Maggie's Farm

There is a sort of closure when a missing person is found dead or alive. There is closure any time a question mark is resolved with a fact.

However, there is no closure to grief.  Major losses leave a hole in the soul. The sediments of time layer evenly over everything, but the depression in the ground remains for your lifetime.  WSJ (paywall, alas): Closure Really Is a Myth, A Stumbling Block to Grief - I know both professionally and from my own experience that the term “closure” isn’t only a myth, it’s an illusion that is counterproductive.

A TV station asked a guy in the Powerball line in a bodega in New York what he would do with the money if he won. He said he'd spend it on hookers and cocaine. Wonderful reply, but probably lying for the most part.

Do people focus too much about what they want, or too little? Well, everybody is different. I routinely disparage general discussions about "happiness."  I never disparage people having personal life goals or direction, as long as they can be flexible in the face of harsh realities. But there is no generic definition of any universal details of happiness, and a large category of people is only happy when unhappy, upset, stressed, or in chaos because such things sort-of organize their thinking and thus help them feel "better".

This piece makes a good point: How much pain, sacrifice, and deprivation are you willing to sustain to try to reach your goals?

Readers know that I am highly-skeptical of all reports of studies.

Everybody remembers being told, by the scientists, not to eat eggs and red meat. Of course, now that is all known to be bogus. Unless you do manual labor or are significantly underweight, there is no reason to eat grains or cereals for breakfast except for fun. Oats and cholesterol? All now known to be bogus too. And real butter is good for you.

Just one reason I distrust reports has to do with data-mining. I was once involved with a medical study which applied data-mining to a large amount of data. Inevitably, we found some correlations which passed the t-test. That's not science, but academics get papers published that way and papers can lead to grants and tenure.

Is social isolation a good or bad thing? It seems to me to depend on the reason for it. Many people do not enjoy a social life while many suffer from loneliness. It's probably a bell curve, like most things.

This report, I feel, confuses causation with correlation. That's a rookie error: How Your Relationships Affect Your Health

The explanation is here.

I am not sure why it is a mystery. Everything decays, wears out. Entropy is like gravity, and I doubt that humans in a natural environment were ever designed to live much past child-producing years (knees, ovaries, penile weakness, heart valves, loss of collagen, cancers, etc,). But we do, now. Most of us. 

Even Today, Menopause Remains a Mystery

Sixty years behind the science: Working the refs on nutrition science

To compensate for my previous holiday post, a reminder that dietary fat will not harm you. Enjoy your Christmas prime rib with Yorkshire Pudding.

A brief review: Saving Normal

The book.

No. As all docs know from their experience, being fit is no protection from the countless deleterious effects of being overweight.

I apologize for the holiday timing of this report.

Some Ways To Cope With Grief During The Holidays

Beyond Fight or Flight: Healing Intergenerational Wounds

I have argued for years that "reality-testing," which is the measure of psychosis from any cause, is a spectrum and not binary. Reality-testing has many grey areas.  I have even argued that imperfect reality-testing in some areas is a normal part of human mental life.

Most areas of mental life are far too complex to be reduced to black-and-white distinctions. I am pleased to see that others are talking about it. For example, Viewing Psychosis as a Spectrum.

I believe in Santa. Don't you?

LET SCIENCE EXPLAIN WHY YOUR COWORKERS ARE SLACKERS - THE MORE PEOPLE ON A TEAM, THE GREATER THE LIKELIHOOD THAT NOT EVERYONE WILL PULL THEIR WEIGHT.

I have noticed the same tendency in myself on occasion, and hated myself for it. Some self-loathing can be the price of self-knowledge. It is easier to forgive the faults and flaws of others than one's own.

Freud did not discover the unconscious territory of the mind, but he was a pioneer in making a methodical study of it and in proposing theories about how it worked.

100 years old and making a comeback – Freud’s theories of the unconscious