Thursday, January 7. 2021
I have long wanted to write a brief piece on the idea of "failure to launch", a term which has been in use for almost a generation now. I will try to keep it brief, but with not entirely-formed thoughts.
My main point is that many are not equipped to launch out into the big world to become world-beaters, or even to become well-adapted to current economic-psycho-social expectations. In my view, it is remarkable that so many are equipped and willing. It is a social expectation now but not a useful one.
Humans are tribal, family- and extended-family-oriented creatures. Every human has some gifts, and many shortcomings. Luck matters in life of course, but I do believe that "we make our own luck" if we have the temperament to do so. In my career, I have seen many flawed but talented flounder on the rocks because wealth, privilege, and family enablement made it possible.
A bit more than a century ago, and forever before that, most people worked on farms. Family farms. Life was hard before machines, but there was work for everybody in the family for generations. Occasionally, an ambitious kid would leave for the city for work or further education. With the industrial revolution, there was work for all (including kids) off the farm, at whatever level one sought to achieve. Not pleasant work in the mills until skills were achieved, but still work, contributing to the family...
Continue reading "Farms, factories, and "Failure to Launch""
Tuesday, December 15. 2020
The kerfuffle about the soon-to-be First Lady's (where did that obnoxious term come from? From some Third World dictatorship?) honorific has been amusing.
Tucker Carlson attributes it to "status anxiety." Is that a thing? Perhaps it is, for some more insecure people, whether about attractiveness, wealth, profession, education, or other. Of course, in the US physicians are given the honorific Dr. in formal settings. It is pleasant. In the UK, physicians are given the honorific "Mr." or whatever their pronoun preference is nowadays.
Jill Biden Wants Us to Call Her 'Dr.' So Here's a Look at Her Ed.D 'Position Paper' to Receive That Doctorate
Tuesday, November 24. 2020
Children of Quarantine: What does a year of isolation and anxiety do to a developing brain?
... after 37 weeks of pandemic, too many American parents are too tapped out. Decades of research has definitively shown that the presence of a responsive caregiver, especially during early childhood, when the brain is extremely plastic, is the crucial ingredient in healthy development. This stable adult attention is exponentially more meaningful when children are growing up in persistent adversity: environments of neglect, abuse, deprivation, or poverty that medical and psychological professionals call “toxic stress.”
Friday, October 16. 2020
Lots of people have a bit of oddball in them. I like them. I also like hearty, wholesome, uncomplicated people too.
This Stanford undergrad is a good writer and has a fine future. I do not view her as autistic in the usual sense, but she does have "issues" as she discusses. She has been through the entire Psychiatric gauntlet without much apparent result. Nevertheless, she is at Stanford, is obviously talented and perceptive: My Brief Spell as an (autism) Activist.
Without trying to diagnose somebody I have ever met, I think this young lady could use some basic life counseling, or life coaching if you want to call it that. There is plenty of room in the world for "outsiders."
Wednesday, September 23. 2020
Older people have become younger: physical and cognitive function have improved meaningfully in 30 years
The functional ability of older people is nowadays better when it is compared to that of people at the same age three decades ago. This was observed in a study conducted at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The study compared the physical and cognitive performance of people nowadays between the ages of 75 and 80 with that of the same-aged people in the 1990s.
Tuesday, September 22. 2020
From Dalrymple:
While I feel guilt for my own bad actions or omissions, the kinds of things that are under my direct control, I do not feel guilt that my own life has been a comparatively fortunate one, probably more fortunate than that of the majority of mankind. On the contrary, I feel gratitude, or perhaps, more accurately, I should say gladness. I feel sorrow for the unfortunate, but not guilt toward them since I am not responsible for their sorrows. True, I did nothing to deserve having the opportunities that I have had, but I did nothing not to deserve them, either. I took the world as I found it and for me to feel guilty about my comparative good fortune would be a sign not of moral sensitivity or virtue, but of moral grandiosity. Moral grandiosity has probably done more harm in the world than indifference, inasmuch as it recognizes no limits to its power to bring about a supposedly better world.
Friday, September 11. 2020
Young women tend to have little problem with sexual delights as long as their partner is not a dud or a selfish jerk.
Middle-aged women (40-65) tend to be more readily orgasmic. It is hormonal, in part. Women in good health remain capable of sexual delight and orgasm until death, but the climaxes are not the same. Still satisfying, but not the screaming or moaning ones of a 35 year-old.
Healthy men over 60 tend to have a decline in sex drive and performance, but not in sexual/romantic interest. It's complicated. It is age, hormonal issues, and other things. Men are, biologically, more excited by fertile females of course, but bonding with the wife is important. She's right there, and willing. With age (say, over 70 or 75) things are not what they were at 40 but men are still capable of, and needful of, romantic and sexual pleasure.
It is a component of life happiness.
Yes, you can have better sex in midlife and in the years beyond. If sustaining intimacy is becoming more difficult, there are many approaches that can help.
Tuesday, September 8. 2020
Why Women Lose Interest in Sex. Loss of sexual desire is women's biggest sexual problem, and it's not all in their heads.
Sex drive, which doctors prefer to term "libido," refers to a biological urge to mate, or to find sexual stimulation or release in non-relational ways.
Sex drive, if not sexual interest, declines with age in men and women but I joke that a "dirty old man" is just an ordinary young man trapped in an older body and that there is no comparable term for women.
I do not consider it to be a "disorder" when some post-menopausal women lose their youthful needs and desires because it is all variance of normal based on hormonal changes, relational issues, physical issues, fitness issues, etc etc.
My ideal, though, is for women and men to maintain a fun sex life of some sort for a lifetime.
PS: When in med school one time they showed us a video of elder porn. It was a couple in their 80s having fun with eachother and laughing in bed. It was eye-opening to us kids. A good thing.
Friday, September 4. 2020
Ben Aldridge knew he was an anxious guy so he devoted a year to overcoming his fears and avoidances.
Not with psychotherapy, not with meds, but with a determination to overcome his weaknesses: How to Be Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable: 43 Weird & Wonderful Ways to Build a Strong, Resilient Mindset
Friday, July 31. 2020
Studies about romantic relationships, which marriages supposedly are, never seem able to capture the complexities of chemistry, compatability, and partnering.
Sexual issues, financial issues, disagreements, emotional issues and frailties, etc etc all beset the basically unnatural notion of lifetime monogamous bonding. In Western cultures, committment is important cement, but how often is it, really?
Good friendships can easily last a lifetime, thank God. That's partly because you do not live with them and have to deal with their flaws every day. Friendships are essential in life, I believe. No one partner can meet all of our relational wants, supports, comraderie, and enjoyments.
A relationship study: A landmark study shows what makes a successful relationship
Wednesday, July 29. 2020
Summing up personality types, or at least dominant personality traits, in a simple phrase has probably gone on as long as language has existed. "That guy's a jerk - stay away."
Theophrastus (370-285 BC), a student of Aristotle and a botanist among other things, made a list of the types which have been used in drama ever since. They are of course one-dimensional character types (we could term them stereotypes) but I think we all use phrases similar to those to describe people: The Flatterer and the Chatterer
Sunday, July 26. 2020
A friend told me about the Karpman Drama Triangle.
It's a model for (dysfunctional) family dynamics. One aspect of the model is that the Victim is not necessarily a literal victim, but one who assumes the victim role.
Wednesday, July 22. 2020
You can make arguments about the de-institutionalization of chronically mentally ill patients, but the medicines used for treatment of the various sorts of schizophrenia have highly-variable results. What we group under "schizophrenia" is not unitary and, furthermore, this rough category of psychoses is a brain-wiring issue and not a primarily chemical one.
Furthermore, many patients do not like to take medicine. You can't force them to, under ordinary conditions.
The other category of severe mental illness, Bipolar Disorder, is thankfully readily medically and psychotherapeutically managed now in people who are willing to follow a treatment program.
I do not agree with several points made in this piece, but I do not feel that jails and homeless tents are good approaches to severe mental illness.
Friday, June 26. 2020
Thanks in no small part to Youmans’s Spencerian pump, the scientific method permeated American popular culture and influenced the major American intellectual movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably pragmatism and behaviorism. These movements’ most important figures—including Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and, later, B.F. Skinner—developed their ideas about “the scientific method” partly in the pages of The Popular Science Monthly and its 1915 spinoff, The Scientific Monthly. In the series of articles introducing the philosophy of pragmatism, Peirce granted a monopoly on truth to “the scientific method,” which consisted of restricting one’s conception of a thing to its sensible effects. This method alone, Peirce promised, would carry people past their diverse points of view to converge upon a single, certain answer to any question, “like the operation of destiny.”
Tuesday, June 9. 2020
How to manage impossible problems. It's a bit of an oldie, but a goodie: F- Feelings.
Many people have found it to be helpful, clarifying.
Wednesday, June 3. 2020
It's coming to a DSM near you one of these days: Orthorexia nervosa. You may find many victims of this disorder in the socially-distanced lines at Whole Foods. It's a harmless preoccupation other than the risk of annoying or boring your friends.
Another one is Binge Eating, aka Binge Eating Disorder. These are people who will ask for seconds, or eat ravenously until the food is gone. Historically it was just called the sin of gluttony, but now it's a diagnosis. It is interesting to me how various behaviors, maybe once attributed to demons, later to sins, are now DSM diagnoses.
Tuesday, June 2. 2020
Does a "mind" even exist? It seems to me that it does, but the concept of mind has a history.
Scott Alexander reviews a 20 year-old book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Wednesday, May 13. 2020
I am used to working from home. I have done it once a week for close to 6 years, sometimes twice a week, but rarely that often. I was much more productive working from home that often. It helps reset your mind, helps keep you out of office politics, is relaxing and allows you to concentrate.
That said, I've now been working from home for 2 months straight. I'm comfortable doing it, but I will admit the productivity question is an odd one, and I would like to know if others think they are more productive, about the same, or less so.
Here is how I view the situation. I'm about as productive as I was at the office, but I take more time doing the work because I have to. So, by that standard, I'm LESS productive. I find myself working earlier and later, with more breaks than I would have at the office. Most of my daily 'ad-hoc' work shows up at 5pm, as people realize things need to get finished or as the West Coast sends in requests prior to end of day. I don't like to leave my work undone for the day, I prefer an empty email when I shut down. However, this situation is such that I've found myself responding to emails at 11pm, even midnight.
Working from home reduces access to co-workers who may have answers or assist (it takes longer for them to respond), it reduces access to information (the rapidity at which we shifted limited how many files I was able to move to a shared drive), it reduces brainstorming opportunities, it reduces camaraderie (sorry, Zoom meetings 'for fun' are not fun in any way, shape or form).
So I'm curious - how has the lockdown affected those of you who are working from home? More, less or the same in terms of productivity?
Thursday, February 20. 2020
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