When Are You Really an Adult?

What adulthood means in a society is an ocean fed by too many rivers to count. It can be legislated, but not completely. Science can advance understanding of maturity, but it can’t get us all the way there. Social norms change, people opt out of traditional roles, or are forced to take them on way too soon. You can track the trends, but trends have little bearing on what one person wants and values. Society can only define a life stage so far; individuals still have to do a lot of the defining themselves. Adulthood altogether is an Impressionist painting—if you stand far enough away, you can see a blurry picture, but if you press your nose to it, it’s millions of tiny strokes. Imperfect, irregular, but indubitably part of a greater whole.

Julie Beck writing in The Atlantic 

Time Pressure at Work

The typical form of time pressure in organizations today is what we call “being on a treadmill” – running all day to keep up with many different (often unrelated) demands, but getting nowhere on your most important work. That’s an absolute killer for creativity. Generally, low-to-moderate time pressure is optimal for creativity. But we did find some instances in which people were terrifically creative under high time pressure. Almost invariably, it was quite different from being on a treadmill. Rather, people felt like they were “on a mission”— working hard to meet a truly urgent deadline on an important project, and protected from all other demands.

Teresa Amabile talking about her book The Progress Principle  

Lies our Culture Tells Us

College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president’s repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We’ve created a culture based on lies.    

(Among them:) Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people. We pretend we don’t tell this lie, but our whole meritocracy points to it. The message of the meritocracy is that you are what you accomplish. The false promise of the meritocracy is that you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love — that if you perform well, people will love you.      

No wonder it’s so hard to be a young adult today. No wonder our society is fragmenting. We’ve taken the lies of hyper-individualism and we’ve made them the unspoken assumptions that govern how we live.

David Brooks writing in The New York Times

The Great Mystery

The first-ever “photo” of a black hole. It’s an achievement once thought impossible, given that black holes exert such monstrous gravity that they swallow light itself. 

Over the last century, science has shown that our universe is a far stranger place than our everyday experience would suggest. Space itself is curved and warped by mass. Time slows down on an object the faster it travels. Electrons act both as particles and waves. “Entangled’’ particles seem to instantly know and react to what happens to their partner across vast distances. At the quantum level, there is no empty space: Particles constantly pop in and out of existence, creating an ephemeral quantum “foam.” At the other end of the scale, there are least 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, each containing billions of stars and probably more than a few planets where intelligent life has evolved and is puzzling over the same questions as we are. The more we discover, the more it becomes clear that our certainties, whatever they may be, are built on illusions. We live in a great mystery.  

William Falk writing in The Week Magazine 

The Gateway to Christianity

The Gateway to Christianity is not through an intricate labyrinth of dogma, but by a simple belief in the person of Christ. – William Lyon Phelps

God's son

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering. – Saint Augustine

Do people work better when they are stressed?

It’s a dangerous fallacy to say that people perform better when they’re stressed, over-extended, or unhappy. We found just the opposite. People are more likely to come up with a creative idea or solve a tricky problem on a day when they are in a better mood than usual. In fact, they are more likely to be creative the next day, too, regardless of that next day’s mood. There’s a kind of “creativity carry-over” effect from feeling good at work. 

Teresa Amabile talking about her book Do people work better when they are stressed?

Would you be Willing?

Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social interaction at Loughborough University, and her colleagues, have analysed thousands of hours of recorded conversations, from customer services to mediation hotlines and police crisis negotiation. They discovered that certain words or phrases have the power to change the course of a conversation.

People who had already responded negatively when asked if they would like to attend mediation seemed to change their minds when the mediator used the phrase, “Would you be willing to come for a meeting?” “As soon as the word ‘willing’ was uttered, people would say: ‘Oh, yes, definitely’ – they would actually interrupt the sentence to agree.” Stokoe found it had the same effect in different settings: with business-to-business cold callers; with doctors trying to persuade people to go to a weight-loss class. She also looked at phrases such as “Would you like to” and “Would you be interested in”. “Sometimes they worked, but ‘willing’ was the one that got people to agree more rapidly and with more enthusiasm.”

Rosie Ifouldwriting in The Guardian 

When Company Values Falter

When we talk about cases of clear fraud or criminal misdoing, it seems so easy to say, “What was wrong with these evil people?” But when they’re in the moment, they’re saying to themselves, “I have to do things for these investors” or “I have to do things for my employees to keep things going.” It’s the concept of escalation of commitment; at first you had very small things that would get covered up and justified, but then the amount of deception gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Theranos might be a good example of this. The people who founded that company had good intentions, right? They wanted to develop medical testing and products that would benefit the world. They believed in it. And either for the mission, for the long-term viability of the company, or for the employees, you can see how they end up making mistakes and unethical actions even though they began with good intentions.

Ken Shotts quoted in Fast Company

we are here

The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be. This idea overwhelms some people. -Anne Lamott (born April 10, 1954) 

Your Pain

Finding a different way to interact with your pain is hard. People have the most difficulty embracing the paradox of acceptance. Our instinct is to run as far away from our pain as possible, to be as safe as we can be. Making a decision to step into it rather than trying to get rid of it can be excruciatingly difficult. Feeling the intensity of those difficult, painful emotions and sensations can feel very dark and very lonely. I see it in all forms of suffering. The depression that never seems to lift, the drink that has to be drunk, the highway we cannot drive on, the hands that must be washed over and over and over. The reality is that most people are willing to embrace acceptance only when they have run out of options – when what they have been doing, often for years, simply doesn’t work anymore. This is a dark place that feels like there is no light to guide you out. It can be devastating. 

To be able to connect and embrace a lifetime’s worth of suffering in service of a valued end, that – in its very essence – is acceptance. 

Joseph Trunzo writing in Aeon 

The Hedonic Treadmill

One is weary of living in the country and moves to the city; one is weary of one’s native land and goes abroad; one is [weary of Europe] and goes to America etc.; one indulges in the fanatical hope of an endless journey from star to star. Or there is another direction, but still extensive. One is weary of eating on porcelain and eats on silver; wearying of that, one eats on gold; one burns down half of Rome in order to visualize the Trojan conflagration. This method cancels itself and is the spurious infinity.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either / Or

Riding the Wave of Boredom

It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

David Foster Wallace 

Was it an April Fools’ Joke?

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has released a rap song. 

Mosquito bites can be avoided by listening to electronic music - specifically dubstep.

DJ Khaled is TikTok’s new Chief Motivational Officer.

Google has developed an audio assistant that attempts to talk with plants. 

Tinder is introducing a Height Verification Badge.

McDonald's is adding Shake-Dipping Sauces.

Burger King has put out an Impossible Meats beefless Whopper.

Starbucks is opening new stores aimed at dogs.

The US Open to add puppies to the ballperson teams at the 2019 tournament.

New Alarm Clock App wakes you to the Sound of a Puking Dog.

Fish slime could help the development of new antibiotics, researchers say. 

Shutterstock is opening a brick-and-mortar library for stock images.

Snoop Dogg once left a sack containing £400,000 cash in a nightclub, its owner said. 

A globe company is selling a flat Earth globe.

Hasbro Has Found a Millennial-Friendly Replacement for Mr. Potato Head is is Mr. Avo Head who sports a man-bum.

A comedian with no political experience has won the most votes in the first round of Ukraine's presidential elections.

The weed-flavored cottage cheese.

Auntie Annie’s is getting into the hot yoga business.

White Castle is auctioning off a carbon-frozen burger from 1921.

Pasta air fresheners.

Scroll down to see which of the stories in this list are real.

These stories are real!

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has released a rap song.

Mosquito bites can be avoided by listening to electronic music - specifically dubstep.

Burger King has put out an Impossible Meats beefless Whopper.

Fish slime could help the development of new antibiotics, researchers say.

New Alarm Clock App wakes you to the Sound of a Puking Dog.

Snoop Dogg once left a sack containing £400,000 cash in a nightclub, its owner said.

A comedian with no political experience has won the most votes in the first round of Ukraine's presidential elections.

Embracing Life as it Is

For millennia, philosophers have understood that we don’t see life as it is; we see a version distorted by our hopes, fears, and other attachments. The Buddha said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.” Marcus Aurelius said, “Life itself is but what you deem it.” The quest for wisdom in many traditions begins with this insight. Early Buddhists and the Stoics, for example, developed practices for reducing attachments, thinking more clearly, and finding release from the emotional torments of normal mental life.

The goal is to minimize distorted thinking and see the world more accurately. When people improve their mental hygiene in this way—when they free themselves from the repetitive irrational thoughts that had previously filled so much of their consciousness—they become less depressed, anxious, and angry. 

Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt writing in The Atlantic 

Patriotism & nationalism

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism when hate of people other than your own comes first. -Charles de Gaulle

Mental illness: Out of the shadows

Mental illnesses account for more suffering and premature death in rich countries than heart disease and strokes, or than cancer. One study estimates that depression is 50% more disabling than angina, asthma or arthritis. Men with mental-health problems die 20 years earlier than those without, according to the British Medical Association, mostly from causes other than suicide. That is partly because mental illnesses make physical ones tougher to treat, and because sufferers often live less healthily. Research has linked even moderate levels of stress to lower life-expectancy. 

Half of adults with long-term mental conditions suffered their first symptoms before turning 14. Left untreated, even moderate conditions such as anxiety hurt school results and the prospects for employment. For serious conditions such as psychosis, prompt treatment greatly improves outcomes.

From The stigma of mental illness is fading in The Economist 

No one was paying attention

Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky. The stores…stayed open on Thursday nights so that people could have an extra opportunity to see what was for sale.

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

(Born March 25, 1925)

the tragic fate of most individuals

The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born, when we die, although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. -Erich Fromm (born March 23, 1900)