Your "unlived life"

"The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live."

~ Carl Jung

"Good theatre gives you a significant cheat code for accessing human thinking and behaviour"

"The most important rule of theatre [says an old theatre adage] is that the king is never played by the actor playing the king, but by all the other actors around him.'...
    "The greatest playwrights know everything about human nature not because they have some mystical, clairvoyant insight into you or me, but due to the structural constraints of their format: in order for tragedies to work — for problems, decisions, and plot twists to be accepted by the audience as true — the writers must learn to tweak the interactions between the characters until those seem logical and believable to all. Accessing good theatre gives you a significant cheat code for accessing human thinking and behaviour. Read Sophocles, watch Laurence Olivier’s Shakespeare adaptations, see Molière or Chekhov on stage, enter a book club debate about Brecht, David Mamet or Yasmina Reza, and you will experience many 'Aha!' moments that will be assets in your subsequent life. 

    "You will also, of course, feel aesthetic pleasure and what Aristotle calls catharsis* ... which is why most people engage with plays in the first place. The great knowledge that you will be gifted is just the bonus."

~ Anna Gát from her post 'Tyranny as Tragedy'

* Increasingly, the interpretation of catharsis as "intellectual clarification" rather than the more commonly held "emotional purgation" has gained recognition in describing the effect of catharsis. 

"Without doubt 'katharsis' [in the original Greek spelling] is the most celebrated concept in the entire field of literary criticism" says Leon Golden, yet Aristotle, in The Poetics, his work on aesthetics, "provided neither a definition nor a commentary for this key term". "That katharsis is meant to represent some form of moral [or emotional] purification has been held [widely] ... [but] there is not a single word in The Poetics itself to justify it." Golden argues that what Aristotle meant by the word is "the intellectual pleasure of learning" — and so "'katharsis' in The Poetics should not be translated as 'purgation' or 'purification' but, rather, as 'intellectual clarification'."

Laughter

 

"Laughter is a reflex, but unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose; one might call it a luxury reflex. Its only function seems to be to provide relief from tension.
    "The[re] ... is a striking discrepancy between the nature of the stimulus and that of the response in humorous transactions.
    "When a blow beneath the kneecap causes an automatic upward kick, both 'stimulus' and 'response' function on the same primitive physiological level, without requiring the intervention of the higher mental functions. But that such a complex mental activity as reading a page of Thurber should cause a specific reflex contraction of the facial muscles is a lopsided phenomenon that has puzzled philosophers since Plato. ...
    "Humour is the only form of communication in which a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a stereotyped, predictable response on the physiological reflex level. Thus the response can be used as an indicator for the presence of the elusive quality that is called humour—as the click of the Geiger counter is used to indicate the presence of radioactivity.
    "Such a procedure is not possible in any other form of art; and, since the step from the sublime to the ridiculous is reversible, the study of humour provides clues for the study of creativity in general."

~ Arthur Koestler, composite quote from his book Act of Creation and his entry on 'Humour' in Encyclopaedia Britannica —using "dense academia-speak" to say that humour has psychological benefits [Cartoons by Thurber. Hat tip Gordon McLauchlan's Acid Test]

Neurotic v psychotic

"A psychotic is an out-and-out loon. He may think his father is poisoning his yoghurt, that his wife is planning to strangle him with noodles, or that the US Government should flood Las Vegas with soda water.

    "A neurotic on the other hand is a determined sufferer, afflicted by things like depressed cuticles, a fear of pistachio nuts or underarm humidity. 

    "To put it most simply, a psychotic thinks two plus two equals seven ... A neurotic knows that two plus two equals four — but he just can't stand it."

~ Leo Rosten from his novel Dear Herm [hat tip Gordon McLauchlan's Acid Test]

"The doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people

"Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth.' ...

"Even popular culture sometimes promotes this apocalyptic degrowth mindset to children. ...

"Not only is the embrace of degrowth misguided, but research suggests that this doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people. ... [T]hat anxiety is international: A study from 2021, surveying 10,000 children and young people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, found that 59 percent of respondents were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45 percent of respondents said those feelings negatively affected daily life and basic functioning.

Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth'...

"Instead of rushing to solutions that require lowering living standards via coercive government mandates or expensive taxpayer-funded subsidies, we should focus on the freedom to make technological advances that raise our standard of living while also mitigating environmental harm. An advantage of that approach is that it may also improve the mental health of young people..."

~ Chelsea Follett from her post 'The Kids Need Optimism, Not Doom and Degrowth'

"What is troubling isn’t just the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time."

"The perverse outcomes resulting from adults seeking to protect children range from the mildly idiotic ... to the morally questionable ... Last week our current Prime Minister and the MP for Tukituki (Hastings), Catherine Wedd, added to this list with a proposal to prevent those under 16 from accessing social media.

"This will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are. Leadership is knowing when to say no ...

"Professor Jonathan Haidt has compiled compelling research on the malign impact of social media on young minds. [In actual fact, not at all compelling - Ed] ...

"Thanks to the work of Haidt and others, responsible — and even irresponsible — parents know of this issue and act accordingly. If we were governed by a party that believed in Individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility and limited government, that is where this story would end. ... [Instead] girls being mean to each other on Snapchat requires central government legislation ...

"What is troubling isn’t [just] the idiocy of the legislation, but that Luxon didn’t instinctively understand that it wasn’t the role of the state to monitor children’s screen time. ..."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'Banning under 16s from social media will prove popular. Foolish ideas often are'

What Donald Trump is really after.

The commentariat has spilled a lot of electronic ink in recent years trying to deduce what Donald Trump is really after.

Is it just power?

            ...influence?

            ... to truly make America great again?

Is he just deluded about tariffs/deficits/the Constitution/history/economics/every other thing within range?

            ... or is it all because he has mummy issues?

            ... or because the short-fingered vulgarian really swings a short sword?

It seems clear to me that it's all pretty simple really.  You can see what he's really after right here:

It's as simple as that. The stupid, orange bastard just likes to be noticed. To be talked about. To have his name on everyone's lips.

"Likes"? No, it's more than "likes." The narcissist craves excessive attention and validation from others. He insists on constant praise and recognition.  He demands lackies who follow orders, abase themselves, kiss the ring. Sound familiar?

As we can all see, the Toddler-in-Chief obviously doesn't even care why he's talked about. The only thing worse would not to be talked about.

Can we avoid it?

Let's not ban social media for sub-16-year olds

WHEN AUSTRALIA PASSES LEGISLATION, we're often not far behind.

Australia's Orwellianly titled Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act was passed last year. 

The Act's aim is to ban under 16-year olds from social media.

The social media ban was rushed through Parliament with no real inquiry into the nature of the problem it was supposed to solve or the likely effects of a ban. Evidence from mental health experts on the question of whether and how social media use is harmful is at best inconclusive, as far as I can determine.
    But the advocates of a ban haven’t worried too much about that. They’ve relied on casual correlation and on the testimony of instant experts, with no particular expertise in the mental health of young people. ... most notably Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.

Twenge peddles bullshit based on so-called "generational analysis"— on the assumption that being a "millennial"/"Gen Z"/"Gen Y"/"Gen Jones" is any more effective than astrology. (Indeed, as one review of her latest book concludes, "for serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive.”)

Jonathan Haidt is other alleged expert relied upon. Haidt was good on teenagers' need for more independence — here he is not only bad at the data, but is arguing against his own earlier conclusion. In Mike Masnick's summary of the situation:

Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored 'The Coddling of the American Mind. 'In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.
    This year, he’s back with a new book, 'The Anxious Generation,' arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.
    Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.

"Unfortunately for those seeking an easy solution," says Masnick "the data doesn’t support Haidt’s conclusions."

[A]s a quick summary: he’s wrong on the data, which undermines his entire argument. Almost every single expert in the field who does actual research on these issues says so. Candice Odgers ripped apart his misleading use of data in Nature. Andrew Przybylski, who has done multiple, detailed studies using massive amounts of data going back years, and keeps finding little to no evidence of the things Haidt claims, has talked about the problems in Haidt’s data. Ditto Jeff Hancock, at Stanford, who recently helped put together the National Academies of Sciences report on social media and adolescent health (which also did not find what Haidt found).
    Indeed, one thing that came up in looking over the “strongest” research in the book was that (contrary to some of Haidt’s claims), data outside of the US on suicide rates seem to show they’re often (not always) going down, not up. Even worse, the data on depression in the US showing an increase in depression rates among kids is almost certainly due to changes in screening practices for depression and how suicide ideation is recorded.
    As my review notes, though, the problems with the data are only the very beginning of the problems with the book. Because, in the first part of the book, Haidt misleadingly throws around all the data, but in the latter part, he focuses on his policy recommendations.

It's those very policy recommendations that Australia has just followed! 

It's not just pseudo-psychology based on bad data: "even his former co-author, Greg Lukianoff, pointed out that Haidt’s proposals clearly violate [the US's] First Amendment."

So fast and loose on both data and free speech!

CANDICE ODGERS IS ONE researcher whose data, she says, from "studies on the impact of phones and social media on children, including a 'study of studies,' conclude that social media is good for some kids, helping them find like-minded individuals. It’s mostly neutral for many kids, and problematic for only a very small group (studies suggest less than 10 percent)." In other words, as she notes in her review of Haidt’s book 

the evidence suggests the causality is likely in the other direction.

Ouch.

A recent debate pitted Odgers against Haidt, where — as he watched his argument crumble — he had to admit that she knows the data better than he.

This matters, because this bullshit will be coming here soon. You can count on it.

A judge in a Florida court this week summarises how absurd the bullshit is.  Masnick commentates the brawl:

The transcript reads like a master class in dismantling moral panic arguments. When Florida’s lawyers stood up in court to defend the law, they reached for what they clearly thought was their strongest argument: “Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms.”

But Judge Mark Walker, chief judge of the Northern District of Florida, wasn’t buying what Florida was selling. His response cut straight to the heart of why these kinds of claims deserve skepticism, and some of it was based on his own childhood experience on the other side of a moral panic:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms. This is a mental health —

THE COURT: It was well known when I was growing up that I was going to become a Satanist because I played Dungeons & Dragons. Is that — I don’t know what really that means. You can say that there’s studies, Judge, and you can’t ignore expert reports that say X.

The D&D reference isn’t just an amusing comeback — it’s a federal judge explaining through personal experience why courts shouldn’t accept “everybody knows” arguments about harm to children. After all, lots of things have been “well known” to harm children over the years. It was “well known” that chess made kids violent. Or that the waltz would be fatal to young women, or that the phone would prevent young men from ever speaking to young women again. I could go on with more examples, because there are so many.

When Florida’s lawyer tried to argue that social media was somehow different — that this time the moral panic was justified — Judge Walker was ready with historical receipts:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Kids weren’t reading comics — millions and millions of kids weren’t reading comics eight hours a day. Millions and millions of kids weren’t listening to rap music eight hours a day. There’s something different going on here, and there’s a consensus —

THE COURT: The problem, Counsel, that’s a really bad example, the comics, because there is an entire exhibit in Glasgow where they barred comics in the entire country because somebody decided that comics were turning their youth against their parents and were causing them to engage and worship the supernatural and stuff.

So, I mean, I guess that was the point the plaintiffs were making is from the beginning of time, we’ve targeted things under some belief that it’s harming our youth, but doesn’t necessarily make it so.

But, go ahead.

That trailing “but, go ahead” is savage. I think I’d rather curl up in a ball and try to disappear in the middle of a courtroom than “go ahead” after that.

"A central purpose is your top productive goal"

"A central purpose is your top productive goal. It’s stylised and utterly selfish ...     To refresh your recollection,'a central purpose is the long-range goal that constitutes the primary claimant on a man’s time, energy, and resources.' (Leonard Peikoff, OPAR)
    "A central purpose is important to adults of all ages, whether you are starting out, mid-career, or retired. If you want to lead a happy, selfish life, you need to integrate your values. You do this through a properly set and pursued central purpose. ...
    "Done right, a central purpose provides three psychological benefits:It simplifies everyday decision-making by clarifying your top priority and setting a standard for judging lesser ones
    "It connects mundane actions to a selfish end, thereby making them meaningful and motivating
    "It ensures you make visible progress across the years of your life, rather than falling into a rut or burning out ...
    "Recently I’ve been chewing how a central purpose makes you happier, and I thought I’d share my current perspective on that.

"1. A central purpose can transform routine work into a rich source of values
"A long-range goal makes the difference in whether productive work provides spiritual fuel or not. ... If you view work as 'punching the clock' to get money, it may fill your stomach, but it will not fill your soul.   But you can make any honest work into soul-nourishing activity by linking it to your central purpose. ...

"2. A central purpose is essential to reducing internal conflict
"... You feel conflict when you are pulled in two directions and either you don’t want to decide or you can’t decide which direction to go. This is particularly problematic for people who have a 'flat' value-hierarchy, meaning all of their values are of similar importance. ...
    "You need strong values to experience great joy. When you choose a central purpose, you create a standard for prioritising your values. This makes it easier to choose between them. ...

"3. A central purpose adds deep meaning to your life
"... The only source of meaning for your life that is entirely under your volitional control is your central purpose. It is your choice of what you want to create with your life. It is your vision of the future that you commit to. With a central purpose, you decide what would be meaningful. That it’s your long-range goal can make the journey itself become meaningful."

~ Jean Moroney, from her posts 'How a Central Purpose Integrates Your Life' and 'Three Ways a Central Purpose Makes You Happier'

"The whole cultural focus on psychological flaws distracts from what’s really important to a human life going well"

Image created by Gina Gorlin by Open AI's DALL-E

"Great poetry and literature are [said to be] spurred by depression. Great leaders are [said to be] enabled by narcissism. Great performers—founders, athletes, musicians—function through myopic obsession and cut-throat competitiveness. Insecurity, the need to prove oneself, impels the exceptional.
    "This constellation of narratives is commonplace, including in Silicon Valley. ...
    "This narrative is wrong; not just a little wrong, but wrong wrong. Empirically, it ignores the mountains of evidence that psychopathology impairs human performance. Philosophically, it implies that vice, not virtue, is the source of human greatness.
    "But the ubiquity of this narrative does draw attention to an important truth: highly salient, very real human flaws, even if they are not enablers of greatness, are not showstoppers for greatness. ...
    "[There's always interest in flawed creators such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman or Steve Jobs] —almost as if their flaws are the most interesting thing about them.
    "But—and I say this as a clinical psychologist—their flaws aren't actually that interesting. ... What’s really interesting, interesting because it is extraordinary, is what these people have been able to achieve even despite and in the presence of these flaws. Greatness is not facilitated by flaws; but it also plainly does not require one to 'fix oneself' first.... [turns out] flawlessness is a faulty metric for human perfection.

    "The whole cultural focus on flaws—whether through the lens of 'flaws make us great or 'flaws make us terrible'—distracts from what’s really important to a human life going well. Life poses us with all kinds of problems, our own faults being among them. But personal faults are not magically privileged as the most worthwhile problems. The point of life is not to minimise faults, the point is to live. To reap all the joy and fulfillment we can from our limited time on this earth. In other words: life is ultimately about what we build, not what we escape or minimise.
    "And it turns out we can build a great deal even in the presence of serious weaknesses, if we set building as the thing that drives us.... To really unlock ... full flourishing, [we] need a more fundamental paradigm shift: from 'I’m broken, how do I fix myself?' to 'This is my one precious life, how do I make it awesome?' ...
    "As to the flawed ... giants of the world: instead of attacking or defending their flaws—or elevating those flaws to the level of pseudo-virtues that will only cause pain in their confused emulators—let us study the workings of their outsize human agency, and therein find the inspiration and courage to cultivate our own."

~ Dr Gina Gorlin, from her post 'Your flaws matter less than you think'

"...it reflects a man’s deepest values; it is experienced by him as a sense of his own identity."

"[T]he myth of a supernatural recorder from whom nothing can be hidden, who lists all of a man’s deeds ... That myth is true, not existentially, but psychologically. The merciless recorder is the integrating mechanism of a man’s subconscious; the record is his sense of life. ....
   "What he does not know is that every day of his life is judgment day — the day of paying for the defaults, the lies, the contradictions, the blank-outs recorded by his subconscious on the scrolls of his sense of life. And on that kind of psychological record, the blank entries are the blackest sins.
    "A sense of life, once acquired, is not a closed issue. It can be changed and corrected — easily, in youth, while it is still fluid, or by a longer, harder effort in later years. Since it is an emotional sum, it cannot be changed by a direct act of will. It changes automatically, but only after a long process of psychological retraining, when and if a man changes his conscious philosophical premises.
    "Whether he corrects it or not, whether it is objectively consonant with reality or not, at any stage or state of its specific content, a sense of life always retains a profoundly personal quality; it reflects a man’s deepest values; it is experienced by him as a sense of his own identity."

~ Ayn Rand, from her article 'Philosophy and Sense of Life' (collected in her book The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature)

"Productive work forms the essential basis of a person’s mental health"

Pic from 'Building the Builders'

"You might think there’s something counterintuitive in these findings: shouldn’t patients be able to make more progress toward their mental health goals when they don’t need to worry about showing up to work each day? But what this intuition misses is that doing productive work—bringing something valuable into the world by one’s own focused efforts—forms the essential basis of a person’s mental health.
    "I’d even go so far as to say it forms the essential basis of a person."

~ Dr. Gena Gorlin, from her article 'The best way to build yourself is to build'

Beware psychotherapy most when it works

"Jaundiced perceptions aside, [psycho]therapy’s role in modern life is no joke.... Nearly a quarter of America has been in therapy in the past 12 months ...
    "[P]sychology’s efficacy is a matter of some importance. Yet this is where we encounter an irony—it may be that psychotherapy is most dangerous when it works....
    "The most eyebrow-raising trend in modern counseling might be termed ideological therapy, wherein social justice bleeds into psychology (as it seems to bleed into everything these days). Members of this counselling camp vow to help members of this or that identity group cope with racism, sexism, or other grievance-based identitarian concerns. This, of course, presupposes that society is patriarchal, racist, and/or otherwise riven, and that the need for change resides structurally in society and not in the mind of the patient.
    "In this instance, therapy not only lacks a social conscience, but actively sells the message that society is the oppressive root of all evil....
    "The minute therapists 'put their own ideological biases ahead of the client, they become activists, not therapists,' [academic psychologist Matt Grawitch] tells me. In the process, they do their patient a disservice. Are you better off acquiring the coping skills to deal with the giant rabbit that visits your room at night ... or being led on a process of discovery that reveals it to be an illusion? ....
    "To believe that psychotherapy is working as advertised would require us to believe that the nation’s unprecedented mental-health challenges would be much worse were it not for therapy. That seems a stretch."

~ Steve Salerno, from his post 'Beware Psychotherapy That Works'

“ You could create a whole theory of psychology and social theory based on dividing people into these two groups”

 

“People often talk about [university] as a rite of passage. But I believe the bigger transition is leaving your home town behind. You could create a whole theory of psychology and social theory based on dividing people into two groups: (1) Individuals who leave their home town at the end of their youth, and (2) those who stay.”

~ Ted Gioia, from his post ‘ How 'American Graffiti' Invented Classic Rock (and Changed My Life)’

"The Need for Therapeutic Architecture in Today’s Society"

New post over at my architecture blog: "The Need for Therapeutic Architecture in Today’s Society"

A slice:

"With the rise in mental illness there is an increasingly strong need for therapeutic spaces," writes architect Abigail Freed. "Therapeutic architecture," she argues "lessens the need for the typical patient-doctor relationship. The space itself becomes the 'therapeutic apparatus'."

What a fascinating idea!

Read on here ...  

Change ...

"They always say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself."

~ Andy Warhol

"Age segregation is ... a blind spot in today’s culture."

"Age segregation is weird and new.
    "This is a blind spot in today’s culture. While we abhor any other kind of segregation, we think of age segregation as natural. You don’t have an all-ages soccer team! [Instead y]ou have the 7-year-olds at 11 a.m. and the 8-year-olds at noon.... [D]on’t buy into the idea that a young kid around older kids will be bullied. Or that an older kid interacting with young ones will be socially or intellectually stunted. Kids are hardwired to grow up interacting with a wide swath of ages....
    "I am a research psychologist, interested in play. My work has convinced me that age-mixed play is qualitatively different from play among children who are all similar in age. It is more nurturing, less competitive, often more creative, and it offers unique opportunities for learning. Throughout most of human history, age-mixed play was the norm. Only with the advent of age-graded schooling and, even more recently, of age-graded, adult-supervised activities outside of school, have children and adolescents been deprived of opportunities to play with others across the whole spectrum of ages. In the course of human evolution, play came to serve its educational functions in age-mixed settings; I contend that it still serves those functions best in such settings....
    "In the name of fun, the older participants naturally, and often unconsciously, erect 'scaffolds' that allow younger ones to stretch and build their physical, social, and intellectual skills. Motivation is no problem in such learning....
    "The benefits of age-mixed play go in both directions. In interactions with younger ones, older children exercise their nurturing instincts and take pride in being the mature person in a relationship. They also consolidate and expand their own knowledge through teaching....
    "Age segregation deprives [children] not only of fun, but also of the opportunity to use fully their most powerful natural tools for learning."

~ combined quote from Lenore Skenazy's post 'How a 14-Year-Old Genius Developed Genius Social Skills' and Dr Peter Gray's post 'The Value of Age-Mixed Play'

"Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths"

"There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group.... But I think there’s more going on here ... there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups.
 

   ""[T]een mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue... [but we can't ignore that] 'progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophising is a good way to get what they want'.... on the other side of the political spectrum, there was 'the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.' The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men ... The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred ...
    "The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy..

 

   "... I think the messages young, liberal women are hearing (every day, around the clock) are doing them no good.
    "Seemingly learning to view every single interaction through an intersectionalist lens, while searching for the ways in which you're being victimised by everyone on the planet who disagrees with you, makes you depressed. Crazy.
    "The 4Chan backlash was always inevitable (and is equally self-pitying and responsibility-denying).
I really feel for kids today. Instinctively I know the answer is to retreat from it all and engage with the world in a more physical, productive way, but opportunities to do that are dwindling'....

    "Thinking of ourselves as oppressed or infirm may inadvertently cultivate what psychologists call an external locus of control. Locus of control is a psychological concept articulated in the 1950s by Julian Rotter. Those with an internal locus of control experience themselves as able to influence outcomes that affect them. Those with an external locus of control feel that most of what happens to them is beyond their ability to affect.

    "Though both external and internal loci of control confer advantages and disadvantages, research has shown that having an internal locus of control is associated with less stress and better health, whereas having an external locus of control is correlated with anxiety disorders. Importantly, an internal locus of control appears to be a decisive factor in determining whether one will be psychologically resilient. As a society, therefore, it is in our interest to cultivate an internal locus of control, and indeed, the popular notions of grit and mindset are undergirded by locus of control theory. However, some [online and educational] environments [have been] fostering its opposite.....

    "In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
    "They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
    "They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
    "They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3)....

     "[And yet c]reating a society in which we are encouraged to confront anxiety and face difficult realities matters not just for the mental health of individuals, but also for our collective well-being. In the world that soon awaits us, humankind will desperately need those individuals willing to rise from their beds. The challenges that loom ahead will require us to set aside timidity, weakness, and victimhood and claim instead agency and boldness, no matter how grim the odds."

~ composite quote from Lisa Marchiano and her article 'Collision with Reality: What Depth Psychology Can Tell us About Victimhood Culture,' Jonathan Haidt, from his article 'Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest,' and comment by Ria Parkinson [hat tip Paul Litterick and Ria Parkinson]

"Psychologically, [the goal] is the erosion of ambition."

 

"Politically, the goal of today's dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.
    "The political goal presupposes the two others."

~ Ayn Rand, from her essay 'Tax Credits for Education,' included in the collection The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought  [hat tip Society for Reason]

 

Eco-Anxiety: "The kids are not alright"

[Pic from Zion Lights]

"The kids are not alright.
    "I know how they feel. I was anxious about the state of the planet from a young age and did everything I could to make a difference. I know many people think of activists as attention-seekers, and certainly, some of them have problems with inflated egos, but I was never driven by narcissism. I was driven by fear.
    "Anxiety, a feeling of helplessness, and fear.
    "Now that fear is widespread....
    "Out of desperation and fear, eco-anxious individuals are joining mainstream climate activist groups. I understand why: I’ve been there, done that, bought the rhetoric. But after two decades of taking action, it’s become clear that some groups are doing more harm than good....
    "The idea of being on a special mission to save humanity is one of the things that makes it so difficult to leave. We have a cause to win, only it isn’t winnable in any real sense, which means we are also trapped....
    "The late statistician Hans Rosling liked to point out that most people around the world incorrectly believe that the world is getting worse, when the contrary is true in many respects. In reality, data shows that extreme poverty is on the decline, access to education is on the rise, and global child mortality is on the decline.
    "This is crucial information for the young people who will inherit the world’s problems. How can we address important issues if we don’t understand what they are? And how can we reach out to people who have already succumbed to doomerism?
    "It is difficult, but not impossible....
    "As a mother of two young daughters, I do not wish to see my children, or their friends, experience eco-anxiety because they have been convinced that they don’t have a future....
    "The most powerful preventative method is to tell children positive stories about how much humankind has already achieved. This may not come naturally to you, but if you’re not doing it, you’re only a few steps away from doomerist territory yourself.
    "For many years I was surrounded by people who believe that humankind is a virus on the planet and that people deserve to be eradicated. This dark ideology is more common than you think, and it is easily reinforced by relentless bad news in the media. We must learn to tell better stories about humanity. Celebrate humankind and all of our achievements, and share this with your children. Because the truth is that the humans are alright."

~ Zion Lights, from her post 'In an era of eco-anxiety, how do we protect young people from the lure of doomerism?'