Learning to adopt

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Today’s students need universities and colleges that will help them navigate a world where constant changes are the norm and where learning how to adapt is the central problem of living and of citizenship. The idea that the college years should be primarily about potential is not idealistic or naive; it is prescient.

Caitlin Zaloom, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost 

The Problem of Mindfulness

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It’s often pragmatically useful to step away from your own fraught ruminations and emotions. Seeing them as drifting leaves can help us gain a certain distance from the heat of our feelings, so as to discern patterns and identify triggers. But after a certain point, mindfulness doesn’t allow you to take responsibility for and analyse such feelings. It’s not much help in sifting through competing explanations for why you might be thinking or feeling a certain way. Nor can it clarify what these thoughts and feelings might reveal about your character. Mindfulness, grounded in anattā, can offer only the platitude: ‘I am not my feelings.’ Its conceptual toolbox doesn’t allow for more confronting statements, such as ‘I am feeling insecure,’ ‘These are my anxious feelings,’ or even ‘I might be a neurotic person.’ Without some ownership of one’s feelings and thoughts, it is difficult to take responsibility for them.

Sahanika Ratnayake writing in Aeon

Beating the Social Media Addiction

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Since social media can be a quick or easy fix to avoid negative feelings, you can ask yourself the following questions to evaluate what you could be avoiding and may need to address in another way in your life. 

·     What are you potentially avoiding or using social media to escape from?

·     How is being on social media making you feel? Are you comparing yourself to others or using it to judge others? Does it make you feel inadequate?

·     Do you rely on social media for your self-esteem? If you only feel good about yourself when your posts gets a lot of likes, this could be you.

According to Dr. Logan Jones, psychologist and founder of NYC Therapy + Wellness, it can be helpful to evaluate this time and choose something more positive and intentional you'd rather fill your time with (like reading, workout out, or spending time with friends IRL). 

"The best way to reinforce behavior is to do more of it. So instead of saying, 'I'm not going to do social media', you can say 'I'm working on being more present.' So you want to be affirming healthy, positive things that you're doing," Jones said. 

Mercey Livingston writing in c/net

Stop riding with the brakes on

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We fear failure more than we love life, so we refuse the great adventure. We are careful to do only what we have always done and know how to do well, so we never break the dull repetition of the old routine for the new creation of God. Crawl out of these tombs and prisons - there is a world of light and freedom waiting!

Have faith in God and let life be free. Stop riding with the brakes on. The soul will never grow tied down in a bed with the shades drawn. The higher we build the barricades of caution to protect ourselves, the deeper grows the grave we call our life.

Inbuilt gullibility

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Fake news may be exacerbating people’s inbuilt gullibility. A study published last year in Science, a journal, concluded that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth” and that this effect was especially strong for fake political news. Fake news provides voters with a smorgasbord of facts and lies from which to pick and choose.

ln 2004 Drew Westen of Emory University in Atlanta put partisan Republicans and Democrats into a magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner and found that lying or hypocrisy by the other side lit up areas of the brain associated with rewards; lies by their own side lit up areas associated with dislike and negative emotions. At no point did the parts of the brain associated with reason show any response at all. If voters’ judgments are rooted in emotion and intuition, facts and evidence are likely to be secondary.

The Economist 

For the Birds

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The Christmas story absolutely escaped Tom. The whole “God born in a manger” thing was beyond him. Or maybe it was just too simple for him to grasp. At least, until that Christmas Eve when the snow began to fall. He had just settled into his fireside chair and begun to read when he heard thumping sounds on the window and at first he thought someone was throwing snowballs. He went to the door. Looking into the yard, he found a small flock of birds. Huddled there in the snow. They had been caught in the storm and had desperately tried to find shelter by flying through his large living room window.  He knew he couldn’t let those little creatures freeze. The barn! Where the children keep the pony. That would provide shelter if he could get the birds in there. 

He opened the barn doors and turned on a light. The birds didn’t move. Maybe some food would entice them. He sprinkled bread crumbs next to the stable door. Nothing. He tried catching them and shooing them.  The birds went everywhere, except into the barn. They were afraid of him. I want them to trust me he thought. How can I convince them I want to help?  Buy any move he made tended to frighten them. They would not follow or be lead or shooed. 

“If only I could be a bird myself he thought. If I could be a bird and mingle with them and speak their language and show them the way to the barn, then they could see and understand.”

It was at that moment the church bells began to ring. Listening to the good news, Tom understood and sank to his knees in the snow. 

The Happy Catastrophe

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A fire broke out backstage in a theater on opening night of a new comedy production. A clown realized the danger and pushed through the curtains to alert the audience. 

They applauded.

The clown repeated his warning more urgently. By now he was center stage, flailing his arms, his eyes wide with panic. 

The crowd went wild. Whistles. Cheers. Raucous laughter. Never had they seen such a routine!

Is this how the world ends? The human race stands in thunderous ovation, calling for an encore, convinced it’s just another happy joke.

A Look back at the Biggest Events of the 2010s

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2010

The deadliest natural disaster of the decade happens in the first month of 2010: A 7.0 earthquake hits Haiti. 

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider successfully trap anti-matter for the first time.

Another team of scientists became the first to successfully create "synthetic life.”

Apple debuts the iPad.

Instagram and Pinterest launch. 

 

2011

The death of Osama bin Laden.

The space shuttle fleet is retired.

The world’s first synthetic organ transplant.

Occupy Wall Street.

The Arab Spring rises.

The number of social media users around the world reaches 1 billion.

Google+ and Snapchat launch.

 

2012

Hurricane Sandy hits the US East Coast.

A mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado is followed months later by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

The first license is issued in the United States for a self-driven car.

 

2013

The Black lives matter hashtag is first used.

A terror attack takes place at the Boston Marathon.

The Mayan calendar reaches the end of its cycle—leading to a bit of hysteria.

Personalized DNA sequencing is available for under $100.

The Oxford English Dictionary selects “selfie” as the word of the year.

 

2014

Google Glass is launched.

The deadliest outbreak of Ebola starts in West Africa.

The US begins restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge begins.

 

2015

The first Apple watch is officially released. 

The Supreme Court strikes down state bans on same-sex marriage. 

195 countries agree to the Paris Climate Agreement.

The number of PCs used around the world reaches 2 billion (it took 30 years to reach one billion but only 8 years to reach two billion).

The number of social media users (worldwide) also reaches 2 billion.

3D printing enters the consumer market.

The New Horizons probe arrives at Pluto while Voyager I enters the heliopause (the outer edge of our solar system).

 

2016

The US gets its first female presidential nominee of a major political party.

Britons vote in favor of Brexit—the UK withdrawal from the European Union.

The Chicago Cubs ends the longest drought in baseball by winning the World Series (the last time the Cubs won a World Series was in 1908, 108 years earlier).

 

2017

TicToc is released.

Hundreds of thousands of people descended on Washington, DC for the Women's March. Though an activist first coined the phrase #MeToo back in 2006, what’s typically known as the #MeToo movement exploded in late 2017 when a New York Times article revealed accusations against an influential Hollywood producer.

 

2018 

A school shooting takes place at a high school in Parkland, Florida. 

California becoming the sixth state to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana. 

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico is left without electricity—for almost an entire year.

 

2019

Simone Biles raises her medal count to 25 world medals and 19 gold—the most of any gymnast, male or female, in history. 

Donald Trump becomes the 4th US president to face possible impeachment.

The world’s top supercomputers achieve exaflop speed—that’s a million trillion calculations per second (a thousandfold improvement over machines at the beginning of the decade).