What the Surgeon General Misses about Loneliness

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote a New York Times opinion piece two weeks ago about loneliness. He called it a “public health” problem and suggested the cause is isolation.  

The Washington Post published a follow-up article based on the significant response it got to the advisory, noting: 

Some (readers) pushed back on the notion that isolation was bad for them, describing themselves as introverts who prefer solitude or distrust others in their community.

So, on the one hand, you have people being told they are lonely, and they must be fixed, who do not see a problem themselves and aren't asking to be fixed. On the other hand, as noted by a sociologist in a Psychology Today article, the surgeon general's advisory reduces loneliness to "something people often bring on themselves." The fix for this lack of social interaction is, therefore, more social interaction. But there are "many outgoing people with active social lives (who) are lonely."  

Symptoms interpreted as caused by a lack of interaction may actually be caused by estrangement. This alienation would not be solved by additional interaction but by more meaningful connections. That is, quality instead of quantity. 

Stephen Goforth

Students’ Views on Chatbots and Cheating

A new study finds more than a third of the students surveyed regularly use AI tools like ChatGPT. Read more here or watch the video below.

You can’t Rush it

When something changes in your life—you leave a job, end a relationship, or lose someone you love—recognize that you’re now in a transition. Transitions take time to move through, and they can’t be rushed. Your identity (as an employee, partner, or friend, perhaps) will have to shift and change, as well. Be kind and accepting, and don’t expect too much of yourself as you struggle through this time.

Kira Newman writing in Greater Good

The only real mistake

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.  -John Powell

How Emotionally intelligent leaders deal with failure and setbacks

Emotionally intelligent leaders expect there to be roadblocks and emotionally prepare for them. They look for the lesson learned and don’t take setbacks personally.   To emotionally intelligent leaders, disappointments are part of their learning and development journey. They understand that these moments will ultimately help them to reach their goals.

Harvey Deutschendorf writing in Fast Company

Growing yourself

If you want to grow your business, you have to grow yourself.  -John Maxwell

Imagining the Future

I often ask people to tell me how they think they would feel two years after the sudden death of an eldest child. As you can probably guess, this makes me quite popular at parties. I know, I know—this is a gruesome exercise and I’m not asking you to do it. But the fact is that if you did it, you would probably give me the answer that almost everyone gives me, which is some variation on "Are you out of your damned mind? I’d be devastated—totally devastated. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. I might even kill myself. So who invited you to this party anyway?"

If at this point I’m not actually wearing the person’s cocktail, I usually probe a bit further and ask how he came to his conclusion. What thoughts or images came to mind, what information did he consider? People typically tell me that they imagined hearing the news, or they imagined opening the door to an empty bedroom.

But in my long history of asking this question and thereby excluding myself from every social circle to which I formerly belonged, I have yet to hear a single person tell me that in addition to these heartbreaking, morbid images, they also imagined the other things that would inevitably happen in the two years following the death of their child.

Indeed, not one person has ever mentioned attending another child’s school play, or making love with his spouse, or eating a taffy apple on a warm summer evening, or reading a book, or writing a book, or riding a bicycle, or any of the many activities that we—and that they—would expect to happen in those two years.

Now, I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that a bite of gooey candy compensates for the loss of a child. That isn’t the point. What I am suggesting is that the two-year period following a tragic event has to contain something—that is, it must be filled with episodes and occurrences of some kind—and these episodes and occurrences must have some emotional consequences.

Regardless of whether those consequences are large or small, negative or positive, one cannot answer my question accurately without considering them. And yet, not one person I know has ever imagined anything other than the single, awful event suggested by my question. When they imagine the future, there is a whole lot missing, and the things that are missing matter.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

If I Really Cared

If I really cared . . .
I’d look you in the eyes when you talk to me;
I’d think about what you’re saying rather than what I’m going to say next;
I’d hear your feelings as well as your words.

If I really cared . . .
I’d listen without defending;
I’d hear without deciding whether you’re right or wrong;
I’d ask you why, not just how and when and where.

If I really cared . . .

More of Ruth Senter’s poem

It takes courage

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. - e.e. cummings

The Secrets to Success

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure. - Colin Powell.

Courage

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005

Little Negatives

I began to analyze my own conversational habits and was shocked by what I found. I discovered that I was making such statements as “I am afraid I'll be late” or “I wonder if I'll have a flat tire” or “I don't think I can do that” or “I'll never get through this job. There's so much to do.” If something turned out badly, I might say “Oh, that's just what I expected.” Or, again, I might observe a few clouds in the sky and gloomily state, “I know was going to rain.” These are ‘little negatives” to be sure, and a big thought is of course more powerful than a little one, but it must never be forgotten that “mighty oaks from little acorns grow,” and if a mass of “little negatives” clutter up your conversation, they are bound to seep into your mind. It is surprising how they accumulate in force, and presently, before you know it, they will grow into “big negatives.”

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

Fame: The Social Currency

Merit doesn’t drive celebrity. A good story does. It gives us a common topic to feed our hunger for connection. That’s why, according to a couple of studies, some people are famous for just being famous.   

Researchers at Stanford University compared baseball players (since there are clear measures of their abilities). Even if players were well past their prime, fame drove conversations, not achievement. 

There are applications here to business and other corners of society. One of the researchers says, “It is critical to remember that the most prominent people in your organization are not always the ones producing the highest-quality work; they might just be better at selling themselves."

Read more about the study here. 

Stephen Goforth

Managing Yourself

If you understand how you think and work, you have more control over who you will become. Abilities can improve as you understand how your mind works.

Creative and critically thinking people open a conversation with themselves that allows them to understand, control, and improve their own minds and work.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Students Do

The Potential of AI using Liquid Neural Networks

Large language models like ChatGPT and Dall-E have billions of parameters, and each improved model increases in size and complexity. Researchers at an MIT lab believe artificial intelligence can make a leap forward by going smaller. Their experiments show liquid neural networks beat other systems when navigating in unknown environments. “Liquid neural networks could generalize to scenarios that they had never seen, without any fine-tuning, and could perform this task seamlessly and reliably.” They also open the proverbial black box of the system’s decision-making process, which could help to root out bias and other undesirable elements in an AI model. The results have immediate implications for robotics, navigation systems, smart mobility, and beyond toward predicting financial and medical events. Read more here.

When resting means death

Two climbers died in a weekend snowstorm on Mount Rainier. The men carried warm clothes, sleeping bags, tents, and other items. They had everything they needed to save their lives. But instead of using what they had brought with them to survive, they first sat down to rest—where they died of exposure.

The climb can be tough. In those desperate moments when exhaustion overwhelms us, we have to use the tools at our disposal so our rest will not be in vain.

Stephen Goforth

Loneliness and Giving

Most of us, driven by our own aching needs and voids, address life and other people in the stance of seekers. We become what CS Lewis, in his book, The Four Loves, calls “..those pathetic people who simply want friends and can never make any. The very condition of having friends is that we should want something else besides friends.”

Most of us know our need to be loved and try to seek the love that we need from others. But the paradox remains uncompromised; if we seek the love which we need, we will never find it. We are lost.

Love can effect the solution of our problems but we must face the fact that to be loved, we must become loveable. When a person orients his life towards the satisfaction of his own needs, when he goes out of seek the love which he needs, no matter how we try to soften our judgments of him, he is self-centered. He is not lovable, even if he does deserve our compassion, He is concentrating on himself, and as long as he continues to concentrate on himself, his ability to love will always remain stunted and he will himself remain a perennial infant.

If, however, a person seeks not to receive love, but rather to give it, he will become lovable and he will most certainly be loved in the end. This is the immutable law under which we live: concern for ourselves and convergence upon self can only isolate self and induce an even deeper and more torturous loneliness. It is a vicious and terrible cycle that closes in on us when loneliness, seeking to be relieved through the love of others, only increases. The only way we can break this cycle formed by our lusting egos is to stop being concerned with ourselves and to being to be concerned with others.

John Powell, Why Am I Afraid to Love?

Adobe’s ‘Firefly’ Joins the Generative AI Fireworks Show

Adobe’s generative AI model Firefly will create a combination of new images, text effects, and video from user descriptions. The program borrows from other Adobe programs: Express, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Similar to DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, Adobe hopes to avoid some of the legal entailments by using its own collection of images as a data set from which the AI is trained (Adobe Stock). The company hasn’t indicated how much it will cost to use Firefly and, for the moment, it remains free and in Beta.  Text-based video editing is also being integrated into Adobe Premiere Pro, 

Sabotaging Yourself

From time to time a project will come along that seems so big and challenging you start to question your ability to succeed. It could be as epic as writing a book or directing major motion picture or it could be something more pedestrian like passing a final exam or delivering an important speech to your corporate boss. Naturally, some doubts will float through your mind when ever failures possible.

Sometimes, when the fear of failure is strong, you use a technique psychologist call self-handicapping to change the course of your future emotional state. Self-handicapping behaviors are investments in a future reality in which you can blame your failure on something other than your ability.

You might wear inappropriate clothes to a job interview, or… or stay up all night drinking before work – you are very resourceful when it comes to setting yourself up to fail. If you succeed, you can say you did so despite terrible odds. If you fall short, you can blame the events leading up to the failure instead of your own incompetence or inadequacy.

When you see your performance in the outside world as an integral part of your personality, you are more likely to self-handicap. Psychologist Phillip Zombardo told the New York Times in 1984, “Some people stake their whole identity on their acts. They take the attitude that ‘if you criticize anything I do, you criticize me.’ Their egocentricity means they can’t risk a failure because it’s a devastating blow to their ego.”

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

The Base Rate Fallacy can get you in trouble

The Base Rate Fallacy comes into play when someone comes to a conclusion without considering all the relevant information. There’s a tendency to over-estimate the value of new information out of context. Consider also, an accurate test is not necessarily a very predictive test. And some facts are provably true but nevertheless can feel false when phrased a certain way. These factors can lead someone to hold misconceptions about medical tests and other data actually mean.