Posts Tagged ‘depression’
Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships
By many measures, it would seem that we are not okay, and, more specifically, that the kids are not, in fact, alright.(1) These measures include rates of isolation, loneliness, unhappiness, self-harm, burnout, anxiety, depression, etc. I am not a social scientist, but, as best as I can judge, the findings are well-attested, and they are…
Read MoreFrom ‘Progress’ to an Economics of Happiness
If there’s one thing I’d love world leaders to think about in connection with the UN’s International Day of Happiness, it’s that their measure of progress actually goes up with unhappiness and unrest. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, which is still used as the principal indicator for development and progress, simply measures the exchange of…
Read MoreAttending to the world
“Attention discourse” is my term for the proliferation of articles, essays, books, and op-eds about attention and distraction in the age of digital media. I don’t mean the label pejoratively. I’ve made my own contributions to the genre, in my newsletter and elsewhere, and as recently as May of last year. In fact, I tend…
Read MorePutting technology in its place
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Read MoreIndigenous and feminine wisdom: an interview with Ella Noah Bancroft
Ella Noah Bancroft is a descendant of the peoples of the Bundjalung nation (in present-day Australia) and has bloodlines to England, Poland and Scotland. She is an Indigenous artist, storyteller, mentor and active advocate for The Decolonization movement. She is the founder of the not-for-profit event The Returning, which works to reconnect people back to…
Read MoreBirdsong as a Compass
The booming call of the Pheasant Coucal is soft and rhythmic on a calm, springtime afternoon. I first noticed it in 2004, when I was eight years old. From the window of our old weatherboard house, I spotted the bird splayed out on top of the wire fence, calling out into the bushland: He has…
Read MoreNot Giving up on Happiness: Care of the Self and Well-Being in a Plague Year
The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the Great Depression and World War II). My father is 90 and when I called him a child of…
Read MoreTechnology and Its Discontents
Tucked within the pages of the January issue of the Agriview, a monthly farm publication published by the State of Vermont, was a short survey from the Department of Public Service (DPS). Described as an aid to the Department in drafting their “Ten Year Telecom Plan”, the survey contains eight questions, the first seven of…
Read MoreLivin’ the Screen Life: #productsmakemehappy
Important official legal disclaimer: This is a short work of fiction. Any resemblances to real people, people you may know, people you think you may know, etc., is entirely deliberate. When I’m at work I’m staring at a screen. When I’m not at work I’m staring at screens. Checking social media. Scrolling through updates. Scrolling…
Read MoreGlobalization and the American Dream
This blog is also available in Spanish. “… America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being – confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future-oriented – is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced.” — Dinesh D’Souza, What’s…
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