc.com

You may think you're getting more accomplished by working longer hours. You're probably wrong.

There's been a flurry of recent coverage praising Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, for leaving the office every day at 5:30 p.m. to be with her kids. Apparently she's been doing this for years, but only recently "came out of the closet," as it were.

What's insane is that Sandberg felt the need to hide the fact, since there's a century of research establishing the undeniable fact that working more than 40 hours per week actually decreases productivity.

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the "sweet spot" is 40 hours a week � and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.

Anyone who's spent time in a corporate environment knows that what was true of factory workers a hundred years ago is true of office workers today. People who put in a solid 40 hours a week get more done than those who regularly work 60 or more hours.

The workaholics (and their profoundly misguided management) may think they're accomplishing more than the less fanatical worker, but in every case that I've personally observed, the long hours result in work that must be scrapped or redone.

Accounting for Burnout What's more, people who consistently work long work weeks get burned out and inevitably start having personal problems that get in the way of getting things done.

I remember a guy in one company I worked for who used the number of divorces in his group as a measure of its productivity. Believe it or not, his top management reportedly considered this a valid metric. What's ironic (but not surprising) is that the group itself accomplished next to nothing.

In fact, now that I think about it, that's probably why he had to trot out such an absurd (and, let's face it, evil) metric.

Proponents of long work weeks often point to the even longer average work weeks in countries like Thailand, Korea, and Pakistan�with the implication that the longer work weeks are creating a competitive advantage.

Europe's Ban on 50-Hour Weeks.

However, the facts don't bear this out. In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week. You simply don't see the 50-, 60-, and 70-hour work weeks that have become de rigeur in some parts of the U.S. business world.

If U.S. managers were smart, they'd end this "if you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming to work on Sunday" idiocy. If you want employees (salaried or hourly) to get the most done�in the shortest amount of time and on a consistent basis�40 hours a week is just about right.

In other words, nobody should be apologizing for leaving at work at a reasonable hour like 5:30 p.m. In fact, people should be apologizing if they're working too long each week�because it's probably making the team less effective overall.

[Sep 17, 2017] If You Get Rich, You Wont Quit Working For Long

Dec 26, 2016 | news.slashdot.org
(bbc.com) 406 Posted by msmash on Monday December 12, 2016 @11:45AM from the understanding-people dept.

An anonymous reader writes:

You'd think striking it suddenly rich would be the ultimate ticket to freedom. Without money worries, the world would be your oyster. Perhaps you'd champion a worthy cause, or indulge a sporting passion, but work? Surely not. However, remaining gainfully employed after sudden wealth is more common than you'd think .

After all, there are numerous high-profile billionaires who haven't called it quits despite possessing the luxury to retire, including some of the world's top chief executives, such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. But it turns out, the suddenly rich who aren't running companies are also loathe to quit, even though they have plenty of money. That could be, in part, because the link between salary and job satisfaction is very weak.

According to a meta-analysis by University of Florida business school professor Timothy Judge and other researchers, there's less than a 2% overlap between the two factors.

In the long run, we derive job satisfaction from non-monetary sources, which include positive peer relationships, the ability to work on meaningful projects and even leadership opportunities.

[Sep 17, 2017] The ethic of hard work , Obama, Trump and Hillary by Gaius Publius

Notable quotes:
"... If anything, the whole plagiarism scandal reflects somewhat poorly on Michelle Obama. One reason Obama's words were able to play so well at the RNC was that in the lifted passages, Obama was speaking using the conservative language of "bootstrapping." Obama's sentence, that "the only limit" to one's achievements is the height of one's goal and the "willingness to work" toward it, is the Republican story about America. It's the story of personal responsibility, in which the U.S. is overflowing with opportunity, and anyone who fails to succeed in such a land of abundance must simply not be trying hard enough. ..."
"... People on the left are supposed to know that it is a cruel lie to tell people that all they need to do is work hard. There are plenty of people with dreams who work very hard indeed but get nothing, because the American economy is fundamentally skewed and unfair. This rhetoric, about "hard work" being the only thing needed for the pursuit of prosperity, is an insult to every tomato-picker and hotel cleaner in the country. It's a fact that those who work the hardest in this country, those come home from work exhausted and who break their backs to feed their families, are almost always rewarded the least. Far from embarrassing Melania Trump and the GOP, then, it should be deeply humiliating for Democrats that their rhetoric is so bloodless and hollow that it can easily be spoken word-for-word in front of a gang of crazed racists. Instead of asking "why is Melania Trump using Michelle Obama's words?" we might think to ask "why is Michelle Obama using the right-wing rhetoric of self-reliance?" ..."
"... This is, of course, the myth of "meritocracy" that Thomas Frank has exposed with scalpel-like precision in his latest book Listen, Liberal . It's clear that the Democratic Party, at its core, believes with Michelle (and Barack) Obama the comfortable and self-serving lie that no individual has anyone to blame but herself if she fails to achieve high goals. She should just have reached higher; she should just have worked harder. ..."
"... It's not only a lie, it's a "cruel lie," as Nimni says. So why is she, Michelle Obama, telling it? Clearly it serves her interests, her husband's interests, her party's interests, to tell the "rich person's lie," that his or her achievement came from his or her own efforts. To call most people's success a product of luck (right color, right gender, right country, right neighborhood, right schools, right set of un-birth-damaged brain cells) or worse, inheritance (right parents), identifies the fundamental unfairness of our supposed "meritocratic" system of allocating wealth and undercuts the "goodness," if you look at it writ large, of predatory capitalism. By that measure, neither the very wealthy themselves (Charles Koch, Jamie Dimon) nor those who serve them (Barack Obama et al ) are "good" in any moral sense. ..."
"... U.S. cultural norms, as the piece describes accurately, glorify and misrepresent "work" especially of the "hard" kind. Hmm I wonder where that notion came from and why it gained such a foothold in the prevailing groupthink? ..."
"... The present regime of "teach to the test" here in America almost completely short circuits the teaching of critical thinking skills. With stressed parents increasingly abdicating their responsibilities towards the upbringing of their offspring in favour of the State, is it any wonder that the narrow interests of the State, such as the Iron Law of Institutions, are supplanting enlightenment in the minds of the young? We now must begin to consider the divergence of the interests of the Society from the interests of the State. With the balance of power swinging heavily in favour of the State these recent decades, I am not sanguine about the near term future of our culture. ..."
"... As is so often the case in American culture, the "hard work" meme emerges from the slave system. Slaves had to be bullied and terrorized in order to extract "hard work" from them, given that they had zero rewards of any tangible sort for it. So "hard work" required constant vigilance and frequent punishments while slaves rationally attempted to do the least amount of work that enabled them to escape the many types of tortures they were regularly threatened with. ..."
"... Then after "emancipation," plantation owners complained that they could not get any of those lazy, shiftless Negroes to perform "hard work" for them, given that the newly freed men and women were much more interested in getting ahead for themselves than continuing to pick cotton or harvest rice for starvation wages. ..."
"... I don't think you are over-simplifying, Clive�in Hong Kong, too, my experience has been that most people I deal with in the work world take a great deal of intrinsic pride in doing a job efficiently and well, for its own sake, not because it will necessarily make you more money. ..."
"... What I'm starting to sniff in the zeitgeist today is that Trump's kids are totally changing what people think of the father. People are making the semi-rational assumption that anyone who can raise such good kids must be very different in private than he is on the campaign trail. ..."
"... the genesis of the "plagiarism" attacks. The mud slinging has started early in this campaign. However, if Trumps' family can exude some sense of charm and class, the entire mud slinging strategy can be 'stood on its' head.' ..."
"... Me, I'm terrified of Hillary Clinton and the devastation that her ascension to the Presidency might bring to this nation and to the world. She is not only a liar, a blatantly self-dealing criminal, but more devastating yet, a sociopath of the first water, willing to walk across the bodies to advance her personal and class agenda. ..."
"... Her time as President would go a long way toward cementing the Unitary Executive in place (i.e., a functional Dictator, as understood in the Roman Republican meaning of the term, a Tribune, in which a chief magistrate of the State like the President under our Constitution, whose writ as an authoritarian ruler ran so long as there was a national emergency. I serve as the clerk for government documents in a university law library, and I can tell you that the number of House Documents announcing a "National Emergency" or the continuation of a previously announced "National Emergency" is very alarming. These "emergencies" are the camel's nose under the tent in my estimation for the slow accretion of Dictatorial powers (again, in the Roman Republican sense of the term "dictator") toward the Caesar-like role of Unitary Executive. These "National Emergencies" functionally invest power into the hands of the President and those forces military, legal, and regulatory under the control of the Executive by which the President can wage military, legal/diplomatic, and economic warfare against those who refuse to bend the knee to US-dominated global hegemony. ..."
"... Hillary is practically salivating to grasp the rod of power embodied in the Unitary Executive. Warfare will follow her tenure in office like a dire shadow, and due to her belief in the right of and necessity of the US to enforce a global hegemony, she is inevitably moving toward a deadly clash with other nuclear powers unwilling to submit to the yoke of globalized, stateless, culturally-anodyne finance capitalism. Good times await. ..."
"... "Our well-nigh useless Legislative branch has largely surrendered its Constitutional responsibilities to the Executive through such trash as Authorizations of Military Force rather than engaging in the mandated procedure of the Declaration of War found in the Constitution to authorize extended use of military (and legal and economic) force." ..."
"... That allows individuals to claim they had no responsibility for the war, something Pence and Clinton cannot claim because of their votes. But on what other things do you see Obama as being a strong "unitary executive." I thought it was generally viewed that Congress had thwarted his (almost) every wish. ..."
"... And how about that patriot act renewal, US out of iraq/afganistan? Vicky nuland and the ukraine? I guess the problem is that you get your information as it is generally viewed, but you fail to indicate who it is that generally views things that way, however, it should help you understand why trump will win because hillary is generally viewed as corrupt. ..."
"... I'm intrigued by author's concluding idea. "It involves another attempt to take over the Republican Party, this time by the Clinton-led Democratic leadership. " ..."
"... And if the words were lies coming out of Obama's mouth, what are they coming out of Trump's mouth? ..."
"... "Far from embarrassing Melania Trump and the GOP, then, it should be deeply humiliating for Democrats that their rhetoric is so bloodless and hollow that it can easily be spoken word-for-word in front of a gang of crazed racists. Instead of asking "why is Melania Trump using Michelle Obama's words?" we might think to ask "why is Michelle Obama using the right-wing rhetoric of self-reliance?" ..."
"... A lot of this is related to the Democrats and what Bill made "successful" with his presidency. The lack of a truly left party that works for average citizens has created this environment when a character like Trump can gain such support. This article illustrates but another example of meritocratic nonsense being regurgitated by the party. ..."
"... A thought-provoking and unexpected take, Gaius Publius. I was struck by one item left off your list of lucky attributes: beauty. Both Michelle Obama and Melania Trump are undeniably beautiful women -� tall, slim, with the elegantly symmetrical features prized in every culture. Sadly in beauty-obsessed America the doors opened for women who look this lovely are shut hard against women who are fat, or old, or ugly. ..."
"... I had pretty much the exact same thought as your second "blackbird" when the video of Melania Trump plagiarizing Michele Obama's speech and all my liberal friends were yuking it up. All I could think was "If the same speech could plausibly come out of either of their mouths without alienating the audience, we have much worse problems than her Mrs. Trump's copycating." The fact that this seemed to bother hardly anyone else made it worse. So much of these elections just get reduced down to rooting for your team at a sporting event. This works well to keep people from having to deal with a lot of unpleasant questions and conclusions. ..."
"... Read Roosevelt's speech, Trump certainly did, for some real fear mongering and look at the coalition he has taken over the Republican party to form. FDR 1932. ..."
"... > "another attempt to take over the Republican Party" Which shouldn't be that hard, since both the Democrat and Republican parties are neoliberal. As always, the real enemy is the left. ..."
"... I'm surprised Gaius failed to address this portion of Michelle's speech which he quoted: "tell the truth; keep your promises; treat others with dignity and respect." Since when has Obama told the truth, or kept his promises, or treated anyone except Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blanfein with respect? ..."
"... Put aside whether "Michelle Obama" or some speechwriting merc came up with the banal verbiage redolent of Sunday school and Horatio Alger. What gives the snippet its special Trumpian turn into hyper-unreality, an ever-expanding balloon of hot boast and hyperbolic deceit, is the way it transcends garden-variety plagiarism by laying claim to the very virtues that the appropriation itself falsifies. ..."
"... That's chutzpah! The stunning effrontery supersizes an overall meta-ness that's less indicative of middle-class morality and meritocracy than the predatory opportunism of the exploitative rich, what C. Wright Mills might have recognized as the "higher immorality." Here we have a colossally vain billionaire atop an empire of glitz and privilege kayfabing his way to a party nomination as the indignant voice of the brutalized working class he's dedicated his life to disparaging as envious losers. The mind reels between giddiness and nausea. ..."
"... You can't forever distract it away with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and color counter-revolutions against exploitative freeloaders (the non-rich and famous ones, that is). It takes an philosophy of human worth apart from vanities over this or that temporarily adaptive skill or happy accident. ..."
"... I think Oren Nimni basically gets it right: When you cut through the tautologies and the bromides that many parents deliver to their children, what you have is the message, "don't expect government to be there for you; those days are over" (which, actually, sounds like Bubba Bill's pitch�"the day's of big government are over"). ..."
"... If you work hard enough and have enough ambition you will succeed is not a lie to those born on 3rd base, it was true for them. The Obama's the Trumps. They are really just guilty of not understanding the plight of those who were born at bat against a major league pitcher. ..."
www.nakedcapitalism.com

naked capitalism

Gaius Publius Two Ways of Looking at a Plagiarism

Oren Nimni: Obama's statement "is an insult to every tomato-picker and hotel cleaner in the country"

The fact that Michelle Obama's statement is blatantly false (and that a woman of color in the United States said it) is revealing. Current Affairs writer Oren Nimni on that (emphasis in original):

If anything, the whole plagiarism scandal reflects somewhat poorly on Michelle Obama. One reason Obama's words were able to play so well at the RNC was that in the lifted passages, Obama was speaking using the conservative language of "bootstrapping." Obama's sentence, that "the only limit" to one's achievements is the height of one's goal and the "willingness to work" toward it, is the Republican story about America. It's the story of personal responsibility, in which the U.S. is overflowing with opportunity, and anyone who fails to succeed in such a land of abundance must simply not be trying hard enough.

People on the left are supposed to know that it is a cruel lie to tell people that all they need to do is work hard. There are plenty of people with dreams who work very hard indeed but get nothing, because the American economy is fundamentally skewed and unfair. This rhetoric, about "hard work" being the only thing needed for the pursuit of prosperity, is an insult to every tomato-picker and hotel cleaner in the country. It's a fact that those who work the hardest in this country, those come home from work exhausted and who break their backs to feed their families, are almost always rewarded the least.

Far from embarrassing Melania Trump and the GOP, then, it should be deeply humiliating for Democrats that their rhetoric is so bloodless and hollow that it can easily be spoken word-for-word in front of a gang of crazed racists. Instead of asking "why is Melania Trump using Michelle Obama's words?" we might think to ask "why is Michelle Obama using the right-wing rhetoric of self-reliance?"

This is, of course, the myth of "meritocracy" that Thomas Frank has exposed with scalpel-like precision in his latest book Listen, Liberal . It's clear that the Democratic Party, at its core, believes with Michelle (and Barack) Obama the comfortable and self-serving lie that no individual has anyone to blame but herself if she fails to achieve high goals. She should just have reached higher; she should just have worked harder.

It's not only a lie, it's a "cruel lie," as Nimni says. So why is she, Michelle Obama, telling it? Clearly it serves her interests, her husband's interests, her party's interests, to tell the "rich person's lie," that his or her achievement came from his or her own efforts. To call most people's success a product of luck (right color, right gender, right country, right neighborhood, right schools, right set of un-birth-damaged brain cells) or worse, inheritance (right parents), identifies the fundamental unfairness of our supposed "meritocratic" system of allocating wealth and undercuts the "goodness," if you look at it writ large, of predatory capitalism. By that measure, neither the very wealthy themselves (Charles Koch, Jamie Dimon) nor those who serve them (Barack Obama et al ) are "good" in any moral sense.

(The idea of the supposed "goodness" of the successful capitalist, by the way, his supposed "greater morality," goes all the way back to the 18th Century attempt of the wealthy to counter the 17th Century bleakness of Protestant predestination. How could people, especially the very rich, know whether they are among the "elect" or the damned? God gives them wealth as a sign of his plans for them, just as God gives them morally deficient poverty-wage workers to take advantage of.)

Clive , July 22, 2016 at 4:27 am

There's also a flip side to the main point drawn out in the above article ("if you work hard you'll be successful and rewarded") which, dare I say, is rarely mentioned and even an anathema in U.S. culture (not, mind you, that I think British culture isn't going the same way so I am not trying to throw stones in this glass house).

Which is: quite often, you are rewarded if you don't "work hard" and even if you work somewhat "hard" the rewards you receive are out of all proportion to the effort you have to make. But no-one (or few people) are willing to admit, if they are in that position, that - to put it crudely - they are really doing bugger all but raking it in.

I, for example, do very little. What I do do certainly isn't "hard work". Now, I have expended a certain amount of mental effort on understanding the system - the dynamic - in play at my employer. And how to successfully exploit that to gain the maximum amount of financial reward for the least amount of effort. But I would hardly call that "work", and certainly it is not of "hard" variety.

U.S. cultural norms, as the piece describes accurately, glorify and misrepresent "work" especially of the "hard" kind. Hmm I wonder where that notion came from and why it gained such a foothold in the prevailing groupthink?

In Japanese culture, to introduce another nuance, the concept of "hard work" is still present as a thing to be looked up to but it is more tinged with an air of "doing your best" or "doing your upmost" rather than "hard" (i.e. demanding) work and lacks the "you're going to get the payoff if you do" quid pro quo. The reward, in Japanese culture, comes from knowing you've done the best you can which is more a personal satisfaction than a financial compensator. But I am glossing over some complexity here so do not view what I've just said in this paragraph as anything other than a simplification.

ambrit , July 22, 2016 at 5:02 am

May I suggest that the "simplification" you mention is an essential part of any group control strategy. Simplified thinking may work wonders in efficiency studies or some sorts of high energy physics, but in the realm of social relations, simplicity masks diversity and complexity to the detriment of any version of "truth." I was lucky in having skeptical parents and some excellent minds among my High School teachers. The present regime of "teach to the test" here in America almost completely short circuits the teaching of critical thinking skills. With stressed parents increasingly abdicating their responsibilities towards the upbringing of their offspring in favour of the State, is it any wonder that the narrow interests of the State, such as the Iron Law of Institutions, are supplanting enlightenment in the minds of the young? We now must begin to consider the divergence of the interests of the Society from the interests of the State. With the balance of power swinging heavily in favour of the State these recent decades, I am not sanguine about the near term future of our culture.

timotheus , July 22, 2016 at 7:43 am

As is so often the case in American culture, the "hard work" meme emerges from the slave system. Slaves had to be bullied and terrorized in order to extract "hard work" from them, given that they had zero rewards of any tangible sort for it. So "hard work" required constant vigilance and frequent punishments while slaves rationally attempted to do the least amount of work that enabled them to escape the many types of tortures they were regularly threatened with.

Then after "emancipation," plantation owners complained that they could not get any of those lazy, shiftless Negroes to perform "hard work" for them, given that the newly freed men and women were much more interested in getting ahead for themselves than continuing to pick cotton or harvest rice for starvation wages. Ever since, we have lived with the embittered voice of the slaveowner infuriated at the loss of all that labor power he once had at his disposal for free. Thus the mythology that "hard work" is all you need to perform to get ahead and the implicit wink-wink-we-know-who-won't-do-that racism that goes along with it.

MsExPat , July 22, 2016 at 10:27 am

I don't think you are over-simplifying, Clive�in Hong Kong, too, my experience has been that most people I deal with in the work world take a great deal of intrinsic pride in doing a job efficiently and well, for its own sake, not because it will necessarily make you more money. (Although often that is the result� over-performing and exceeding expectations is a great way of ensuring repeat customers and a thriving business.)

Coming from the US, where every corporate smile and "Have a Nice Day" is being recorded for performance review, I find this a most refreshing cultural trait, one that I have tried my best to assimilate.

Uahsenaa , July 22, 2016 at 11:14 am

I would add to what Clive said that in Japan the ganbare ethos is also underlined by a certain expectation that your wider social group will back you up, or at least make certain your life doesn't fall off a cliff. This doesn't always work in practice, and there are obvious examples of social groups that the Japanese polity like to pretend simply doesn't exist, but it is a cultural expectation. You even see it among homeless camps in Japan, which constitute a very clear in group.

In the US, a great of anxiety stems from the realization that you could do your best in all circumstances and still have your life fall apart, since that social backstop just isn't there, especially not in the world of meritocracy, in which you're expected to basically give up your pre-existing social networks in order to even participate.

Portia , July 22, 2016 at 1:09 pm

I remember one job where my Boss warned me: "Nice guys finish last here."

Nice of him, eh?

Figure out the culture of your workplace, and if you can stomach it, do what you have to do to succeed. This is what the Obamas and the Clintons have done. And geez, they can stomach a lot. But I do know people who have "worked hard" and been successful in their own businesses, and musicians are a prime example of having to really do the work to get the work. It's who you want to be recognized by, in my way of thinking.

ewmayer , July 22, 2016 at 4:37 am

I often think the better saying would be "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make outrageously successful."

With outrageous � as in wildly-disproportionate-to-effort-and-actual-talent � success comes a sense of infallibility, inevitability, hubris. A self-centered personality-cult delusion � ergo a form of madness � which often ends in a spectacular undoing. Alas, not nearly often enough, when it comes to the DC cabal of hubristic upward-failing sociopaths.

GOP convention finished with a bang tonight, and thankfully the dire pre-convention worries about the streets of Cleveland flowing with rivers of blood proved unfounded � I'd studiously avoided the previous evenings, aside from a few brief nauseating while-channel-flipping glimpses � but happened to catch Trump himself tonight. While I disliked Trump's police-centric take on American security at home, I thought he really effectively hammered the issues of economic inequality � including a mention of soaring unemployment rates in the latino and black communities (I wish he would have said more in that vein, but he did at least say something) and governmental corruption at the highest levels, as well as Hillary's multiple foreign-policy debacles; the whole "what has 15 years of blowing shit up in the middle east done for us?" issue. Also made a very pronounced point of embracing Sanders' "top issue" of bad so-called-free-trade deals, while emphasizing the degree to which things were rigged against Bernie. And closed with a nifty turning of Hillary's pet slogan against her [I paraphrase, too tired to dig the exact quote out]: "she demands a three-word loyalty oath 'I`m with her' well I'm here to tell you tonight that I'm with you ."

And the speeches by his kids (Donald Jr last night, Ivanka tonight) were both good, and I think likely surprising � in a positive way � to many people. The image of the whole family onstage post-speech will likely resonate with the traditional Republican base � clean-cut successful-looking guys and attractive ladies of a leggy-blond (but not Barbie-esque/ditzy) type I expect even folks of a conservative Mormon bent will have found something to like in that image. Scott Adams comments on the kids :

What I'm starting to sniff in the zeitgeist today is that Trump's kids are totally changing what people think of the father. People are making the semi-rational assumption that anyone who can raise such good kids must be very different in private than he is on the campaign trail.

Would be interested to hear the takes of other NC readers who watched the nomination acceptance speech.

ambrit , July 22, 2016 at 5:20 am

Re "..a minority of one.." At least you go in for nuance and reflection. My take on H Clinton and her claque is that they all perceive the Candidate as a 'majority of one.'
Your comment about the wife of Trump reminds me of the old saying by Caesar that : " Caesars' wife must be above suspicion." Thus, the genesis of the "plagiarism" attacks. The mud slinging has started early in this campaign. However, if Trumps' family can exude some sense of charm and class, the entire mud slinging strategy can be 'stood on its' head.'

JerseyJeffersonian , July 22, 2016 at 9:28 am

Me, I'm terrified of Hillary Clinton and the devastation that her ascension to the Presidency might bring to this nation and to the world. She is not only a liar, a blatantly self-dealing criminal, but more devastating yet, a sociopath of the first water, willing to walk across the bodies to advance her personal and class agenda.

Her time as President would go a long way toward cementing the Unitary Executive in place (i.e., a functional Dictator, as understood in the Roman Republican meaning of the term, a Tribune, in which a chief magistrate of the State like the President under our Constitution, whose writ as an authoritarian ruler ran so long as there was a national emergency. I serve as the clerk for government documents in a university law library, and I can tell you that the number of House Documents announcing a "National Emergency" or the continuation of a previously announced "National Emergency" is very alarming. These "emergencies" are the camel's nose under the tent in my estimation for the slow accretion of Dictatorial powers (again, in the Roman Republican sense of the term "dictator") toward the Caesar-like role of Unitary Executive. These "National Emergencies" functionally invest power into the hands of the President and those forces military, legal, and regulatory under the control of the Executive by which the President can wage military, legal/diplomatic, and economic warfare against those who refuse to bend the knee to US-dominated global hegemony.

Our well-nigh useless Legislative branch has largely surrendered its Constitutional responsibilities to the Executive through such trash as Authorizations of Military Force rather than engaging in the mandated procedure of the Declaration of War found in the Constitution to authorize extended use of military (and legal and economic) force. This gives the Executive carte blanche to engage in unending wars (beginning to sound familiar?) with all that that implies concerning the dominance of the MIC in the formulation of national policies.

Hillary is practically salivating to grasp the rod of power embodied in the Unitary Executive. Warfare will follow her tenure in office like a dire shadow, and due to her belief in the right of and necessity of the US to enforce a global hegemony, she is inevitably moving toward a deadly clash with other nuclear powers unwilling to submit to the yoke of globalized, stateless, culturally-anodyne finance capitalism. Good times await.

And that is only the beginning, as the plans she has for the US citizenry are scarcely less dire, what with the inevitability of the Grand Bargain in service of Finance Capitalism looming dead ahead.

Clinton delenda est.

Russ Zimmerman , July 22, 2016 at 10:15 am

"Our well-nigh useless Legislative branch has largely surrendered its Constitutional responsibilities to the Executive through such trash as Authorizations of Military Force rather than engaging in the mandated procedure of the Declaration of War found in the Constitution to authorize extended use of military (and legal and economic) force."

That allows individuals to claim they had no responsibility for the war, something Pence and Clinton cannot claim because of their votes. But on what other things do you see Obama as being a strong "unitary executive." I thought it was generally viewed that Congress had thwarted his (almost) every wish.

flora , July 22, 2016 at 10:54 am

This seems pretty strong. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/obama-kill-list-doj-memo

tegnost , July 22, 2016 at 11:16 am

Indeed, the republicans twisted barack's arm behind his back and forced him to allow insurance company lobbyists to write the "Affordable Care Act". Since you have tsa pre check I'll guess that your cadillac plan is still operational, or if not that that all the people who pay for insurance they can't use are subsidising you, and your own health care costs have been ameliorated. They also forced him to nominate merrick garland. They forced him to foam the runway for the banks and forced him to let all the bankster crimes go unpunished. My view is that obama, like hillary, is a republican because for both of them the policies they worked to advance are republican policies. TPP, ISDS, ACA, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning I could go on and on. I agree with the author that dems like obama and hillary are interested in serving the top sliver of the population that has the lions share of the wealth. It's not right/left anymore, it's top/bottom .

And how about that patriot act renewal, US out of iraq/afganistan? Vicky nuland and the ukraine? I guess the problem is that you get your information as it is generally viewed, but you fail to indicate who it is that generally views things that way, however, it should help you understand why trump will win because hillary is generally viewed as corrupt.

flora , July 22, 2016 at 5:59 am

I think both Obama and Trump were reciting a standard variation of the American Dream�. Horatio Alger stories are part of the US mythos. Bill Clinton used a variation in 1992. Most US pols use the "up from nothing by dint of hard work and good morals" line. The flap is that O and T used the exact same words instead of noting that the sentiment itself is boilerplate?

I'm intrigued by author's concluding idea. "It involves another attempt to take over the Republican Party, this time by the Clinton-led Democratic leadership. "

Roger Smith , July 22, 2016 at 7:16 am

" And if the words were lies coming out of Obama's mouth, what are they coming out of Trump's mouth? "

They are still lies, but they are lies in keeping with the ideology that dominates the party of which Trump is the nominee. Nimni summarized this well:

"Far from embarrassing Melania Trump and the GOP, then, it should be deeply humiliating for Democrats that their rhetoric is so bloodless and hollow that it can easily be spoken word-for-word in front of a gang of crazed racists. Instead of asking "why is Melania Trump using Michelle Obama's words?" we might think to ask "why is Michelle Obama using the right-wing rhetoric of self-reliance?"

A lot of this is related to the Democrats and what Bill made "successful" with his presidency. The lack of a truly left party that works for average citizens has created this environment when a character like Trump can gain such support. This article illustrates but another example of meritocratic nonsense being regurgitated by the party.

jrs , July 22, 2016 at 11:04 am

I think she initially claimed she wrote it didn't she? But yea it's clearly silly coming out of her mouth. Although being a model may be hard work (it could very well be frankly), she hasn't worked hard for years by now, and didn't get into such a privileged position by hard work (in whose definition exactly does marrying money count as hard work?).

So while in Michelle Obama's mouth the words are a lie, at least they might be a lie that's kind of true for her, in Misses Trumps mouth it's beyond silly. I have no idea if Mr Inherited Wealth and Misses Married Money do raise their kids that way or not. Wow the rich are crazy!!!

Hana M , July 22, 2016 at 6:16 am

A thought-provoking and unexpected take, Gaius Publius. I was struck by one item left off your list of lucky attributes: beauty. Both Michelle Obama and Melania Trump are undeniably beautiful women -� tall, slim, with the elegantly symmetrical features prized in every culture. Sadly in beauty-obsessed America the doors opened for women who look this lovely are shut hard against women who are fat, or old, or ugly.

MsExPat , July 22, 2016 at 10:17 am

+ Good point. Jane Sanders was repeatedly ridiculed for her appearance by pro-Hillary twitter bots during Bernie's campaign , and I doubt that would have happened had she been young, fashionable and svelte.

Hana M , July 22, 2016 at 11:32 am

There is a strong correlation between height and compensation. "When it comes to height, every inch counts�in fact, in the workplace, each inch above average may be worth $789 more per year, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 89, No. 3).

The findings suggest that someone who is 6 feet tall earns, on average, nearly $166,000 more during a 30-year career than someone who is 5 feet 5 inches�even when controlling for gender, age and weight."
http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/standing.aspx

Hana M , July 22, 2016 at 12:07 pm

That apparently is not true. One study of lawyers "found that those rated attractive on the basis of their graduation photographs went on to earn higher salaries than their less well-favoured colleagues. Moreover, lawyers in private practice tended to be better looking than those working in government departments." Even among economists, beauty pays and "attractive candidates were more successful in elections for office in the American Economic Association." http://www.economist.com/node/10311266

Roquentin , July 22, 2016 at 7:56 am

I had pretty much the exact same thought as your second "blackbird" when the video of Melania Trump plagiarizing Michele Obama's speech and all my liberal friends were yuking it up. All I could think was "If the same speech could plausibly come out of either of their mouths without alienating the audience, we have much worse problems than her Mrs. Trump's copycating." The fact that this seemed to bother hardly anyone else made it worse. So much of these elections just get reduced down to rooting for your team at a sporting event. This works well to keep people from having to deal with a lot of unpleasant questions and conclusions.

Or worse still, they've become so used to neoliberal platitudes like "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" that it's become "common sense" or the don't even recognize it as such.

A forgotten man , July 22, 2016 at 9:05 am

In case you missed it, T's entire speech was about the "forgotten man," those that work hard and still cannot make a living wage. The height of their dreams count for nothing. The system is rigged. Read Roosevelt's speech, Trump certainly did, for some real fear mongering and look at the coalition he has taken over the Republican party to form. FDR 1932.

Lambert Strether , July 22, 2016 at 11:41 am

> "another attempt to take over the Republican Party" Which shouldn't be that hard, since both the Democrat and Republican parties are neoliberal. As always, the real enemy is the left.

Jess , July 22, 2016 at 12:50 pm

I'm surprised Gaius failed to address this portion of Michelle's speech which he quoted: "tell the truth; keep your promises; treat others with dignity and respect."

Since when has Obama told the truth, or kept his promises, or treated anyone except Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blanfein with respect?

dingusansich , July 22, 2016 at 1:07 pm

you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise

Put aside whether "Michelle Obama" or some speechwriting merc came up with the banal verbiage redolent of Sunday school and Horatio Alger. What gives the snippet its special Trumpian turn into hyper-unreality, an ever-expanding balloon of hot boast and hyperbolic deceit, is the way it transcends garden-variety plagiarism by laying claim to the very virtues that the appropriation itself falsifies.

That's chutzpah! The stunning effrontery supersizes an overall meta-ness that's less indicative of middle-class morality and meritocracy than the predatory opportunism of the exploitative rich, what C. Wright Mills might have recognized as the "higher immorality." Here we have a colossally vain billionaire atop an empire of glitz and privilege kayfabing his way to a party nomination as the indignant voice of the brutalized working class he's dedicated his life to disparaging as envious losers. The mind reels between giddiness and nausea.

What then exists outside the genteel social Darwinism of meritocratic ideology and further descent into a society of the spectacle, the Reaganite sitcom devolved into the Trump unreality show? To the gnomic, sidelong mysticism of Stevens let's add the frontal transvaluation of a sardonic Shaw:

What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: 'You're undeserving; so you can't have it.' But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

Governors both, Democrats and Republicans, the meritocrats and the masters. What must be taken in is that the unskilled, the uneducated, the out of step, the unlucky, all need the means to live. If that's taken from them by the self-described deserving on the Acela and the higher immoralists in their towers and Gulfstreams, a democracy will begin to wobble like a spinning coin on the verge. You can't educate that away. You can't forever distract it away with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and color counter-revolutions against exploitative freeloaders (the non-rich and famous ones, that is). It takes an philosophy of human worth apart from vanities over this or that temporarily adaptive skill or happy accident.

When the market is be all and end all, an expression of natural law and supernatural giver of meaning, it's hard to see how even a managed, minimal democracy can prevail except as grotesque, corrupt parody, a mood traced in the shadow a decipherable cause. Or did I read something like that somewhere, like in a poem?

George S , July 22, 2016 at 1:25 pm

I don't recall Ms. Obama's speech. Based on the excerpts I heard during the recent news cycle (from both speeches) were pathetic. I think Oren Nimni basically gets it right: When you cut through the tautologies and the bromides that many parents deliver to their children, what you have is the message, "don't expect government to be there for you; those days are over" (which, actually, sounds like Bubba Bill's pitch�"the day's of big government are over").

... ... ...

Tim , July 22, 2016 at 2:47 pm

If you work hard enough and have enough ambition you will succeed is not a lie to those born on 3rd base, it was true for them. The Obama's the Trumps. They are really just guilty of not understanding the plight of those who were born at bat against a major league pitcher.

... ... ...

[Sep 17, 2017] My Success at Work Made Me a Failure at Home

Notable quotes:
"... By the time we had three young children, I was rarely home. ..."
"... After Cisco bought IronPort, I went to work for Cisco for a few years, then quit and took about 18 months off. During that time, my relationship with my family completely changed. I was packing lunches, driving carpools, making dinners; I began doing my part. With the help of my wife and other role-model dads, I essentially got re-programmed. In 2011, I joined Andreessen Horowitz as a partner. But my new role at home has continued to work for us even though I'm working full-time again. ..."
"... Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. You can follow him on Twitter @W_ScottWeiss. This piece originally appeared on Medium . ..."
Sep 30, 2015 | Observer

My brightest years running a startup were the darkest ones for my family.

My wife and I were college sweethearts. We delayed having children first by choice, then by necessity, as we put ourselves through business school. But nearly six years into our marriage, we agreed it was time. My wife and I both worked at startups and were committed to our careers; we expected that we would both pursue our careers and raise our first child at the same time. To facilitate that, we found an amazing, energetic, full-time nanny. In fact, my wife went back to work just two weeks after our first child was born, because the startup she was with was approaching an IPO, and our new nanny supported us through that period. When my wife became pregnant with our second child, I was a managing partner at Idealab, a startup studio, where a large part of my job involved shutting down companies that had been hurt by the dot-com bust. I planned to take some time off and stay at home while my wife went back to work six months after the birth, but by the time our second child was born, 22 months later, a lot had changed. Disenchanted with my work and eager to build something of my own, I had decided to start a company. As we brought our daughter home from the hospital, I had already launched into fundraising for what would be IronPort, an email-security startup.

It was just my co-founder and me in the beginning, and while we had an ambitious vision - to protect enterprises against all Internet-related threats - we didn't yet have the resources to scale it. So initially, we did everything by ourselves. The life one signs up for at an early-stage tech startup involves getting in early, killing yourself to make something great, and getting a meaningful product out before you run out of money. This was true even after we started hiring people. I didn't code, but as the CEO, I felt it necessary to be physically present with the engineering team. Sometimes, I would get everyone lunch or dinner. When we started pulling consistent coding weekends, we brought in the entire management team to serve the engineers: We brought them food, washed their cars, got oil changes, took in their dry cleaning, and arranged for childcare for their kids in the office.

Thanks to all the effort, IronPort ultimately grew to be very large and successful over its seven years as an independent company, before being acquired by Cisco. It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime professional experience. But those brightest years at work were without a doubt the darkest years at home. We had added baby number three just 18 months after the second one, which had forced us to make a decision about how to parent going forward. We did the math - and some soul-searching - and figured it would take two or more nannies and other staffers to allow us to keep pursuing work at our current pace. So, after years of working full-time in a startup with our first child, and continuing to work as its senior VP of business development after its IPO, my Harvard MBA wife, who had had an amazing career in her own right, "decided" to become a full-time mom and take care of our kids.

By the time we had three young children, I was rarely home. And when I was there, well, let's just say I wasn't particularly helpful or cheery. My perspective at the time was: I'm killing myself at work, so when I get home, I just want to kick back with a cocktail and watch some TV. All I do is talk to people all day long, and so at home, I'd really prefer just quietly relaxing. Then, as IronPort grew, I was constantly on the road with customers, press, analysts, and of course, employees. We ultimately got most of our revenue from outside of the U.S., and we all felt it to be very important to support our disparate offices from Europe to Asia to South America. There were several times when I was gone more than half of the days in a given month. Even when I was home, I was usually in this brutal state of sleep deprivation and recovery from adjusting to yet another time zone and couldn't be relied on to help with childcare.

My wife's experience was totally different. She was now home speaking in monosyllabic words to kids all day and was starving for adult conversation by the time I got in the door. And that part about sitting on my ass in front of the TV with a cocktail? This ran counter to all of her efforts to teach the kids about pitching in together as a family. The message of everyone helping to cook, clean, and be responsible for the household fell completely flat when daddy wouldn't so much as take out the trash or change a light bulb. Nope, I was far too important for that and suggested she should hire someone to keep the house clean or even cook, if that was "stressing her out."

Ugh. I was completely missing the point. I was setting such a great example at work, but such a terrible one at home, where I often acted like a self-important asshole. Something had to change.

After Cisco bought IronPort, I went to work for Cisco for a few years, then quit and took about 18 months off. During that time, my relationship with my family completely changed. I was packing lunches, driving carpools, making dinners; I began doing my part. With the help of my wife and other role-model dads, I essentially got re-programmed. In 2011, I joined Andreessen Horowitz as a partner. But my new role at home has continued to work for us even though I'm working full-time again.

My wife and I have now been married for 22 years. Reflecting on the years we've spent as parents, here are the most critical things I needed to change:

Disconnect to Connect

During the IronPort days, when my children were young, I thought what I was doing at work was far more important and urgent than what was going on at home. I was often accused of being physically present without being mentally present. (If you find yourself sneaking into the bathroom to complete emails, then you're certainly not in the moment.) My wife dropped a bunch of hints, but I was undeterred. When I left IronPort, I realized that committing to my family required disconnecting from work (e.g. turning off the computer and phone), and completely focusing all of my attention on the details of the home. Cooking a great meal. Helping with a science project. Discussing the future with my partner.

Planning and Priorities

My wife and I have a weekly date night. My son and I are in a fantasy football league together. I cook with my daughters. Most times these have become immovable appointments on my calendar. When my calendar reflects that I can't do a meeting on Wednesday and Friday mornings before 9 a.m., because I cook breakfast and drive a carpool, then it's amazing how meetings just don't get scheduled. (If it's at all possible, living physically close to the office is also a huge help to juggling the priorities. It means that I can cut out for a family dinner and then go back to the office or have a late meeting afterwards.)

Communicate

When I was traveling at IronPort, I would sometimes go for days without communicating at all. When friends would ask my wife, "Hey, where's Scott this week?" she would sincerely have to answer, "I have no idea, you'll have to email him yourself." I was that sucked in. Now that I am completely tuned in to the weekly family schedule, we plan and calendar family meals (perhaps the single most important thing we do), pickups and drop-offs, and make adjustments on the fly. For example: Did some time suddenly free up so I can catch the last 30 minutes of the kids' basketball game? Can I pick something up on the way home? And so on. My norm is to check in between meetings, but if I'm the "parent on duty" - i.e., if my wife is out of town - then I will start a meeting with, "You'll have to excuse me, but I'm the only parent in town so I need to keep my phone handy in case of an issue." Communication was by far my biggest area for improvement. Now, multiple, daily phone and text check-ins are the norm. Communication is important in a broader sense, too. I believe that families - and that includes everyone - need to discuss each parent's life-changing decisions, such as joining a startup or becoming a CEO, together. And they should reserve the right to change the contract as their life together evolves.

Participate

It's just not possible to be a real partner if you aren't deeply involved in all aspects of the family; you can't just ask your partner to delegate certain tasks to you. Or maybe you can, but then it needs to be a mutual, shared decision - one that honors your partner's choices and dreams, too. But I personally believe that even the busiest CEOs should drive a carpool, pack a lunch, help with homework, make a breakfast or dinner, and consistently attend school events. And note, my wife didn't need another person to "manage" in the household; she needed me to "own" some of our family life activities myself. Being involved every week is the only way to stay connected at home, and it cannot be outsourced. It might even make you a better CEO since you're more sensitive to the needs of others.


There's a debate that rages in the corridors of VCs, startups, and other intense entrepreneurial centers, which is: Can you have it all? Aren't the best CEOs and founders so ambitious, so driven, that they must sacrifice everything to make it work? We have seen couples struggle with this on a personal level, and there is almost always an imbalance that leads to deep sacrifices on one front or the other.

What historically has been somewhat unique to Silicon Valley is the age and experience level of CEOs; that role is often achieved a decade earlier than in traditional industries. I've observed that CEOs in their 20s may be fully equipped and knowledgeable enough to handle leading a company, but when their family life begins to expand and demand for their attention increases, they are at a loss as to why things aren't just falling into place. The changes that I've described ideally should be made before you get to that point.

It's easy for me to share this advice now - after I sold my company. The reality is that it took certain sacrifices, in terms of my family life, to make IronPort a success. Still, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that the new generation, having grown up with more permeable boundaries between work and home, and being used to new technologies to keep them even more connected in ways we couldn't be before, refuses to accept a world in which one can't have it all.

Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. You can follow him on Twitter @W_ScottWeiss. This piece originally appeared on Medium.

[Sep 17, 2017] High achiever disease

Oct 22, 2015 | Observer

This question originally appeared on Quora: What is the mindset of high achievers?

I'm a very high achiever. I know this. I am obsessive, I am overly ambitious, and I am definitely out of balance at times (something I'm working on), but that's just how I operate.

The rules I live by are strict but that's because they have to be. As a result, a I'm criticized a lot by people who aren't "high achievers." But that comes with the territory. And as a result, I achieve what I set out to achieve.

Here is my mindset.

1) My Time Is Gold

Time is the only thing I have. Time is what creates my writing. Time is what makes me money. Time is what allows me to eat, sleep, read, learn. Time is my most precious resource.

When deciding where to invest my time, I am extremely greedy. I have to be. I give my close, close friends the time they deserve because I value our relationship. Casual friends and acquaintances I give extra time I have to, when I can. Anyone else, I weigh the investment versus the return and go from there. It might not be "normal" but it's required to reach the levels of success I know I want for myself.

2) I Set Goals and I Reach Them

When I set a goal, I put a date to it. I tell myself when I'm going to have it done by. If I don't have it done by then, I better have a good reason for not doing it. If I don't have a good reason, I set another date and push myself harder to reach it. I do the same thing even if I had a good reason in the first place.

The difference between those who "achieve" and those who don't is the follow through. It's the ability to set a goal and walk through the finish line.

3) I See Every Decision As Crucial

Every decision I make has an effect. What time I go to bed, how much time I spend reading or writing, how much time I spend with my friends, etc. Everything I do, every choice I make, I ask myself whether or not it is moving me closer towards my goal. Will this burger make me feel sick and will I waste an hour feeling groggy later? Yes? Ok, I don't eat it. Will me going out late tonight keep me from waking up early to write? Ok, I don't go out. Every single decision has to, in some way, be contributing to my growth. Am I perfect? Am I 100% consistent? No. But I'd say I'm somewhere around 80-90%. And that percentage over a long period of time is insanely, profoundly, immeasurably valuable.

4) I Learn Something From Everyone

Every single person I meet, I try to learn something from. Whether it's a CEO of a major company or a random person next to me on the train, I believe we all cross paths for a reason and there is a lesson everywhere you turn. By seeing life this way you are always open to the process. Every moment is an opportunity to grow. And the more moments you string together, the faster you learn, the more you grow, and better you become at everything you do.

5) I Invest In Skills, Not In Rewards

I can play classical piano. I can beatbox. I can write stories. I can sing. I can produce music. I can rap. I can write songs. I can take pretty good pictures. I can lift weights with top athletes. I can cook. I can do a lot of things. I don't say this to brag, I say this to point out the fact that I am not a prodigy, I am not a genius, I am NOT ANY MORE GIFTED THAN YOU. The only difference is that instead of spending my Friday nights going to clubs and getting drunk, my Saturday nights hanging out at bars, my Sundays at brunch sipping mimosas, instead of being super social and mr. on-the-town, I work. I work really hard. And to me it's not even work, it's fun. I'd rather learn a new skill than get drunk. I'd rather socialize with people who I can learn from rather than having the same repetitive conversations with inebriated acquaintances. And it's sad how this mentality is seen as "above" other people. That's just part of the gig. People don't like it when you get good at stuff. People want you to be lazy like them. Fuck that.

6) I Surround Myself With Likeminded People

There are people out there who live life like me. There are people who want to learn more than they want to get rich. There are people who want to build something of their own more than they want to climb their way up the corporate ladder. There are people out there like you, you just have to find them. And once you do find them, become friends and help each other. Once a week I meet up with a few entrepreneurs I know and we exchange ideas, set new goals, and hold each other accountable. Once a week I also meet up with an artist group from my college and we help each other stay grounded, meditate, and share our art. These sorts of groups of peers are beyond valuable. They will help you remember what you're working toward.

7) I Read, A Lot

I read #ABookAWeek, minimum. On my website, I share which book I read last week and allow people to sign up for my weekly newsletter: www.nicolascole.com/blog.

I know you can learn without reading. I know that experience is immensely valuable. But if you're not reading you're not learning fast enough, and that's just the truth of it. When someone asks me what I'm reading, I say, "What genre?" I alternate between self development How-To books, timeless fiction literature, books on spirituality and meditation, books on creative process, nonfiction memoirs, and books on marketing and advertising.

Pick up a book. Now.

8) I Know The Value Of A Mentor

I write about mentorship a lot because I believe it is the single most effective way to learn, period.

When I find a mentor, I give them everything. I throw everything I think I know out the window and I allow myself to be completely open to what they have to teach. I work harder than they expect me to work. I ask a million questions. I spend as much time around them as possible because I know how rare and valuable a mentor can be.

Since I was 15 years old, I've had some sort of mentor in my life. To show you how crucial mentors are, here's what happened:

15-18: Gaming Mentor. I sought out and played with one of the best World of Warcraft players I could find. As a result, we became best friends and I went on to become one of the highest ranked World of Warcraft players in North America.

19-22: Lifting Mentor: I became friends with a powerlifter at my gym. He took me under his wing and taught me everything. We became great friends (still friends today) and he helped me gain 40 lbs of muscle and lift more weight than I ever thought was possible for a once-skinny-kid like me.

23-Present: My current mentor is also my boss -- a successful entrepreneur and marketing master. He hasn't just taught me about business, he's taught me how to be my own man. He's taught me how to carry myself, how to dress, how to handle clients, how to pitch clients, how to explain my creative ideas, how to stand up for what I believe in, and how to be willing to pursue ideas that other people would call "impossible."

9) I Care About What I Create

This might be the most important differentiating factor in being a high achiever: I care. I care a lot. I care what I create, I care about the difference I make, I care about helping people, I can about helping others learn. I care, and as a result, I take things personally. I care if someone doesn't like what I make. I care about what people think. I do. It doesn't deter me from what I want to do, but I do care. And because I care, I put my everything into what it is I do.

People that don't care, go nowhere. And do you know why most people don't care? Because it's hard. It leaves you vulnerable. It is a chink in the armor where people can point and aim and say, "Hah, you care." Especially as a man, we're told not to care. And a lot of people don't care out of fear that what they DO care about will make them look naive. What if other people don't care about what you care about? How weird will you look then?

If you want to achieve, if you want to become successful-use whatever words you want-if you want to reach something that is slightly out of your grasp, you have to care. You have to care a lot. You have to allow yourself to feel all those emotions: excitement, fear, ambition, vulnerability. And you have to use what you feel to propel you to create, create, create.

You have to care.

Related Links:

Has anyone achieved anything by reading self-improvement articles/books?
How can 20-year-olds enhance their intelligence?
What are some real-life bad habits that programming gives people?

Nicolas Cole is an artist, writer, creative marketing strategist and self development coach. He's also a Quora contributor. You can follow Quora on Twitter , Facebook , and Google+ .

[Sep 16, 2017] How One Writer Is Battling Tech-Induced Attention Disorder

Sep 16, 2017 | tech.slashdot.org

(wired.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday September 05, 2017

New submitter mirandakatz writes: Katie Hafner has spent the last 23 days in rehab. Not for alcoholism or gambling, but for a self-inflicted case of episodic partial attention thanks to her iPhone . On Backchannel, Hafner writes about the detrimental effect the constant stream of pings has had on her, and how her life has come to resemble a computer screen. "I sense a constant agitation when I'm doing something," she says, "as if there is something else out there, beckoning -- demanding -- my attention. And nothing needs to be deferred."

"I blame electronics for my affliction," writes Hafner, who says the devices in her life "teem with squirrels." "If I pick up my iPhone to send a text, damned if I don't get knocked off task within a couple of seconds by an alert about Trump's latest tweet. And my guess is that if you have allowed your mind to be as tyrannized by the demands of your devices as I have, you too suffer to some degree from this condition." Hafner goes on to describe her symptoms of "episodic partial attention" and provide potential fixes for it: "There are the obvious fixes. Address the electronics first: Silence the phone as well as all alerts on your computer, and you automatically banish two squirrels. But how do you shut down the micro-distractions that dangle everywhere in your physical world, their bushy gray tails twitching seductively? My therapy, of my own devising, consists of serial mono-tasking with a big dose of mindful intent, or intentional mindfulness -- which is really just good, old-fashioned paying attention. At first, I took the tiniest of steps.

I celebrated the buttoning of a blouse without stopping to apply the hand cream I spotted on the dresser as if I had gotten into Harvard. Each task I took on -- however mundane -- I had to first announce, quietly, to myself. I made myself vow that I would work on that task and only that task until it was finished. Like a stroke patient relearning how to move an arm, I told myself not that I was making the entire bed (too overwhelming), but that I had a series of steps to perform: first the top sheet, then the blankets, then the comforter, then the pillows. Emptying the dishwasher became my Waterloo. Putting dishes away takes time, and it's tedious. Perhaps the greatest challenge lies in the fact that the job requires repeated kitchen crossings. There are squirrels everywhere, none more treacherous than the siren song that is my iPhone."

[Sep 16, 2017] Happy Music Boosts Brains Creativity, Study Says

Sep 16, 2017 | science.slashdot.org

(newscientist.com) 102 Posted by BeauHD on Thursday September 07, 2017 @09:00AM from the creative-juices dept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Need inspiration? Happy background music can help get the creative juices flowing. Simone Ritter, at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Sam Ferguson, at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, have been studying the effect of silence and different types of music on how we think. They put 155 volunteers into five groups. Four of these were each given a type of music to listen to while undergoing a series of tests, while the fifth group did the tests in silence. The tests were designed to gage two types of thinking: divergent thinking, which describes the process of generating new ideas, and convergent thinking, which is how we find the best solutions for a problem. Ritter and Ferguson found that people were more creative when listening to music they thought was positive , coming up with more unique ideas than the people who worked in silence. However, happy music -- in this instance, Antonio Vivaldi's Spring -- only boosted divergent thinking. No type of music helped convergent thinking, suggesting that it's better to solve problems in silence. The study was published in the journal PLoS One .

[Apr 06, 2017] Alienation in neoliberal healthcare system

Notable quotes:
"... The spike in reported burnout is directly attributable to loss of control over work, increased performance measurement (quality, cost, patient experience), the increasing complexity of medical care, the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), and profound inefficiencies in the practice environment, all of which have altered work flows and patient interactions. ..."
"... The rest of the items seem more plausible. However absent from the post is consideration of why physicians lost control over work, have been subject to performance measurement (often without good evidence that it improves performance, and particularly patients' outcomes), and have been forced to use often badly designed, poorly implemented EHRs ..."
"... In fact, we began the project that led to the establishment of Health Care Renewal because of our general perception that physician angst was worsening (in the first few years of the 21st century), and that no one was seriously addressing its causes. Our first crude qualitative research(8) suggested hypotheses that physicians' angst was due to perceived threats to their core values, and that these threats arose from the issues this blog discusses: concentration and abuse of power, leadership that is ill-informed , uncaring about or hostile to the values of health care professionals, incompetent, deceptive or dishonest, self-interested , conflicted , or outright corrupt , and governance that lacks accountability , and transparency . ..."
"... We have found hundreds of cases and anecdotes supporting this viewpoint. ..."
"... However, the biggest cause of physicians' loss of control over work may be the rising power of large health care organizations, in particular the large hospital systems that now increasingly employ physicians, turning them into corporate physicians . ..."
"... We have also frequently posted about what we have called generic management , the manager's coup d'etat , and mission-hostile management. Managerialism wraps these concepts up into a single package. The idea is that all organizations, including health care organizations, ought to be run people with generic management training and background, not necessarily by people with specific backgrounds or training in the organizations' areas of operation. Thus, for example, hospitals ought to be run by MBAs, not doctors, nurses, or public health experts. Furthermore, all organizations ought to be run according to the same basic principles of business management. These principles in turn ought to be based on current neoliberal dogma , with the prime directive that short-term revenue is the primary goal. ..."
Apr 06, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Here is what the blog post said about the causes of burnout:

The spike in reported burnout is directly attributable to loss of control over work, increased performance measurement (quality, cost, patient experience), the increasing complexity of medical care, the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), and profound inefficiencies in the practice environment, all of which have altered work flows and patient interactions.

We dealt with the curious citation of inefficiencies as a cause of burnout above.

The rest of the items seem more plausible. However absent from the post is consideration of why physicians lost control over work, have been subject to performance measurement (often without good evidence that it improves performance, and particularly patients' outcomes), and have been forced to use often badly designed, poorly implemented EHRs . Particularly absent was any consideration of whether the nature or actions of large organizations, such as those led by the authors of the blog post, could have had anything to do with physician burnout.

Contrast this discussion with how we on Health Care Renewal have discussed burnout in the past. In 2012, we noted the first report on burnout by Shanefelt et al(2). At that time we observed that the already voluminous literature on burnout often did not attend to the external forces and influences on physicians that are likely to be producing burnout. Instead, burnout etc has been addressed as if it were lack of resilience, or even some sort of psychiatric disease of physicians.

In fact, we began the project that led to the establishment of Health Care Renewal because of our general perception that physician angst was worsening (in the first few years of the 21st century), and that no one was seriously addressing its causes. Our first crude qualitative research(8) suggested hypotheses that physicians' angst was due to perceived threats to their core values, and that these threats arose from the issues this blog discusses: concentration and abuse of power, leadership that is ill-informed , uncaring about or hostile to the values of health care professionals, incompetent, deceptive or dishonest, self-interested , conflicted , or outright corrupt , and governance that lacks accountability , and transparency .

We have found hundreds of cases and anecdotes supporting this viewpoint.

... ... ...

Finally, the Health Affairs post mention of "loss of control over work" deserves special attention. It could represent a catch-all of more "system factors" as noted above. However, the biggest cause of physicians' loss of control over work may be the rising power of large health care organizations, in particular the large hospital systems that now increasingly employ physicians, turning them into corporate physicians .

In the US, home of the most commercialized health care system among developed countries, physicians increasingly practice as employees of large organizations, usually hospitals and hospital systems, sometimes for-profit corporations. The leaders of such systems meanwhile are now often generic managers , people trained as managers without specific training or experience in medicine or health care, and " managerialists " who apply generic management theory and dogma to medicine and health care just as it might be applied to building widgets or selling soap.

We have also frequently posted about what we have called generic management , the manager's coup d'etat , and mission-hostile management. Managerialism wraps these concepts up into a single package. The idea is that all organizations, including health care organizations, ought to be run people with generic management training and background, not necessarily by people with specific backgrounds or training in the organizations' areas of operation. Thus, for example, hospitals ought to be run by MBAs, not doctors, nurses, or public health experts. Furthermore, all organizations ought to be run according to the same basic principles of business management. These principles in turn ought to be based on current neoliberal dogma , with the prime directive that short-term revenue is the primary goal.

... ... ...

Summary

I am glad that physician burnout is getting less anechoic. However, in my humble opinion, the last thing physicians at risk of or suffering burnout need is a top down diktat from CEOs of large health care organizations. The CEOs who wrote the Health Affairs post not have any personal responsibility for any physicians' burnout. However, the transformation of medical practice by the influence of large health care organizations run by the authors' fellow CEOs, particularly huge hospital systems, often resulting in physicians practicing as hired employees of such corporations likely is a major cause of burnout. If the leaders of such large organizations really want to reduce burnout, they should first listen to their own physicians. But this might lead them to realize that reducing burnout might require them to divest themselves of considerable authority, power, and hence remuneration. True health care reform in this sphere will require the breakup of concentrations of power, and the transformation of leadership to make it well-informed, supportive of and willing to be accountable for the health care mission, honest and unconflicted.

Physicians need to join up with other health care professionals and concerned member of the public to push for such reform, which may seem radical in our current era. Such reform may be made more difficult because it clearly would threaten the financial status of some people who have gotten very rich from the status quo, and can use their wealth and power to resist reform.

[Jan 30, 2017] How to Manage Your Tasks with Todo.txt

Mar 24, 2014 | computers.tutsplus.com

There's far too many to-do list apps to pick the perfect one. They're each so similar, yet different, and they'd all take time to setup and learn to use. You already have too much to do, so why take the time to learn how to use a new to-do list app just to keep up with everything you have to do?

The simplest way to keep track of your tasks is to write them down on a piece of paper. You can list them in the way that makes sense to you, with any extra info you want, and only have to carry the paper around to keep track of what you need to do. It's simple, cheap, and just makes sense.

But perhaps you'd rather keep a digital to-do list, so it'll be on all your devices and you won't have to worry about accidentally throwing it away. You just need a solution that's as simple as plain paper and ink.

Enter Todo.txt . It's a system for keeping track of your to-dos in a plain text file, and is the closest digital equivalent to keeping track of your tasks on paper. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use Todo.txt to replace those paper lists and still ensure everything gets done.

What Is Todo.txt?

Todo.txt is a framework of guidelines through which a simple text file can become a feature-rich to-do list. Instead of just writing your tasks in a list at random, its simple rules will help you avoid creating a mess of tasks, and will make that plain text file into something much more useful and interesting. That might sound confusing, but it's actually simple. Here's how it works:

The first rule in Todo.txt is that each to-do item is its own line in your text file. New to-do item, new line. So let's give that a try. Open your favorite text editor (or just use Notepad on a PC or TextEdit on a Mac), and type in some tasks you need to get done, each on its own line, like so:

1 2 3 Do the dishes because they're starting to pile up and it really looks bad. Do a load of laundry, preferably a light load. Vacuum the house, making sure to get into all the little corners.

There's my first three tasks, each of which are rather long. You can include as much info as you want into each task. Just make sure each task is on its own line.

Now, just save that file as todo.txt , and place it inside your Documents folder or somewhere else you can access it easy. Better yet, place it in your Dropbox folder so you can easily sync it later.

And just like that, you've started to use Todo.txt! Sure it doesn't seem all that impressive just yet: a plain text file with your to-do items in it. Now we're ready to start using some of the text formatting conventions Todo.txt supports, and use some of the tools that support Todo.txt. That's when you'll see how useful this whole idea can be.

How to Speak the Lingo

We now have a text file called todo.txt that's stored in our Documents folder. Inside it we have a few to-do items. Let's take a look at that file again (this time, in the interests of brevity, I've shortened my todo items a bit):

1 2 3 Do the dishes. Do a load of laundry. Vacuum the house.

Ok, not bad so far, but we really aren't using the Todo.txt framework to the full. While Todo.txt is supposed to be simple, it isn't featureless. Todo.txt is designed to help you prioritize your to-do items, as well as organize them into projects and contexts . This is largely following the spirit of David Allen's famous productivity methodology known as "Getting Things Done" , or more often abbreviated to "GTD"-but you can use these tools to organize your tasks however you'd like. If you don't like GTD, you can still use Todo.txt to keep track of your tasks, and use these extra features to help you keep them organized.

Now, let's look at how projects, contexts, and priorities would apply to our sample list, and how to actually mark tasks as complete. I'll keep using my simple to-do list that, honestly, isn't tasks you'll likely need to put down on a to-do list, but you can use the same ideas shown here to keep track of any of your tasks.

Projects

In my list, all three items are related to cleaning the house. So we can group them all into a project called "cleaning". Just add a "+" sign followed by the project name to your tasks, like so:

1 2 3 Do the dishes. +cleaning Do a load of laundry. +cleaning Vacuum the house. +cleaning

That's nice, but everything on my list falls into the same project, so it seems a little redundant. I could break everything out further, especially the "Do a load of laundry" task that includes putting the load in the washer, then the dryer, and finally folding the clothes. Todo.txt allows items to be in more then one project; just add another + project to the end of the task to add it to another project. Let's take advantage of this and split the "Do a load of laundry" to-do item into multiple items, and then put them in their own "laundry" project.

1 2 3 4 5 6 Do the dishes. +cleaning Put a load of laundry into the washer. +laundry +cleaning Put the load into the dryer. +laundry +cleaning Fold the load of laundry. +laundry +cleaning Put away the folded clothes. +laundry +cleaning Vacuum the house. +cleaning

Great. Now our to-do list is split into multiple projects, and our "laundry" project tasks are categorized under the "cleaning" project as well.

Context

Context refers to a place or situation where you have certain things to do. In the case of our sample list, the context for all of them is pretty obvious: at home. In a case like that, I don't think adding a context is really all that useful, since it's an implied part of the project itself. Let's add some more items so we can better understand context.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Do the dishes. +cleaning Put a load of laundry into the washer. +laundry +cleaning Put the load into the dryer. +laundry +cleaning Fold the load of laundry. +laundry +cleaning Put away the folded clothes. +laundry +cleaning Vacuum the house. +cleaning Buy eggs. Buy juice. Buy a new pair of jeans.

I added three new to-do items, all of which have to do with buying things. The first two are food items, things I'll need to buy at the grocery store. The last one is an article of clothing, something I'll probably buy at the mall. All of these items could be put into a "shopping" project. But the location I'll buy them at is different. This is where contexts come in. Designate a context in Todo.txt with an "@" sign followed by the name of your context. Here's what our new list, including contexts, looks like:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Do the dishes. +cleaning Put a load of laundry into the washer. +laundry +cleaning Put the load into the dryer. +laundry +cleaning Fold the load of laundry. +laundry +cleaning Put away the folded clothes. +laundry +cleaning Vacuum the house. +cleaning Buy eggs. +shopping @grocery Buy juice. +shopping @grocery Buy a new pair of jeans. +shopping @mall

And there we go. Now the to-do items in our "shopping" project have been given a context. When we're at the grocery store we can focus on the items we need to buy there, and the same goes for when we're at the shopping mall.

Priority

The last feature we need to look at is priority. To do that, we'll add a few work-related tasks to the list, then assign a priority to them and some of our existing tasks. Just add a letter surrounded by parenthesis to the beginning of your tasks to give them a priority.

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 (A) Do the dishes. +cleaning (B) Put a load of laundry into the washer. +laundry +cleaning Put the load into the dryer. +laundry +cleaning Fold the load of laundry. +laundry +cleaning Put away the folded clothes. +laundry +cleaning Vacuum the house. +cleaning Buy eggs. +shopping @grocery Buy juice. +shopping @grocery (A) Buy a new pair of jeans. +shopping @mall Email Matt about my new article idea. +work (A) Finish rough draft of next article. +work

Priorities are designated by an uppercase letter, A-Z, which is enclosed in parentheses, and then followed by a space. They always appear at the beginning of the to-do item, and are in alphabetical order-that is, a task with a priority of (A) is more important than a (B) task, and so on. You'll see why this is when we get into some of the tools you can use to manipulate your Todo.txt file.

Marking Items Complete

One final word on formatting your Todo.txt file: marking a task as complete.You could delete the item once you're done with it, but that isn't the preferred way in Todo.txt. Instead, put a lowercase "x" at the start of the to-do item, like so:

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 (A) Do the dishes. +cleaning (B) Put a load of laundry into the washer. +laundry +cleaning Put the load into the dryer. +laundry +cleaning Fold the load of laundry. +laundry +cleaning Put away the folded clothes. +laundry +cleaning Vacuum the house. +cleaning Buy eggs. +shopping @grocery Buy juice. +shopping @grocery x (A) Buy a new pair of jeans. +shopping @mall Email Matt about my new article idea. +work (A) Finish rough draft of next article. +work

If you'll notice, there's now a small "x" at the beginning of the line containing the item "Buy a new pair of jeans." This signifies that the jeans have been bought and the item has been completed, effectively "crossed off" my list. That way, you'll see what you've completed, along with the stuff that still needs done.

You now know how to assign to-do items both projects and contexts, as well as how to prioritize various items inside your plain text to-do list. All of this helps make our to-do list more useful to us than it was before, giving structure and organization to an otherwise basic, unordered list. You can use each of these features, or none of them-it's your choice. Todo.txt at its basics is whatever you'd like it to be. It's a blank slate for your tasks, and some rules that keep everything organized.

And you could stop here. That's enough to keep up with your tasks the way you want, in a plain text file. You could easily find all of your projects or contexts with a Command-F or Control-F search, and stay on top of what needs done with nothing else.

But because we're following conventions outlined by Todo.txt, we can make use of some other interesting tools which give even more power to our humble little text file.

Desktop App Options

Being an open source project, Todo.txt also works in a variety of specialized apps outside of your plain text editor. You'll find apps for almost any platform that work with Todo.txt, but one of the best is a free app: Todour .

Todour is available for both Mac and Windows, and gives a simple graphical interface to our Todo.txt file. And I mean simple . Take a look:

See what I mean? You should notice right away though that your items have been correctly prioritized automatically. You won't see much fancy stuff here in Todour, but it has all the essentials. You can add and remove items, mark them as done or undone, and all of that is nicely supported within your plain text file. Check the little box there to mark an item complete, and a lowercase "x" appears at the start of that line in your text file. Nifty, isn't it?

The reason I really recommend Todour over using just a text editor is that it includes a search filter. This lets you take full advantage of projects and contexts and can dynamically hide everything else in your to-do list. Just search for a project or context, and only those tasks will appear. Search for a project and a context, and you'll see only the tasks that have both.

Overall Todour, like Todo.txt itself doesn't have many flashy features. But it has the essentials and it gets them right.

Mobile Access

Todo.txt was born from the command line, in a traditional computer world. But that doesn't mean you can't use Todo.txt on mobile devices. In fact, there are Todo.txt apps for iOS and Android for $2 each. They have all the same features and functionality that we've already discussed including projects, contexts, and priorities. The interface is clean and minimal, and focused on just letting you quickly keep up with your Todo.txt tasks.

There isn't too much to say about the mobile apps, other than that they work just like you'd expect. Like Todo.txt itself, these mobile apps are simple and straightforward. You can add tasks, filter them by project and category, and edit or complete them on the go-and keep everything in sync with your computer via Dropbox.

There's still one more tool to cover in the Todo.txt arsenal, and it's the most potent one-but also the most geeky: the command line interface.

[Nov 23, 2016] Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It

Nov 23, 2016 | tech.slashdot.org
(nytimes.com) 184 Posted by msmash on Monday November 21, 2016 @12:20PM from the dilemma dept.

The New York Times ran a strong opinion piece that talks about one critical reason why everyone should quit social media: your career is dependent on it. The other argues that by spending time on social media and sharing our thoughts, we are demeaning the value of our work, our ideas . (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source .)

Select excerpts from the story follows:

In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable. Any 16-year-old with a smartphone can invent a hashtag or repost a viral article. The idea that if you engage in enough of this low-value activity, it will somehow add up to something of high value in your career is the same dubious alchemy that forms the core of most snake oil and flimflam in business.

Professional success is hard, but it's not complicated. The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about. [...] Interesting opportunities and useful connections are not as scarce as social media proponents claim. In my own professional life, for example, as I improved my standing as an academic and a writer, I began receiving more interesting opportunities than I could handle. As you become more valuable to the marketplace, good things will find you.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that new opportunities and connections are unimportant. I'm instead arguing that you don't need social media's help to attract them. My second objection concerns the idea that social media is harmless. Consider that the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it's engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media in the way it's designed to be used -- persistently throughout your waking hours -- the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.

Once this Pavlovian connection is solidified, it becomes hard to give difficult tasks the unbroken concentration they require, and your brain simply won't tolerate such a long period without a fix. Indeed, part of my own rejection of social media comes from this fear that these services will diminish my ability to concentrate -- the skill on which I make my living.

A dedication to cultivating your social media brand is a fundamentally passive approach to professional advancement. It diverts your time and attention away from producing work that matters and toward convincing the world that you matter. The latter activity is seductive, especially for many members of my generation who were raised on this message, but it can be disastrously counterproductive.

Tim Harford - Article - Multi-tasking how to survive in the 21st century

Modern life now forces us to do a multitude of things at once - but can we? Should we?

Forget invisibility or flight: the superpower we all want is the ability to do several things at once. Unlike other superpowers, however, being able to multitask is now widely regarded as a basic requirement for employability. Some of us sport computers with multiple screens, to allow tweeting while trading pork bellies and frozen orange juice. Others make do with reading a Kindle while poking at a smartphone and glancing at a television in the corner with its two rows of scrolling subtitles. We think nothing of sending an email to a colleague to suggest a quick coffee break, because we can feel confident that the email will be read within minutes.

All this is simply the way the modern world works. Multitasking is like being able to read or add up, so fundamental that it is taken for granted. Doing one thing at a time is for losers - recall Lyndon Johnson's often bowdlerised dismissal of Gerald Ford: "He can't fart and chew gum at the same time."

The rise of multitasking is fuelled by technology, of course, and by social change as well. Husbands and wives no longer specialise as breadwinners and homemakers; each must now do both. Work and play blur. Your friends can reach you on your work email account at 10 o'clock in the morning, while your boss can reach you on your mobile phone at 10 o'clock at night. You can do your weekly shop sitting at your desk and you can handle a work query in the queue at the supermarket.

This is good news in many ways - how wonderful to be able to get things done in what would once have been wasted time! How delightful the variety of it all is! No longer must we live in a monotonous, Taylorist world where we must painstakingly focus on repetitive tasks until we lose our minds.

And yet we are starting to realise that the blessings of a multitasking life are mixed. We feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we might plausibly be doing at any one time, and by the feeling that we are on call at any moment.

And we fret about the unearthly appetite of our children to do everything at once, flipping through homework while chatting on WhatsApp, listening to music and watching Game of Thrones. (According to a recent study by Sabrina Pabilonia of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, for over half the time that high-school students spend doing homework, they are also listening to music, watching TV or otherwise multitasking. That trend is on the increase.) Can they really handle all these inputs at once? They seem to think so, despite various studies suggesting otherwise.

And so a backlash against multitasking has begun - a kind of Luddite self-help campaign. The poster child for uni-tasking was launched on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter in December 2014. For $499 - substantially more than a multifunctional laptop - "The Hemingwrite" computer promised a nice keyboard, a small e-ink screen and an automatic cloud back-up. You couldn't email on the Hemingwrite. You couldn't fool around on YouTube, and you couldn't read the news. All you could do was type. The Hemingwrite campaign raised over a third of a million dollars.

The Hemingwrite (now rebranded the Freewrite) represents an increasingly popular response to the multitasking problem: abstinence. Programs such as Freedom and Self-Control are now available to disable your browser for a preset period of time. The popular blogging platform WordPress offers "distraction-free writing". The Villa St�phanie, a hotel in Baden-Baden, offers what has been branded the "ultimate luxury": a small silver switch beside the hotel bed that will activate a wireless blocker and keep the internet and all its temptations away.

The battle lines have been drawn. On one side: the culture of the modern workplace, which demands that most of us should be open to interruption at any time. On the other, the uni-tasking refuseniks who insist that multitaskers are deluding themselves, and that focus is essential. Who is right?

The 'cognitive cost'

There is ample evidence in favour of the proposition that we should focus on one thing at a time. Consider a study led by David Strayer, a psychologist at the University of Utah. In 2006, Strayer and his colleagues used a high-fidelity driving simulator to compare the performance of drivers who were chatting on a mobile phone to drivers who had drunk enough alcohol to be at the legal blood-alcohol limit in the US. Chatting drivers didn't adopt the aggressive, risk-taking style of drunk drivers but they were unsafe in other ways. They took much longer to respond to events outside the car, and they failed to notice a lot of the visual cues around them. Strayer's infamous conclusion: driving while using a mobile phone is as dangerous as driving while drunk.

Less famous was Strayer's finding that it made no difference whether the driver was using a handheld or hands-free phone. The problem with talking while driving is not a shortage of hands. It is a shortage of mental bandwidth.

Yet this discovery has made little impression either on public opinion or on the law. In the United Kingdom, for example, it is an offence to use a hand-held phone while driving but perfectly legal if the phone is used hands-free. We're happy to acknowledge that we only have two hands but refuse to admit that we only have one brain.

Another study by Strayer, David Sanbonmatsu and others, suggested that we are also poor judges of our ability to multitask. The subjects who reported doing a lot of multitasking were also the ones who performed poorly on tests of multitasking ability. They systematically overrated their ability to multitask and they displayed poor impulse control. In other words, wanting to multitask is a good sign that you should not be multitasking.

We may not immediately realise how multitasking is hampering us. The first time I took to Twitter to comment on a public event was during a televised prime-ministerial debate in 2010. The sense of buzz was fun; I could watch the candidates argue and the twitterati respond, compose my own 140-character profundities and see them being shared. I felt fully engaged with everything that was happening. Yet at the end of the debate I realised, to my surprise, that I couldn't remember anything that Brown, Cameron and Clegg had said.

A study conducted at UCLA in 2006 suggests that my experience is not unusual. Three psychologists, Karin Foerde, Barbara Knowlton and Russell Poldrack, recruited students to look at a series of flashcards with symbols on them, and then to make predictions based on patterns they had recognised. Some of these prediction tasks were done in a multitasking environment, where the students also had to listen to low- and high-pitched tones and count the high-pitched ones. You might think that making predictions while also counting beeps was too much for the students to handle. It wasn't. They were equally competent at spotting patterns with or without the note-counting task.

But here's the catch: when the researchers then followed up by asking more abstract questions about the patterns, the cognitive cost of the multitasking became clear. The students struggled to answer questions about the predictions they'd made in the multitasking environment. They had successfully juggled both tasks in the moment - but they hadn't learnt anything that they could apply in a different context.

That's an unnerving discovery. When we are sending email in the middle of a tedious meeting, we may nevertheless feel that we're taking in what is being said. A student may be confident that neither Snapchat nor the live football is preventing them taking in their revision notes. But the UCLA findings suggest that this feeling of understanding may be an illusion and that, later, we'll find ourselves unable to remember much, or to apply our knowledge flexibly. So, multitasking can make us forgetful - one more way in which multitaskers are a little bit like drunks.

Early multitaskers

All this is unnerving, given that the modern world makes multitasking almost inescapable. But perhaps we shouldn't worry too much. Long before multitasking became ubiquitous, it had a long and distinguished history.

In 1958, a young psychologist named Bernice Eiduson embarked on an long-term research project - so long-term, in fact, that Eiduson died before it was completed. Eiduson studied the working methods of 40 scientists, all men. She interviewed them periodically over two decades and put them through various psychological tests. Some of these scientists found their careers fizzling out, while others went on to great success. Four won Nobel Prizes and two others were widely regarded as serious Nobel contenders. Several more were invited to join the National Academy of Sciences.

After Eiduson died, some of her colleagues published an analysis of her work. These colleagues, Robert Root-Bernstein, Maurine Bernstein and Helen Garnier, wanted to understand what determined whether a scientist would have a long productive career, a combination of genius and longevity.

There was no clue in the interviews or the psychological tests. But looking at the early publication record of these scientists - their first 100 published research papers - researchers discovered a pattern: the top scientists were constantly changing the focus of their research.

Over the course of these first 100 papers, the most productive scientists covered five different research areas and moved from one of these topics to another an average of 43 times. They would publish, and change the subject, publish again, and change the subject again. Since most scientific research takes an extended period of time, the subjects must have overlapped. The secret to a long and highly productive scientific career? It's multitasking.

Charles Darwin thrived on spinning multiple plates. He began his first notebook on "transmutation of species" two decades before The Origin of Species was published. His A Biographical Sketch of an Infant was based on notes made after his son William was born; William was 37 when he published. Darwin spent nearly 20 years working on climbing and insectivorous plants. And Darwin published a learned book on earthworms in 1881, just before his death. He had been working on it for 44 years. When two psychologists, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, studied Darwin and other celebrated artists and scientists they concluded that such overlapping interests were common.

Another team of psychologists, led by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, interviewed almost 100 exceptionally creative people from jazz pianist Oscar Peterson to science writer Stephen Jay Gould to double Nobel laureate, the physicist John Bardeen. Csikszentmihalyi is famous for developing the idea of "flow", the blissful state of being so absorbed in a challenge that one loses track of time and sets all distractions to one side. Yet every one of Csikszentmihalyi's interviewees made a practice of keeping several projects bubbling away simultaneously.

Just internet addiction?

If the word "multitasking" can apply to both Darwin and a teenager with a serious Instagram habit, there is probably some benefit in defining our terms. There are at least four different things we might mean when we talk about multitasking. One is genuine multitasking: patting your head while rubbing your stomach; playing the piano and singing; farting while chewing gum. Genuine multitasking is possible, but at least one of the tasks needs to be so practised as to be done without thinking.

Then there's the challenge of creating a presentation for your boss while also fielding phone calls for your boss and keeping an eye on email in case your boss wants you. This isn't multitasking in the same sense. A better term is task switching, as our attention flits between the presentation, the telephone and the inbox. A great deal of what we call multitasking is in fact rapid task switching.

Task switching is often confused with a third, quite different activity - the guilty pleasure of disappearing down an unending click-hole of celebrity gossip and social media updates. There is a difference between the person who reads half a page of a journal article, then stops to write some notes about a possible future project, then goes back to the article - and someone who reads half a page of a journal article before clicking on bikini pictures for the rest of the morning. "What we're often calling multitasking is in fact internet addiction," says Shelley Carson, a psychologist and author of Your Creative Brain. "It's a compulsive act, not an act of multitasking."

A final kind of multitasking isn't a way of getting things done but simply the condition of having a lot of things to do. The car needs to be taken in for a service. Your tooth is hurting. The nanny can't pick up the kids from school today. There's a big sales meeting to prepare for tomorrow, and your tax return is due next week. There are so many things that have to be done, so many responsibilities to attend to. Having a lot of things to do is not the same as doing them all at once. It's just life. And it is not necessarily a stumbling block to getting things done - as Bernice Eiduson discovered as she tracked scientists on their way to their Nobel Prizes.

The fight for focus

These four practices - multitasking, task switching, getting distracted and managing multiple projects - all fit under the label "multitasking". This is not just because of a simple linguistic confusion. The versatile networked devices we use tend to blur the distinction, serving us as we move from task to task while also offering an unlimited buffet of distractions. But the different kinds of multitasking are linked in other ways too. In particular, the highly productive practice of having multiple projects invites the less-than-productive habit of rapid task switching.

To see why, consider a story that psychologists like to tell about a restaurant near Berlin University in the 1920s. (It is retold in Willpower, a book by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.) The story has it that when a large group of academics descended upon the restaurant, the waiter stood and calmly nodded as each new item was added to their complicated order. He wrote nothing down, but when he returned with the food his memory had been flawless. The academics left, still talking about the prodigious feat; but when one of them hurried back to retrieve something he'd left behind, the waiter had no recollection of him. How could the waiter have suddenly become so absent-minded? "Very simple," he said. "When the order has been completed, I forget it."

One member of the Berlin school was a young experimental psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik. Intrigued, she demonstrated that people have a better recollection of uncompleted tasks. This is called the "Zeigarnik effect": when we leave things unfinished, we can't quite let go of them mentally. Our subconscious keeps reminding us that the task needs attention.

The Zeigarnik effect may explain the connection between facing multiple responsibilities and indulging in rapid task switching. We flit from task to task to task because we can't forget about all of the things that we haven't yet finished. We flit from task to task to task because we're trying to get the nagging voices in our head to shut up.

Of course, there is much to be said for "focus". But there is much to be said for copperplate handwriting, too, and for having a butler. The world has moved on. There's something appealing about the Hemingwrite and the hotel room that will make the internet go away, but also something futile.

It is probably not true that Facebook is all that stands between you and literary greatness. And in most office environments, the Hemingwrite is not the tool that will win you promotion. You are not Ernest Hemingway, and you do not get to simply ignore emails from your colleagues.

If focus is going to have a chance, it's going to have to fight an asymmetric war. Focus can only survive if it can reach an accommodation with the demands of a multitasking world.

Loops and lists

The word "multitasking" wasn't applied to humans until the 1990s, but it has been used to describe computers for half a century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first used in print in 1966, when the magazine Datamation described a computer capable of appearing to perform several operations at the same time.

Just as with humans, computers typically create the illusion of multitasking by switching tasks rapidly. Computers perform the switching more quickly, of course, and they don't take 20 minutes to get back on track after an interruption.

Nor does a computer fret about what is not being done. While rotating a polygon and sending text to the printer, it feels no guilt that the mouse has been left unchecked for the past 16 milliseconds. The mouse's time will come. Being a computer means never having to worry about the Zeigarnik effect.

Is there a lesson in this for distractible sacks of flesh like you and me? How can we keep a sense of control despite the incessant guilt of all the things we haven't finished?

"Whenever you say to someone, 'I'll get back to you about that', you just opened a loop in your brain," says David Allen. Allen is the author of a cult productivity book called Getting Things Done. "That loop will keep spinning until you put a placeholder in a system you can trust."

Modern life is always inviting us to open more of those loops. It isn't necessarily that we have more work to do, but that we have more kinds of work that we ought to be doing at any given moment. Tasks now bleed into each other unforgivingly. Whatever we're doing, we can't escape the sense that perhaps we should be doing something else. It's these overlapping possibilities that take the mental toll.

The principle behind Getting Things Done is simple: close the open loops. The details can become rather involved but the method is straightforward. For every single commitment you've made to yourself or to someone else, write down the very next thing you plan to do. Review your lists of next actions frequently enough to give you confidence that you won't miss anything.

This method has a cult following, and practical experience suggests that many people find it enormously helpful - including me (see below). Only recently, however, did the psychologists E J Masicampo and Roy Baumeister find some academic evidence to explain why people find relief by using David Allen's system. Masicampo and Baumeister found that you don't need to complete a task to banish the Zeigarnik effect. Making a specific plan will do just as well. Write down your next action and you quiet that nagging voice at the back of your head. You are outsourcing your anxiety to a piece of paper.

A creative edge?

It is probably a wise idea to leave rapid task switching to the computers. Yet even frenetic flipping between Facebook, email and a document can have some benefits alongside the costs.

The psychologist Shelley Carson and her student Justin Moore recently recruited experimental subjects for a test of rapid task switching. Each subject was given a pair of tasks to do: crack a set of anagrams and read an article from an academic journal. These tasks were presented on a computer screen, and for half of the subjects they were presented sequentially - first solve the anagrams, then read the article. For the other half of the experimental group, the computer switched every two-and-a-half minutes between the anagrams and the journal article, forcing the subjects to change mental gears many times.

Unsurprisingly, task switching slowed the subjects down and scrambled their thinking. They solved fewer anagrams and performed poorly on a test of reading comprehension when forced to refocus every 150 seconds.

But the multitasking treatment did have a benefit. Subjects who had been task switching became more creative. To be specific, their scores on tests of "divergent" thinking improved. Such tests ask subjects to pour out multiple answers to odd questions. They might be asked to think of as many uses as possible for a rolling pin or to list all the consequences they could summon to mind of a world where everyone has three arms. Involuntary multitaskers produced a greater volume and variety of answers, and their answers were more original too.

"It seems that switching back and forth between tasks primed people for creativity," says Carson, who is an adjunct professor at Harvard. The results of her work with Moore have not yet been published, and one might reasonably object that such tasks are trivial measures of creativity. Carson responds that scores on these laboratory tests of divergent thinking are correlated with substantial creative achievements such as publishing a novel, producing a professional stage show or creating an award-winning piece of visual art. For those who insist that great work can only be achieved through superhuman focus, think long and hard on this discovery.

Carson and colleagues have found an association between significant creative achievement and a trait psychologists term "low latent inhibition". Latent inhibition is the filter that all mammals have that allows them to tune out apparently irrelevant stimuli. It would be crippling to listen to every conversation in the open-plan office and the hum of the air conditioning, while counting the number of people who walk past the office window. Latent inhibition is what saves us from having to do so. These subconscious filters let us walk through the world without being overwhelmed by all the different stimuli it hurls at us.

And yet people whose filters are a little bit porous have a big creative edge. Think on that, uni-taskers: while you busily try to focus on one thing at a time, the people who struggle to filter out the buzz of the world are being reviewed in The New Yorker.

"You're letting more information into your cognitive workspace, and that information can be consciously or unconsciously combined," says Carson. Two other psychologists, Holly White and Priti Shah, found a similar pattern for people suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

It would be wrong to romanticise potentially disabling conditions such as ADHD. All these studies were conducted on university students, people who had already demonstrated an ability to function well. But their conditions weren't necessarily trivial - to participate in the White/Shah experiment, students had to have a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, meaning that their condition was troubling enough to prompt them to seek professional help.

It's surprising to discover that being forced to switch tasks can make us more creative. It may be still more surprising to realise that in an age where we live under the threat of constant distraction, people who are particularly prone to being distracted are flourishing creatively.

Perhaps we shouldn't be entirely surprised. It's easier to think outside the box if the box is full of holes. And it's also easier to think outside the box if you spend a lot of time clambering between different boxes. "The act of switching back and forth can grease the wheels of thought," says John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University.

Kounios, who is co-author of The Eureka Factor, suggests that there are at least two other potentially creative mechanisms at play when we switch between tasks. One is that the new task can help us forget bad ideas. When solving a creative problem, it's easy to become stuck because we think of an incorrect solution but simply can't stop returning to it. Doing something totally new induces "fixation forgetting", leaving us free to find the right answer.

Another is "opportunistic assimilation". This is when the new task prompts us to think of a solution to the old one. The original Eureka moment is an example.

As the story has it, Archimedes was struggling with the task of determining whether a golden wreath truly was made of pure gold without damaging the ornate treasure. The solution was to determine whether the wreath had the same volume as a pure gold ingot with the same mass; this, in turn, could be done by submerging both the wreath and the ingot to see whether they displaced the same volume of water.

This insight, we are told, occurred to Archimedes while he was having a bath and watching the water level rise and fall as he lifted himself in and out. And if solving such a problem while having a bath isn't multitasking, then what is?

Tim Harford is an FT columnist. His latest book is 'The Undercover Economist Strikes Back'. Twitter: @TimHarford

Six ways to be a master of multitasking

1. Be mindful

"The ideal situation is to be able to multitask when multitasking is appropriate, and focus when focusing is important," says psychologist Shelley Carson. Tom Chatfield, author of Live This Book, suggests making two lists, one for activities best done with internet access and one for activities best done offline. Connecting and disconnecting from the internet should be deliberate acts.

2. Write it down

The essence of David Allen's Getting Things Done is to turn every vague guilty thought into a specific action, to write down all of the actions and to review them regularly. The point, says Allen, is to feel relaxed about what you're doing - and about what you've decided not to do right now - confident that nothing will fall through the cracks.

3. Tame your smartphone

The smartphone is a great servant and a harsh master. Disable needless notifications - most people don't need to know about incoming tweets and emails. Set up a filing system within your email so that when a message arrives that requires a proper keyboard to answer - ie 50 words or more - you can move that email out of your inbox and place it in a folder where it will be waiting for you when you fire up your computer.

4. Focus in short sprints

The "Pomodoro Technique" - named after a kitchen timer - alternates focusing for 25 minutes and breaking for five minutes, across two-hour sessions. Productivity guru Merlin Mann suggests an "email dash", where you scan email and deal with urgent matters for a few minutes each hour. Such ideas let you focus intensely while also switching between projects several times a day.

5. Procrastinate to win

If you have several interesting projects on the go, you can procrastinate over one by working on another. (It worked for Charles Darwin.) A change is as good as a rest, they say - and as psychologist John Kounios explains, such task switching can also unlock new ideas.

6. Cross-fertilise

"Creative ideas come to people who are interdisciplinary, working across different organisational units or across many projects," says author and research psychologist Keith Sawyer. (Appropriately, Sawyer is also a jazz pianist, a former management consultant and a sometime game designer for Atari.) Good ideas often come when your mind makes unexpected connections between different fields.

Tim Harford's To-Do Lists

David Allen's Getting Things Done system - or GTD - has reached the status of a religion among some productivity geeks. At its heart, it's just a fancy to-do list, but it's more powerful than a regular list because it's comprehensive, specific and designed to prompt you when you need prompting. Here's how I make the idea work for me.

Write everything down. I use Google Calendar for appointments and an electronic to-do list called Remember the Milk, plus an ad hoc daily list on paper. The details don't matter. The principle is never to carry a mental commitment around in your head.

Make the list comprehensive. Mine currently has 151 items on it. (No, I don't memorise the number. I just counted.)

Keep the list fresh. The system works its anxiety-reducing magic best if you trust your calendar and to-do list to remind you when you need reminding. I spend about 20 minutes once a week reviewing the list to note incoming deadlines and make sure the list is neither missing important commitments nor cluttered with stale projects. Review is vital - the more you trust your list, the more you use it. The more you use it, the more you trust it.

List by context as well as topic. It's natural to list tasks by topic or project - everything associated with renovating the spare room, for instance, or next year's annual away-day. I also list them by context (this is easy on an electronic list). Things I can do when on a plane; things I can only do when at the shops; things I need to talk about when I next see my boss.

Be specific about the next action. If you're just writing down vague reminders, the to-do list will continue to provoke anxiety. Before you write down an ill-formed task, take the 15 seconds required to think about exactly what that task is.

Written for and first published at ft.com.

[Jul 24, 2015] How Walking in Nature Changes the Brain

Jul 24, 2015 | The New York Times

A walk in the park may soothe the mind and, in the process, change the workings of our brains in ways that improve our mental health, according to an interesting new study of the physical effects on the brain of visiting nature.

Most of us today live in cities and spend far less time outside in green, natural spaces than people did several generations ago.

City dwellers also have a higher risk for anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses than people living outside urban centers, studies show.

These developments seem to be linked to some extent, according to a growing body of research. Various studies have found that urban dwellers with little access to green spaces have a higher incidence of psychological problems than people living near parks and that city dwellers who visit natural environments have lower levels of stress hormones immediately afterward than people who have not recently been outside.

But just how a visit to a park or other green space might alter mood has been unclear. Does experiencing nature actually change our brains in some way that affects our emotional health?

That possibility intrigued Gregory Bratman, a graduate student at the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University, who has been studying the psychological effects of urban living. In an earlier study published last month, he and his colleagues found that volunteers who walked briefly through a lush, green portion of the Stanford campus were more attentive and happier afterward than volunteers who strolled for the same amount of time near heavy traffic.

But that study did not examine the neurological mechanisms that might underlie the effects of being outside in nature.

So for the new study, which was published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mr. Bratman and his collaborators decided to closely scrutinize what effect a walk might have on a person's tendency to brood.

Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can't seem to stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our lives. This broken-record fretting is not healthy or helpful. It can be a precursor to depression and is disproportionately common among city dwellers compared with people living outside urban areas, studies show.

Perhaps most interesting for the purposes of Mr. Bratman and his colleagues, however, such rumination also is strongly associated with increased activity in a portion of the brain known as the subgenual prefrontal cortex.

If the researchers could track activity in that part of the brain before and after people visited nature, Mr. Bratman realized, they would have a better idea about whether and to what extent nature changes people's minds.

Mr. Bratman and his colleagues first gathered 38 healthy, adult city dwellers and asked them to complete a questionnaire to determine their normal level of morbid rumination.

The researchers also checked for brain activity in each volunteer's subgenual prefrontal cortex, using scans that track blood flow through the brain. Greater blood flow to parts of the brain usually signals more activity in those areas.

Then the scientists randomly assigned half of the volunteers to walk for 90 minutes through a leafy, quiet, parklike portion of the Stanford campus or next to a loud, hectic, multi-lane highway in Palo Alto. The volunteers were not allowed to have companions or listen to music. They were allowed to walk at their own pace.

Immediately after completing their walks, the volunteers returned to the lab and repeated both the questionnaire and the brain scan.

As might have been expected, walking along the highway had not soothed people's minds. Blood flow to their subgenual prefrontal cortex was still high and their broodiness scores were unchanged.

But the volunteers who had strolled along the quiet, tree-lined paths showed slight but meaningful improvements in their mental health, according to their scores on the questionnaire. They were not dwelling on the negative aspects of their lives as much as they had been before the walk.

They also had less blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex. That portion of their brains were quieter.

These results "strongly suggest that getting out into natural environments" could be an easy and almost immediate way to improve moods for city dwellers, Mr. Bratman said.

But of course many questions remain, he said, including how much time in nature is sufficient or ideal for our mental health, as well as what aspects of the natural world are most soothing. Is it the greenery, quiet, sunniness, loamy smells, all of those, or something else that lifts our moods? Do we need to be walking or otherwise physically active outside to gain the fullest psychological benefits? Should we be alone or could companionship amplify mood enhancements?

"There's a tremendous amount of study that still needs to be done," Mr. Bratman said.

But in the meantime, he pointed out, there is little downside to strolling through the nearest park, and some chance that you might beneficially muffle, at least for awhile, your subgenual prefrontal cortex.

[May 28, 2015] 5 reasons why you shouldn't work too hard

The Washington Post

Forget Russian figure skater Julia Lipnitskaia spinning in a blur with her leg impossibly held straight up against her ear. The sight of skier Bode Miller collapsing with emotion at the end of a race dedicated to his brother while NBC cameras lingered uncomfortably on the long shot. Or even jubilant Noelle Pikus-Pace climbing into the stands to race into her family's arms after her silver medal finish in the Skeleton.

The image that stands out most in my mind during the broadcast of the 2014 Winter Olympics? The Cadillac commercial with a boxy, middle-aged white guy in a fancy house striding purposefully from his luxurious swimming pool to his $75,000 luxury Cadillac ELR parked out front while extolling the virtues of hard work, American style.

"Why do we work so hard? For stuff?" actor Neal McDonough asks in the commercial that has been playing without cease. "Other countries work. They stroll home. They stop by a caf�. They take the entire month of August off. "Off," he says again, to reinforce the point.

"Why aren't you like that? Why aren't WE like that?"

The first time the commercial aired during the Opening Ceremonies in Sochi, the slight pause after those two questions made me hopeful. I sat up to listen closely.

Was he about to say � we should be more like that? Because Americans work among the most hours of any advanced country in the world, save South Korea and Japan, where they've had to invent a word for dying at your desk. (Karoshi. Death from Overwork.) We also work among the most extreme hours, at 50 or more per week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American works about one month more a year than in 1976.

Was he going to say that we Americans are caught up in what economist Juliet Schor calls a vicious cycle of "work-and-spend" � caught on a time-sucking treadmill of more spending, more stuff, more debt, stagnant wages, higher costs and more work to pay for it all?

Would he talk about how we Americans, alone among the advanced economies, whose athletes are competing between the incessant commercials with such athleticism and grace, have no national vacation policy. (So sacrosanct is time off in some countries that the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2012 that workers who get sick on vacation are entitled to take more time off "to enable the worker to rest and enjoy a period of relaxation and leisure.").

American leisure? Don't let the averages fool you, he could say. While it looks like leisure time has gone up, time diaries show that leisure and sleep time have gone up steeply since 1985 for those with less than a high school degree. Why? They're becoming unemployed or underemployed. And leisure and sleep time for the college educated, the ones working those crazy extreme hours, has fallen steeply.

Americans don't have two "nurture days" per child until age 8, as Denmark does. No year-long paid parental leaves for mothers and fathers, as in Iceland. Nor a national three-month sabbatical policy, which Belgium has.

Instead of taking the entire month of August off, the most employers voluntarily grant us American workers tends to be two weeks. One in four workers gets no paid vacation or holidays at all, one study found. And, in a telling annual report called the "Vacation Deprivation" study, travel company Expedia figures that Americans didn't even USE 577 million of those measly vacation days at all last year.

Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2013 Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2013

So as I watched the Cadillac commercial, hanging onto that rich white guy's pause, I was hoping he'd make a pitch to bring some sanity to American workaholic culture. It wouldn't have been a first for the auto industry. Henry Ford outraged his fellow industrialists when he cut his workers' hours to 40 a week. (Standards in some industries at the time were for 12-hour workdays, 7 days a week.) Ford did so because his internal research showed 40 hours was as far as you could push manual laborers in a week before they got stupid and began making costly mistakes. He also wanted his workers to have the leisure time to buy and use his cars.

The rich guy takes a breath and smirks. We work so much "Because we're crazy, driven hard-working believers, that's why." Bill Gates. The Wright Brothers. Were they crazy? He asks. We went to the moon and, you know what we got? Bored, he says.

"You work hard. You create your own luck. And you've gotta believe anything is possible." Fair enough. "As for all the stuff?" he says as he knowingly unplugs his luxury electric car, "that's the upside of only taking TWO weeks off in August, n'est ce pas?"

Why is everyone so busy?

Posted by wa8dzp

[Note: This item comes from friend Judi Clark. DLH]

Why is everyone so busy?
Time poverty is a problem partly of perception and partly of distribution
Dec 20 2014
<http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21636612-time-poverty-problem-partly-perception-and-partly-distribution-why>

THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. "Our grandchildren", reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around "three hours a day"-and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?

This has not turned out to be one of the world's more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a "perennial time-scarcity problem" afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail-sometimes all at once.

Tick, tock

Why do people feel so rushed? Part of this is a perception problem. On average, people in rich countries have more leisure time than they used to. This is particularly true in Europe, but even in America leisure time has been inching up since 1965, when formal national time-use surveys began. American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago-a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks. Women's paid work has risen a lot over this period, but their time in unpaid work, like cooking and cleaning, has fallen even more dramatically, thanks in part to dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves and other modern conveniences, and also to the fact that men shift themselves a little more around the house than they used to.

The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone's time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.

Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over affiliation, help cultivate this time-is-money mindset. This creates an urgency to make every moment count, notes Harry Triandis, a social psychologist at the University of Illinois. Larger, wealthy cities, with their higher wage rates and soaring costs of living, raise the value of people's time further still. New Yorkers are thriftier with their minutes-and more harried-than residents of Nairobi. London's pedestrians are swifter than those in Lima. The tempo of life in rich countries is faster than that of poor countries. A fast pace leaves most people feeling rushed. "Our sense of time", observed William James in his 1890 masterwork, "The Principles of Psychology", "seems subject to the law of contrast."

When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter. Workers who are paid by the hour volunteer less of their time and tend to feel more antsy when they are not working. In an experiment carried out by Sanford DeVoe and Julian House at the University of Toronto, two different groups of people were asked to listen to the same passage of music-the first 86 seconds of "The Flower Duet" from the opera "Lakm�". Before the song, one group was asked to gauge their hourly wage. The participants who made this calculation ended up feeling less happy and more impatient while the music was playing. "They wanted to get to the end of the experiment to do something that was more profitable," Mr DeVoe explains.

The relationship between time, money and anxiety is something Gary S. Becker noticed in America's post-war boom years. Though economic progress and higher wages had raised everyone's standard of living, the hours of "free" time Americans had been promised had come to nought. "If anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago," he noted in 1965. He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time. So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.

The harried leisure class

That economic prosperity would create feelings of time poverty looked a little odd in the 1960s, given all those new time-saving blenders and lawnmowers. But there is a distinct correlation between privilege and pressure. In part, this is a conundrum of wealth: though people may be earning more money to spend, they are not simultaneously earning more time to spend it in. This makes time-that frustratingly finite, unrenewable resource-feel more precious.

[snip]

[Jun 15, 2013] Messages Galore, but No Time to Think By PHYLLIS KORKKI

"In the name of simplicity, I even try to avoid instant messaging. But I also can't help worrying that I am missing out. "
June 15, 2013 | NYT

I'M old enough to remember a simpler time in the office, when talking - whether in person or on the phone - was the main way to communicate. I once had a job where I filled out those pink "While You Were Out" slips for employees who had stepped away from their desks.

Then, in the 1990s, came e-mail, and things were never the same. Besides delivering a serious blow to the sellers of those pieces of paper, e-mail made communicating with people incredibly - and, at first, delightfully - easy.

Now, a few decades later, people constantly complain that their e-mail in-boxes are unmanageable. And many more technologies have joined the workplace party. We can now use cellphones, texts, instant messaging, text messaging, social media, corporate intranets and cloud applications to communicate at work.

Something may have been lost as we adopted these new communication tools: the ability to concentrate.

"Nobody can think anymore because they're constantly interrupted," said Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor and author of "Sleeping With Your Smartphone." "Technology has enabled this expectation that we always be on." Workers fear the repercussions that could result if they are unavailable, she said.

The intermingling of work and personal life adds to the onslaught, as people communicate about personal topics during the workday, and about work topics when they are at home.

According to a 2011 article in The Ergonomics Open Journal, electronic communication tools can demand constant switching, which contributes to a feeling of "discontinuity" in the workplace. On the other hand, people sometimes deliberately introduce interruptions into their day as a way to reduce boredom and to socialize, the article said.

We're only beginning to understand the workplace impact of new communication tools. The use of such technology in the office is "less rational than we would like to think," said Steve Whittaker a professor of human-computer interaction at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sometimes, "it's one person who's an evangelist," he said. "They will start using a particular thing, and they will bring other people along with them."

More tech-oriented types might favor the latest new communication "toy," while others, like me, are less enthusiastic. In the name of simplicity, I even try to avoid instant messaging. But I also can't help worrying that I am missing out.

Plenty of workplace advice focuses on how we, as individuals, can manage our technology, but in many cases, this is a collective, team-level issue, Professor Perlow said.

As Professor Whittaker put it, "We haven't stabilized our regular practices," and these may need to be negotiated among workers.

It's important to distinguish between collaborative and one-on-one communication, he said. Cloud-based systems are meant for sharing and editing documents, and they can enable people in different cities to work together in real time. Internal social media pages can be useful for seeking and sharing knowledge.

But when one person wants to communicate with another privately, e-mail remains the go-to method, Professor Whittaker said. That's why it is nearly universal, despite a general yearning for something better.

To lessen the disruptive nature of e-mail and other messages, teams need to discuss how to alter their work process to allow blocks of time where they can disconnect entirely, Professor Perlow said. "I don't think you can do it without leadership support," she added.

MAYBE more managers, consulting with their teams, need to set up clear guidelines for communication. When is it best to use the cloud? When is it best to use e-mail, or instant messaging? And when is it acceptable, even preferable, to turn off all technology? Not that managers need to be dictators, but a little clarity can lead to much more productivity.

Making it a priority to learn how to use the latest tools more effectively is a good idea, too. For example, how do those filters that help prioritize messages really work?

And let's never forget the value of face-to-face, or voice-to-voice, communication. An actual unrehearsed conversation - requiring sustained attention and spontaneous reactions - may be old-fashioned, but it just might turn up something new.

[May 22, 2013] Present Shock And The Loss Of History And Context

Zero Hedge

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

In his new book, Douglas Rushkoff examines the telescoping of time and context wrought by ubiquitous digital technologies.

One of the few observers who is able to articulate a coherent critical account of American culture is Douglas Rushkoff. His new must-read book is Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (print edition) and (Kindle edition).

I have long found inspiration and insight in Rushkoff's work, especially his keen understanding of the pathologies of consumerism. In my 2009 book Survival+, I wrote:

Rushkoff's reply to an interview question on the consequences of ubiquitous marketing reveals how media/marketing has created an unquestioned politics of experience in which one's identity and sense of self is constructed almost entirely by what one buys:

"Children are being adultified because our economy is depending on them to make purchasing decisions. So they're essentially the victims of a marketing and capitalist machine gone awry. You know, we need to expand, expand, expand. There is no such thing as enough in our current economic model and kids are bearing the brunt of that.... So they're isolated, they're alone, they're desperate. It's a sad and lonely feeling....The net effect of all of this marketing, all of this disorienting marketing, all of the shock media, all of this programming designed to untether us from a sense of self, is a loss of autonomy. You know, we no longer are the active source of our own experience or our own choices. Instead, we succumb to the notion that life is a series of product purchases that have been laid out and whose qualities and parameters have been pre-established."

In my view, this is a brilliant analysis of the rot at the heart of the American project.

In his new book, Rushkoff examines the telescoping of time and context wrought by ubiquitous digital technologies. We're always accessible, always connected and every channel is always on; this overload affects not just our ability to process information but our culture and the way media and marketing are designed and delivered.

The title consciously plays off the influential 1970 book by Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, which posited that our innate ability to process change was limited even as the rate of change in our post-industrial world increased. That rate of change would soon overwhelm our capacity to process new inputs and adapt to them.

In Rushkoff's view, we've reached that future: the speed of change and the demands of the present are disorienting us in profound ways.

We all know what stress feels like: it often causes our view to narrow to the present stressor, and we lose perspective and the ability to "make sense" of anything beyond managing the immediate situation.

Rushkoff identifies five symptoms of present shock:

  1. Narrative collapse - the loss of linear stories and their replacement with both crass reality programming and post-narrative shows like The Simpsons.
  2. Digiphrenia � digitally provoked mental chaos as technology lets us be in more than one place at any one moment. As Rushkoff notes in this chapter: Our boss isn't the guy in the corner office, but the PDA in our pocket. Our taskmaster is depersonalized and internalized.
  3. Overwinding � trying to squish huge timescales into much smaller ones, for example, packing a year's worth of retail sales expectations into a single Black Friday event.
  4. Fractalnoia � making sense of our world entirely in the present tense, by drawing connections between things with weak causal relationships, for example Big Data, which excels at identifying correlations but is utterly incapable of identifying cause amidst the correlations.
  5. Apocalypto � the intolerance for presentism leads us to fantasize a grand finale, the cultural equivalent of a "market-clearing event."

As Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote in her review: "How do we shield ourselves from distraction, or gravitate to what really matters?"

Studies have shown that our innate ability to remember people and identify their relationships with others is limited to around 100 people--the size of a village or combat company. We undoubtedly have similar innate limitations on how many channels of input we can absorb.

Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations) calls this filter failure, his term for what used to be called information overload. Our filters become overloaded and we lose the ability to "make sense" of what's going on around us.

As the phenomenologists discovered in the 20th century, our basic coping mechanism is to separate the world (and inputs) into three basic categories: the focal point, the foreground and the deep background. Being unable to sort out which input belongs in the three spaces leads to disorientation and poor decisions.

The parallels between filter failure and stress are not coincidental, as we handle filter failure and present shock the same way we handle stress: we limit inputs and make a concerted effort to reorient our awareness and context, what some call "be still and know."

Another troubling parallel to present shock is addiction. People now respond to texts, emails, alerts and phone calls like rats in the proverbial cage with the lever that releases another tab of cocaine: they over-stimulate themselves to death but are incapable of restraining their impulse for more.

The "obvious" solution is to turn off inputs as a way of restoring our ability to live in a present without novelty and distraction. This is akin to withdrawal from a powerful opiate, and so we should not be surprised that there are now treatment facilities for kids who need to detox from digital inputs.

Rushkoff is especially attuned to the distortions in our experience of time created by digital media-communication present shock: "Time in the digital era is no longer linear but disembodied and associative. The past is not something behind us on the timeline but dispersed through the sea of information."

In effect, change no longer flows linearly like time anymore, it flows in all directions at once.

History and meaningful context are both fatally disrupted by this non-linear flow of time and narrative. Is it any wonder that we now read about young well-educated people who do not understand the meaning of "policy"? To understand policy requires a grasp of the histories and narratives that led to the policy, and the linear, causally-linked way that policy is designed to solve or ameliorate a specific problem or challenge.

If the causal chains of history and narrative are disrupted, then how can anyone fashion a meaningful context for actions and narratives, and effectively frame problems and solutions? If everything is equally valid in a non-linear flood of data, then what roles can authenticity, experience and knowledge play in making sense of our world?

These are knotty, complex issues, and you will find much to constructively ponder in Present Shock.

[May 19, 2013] Faced With Overload, a Need to Find Focus by Tony Schwartz

NYTimes.com

For more than a decade, the most significant ritual in my work life has been to take on the most important task of the day as my first activity, for 90 minutes, without interruption, followed by a renewal break. I do so because mornings are when I have the highest energy and the fewest distractions.

... Far and away the biggest work challenges most of us now face are cognitive overload and difficulty focusing on one thing at a time.

Whenever I singularly devote the first 90 minutes of my day to the most challenging or important task � they're often one and the same - I get a ton accomplished.

Following a deliberate break � even just a few minutes - I feel refreshed and ready to face the rest of the day. When I don't start that way, my day is never quite as good, and I sometimes head home at night wondering what I actually did while I was so busy working.

Performing at a sustainably high level in a world of relentlessly rising complexity requires that we manage not just our time but also our energy � not just how many hours we work, but when we work, on what and how we feel along the way.

Fail to take control of your days - deliberately, consciously and purposefully - and you'll be swept along on a river of urgent but mostly unimportant demands.

It's all too easy to rationalize that we're powerless victims in the face of expectation from others, but doing that is itself a poor use of energy. Far better to focus on what we can influence, even if there are times when it's at the margins.

Small moves, it turns out, can make a significant difference.

When it comes to doing the most important thing first each morning, for example, it's best to make that choice, along with your other top priorities, the night before.

Plainly, there are going to be times that something gets in your way and it's beyond your control. If you can reschedule for later, even 30 minutes, or 45, do that. If you can't, so be it. Tomorrow is another day.

If you're a night owl and you have more energy later in the day, consider scheduling your most important work then. But weigh the risk carefully, because as your day wears on, the number of pulls on your attention will almost surely have increased.

Either way, it's better to work highly focused for short periods of time, with breaks in between, than to be partially focused for long periods of time. Think of it as a sprint, rather than a marathon. You can push yourself to your limits for short periods of time, so long as you have a clear stopping point. And after a rest, you can sprint again.

How you're feeling at any given time profoundly influences how effectively you're capable of working, but most of us pay too little attention to these inner signals.

Fatigue is the most basic drag on productivity, but negative emotions like frustration, irritability and anxiety are equally pernicious. A simple but powerful way to check in with yourself is to intermittently rate the quantity and quality of your energy - say at midmorning, and midafternoon - on a scale from 1 to 10.

If you're a 5 or below on either one, the best thing you can do is take a break.

Even just breathing deeply for as little as one minute � in to a count of three, out to a count of six � can quiet your mind, calm your emotions and clear your bloodstream of the stress hormone cortisol.

Learn to manage your energy more skillfully, and you'll get more done, in less time, at a higher level of focus. You'll feel better - and better about yourself - at the end of the day.

About the Author

Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of "Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live." Twitter: @tonyschwartz

Anne-Marie Hislop, Chicago

The key is figuring our when we are most productive and focused. Although a morning person, I need early time for my rituals - exercise, shower, coffee, and NYT online (along with pop-ins at other sites). Then, by time I get to work around 8AM I will have my most focused, productive hours.

I also find that standing while I work on my computer, which I do more and more when I can (don't have a way to type extensively while standing) energizes me and helps me focus.

John Lamont, Pennsylvania

Frankly I think the core premise of the article, how to get more "done", needs to be questioned, especially in the context to which it speaks, the corporate environment. We would be far better served if Mr. Schwarz's audience spent that 1st 30 minutes of their day sitting back and thinking about what they do, who it's really for, what are the consequences of what they and their company do, and is it morally and ecologically ethical.

In the grand scheme of things I don't doubt mankind is now better off than it was 2,000 or even 500 years ago, but in our relentless drive to produce, consume and sell we have developed, and continue to develop technologies and complex global social interactions that have a good chance of setting us back to the stone age.

Let's not be in such a hurry getting wherever we think we're going and spend a bit more time pondering about where it is we actually want to be and who we want to be when we get there.

When Android Ate My Best Friends by Carla Schroder

Everyone has a cell phone these days. Out here in my little corner of the world, in a county that competes with the neighboring county for the poorest in the state, everyone can somehow afford smartphones with generous data plans. I have no idea what people's eye colors are anymore, or if they even have eyes, because all I see are the tops of their heads as they are bent over their tiny screens. This stuff is not cheap-- I don't know anyone whose monthly bite is under a hundred dollars. Which is why I have a cheapo TracFone, because I refuse to pay that much. Plus I like hoarding minutes, so I turn it off. I don't have to be in constant contact with my eleventeen bestest friends at all times.

Michelle, Ma Bell

American telecoms are special beasts. Back in the olden days we had a single giant regulated monopoly, AT&T. Technological progress was non-existent, and stuck at a level barely above Alexander Graham Bell's original prototype. We could not own our telephones, but had to lease them from the phone company, which made those old phones some of the most valuable hardware in existence because we kept paying for them year after year after year. We could not add extensions, or attach any other equipment. The one upside was rock-solid service, which set American telephone service apart from most other countries, where unreliability was the norm.

Then Ma Bell was broken up and we got competition, sort of. We never got a choice of carriers for local service, but long distance became competitive. Though again only sort-of, because in-state calls cost more than cross-country calls, and other oddities. Now with mobile phones everywhere a lot of people don't even bother with land lines, and they'e all happy at getting free long distance, even though it's not really free and they're paying a lot more. But even though mobile service costs more, it includes more, like worse call quality and no-service areas. I estimate that 40% of all cell traffic is "What? Are you there? Hello? What?"

When We Dialed Telephones

Where was I going with all this? Oh yeah, ubiquity. My grandmother had a single black dial telephone, and it sat on a special table next to a chair in her entry hall. A phone call was a bit of an event-- she couldn't Web surf while half-listening, or watch TV, or go shopping, or put people on hold and juggle multiple calls. She had conversations, one at a time. She couldn't just pick up and call someone when she felt like it because she was on a party line. That is a shared phone line, which meant everyone who shared the line could eavesdrop on your calls. When I grew up the other giant time- and attention-pit-of-suck, television, was not yet everywhere, and a lot of our friends did not have TVs. So when we got together we talked to each other. With eye contact and everything.

Now we're all proud that Android dominates mobile phones, rah rah Linux. Little kids have their own phones, and again I marvel at how much people are willing to pay for their mobile fix. Sure, for some it's a necessity, but in my somewhat humble opinion most of the time it's more akin to an addiction. It's like the rats that push the button that stimulates the pleasure centers of their brains, and then starve to death because they won't push the food button. Humans just plain love to push buttons, and are willing to pay top dollar for the privilege-- vending machines, video poker, serial channel-surfing on the TV, mobile phones; give them buttons to push and they're happy for hours.

Woa, you might be thinking, get off the grumpy train, because mobile phones are useful tools! And you are right. But I'm still going to be grumpy at people who won't turn them off when we're visiting or doing an activity together. You know those people who have to answer the phone no matter what they're doing? Showering, sleeping, birthing babies? They're a thousand times worse with mobile phones. In the olden days it was considered rude to leave the TV on when people came to visit. Unless they came to watch a program, of course. Remember when call waiting was all new and special? And an insult, like whoever you were talking to was hoping someone better than you would interrupt your call. Now the phone is the TV, along with a million other interruptions, distractions, delights, and portability. We can't escape the things.

Thinking. No Really.

One of the things I love about computer nerds is most of them understand the need for long stretches of uninterrupted time to think, and to concentrate deeply on a task. It is impossible to master a new skill or solve a problem when you're skittering randomly from one activity to the next, never engaging more than the bare surface of your consciousness. It's unsatisfying, because you never accomplish anything. Multi-tasking is a myth. It is the very rare human who can perform two or more tasks at once. A "multi-tasker" is someone who juggles multiple chores and does a poor job at all of them. I prefer total immersion: full attention and no distractions.

Magic happens in your brain when you achieve that state of total focus. It's almost a meditative state. Obstacles fall away and your path become wide and clear. It's as though you're forging new neural pathways and amping up your brainpower. Single-tasking has superpowers.

When Television Ate My Best Friend

The more things change, the more they stay the same, so please enjoy Linda Ellerbee's classic When Television Ate My Best Friend:

"At last I knew what had happened to Lucy. The television ate her. It must have been a terrible thing to see. Now my parents were thinking of getting one. I was scared. They didn't understand what television could do."

Beginning Android Programming

Pushing buttons is fun, and building the buttons is a million times more fun. Try Juliet Kemp's excellent introduction to Android programming:

Android Programming for Beginners: Part 1

Android Programming for Beginners: Part 2

[Apr 28, 2012] Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week

Inc.com

You may think you're getting more accomplished by working longer hours. You're probably wrong.

There's been a flurry of recent coverage praising Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, for leaving the office every day at 5:30 p.m. to be with her kids. Apparently she's been doing this for years, but only recently "came out of the closet," as it were.

What's insane is that Sandberg felt the need to hide the fact, since there's a century of research establishing the undeniable fact that working more than 40 hours per week actually decreases productivity.

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the "sweet spot" is 40 hours a week�and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.

Anyone who's spent time in a corporate environment knows that what was true of factory workers a hundred years ago is true of office workers today. People who put in a solid 40 hours a week get more done than those who regularly work 60 or more hours.

The workaholics (and their profoundly misguided management) may think they're accomplishing more than the less fanatical worker, but in every case that I've personally observed, the long hours result in work that must be scrapped or redone.

Accounting for Burnout What's more, people who consistently work long work weeks get burned out and inevitably start having personal problems that get in the way of getting things done.

I remember a guy in one company I worked for who used the number of divorces in his group as a measure of its productivity. Believe it or not, his top management reportedly considered this a valid metric. What's ironic (but not surprising) is that the group itself accomplished next to nothing.

In fact, now that I think about it, that's probably why he had to trot out such an absurd (and, let's face it, evil) metric.

Proponents of long work weeks often point to the even longer average work weeks in countries like Thailand, Korea, and Pakistan�with the implication that the longer work weeks are creating a competitive advantage.

Europe's Ban on 50-Hour Weeks However, the facts don't bear this out. In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it's illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week. You simply don't see the 50-, 60-, and 70-hour work weeks that have become de rigeur in some parts of the U.S. business world.

If U.S. managers were smart, they'd end this "if you don't come in on Saturday, don't bother coming to work on Sunday" idiocy. If you want employees (salaried or hourly) to get the most done�in the shortest amount of time and on a consistent basis�40 hours a week is just about right.

In other words, nobody should be apologizing for leaving at work at a reasonable hour like 5:30 p.m. In fact, people should be apologizing if they're working too long each week�because it's probably making the team less effective overall.

[Apr 07, 2011] Rational Inattention

These models are interesting, but the mathematics underneath them can be challenging (here's a taste):

'Rational Inattention' Guides Overloaded Brains, Helps Economists Understand Market Behavior, by Antonella Tutino, Economic Letter, FRB Dallas: Between Internet news sources, social media and email, people are awash in information, most of it accessible at near-zero cost. Yet, humans possess only a finite capacity to process all of it. The average email user, for example, receives dozens of messages per day. The messages can't all receive equal attention. How carefully does someone read an email from a sibling or friend before crafting a reply? How closely does a person read an email from the boss?

Limitations on the ability to process information force people to make choices regarding the subjects to which they pay more or less attention. Economists have long acknowledged the existence of human cognitive capacities, but only in recent years have models embodying such limits known as "rational inattention" found their way into mainstream macroeconomics.

Rational inattention models have a broad range of applications. They may reconcile relatively unchanged prices and volatile ones and how the two play out in aggregate demand in the U.S. economy. Moreover, such models can capture salient features of the business cycle, providing a rationale for sharp contractions or slower expansions. Finally, rational inattention models have significant implications for monetary policy. Since the focus of these models revolves around formation of peoples' expectations, understanding how individuals perceive the economy is instrumental to policymakers' efforts to achieve output and price stabilization objectives.

Rational Inattention: A Primer

One macroeconomic school of thought-known as rational expectations-assumes that people fully and quickly process all freely available information. By comparison, under rational inattention theory, information is also fully and freely available, but people lack the capability to quickly absorb it all and translate it into decisions. Rational inattention is based on a simple observation: Attention is a scarce resource and, as such, it must be budgeted wisely.[1]

[Dec 29, 2010] The Shallows What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Part of the problem is information overload and it should be called by the author as such. The other part is that deluge of Internet information does not mean high quality of information. There is specific "Google effect" when pages are created just to extract advertising fees and promoted using "link farms" to get high Google rating for the topic. And spending time on junk is spending time on junk whether it is electronic or not. It's just easier with computer. Nicklaus Carr easier article in Atlantic Is Google Making Us Stupid- - Magazine - The Atlantic covers the same ground.
Amazon.com

William Timothy Lukeman Death by a thousand distracting cuts, June 8, 2010

In this short but informative, thought-provoking book, Nicholas Carr presents an argument I've long felt to be true on a humanist level, but supports it with considerable scientific research. In fact, he speaks as a longtime computer enthusiast, one who's come to question what he once wholeheartedly embraced ... and even now, he takes care to distinguish between the beneficial & detrimental aspects of the Internet.

The argument in question?

The studies that Carr presents are troubling, to say the least. From what has been gleaned to date, it's clear that the brain retains a certain amount of plasticity throughout life -- that is, it can be reshaped, and the way that we think can be reshaped, for good or for ill. Thus, if the brain is trained to respond to & take pleasure in the faster pace of the digital world, it is reshaped to favor that approach to experiencing the world as a whole. More, it comes to crave that experience, as the body increasingly craves more of anything it's trained to respond to pleasurably & positively. The more you use a drug, the more you need to sustain even the basic rush.

And where does that leave the mind shaped by deep reading? The mind that immerses itself in the universe of a book, rather than simply looking for a few key phrases & paragraphs? The mind that develops through slow, quiet contemplation, mulling over ideas in their entirety, and growing as a result? The mature mind that ponders possibilities & consequences, rather than simply going with the bright, dazzling, digital flow?

Nowhere, it seems.

Carr makes it clear that the digital world, like any other technology that undeniably makes parts of life so much easier, is here to stay. All the more reason, then, to approach it warily, suspiciously, and limit its use whenever possible, since it is so ubiquitous. "Yes, but," many will say, "everything is moving so fast that we've got to adapt to it, keep up with it!" Not unlike the Red Queen commenting that it takes all of one's energy & speed to simply remain in one place while running. But what sort of life is that? How much depth does it really have?

Because some aspects of life -- often the most meaningful & rewarding aspects -- require time & depth. Yet the digital world constantly makes us break it into discrete, interchangeable bits that hurtle us forward so rapidly & inexorably that we simply don't have time to stop & think. And before we know it, we're unwilling & even unable to think. Not in any way that allows true self-awareness in any real context.

Emerson once said (as aptly quoted by Carr), "Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind." The danger is that we'll not only willingly, even eagerly, wear those saddles, but that we'll come to desire them & buckle them on ever more tightly, until we feel naked without them. And we'll gladly pay anything to keep them there, even as we lose the capacity to wonder why we ever put them on in the first place.

Most highly recommended!

Devin (Vancouver) - See all my reviews

This book is a more fully fleshed out attempt to answer the question that Carr first posed a couple of years ago in an article titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains explores the ideas of his Google article in much more detail.

To fully understand what the Internet is doing to our brains, we must first understand our brains. Carr highlights results from a variety of iconic and recent studies that illustrate the plasticity of our thinking organs. We see experiments ranging from the severed sensory nerves of monkeys' hands in the 1960s (and their brains subsequent `rewiring') to London taxi drivers whose posterior hippocampuses (the "part of the brain that plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial represenations of a person's surroudings") were much larger than normal. In short, we see plenty of evidence that the brain can reorganize itself, and is certainly not fixed in one state for all of its adult life.

The Shallows then explores the history of the written word and its explosion due to Gutenberg's invention, and even further back to the argument between Socrates and Plato concerning the value of the written word. Socrates argued that if we committed all of our thoughts to paper, we would not have to remember anything. How do we know this? From the writings of Plato, of course. The soundwaves of Socrates' voice, as wise as he was, cannot travel through time like written words can.

With the first half detailing the brain's plasticity and our species' history with the accumulation of knowledge, Carr sets up the latter half of the book perfectly, and his ideas might be grossly simplified into something like this:

P1: Experiments of brain plasticity have proven that our brains change over time.
P2: We are using the Internet for an increasing amount of our activities, including work, entertainment and commerce.
P3: The Internet is a medium that encourages distractedness and makes our brains inept at remembering.

C: We are all becoming a lot more dependent upon our digital devices, and in doing so, are increasingly distracted in everything we do, both online and off.

Carr's book is a giant caution sign on the side of the road that we ride into the increasingly digital future. The caution sign might be too far behind us already, as we've blazed ahead and rewired our minds to think like computers - logical, task-switching, and distracted at every second of the day. If people in their 30s and 40s (who may have had the Internet for approximately 25-40% of their life times) are experiencing these changes in their brains, imagine the effect the Internet is having on our youth. The Net Generation is defined to be those who have grown up with the Net for more than half their lives. There are some who have had the Internet in 100% of their life spans. Imagine that, never knowing a world without the Internet. Yes, some children are younger than Google. Imagine explaining to your grandchildren that you grew up in a time that didn't have the Internet, let alone the information organizing superpower known as Google.

Will we look back at this period of transition from print to digital and see it as being as momentous as the shift from an oral culture to a print culture? What would Socrates have thought? Have we become lesser human beings, inextricably tied to the addictive external memories of our computers and mobile phones?

Could it be that George W. Bush infamous "the Internets" quote was just a sign of the stupidness to come? Perhaps Bush was ahead of his time. Perhaps the Flynn effect is about to peak, or already has. Could the greatest learning tool ever created be so useful that we forget how to think as we use it?

This is a great book for anyone who's interested in our society as a whole, how our brains work, the effects of technology, and the process of learning. Highly recommended.

J. Edgar Mihelic "Iconoclast, Juggernaut" (Chicago)My wisdom is getting flatter., December 8, 2010 - See all my reviews

Carr, in his epilogue to this work, warns that we as a species have to be 'attentive to what we stand to lose.' In his view, the brain's adaptation to the newer and newer technologies in effect flattens our minds and deprives the individual human of the depth that once could be called wisdom. I agree with him more because I am an avowed Luddite than for the wonderful argument he lays out.

For example, I am enrolled in a science class at this time. As the semester comes to a close, I have an average approaching 100. The problem is that I have actually learned little of the actual science but I have instead learned to utilize the electronic tools built into the shell; the entire evaluative framework of the class is on-line. I have learned how to find the answers but I do not know the answers. Compare this to a literature class, where you have to maybe read and analyze and memorize things and your own wisdom is grown because you build long-term memories that give crucial context. This may not matter, per se, in the terms of the professions of the future, but they have a real impact when it comes to human-to-human interaction or aesthetic enjoyment.

The ironic thing is that I did not read this book. I instead listened to it on my mp3 player as I worked and from time to time flipped through to look at Amazon or Facebook or Gmail. My own mind has developed according to the standards of the internet -- I am hyperlinks not a straight narrative. I can no longer read one book, but have to be 'reading' many simultaneously. This factor will only increase as time and technology advance as we see ourselves more in terms of machines, and the machines start to see themselves in terms of us.

barvazos

the authors description of our decrease in attention and cognitive capabilities is at times a bit exaggerated.

however, the idea of our mind and thought process physically changing and the descriptions of the evolution of thought are really insightful and coherent.

good book, lot's of stuff to think about.
enjoy

[Aug 25, 2010] Your Brain on Computers - Overuse of Digital Devices May Lead to Brain Fatigue - NYTimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO - It's 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Break Time vs. Screen Time

Articles in this series examine how a deluge of data can affect the way people think and behave.

Previous Articles in the Series
Multimedia
Interactive Feature
The Unplugged Challenge
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Loren Frank, a professor of physiology, said downtime lets the brain go over experiences, "solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories."

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done - and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

"Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it's had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories," said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, "you prevent this learning process."

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

"People think they're refreshing themselves, but they're fatiguing themselves," said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today's game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

"Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments," he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, "have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments."

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

"I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime," Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn't want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

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[Aug 24, 2010] Information Overload

August 25, 2010 | Sra. Weldon

Do you ever wonder if you spend too much time online or find that multitasking makes homework feel like it takes forever? Do you end up getting less sleep because you're texting, chatting or surfing or because you find that your brain can't seem to shut itself down for the night?

The NY Times has an entire series devoted to such topics called "Your Brain on Computers." In An Ugly Toll of Technology: Impatience and Forgetfulness, a Dr. Kimberly Young is referenced for comparing net addiction to eating disorders. Even adults are at risk for various problems involving our ability to parent and nurture as is highlighted by The Risks of Parenting while Plugged in �there was a comparison between said addiction and alcoholism the way a parent might say to an objecting son/daughter "just one more text" while driving.

In Attached to Computers and Paying a Price, our connection to constant information changes our chemistry with dopamine (which is possibly addictive) squirts in our brains and alters our expectations of daily life in terms of boredom. More dangerous are the risks involved in using devices while driving, yet it's easy to understand how we would reach for them since so many of us are bound to be addicted to them. We read of families missing big business deals, having family fights (and forgetting to pick up kids!) and getting lower grades.

According to the article, "At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.

As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills."

If you'd like to test your own ability to focus, the NY Times features this test. If you think you might be addicted and would like to find out more, check out the Net Addiction site.

For what it's worth, I think technology can be helpful for practicing Spanish and staying up to date on yoObsession with Computers and InternetObsession with Computers and Internetth Computers and Internetth Computers and Internetat school. It's even useful for contact between teachers, students and parents (at times). What I take away from the NY Times series is how essential boundaries are in terms of when/where my family and I are plugged in�there have to be concrete limits for us not to get lost and fragmented.

[Nov 25, 2009] Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours

February 15th. 2008 | Study Hacks

My Schedule Should Be Terrible�

I should have an overwhelming, Malox-guzzling, stress-saturated schedule. Here's why: I'm a graduate student in a demanding program. I'm working on several research papers while also attempting to nail down some key ideas for my dissertation. I'm TA'ing and taking courses. I maintain this blog. I'm a staff writer for Flak Magazine. And to keep things interesting, I'm working on background research for a potential new book project.

You would be reasonable to assume that I must get, on average, 7 - 8 minutes of sleep a night. But you would also be wrong. Let me explain�

For Some Reason It's Not�

Here is my actual schedule. I work:

That's it. Unless I'm bored, I have no need to even turn on a computer after 5 during the week or any time on Saturday. I fill these times, instead, doing, well, whatever I want.

How do I balance an ambitious work load with an ambitiously sparse schedule? It's a simple idea I call fixed-schedule productivity.

Fixed-Schedule Productivity

The system work as follows:

  1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
  2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

This sounds simple. But think about it for a moment. Satisfying rule 2 is not easy. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you'd probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal work schedule. Here's a simple truth: to stick to your ideal schedule will require some drastic actions. For example, you may have to:

In the abstract, these all seem like hard things to do. But when you have the focus of a specific goal - "I do not want to work past 5 on week days!" - you'd be surprised by how much easier it becomes deploy these strategies in your daily life.

Let's look at an example�

Case Study: My Schedule

My schedule provides a good case study. To reach my relatively small work hour limit, I have to be careful with how I go about my day. I see enough bleary-eyed insomniacs around here to know how easy it is to slip into a noon to 3 am routine (the infamous "MIT cycle.") Here are some of the techniques I regularly use to remain within the confines of my fixed schedule:

Why This Works

You could fill any arbitrary number of hours with what feels to be productive work. Between e-mail, and "crucial" web surfing, and to-do lists that, in the age of David Allen, grow to lengths that rival the bible, there is always something you could be doing. At some point, however, you have to put a stake in the ground and say: I know I have a never-ending stream of work, but this is when I'm going to face it. If you don't do this, you let the never-ending stream of work push you around like a bully. It will force you into tiring, inefficient schedules. And you'll end up more stressed and no more accomplished.

Fix the schedule you want. Then make everything else fit around your needs. Be flexible. Be efficient. If you can't make it fit: change your work. But in the end, don't compromise. No one really cares about your schedule except for yourself. So make it right.

On the BBC News site, Bill Thompson takes the discussion in an interesting new direction:

The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described two processes that he believed lay behind the development of knowledge in children. The first is assimilation, where new knowledge fits into existing conceptual frameworks. More challenging is accommodation, where the framework itself is modified to include the new information.

The current generation of 'search engines' seem to encourage a model of exploration that is disposed towards assimilative learning, finding sources, references and documents which can be slotted into existing frameworks, rather than providing material for deeper contemplation of the sort that could provoke accommodation and the extension, revision or even abandonment of views, opinions or even whole belief systems.

Perhaps the real danger posed by screen-based technologies is not that they are rewiring our brains but that the collection of search engines, news feeds and social tools encourages us to link to, follow and read only that which we can easily assimilate.

Globe and Mail, columnist Margaret Wente becomes the latest writer to fess up to an evaporating ability to read long works of prose:

Google has done wondrous things for my stock of general knowledge. It also seems to have destroyed my attention span. Like a flea with ADD, I jump back and forth from the Drudge Report to gardening sites that list the growing time of Green Zebras �

Thanks to Google, we're all turning into mental fast-food junkies. Google has taught us to be skimmers, grabbing for news and insights on the fly. I skim books now too, even good ones. Once I think I've got the gist, I'll skip to the next chapter or the next book. Forget the background, the history, the logical progression of an argument. Just give me the takeaway.

[Jul 1, 2008] Rough Type Nicholas Carr's Blog

Make information free, and we'll become gluttons of information, as Rob Horning notes in an interesting post today:

As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of "free" stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we'll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we've managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we've set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind-often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started.

Information may be free, but, as Horning explains, it exacts a price in the time required to collect, organize, and consume it. As we binge on the Net, the time available for other intellectual activities - like, say, thinking - shrinks. Eventually, we get bloated, mentally, and a kind of intellectual nausea sets in. But we can't stop because - hey - it's free.

[Jun 23, 2008] Multitasking Considered Detrimental

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 23, @02:20AM
from the but-we-knew-this dept. djvaselaar sends along an article from The New Atlantis that summarizes recent research indicating that multitasking may be detrimental to work and learning.. It begins, "In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: 'There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.' To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence... E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming--all this may become background noise, like the 'din of a foundry or factory' that [William] James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being."

The New Atlantis " The Myth of Multitasking

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: "There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time." To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence. "This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind."

In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people-so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets-particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices-celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the "skills" sections of r�sum�s, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players. "We have always multitasked-inability to walk and chew gum is a time-honored cause for derision-but never so intensely or self-consciously as now," James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book Faster. "We are multitasking connoisseurs-experts in crowding, pressing, packing, and overlapping distinct activities in our all-too-finite moments." An article in the New York Times Magazine in 2001 asked, "Who can remember life before multitasking? These days we all do it." The article offered advice on "How to Multitask" with suggestions about giving your brain's "multitasking hot spot" an appropriate workout.

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, "Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers." The psychologist who led the study called this new "infomania" a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas" for 2007 was Linda Stone's notion of "continuous partial attention," which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are "constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing."

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a "mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously." In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, "Attention Deficit Trait," which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is "purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live," writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. "Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points," Hallowell argues, and this challenge "can be controlled only by creatively engineering one's environment and one's emotional and physical health." Limiting multitasking is essential. Best-selling business advice author Timothy Ferriss also extols the virtues of "single-tasking" in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy. One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking-information overload-costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Changing Our Brains

To better understand the multitasking phenomenon, neurologists and psychologists have studied the workings of the brain. In 1999, Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (part of the National Institutes of Health), used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to determine that when people engage in "task-switching"-that is, multitasking behavior-the flow of blood increases to a region of the frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10. (The flow of blood to particular regions of the brain is taken as a proxy indication of activity in those regions.) "This is presumably the last part of the brain to evolve, the most mysterious and exciting part," Grafman told the New York Times in 2001-adding, with a touch of hyperbole, "It's what makes us most human."

It is also what makes multitasking a poor long-term strategy for learning. Other studies, such as those performed by psychologist Ren� Marois of Vanderbilt University, have used fMRI to demonstrate the brain's response to handling multiple tasks. Marois found evidence of a "response selection bottleneck" that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform. Psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan believes that rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of "adaptive executive control" takes place, which "schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order," as he described to the New Scientist. Unlike many other researchers who study multitasking, Meyer is optimistic that, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice. But his research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that "multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily." His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, "We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We're really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we're driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we're being more efficient."

If, as Poldrack concluded, "multitasking changes the way people learn," what might this mean for today's children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young age? Poldrack calls this the "million-dollar question." Media multitasking-that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail-is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. "I multitask every single second I am online," confessed one study participant. "At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message."

The Kaiser report noted several factors that increase the likelihood of media multitasking, including "having a computer and being able to see a television from it." Also, "sensation-seeking" personality types are more likely to multitask, as are those living in "a highly TV-oriented household." The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: "I get bored if it's not all going at once, because everything has gaps-waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc." one participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: "In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected," the report states. "After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful." This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.

Other experts aren't so sure. As neurologist Jordan Grafman told Time magazine: "Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren't going to do well in the long run." "I think this generation of kids is guinea pigs," educational psychologist Jane Healy told the San Francisco Chronicle; she worries that they might become adults who engage in "very quick but very shallow thinking." Or, as the novelist Walter Kirn suggests in a deft essay in The Atlantic, we might be headed for an "Attention-Deficit Recession."

Paying Attention

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was "owing more to patient attention than to any other talent."

William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), he outlined the differences among "sensorial attention," "intellectual attention," "passive attention," and the like, and noted the "gray chaotic indiscriminateness" of the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. James compared our stream of thought to a river, and his observations presaged the cognitive "bottlenecks" described later by neurologists: "On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule," he wrote. "But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way."

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien-as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today's multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James's description of the youthful mind: an "extreme mobility of the attention" that "makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice." For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done "in the interstices of their mind-wandering." Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline-and so was illustrative of character. "The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again," he wrote, "is the very root of judgment, character, and will."

Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak. We require advice books to teach us how to avoid distraction. In the not-too-distant future we may even employ new devices to help us overcome the unintended attention deficits created by today's gadgets. As one New York Times article recently suggested, "Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high tech 'time nanny' to ease the modern multitasker's plight." Perhaps we will all accept as a matter of course a computer governor-like the devices placed on engines so that people can't drive cars beyond a certain speed. Our technological governors might prompt us with reminders to set mental limits when we try to do too much, too quickly, all at once.

Then again, perhaps we will simply adjust and come to accept what James called "acquired inattention." E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, televisions blaring, podcasts streaming-all this may become background noise, like the "din of a foundry or factory" that James observed workers could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the "interstices of their mind-wandering," with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

[Feb 24, 2008] The Mythology of Information Overload by Tonyia J. Tidline

1/1/99 | Library Trends,

This project combines ideas from mythology, folklore, and library and information science in an effort to make sense of an aspect of modern culture that is frequently perceived as troublesome. Discussions of information overload, "data glut," or "information anxiety" are abundant in popular culture but do little to shed light on the origin of this problem. Library and information science work sidesteps the need to verify the existence of information overload, seeking instead to mitigate its effects. The discipline has produced a vast literature that addresses user perceptions, information needs, and information-seeking behavior. Information management, information retrieval, and attendant notions such as relevance have also received much attention. Within both popular culture and library and information science research, information overload is usually described or defined by means of anecdote or by associated symptoms.

However constituted, popular and scholarly attention confirms information overload as a recognized and resonant cultural concept that persists even without solid corroboration. Mythology and folkloristics are used here as analytic tools to suggest that information overload can be viewed as a myth of modern culture. Here myth does not mean something that is not true but an overarching prescriptive belief.

[ Mar 09, 2007] A very good memo on mental overload from Washington College

Trying to sip information from the fire hose is a difficult and challenging task :-). This memo might help.

In today's world, mental overload is a fact of life. Fortunately, by applying some simple techniques from the computer world, you can avoid some of the costly consequences of a too full brain!

SIGNS OF AN OVERLOAD

A too-full computer can:
� give you error messages
� run slower
� take longer to process information
� crash

A too-full brain can cause you to:
� make mistakes
� forget to do something
� let things slip through the cracks
� become sluggish
� loose creativity
� become unproductive
� procrastinate
� become indecisive
� get stressed out
� experience a total mental break down

[ Mar 09, 2007] Mental overload by Katherine Lewis

Does excessive multi-tasking like happens to college students make us stupid? The answer is tentative yes:
Multi-tasking may be too much for the brain to handle Friday, March 09, 2007

BY KATHERINE REYNOLDS LEWIS

NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

We feel so efficient, listening to a teleconference while sorting e-mail and eating lunch at the same time. But experts warn that instead of completing three tasks in the space of one, we're really spending more time to achieve mediocre results.

"Research that's looked at multi-tasking shows that you can't do it well -- no one can," said Kristin Byron, assistant professor of management at Syracuse University. "You're fighting the way your brain works."

The brain acts on just one task at a time. What we perceive as simultaneous multi-tasking is really rapid switching back and forth to keep different tasks going -- even if one is as simple as deciding to lift the sandwich for another bite.

It's like the classic vaudeville act of spinning plates. Your brain can set a task in motion, then another, and then another, before returning to pick up the first task, explained David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

"If the demands of any given task aren't too taxing, you can get two, three, four plates going up, but at some point you're going to reach a threshold when they're going to crash."

You may avoid driving while talking on a cell phone because of the physical challenge of holding both phone and steering wheel. But Strayer's research shows hands-free cell phone use is just as dangerous while driving. The risk comes in toggling between the two mental demands.

Moreover, subjects in a recent study scored significantly lower on IQ tests they took while driving. "When your attention is taken away from a task, you are not going to perform it as smartly," Strayer said.

So does multi-tasking make us stupid?

It's not an outlandish conclusion. A 2005 study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard found the average worker lost 10 IQ points when interrupted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails -- about equal to the cost of missing an entire night of sleep.

"Interruptions are time-consuming, and they are dangerous in the sense that they can lead to errors," said David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "You are trying to feed information through various kinds of processing channels in the brain which have limited capacity and are really only available for one thing at a time."

Whenever we drop one task to perform another, we face "resumption costs" -- the time and energy it takes to orient ourselves when we return to the original task. It's true that interweaving two lengthy tasks can take less total time than performing the tasks separately. But there's a price.

"A lot of tasks we have to do, there are little moments of gaps which you can steal for another task," said Hal Pashler, psychology professor at the University of California in San Diego. "The interesting hidden cost ... is that (we) may be strikingly unable to recollect what happened."

That's because the free moments in each task -- such as waiting for a partner to respond in a conversation -- appear to be used to store or consolidate memories. If we talk on the phone while checking e-mail, it's at the expense of downtime our brains need.

"The conversation plus the e-mail may take less of your life, but the cost is that tomorrow you may not know exactly what you said," Pashler said.

Thus, if you try to take in new material or facts while multi-tasking, you'll have a tougher time learning, said Russell A. Poldrack, psychology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Does all this mean we should never check our Blackberries while waiting in line at the grocery store? Or even sip a cup of coffee while listening to a conference speaker? After all, multi-tasking is woven into the fabric of modern life. More than 85 percent of people multi-task, and 67 percent believe they do it well, according to a survey by Apex Performance, a Charlotte, N.C., training firm.

Fortunately, the experts give us some slack. "You can't say in every situation it would be better to always focus on one task," Poldrack said.

If you're a stock trader who has to respond quickly to a lot of information, it makes sense to monitor multiple televisions and computer screens at once, he said. It may not matter that the next day you're hazy about which news anchor said what.

Certain physical actions, like walking or eating, are so hard-wired that they don't tax our brains much. There's certainly no harm in combining simple, low-stakes tasks, like folding laundry and watching television. And if background music energizes you to finish your work, that may outweigh the cost of your mind shifting between listening and crafting a report, Poldrack said.

Similarly, talking to an adult passenger doesn't hurt your driving the way talking on a cell phone does, Strayer has found. That's because the person in your car is attuned to the driving environment, and will pause the conversation when a tricky maneuver approaches.

To the degree that tasks rely on similar processes, they are more likely to interfere with each other. For instance, talking on the phone and writing an e-mail is hard, because both involve language, Poldrack said.

The answer is to choose carefully when you take on more than one job at once. For high-priority or complex tasks, you might want to shut down your e-mail, turn off the phone and close your office door. Apex Performance founder Louis Czoka even recommends that clients shut their eyes to focus on a teleconference.

[Feb 18, 2007] Crazy hours becoming the new standard

Forbes.com - MSNBC.com

Just how bad have things gotten? That's the subject of Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek, a recent study from the Center for Work-Life Policy. The study found that 1.7 million people consider their jobs and their work hours extreme, thanks to globalization, BlackBerries, corporate expectations and their own Type A personalities.

... .... ....

What Hewlett and Buck Luce found in their survey was that workers were themselves to blame. Many of the people interviewed for the study say they love their jobs and are reluctant to lessen their work load. In Agoglia's case, working for the small business consulting group was exactly what she wished for. Now she only comes into the office on a need basis. "It offers an opportunity for someone like me who needs more breathing room," she says, "but it also fulfills my desire to be challenged in my job."

That kind of fulfillment has its hazards. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed said their work pressures are self-inflicted but say it is taking a real toll on them individually. Nationally, 70 percent, and globally, 81 percent, say their jobs undermine their health in terms of exercise, diet and the impact of stress. Nationally, 46 percent, and globally, 59 percent, say it gets in the way of their relationships and nationally, 50 percent, say it affects their sex life.

Not surprisingly, men and women have a different take on the extreme nature of their jobs. In the global survey, 58 percent of men and 80 percent of women say they didn't want to work these hours for more than one more year. Says Buck Luce: "For women there's a flight risk. But men get burned out and are able to stick with it. There's a tremendous stigma for men who say, 'I can't do this.' That means there aren't going to be women at the top ranks of companies."

[Jan 18, 2007] Kelly Forrister Is there such a thing as obsessive-compulsive productivity

I wasn't surprised to read that 40% of Americans work 50 hours or more per week and rarely disconnect from their work, even on vacation. I hear about it all the time in my seminars where people feel like an 8 hour day is slacking off and working at night after the kids go to bed and in the morning before the office really opens is the only way they can stay on top of things.

Is it that people have too much to do or is it that they just don't have trusted systems (ala GTD) to feel like they can disconnect?

I've heard David Allen mention that we've always had too much to do. I don't think BlackBerry's necessarily create more work, it's just now people have higher expectations about how fast the work needs to get done.

Someone in one of my seminars recently told me she takes her laptop on vacation just to stay on top of her email (people actually hissed when she said this, perhaps from the fear that this will become expected.) The "vacation tax" of coming back to hundreds, if not thousands, of emails is just not worth it to her.

[Jan 17, 2007] BlackBerrys Don't Fit in Bikinis or obsessive-compulsive productivity by Joe Robinson

August 13, 2006 | Los Angeles Times

It's vacation prime time. Millions of wage-earners are on the road, in the air or on the water in search of overdue recreation, relaxation and adventure. But for too many, it will be a futile quest, thanks to a big, fat killjoy stowed away on the trip: OCP, or obsessive-compulsive productivity, a frantic fixation to wring results from every minute of the day, even our play.

Americans have always had an insistent work ethic. But thanks to technology that allows us to get things done 24/7, growing job demands and the elevation of efficiency to an unofficial national religion, many vacationers simply can't turn off their productive machinery. Every minute of the day, even of play, must be productive.

It's a habit that's increasingly counterproductive, evident in soaring job-stress bills (a $300-billion-a-year tab for U.S. business, according to the American Institute of Stress, a nonprofit organization) and longer workweeks. Nearly 40% of Americans work more than 50 hours a week. The all-output, all-the-time mandate of OCP wires us to do holidays like jobs. We cram downtime with to-do lists and a performance-review mentality that dooms trips to disappointment because we couldn't see or do everything we wanted. The trip's experience is an afterthought in a crazed race to polish off sights to the finish line of the holiday.

But trying to make a vacation productive is like trying to get a cat to bark. It's the wrong animal for the outcome, because vacations aren't about output. Instead, they're about the realm of an increasingly rare species - input - that can't be measured by a performance yardstick. The most packed itinerary can't quantify play, fun, wonder, discovery, adventure. How do you tally the spray of an exploding waterfall? The pattern of ripples on a sand dune? How do you produce quiet?

The productivity of U.S. workers has doubled since 1969, according to Boston College economist Juliet Schor. But none of the dividends have come back in additional free time. The added time that greater productivity creates is simply fodder for more productivity increases - and OCP jitters that we must get more done. How much production is enough?

Even on the job, too much time on task can lead to burnout, heart disease, carpal tunnel syndrome, mistakes, costly do-overs and rote performance. A study last year by the University of Massachusetts Medical School found that chronic 12-hour workdays increase your risk of illness or injury by 37%.

Work without time to think, analyze or recharge feeds knee-jerk performance and the hurry-worry of stress. Everything appears urgent when there isn't time to judge what is truly urgent and what isn't.

More than anybody else's, Americans' identity comes through labor. But the reflex to define self-worth by what we get done makes it hard to relax without a heap of guilt because there's always something next on the horizon to handle. Our focus on future results shrinks our experience of living and, ironically, the very thing we need for optimum performance - input.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. asked managers where they got their best ideas. It wasn't at the office. Rather, inspiration came when people were at play - on the golf course, running. Research on fatigue in the workplace since the 1920s shows that performance rises after a break in the action, whether a break of a few seconds or 15 minutes.

Studies have also found that job performance improves after a vacation. Income doubled at the H Group, an investment services company in Salem, Ore., after owner Ron Kelemen increased employee time off to 3 1/2 weeks. When Jancoa, a Cincinnati cleaning company, switched to a three-week vacation policy, worker productivity soared enough to cut overtime. Profits jumped 15%.

The true source of productivity isn't nonstop output. It's a refreshed and energized mind, something vacations specialize in.

But for that to happen, we must leave the OCP drill sergeant at home. Vacations require a different skill set - leisure skills. Without them, we lapse into default mode - produce, produce, produce. My retired father was stunned when he visited his former company and found a couple of his fellow retirees back at their desks. They didn't know what else to do.

As kids, we knew how to entertain ourselves. But many of us lost the knack when we learned that play for its own sake didn't produce rewards - status, pats on the back, money, goodies. Once we're in OCP territory, we've forgotten how to do things simply because we enjoy doing them.

Researchers say we had it right as kids. "Quality of life does not depend on what others think of us or what we own," contends psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience." "The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves, and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience."

Famed for his studies on when people are at their happiest, Csikszentmihalyi adds that "when experience is intrinsically rewarding, life is justified in the present."

Things we do for our amusement are particularly good at improving that experience, delivering what's supposed to come out of all that production - self-worth, a sense of competence and, best of all, life satisfaction. Upping levels of performance can't generate happiness, psychologists contend, because production is tied to external approval, which is gone by the next morning's to-do list. But research shows that the more active your leisure lifestyle is, the higher your life satisfaction. Leisure also increases initiative, confidence and a positive mood.

So, if you haven't taken your vacation yet, maybe it's time to dust off the leisure portfolio and resuscitate the childhood practice of play. The packing list should include participation, engagement, spontaneity, a nonjudgmental attitude, the ability to ferret out amusements, take detours, wander without aim, plunge into things you haven't done before, and get out of your head and into direct experience. Along the way you may discover something long forgotten. Recess rules.

Continued

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[Dec 31, 2018] The psychological importance of wasting time by Olivia Goldhill Published on Apr 30, 2017 | qz.com

Sites

Anxiety and Obsession with Work

What Constitutes an Addiction

Computer addicts tend to lose all sense of time when they are on-line. They are drawn so deeply into the world of bytes and bits that they do not notice entire days passing by.

They forget to eat, sleep, go to school, and even care for their children. They shirk responsibilities, slack off at work, and miss appointments because they are unable to pull themselves away.

The virtual world and the real world are competing for their attention, and the virtual world often wins.

Anxiety Disorders Education Program

The Anxiety Disorders Education Program is a national education campaign developed by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to increase awareness among the public and health care professionals that anxiety disorders are real medical illnesses that can be effectively diagnosed and treated. More than 19 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders, which include panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias and generalized anxiety disorder. They suffer from symptoms that are chronic, unremitting and usually grow progressively worse if left untreated. Tormented by panic attacks, irrational thoughts and fears, compulsive behaviors or rituals, flashbacks, nightmares, or countless frightening physical symptoms, people with anxiety disorders are heavy utilizers of emergency rooms and other medical services. Their work, family and social lives are disrupted, and some even become housebound. Many of them have co-occuring disorders such as depression, alcohol or drug abuse, or other mental disorders. Because of widespread lack of understanding and the stigma associated with these disorders, many people with anxiety disorders are not diagnosed and are not receiving treatments that have been proven effective through research.

DG DISPATCH - ECNP Generalized Anxiety Disorder Has Worst Impact On Quality Of Life

Brain Lock Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior A Four-Step Self-Treatment Method to Change Your Brain Chemistry

A reader from America , July 2, 1999 5 out of 5 stars Excellent! A DYI approach to OCD and related disorders. A friend gave me this book and it is excellent. If you have OCD or even a related disorder it gives you a practical approach to learning to deal with and outsmart your disorder.

Take me, frinstance, while I do not have any checking compulsions, I have suffered from anxiety disorder and occasionally intrusive, disturbing thoughts for a number of years. (Other than that I am your regular guy, you wouldn't know I had a disorder if you saw me). This book gives you a 4-step method of "reframing" OCD in a way that makes it manageable. Ultimately, the authors say, by using their method you can "retrain your brain" and actually alter your brain chemistry in a positive direction and thus reduce the original symptoms to something liveable.

Buy it (or have a friend give it to you...) :-)

Stop Obsessing! How to Overcome Your Obsessions and Compulsions

The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

A reader from Santa Fe, NM , July 16, 1998 5 out of 5 stars A good description of the problem and some solutions This book contains well-written descriptions of obsessive-compulsive disorder -- it's informative, clear, and a pleasure to read. And for those of us who either suffer from these disorders or are close to someone who does, it's an eye-opener: you are NOT the only person who's ever had to deal with this problem, and there IS hope for curing it! For all these reasons, I highly recommend the book. Two cautions, however: (1) The book gave a good description of the ways of treating OCD as of the date it was written. Since then, however, there have been many new developments, so, if you're specifically interested in treatments, you'll need to look up some more recent books and articles. (2) "Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder" (OCPD) is a related but different condition, and it's possible that someone who exhibits similar symptoms but doesn't have full-blown OCD suffers from this instead. (My mother has never gone in for compulsive hand-washing, but she's rigid, intolerant, controlling, and a pack rat on a truly monumental scale. That's OCPD.) The treatments for the two conditions differ -- drugs are more helpful for OCD than OCPD, for example. As with any mental condition, it's absolutely necessary to have a thorough professional diagnosis; don't just march into your doctor's office demanding Prozac, or stock up on St. John's Wort at your local herbalist's.

Social Anxiety Disorder

Humor

[Jan 15, 1999 ] Man Crashes Car As 50 Pagers Ring At Once -- pretty funny

KIEV (Reuters) - A Ukraine businessman who bought a pager for each member of his staff as a New Year gift was so alarmed when all 50 of them went off at the same time that he drove his car into a lamp post, a newspaper said Thursday.

The unnamed businessman was returning from the pager shop when the accident happened, the Fakty daily reported. ''With no more than 100 meters to go to the office, the 50 pagers on the back seat suddenly burst out screeching. The businessman's fright was such that he simply let go of the steering wheel and the car ploughed into a lamp post.''

After he had assessed the damage to the car, the businessman turned his attention to the message on the 50 pagers. It read: ''Congratulations on a successful purchase!''

Random Findings

Reducing information overload A comparative study of hypertext systems

How to deal with Information Overload on the Internet The intelligent agent concept

The Clever Project -- IBM project

The tremendous growth in the price-performance of networking and storage has fueled the explosive growth of the web. The amount of information easily accessible from the desktop has dramatically increased by several orders of magnitude in the last few years, and shows no signs of abating. Users of the web are being confronted with the consequent information overload problem. It can be exceedingly difficult to locate resources that are both high-quality and relevant to their information needs. Traditional automated methods for locating information are easily overwhelmed by low-quality and unrelated content. Thus, the second generation of search engines will have to have effective methods for focusing on the most authoritative among these documents. The rich structure implicit in the hyperlinks among Web documents offers a simple, and effective, means to deal with many of these problems. The CLEVER search engine incorporates several algorithms that make use of hyperlink structure for discovering high-quality information on the Web.



Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater�s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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