Posts Tagged ‘mental health’
Embrace Your Crookedness
I don’t know why exactly we gravitate to certain writers or thinkers, not just as convenient citations we drop here and there, maybe to add a bit of heft to our own flimsy pronouncements or to have the sheen of their prose shine on our lackluster sentences – but as people, people we want to…
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 MoreHumility and the myth of limitlessness
I might be wrong about this, but it seems that over the last couple of years more and more people have been working their way to the conclusion that modern society is fundamentally broken – not just broken in a way that can be fixed with a little tinkering here and there, but somehow broken…
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 MoreCommunity-oriented life at human scale
The documentary Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (John Page, Chris Breemen, Helena Norberg-Hodge & Eric Walton, 1993) provides an excellent introduction to the local, human scale traditions in Ladakh, and how local communities have been affected by the industrialised notion of “progress”. The observation that consumer culture as portrayed in advertisements and Western media appeals…
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 MoreGroomed to Consume
This blog is also available in Russian and Spanish. With Christmas coming up, household consumption will soon hit its yearly peak in many countries. Despite homely pictures of tranquility on mass-produced greeting cards, Christmas is more about frenzied shopping and overspending than peace on earth or quality time with family and friends. As with so…
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…
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