Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
American men (along with their peers in the UK) derive happiness not from traditional notions of power and strength, but from the typically quieter task of doing meaningful work and contributing to the communities around them. That’s the finding of research out of the UK. Leah Fessler has more in Quartz
There’s this erroneous notion that we’re team players, meaning we’ll work even harder for the team than we would for ourselves. But in real life we belong to five or six different teams, none of which provide this deep sense of belonging. You’re on the marketing team and I’m on the product team and we’re also on the quality team. We’re not solely devoted to a single team. Plus, coordinating teamwork—organizing meetings and such—causes about a 40 percent loss in productivity. And there’s another problem. There’s this concept that teams need to have good relationships between members in order to be high-performing. But a team that’s all chummy, with no discord, is often like a couple that’s burying something and not talking about it. Teams are going to be challenged, and they have to perform—and that sometimes requires yelling at teammates or doing something that pisses people off. Discord can be more associated with performance than harmony is.
Po Bronson quoted in Wired magazine
When the lead singer at the concert asks you to scream as loud as you can, and then he asks again, going, “I can’t hear you! You can do better than that!” have you ever noticed that the second time is always louder? Why wasn’t everyone yelling at the top of their lungs the first time? Some really cool scientists actually tested this in 1979. (They) had people shout as loud as they could in a group and then alone, or vice-versa. Sure enough, the overall loudness of a small group of people was less than any one of them by themselves. You can even chart it on a graph. The more people you add, the less effort any one person does.
If you know you aren’t being judged as an individual, your instinct is to fade into the background. To prove this, psychologist Alan Ingram ruined tug-of-war forever. In 1974, he had people put on a blindfold and grab a rope. The rope was attached to a rather medieval-looking contraption that simulated the resistance of an opposing team. The subjects were told many other people were also holding the rope on their side, and he measured their efforts. Then, he told them they would be pulling alone, and again he measured. There were alone both times, but when they thought they were in a group, they pulled 18 percent less strenuously on average.
This behavior is more likely to show up when the task a hand is simple. With complex tasks, it is usually easy to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Once you know your laziness can be seen, you try harder. You do this because of another behavior called evaluation apprehension, which is just a fancy way of saying you care more when you know you are being singled out. Your anxiety levels decrease when you know your effort will be pooled with others’. You relax. You coast.
David McRaney, You are Not so Smart
Is Taylor Swift doing a better job at building a metaverse than Mark Zuckerberg right now?
Well, in the sense that Mark Zuckerberg is almost totally failing, yeah. This may seem like a leap, but a metaverse—a futuristic virtual-reality world—is essentially a shared online experience, which is not all that different from the online fanscape that Swifties inhabit. It sounds like the Swifties might be living in something that is pretty close to a metaverse currently. They’ll go wherever she goes. So it’s not a virtual world, but it’s a virtual community. That’s really what makes the metaverse and metaverse platforms powerful. People building metaverse platforms, most of them think it’s a technology question. But it’s really a community and culture question.
Wagner James Au quoted in The Atlantic
There’s a lot of evidence that religious people, for example, are happier in a sense of life satisfaction and positive emotion in the moment. But is it the Christian who really believes in Jesus and reads the Bible? Or is it the Christian who goes to church, goes to the spaghetti suppers, donates to charity, participates in the volunteer stuff? Turns out, to the extent that you can disentangle those two, it seems to not be our beliefs but our actions that are driving the fact that religious people are happier. That’s critical because what it tells us is, if you can get yourself to do it — to meditate, to volunteer, to engage with social connection — you will be happier. It’s just much easier if you have a cultural apparatus around you.
Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, quoted in the New York Times
A soft skill enables you to interact well with others. It’s nontechnical and typically falls into categories such as communication and negotiation, adaptability and learning, teaching and training, and interpersonal abilities, including empathy. For organizations, developing and rewarding soft skills is becoming all the more crucial in our ever-automated world. Machines are getting smarter, and as they take over more basic, repetitive, and even physical tasks, the need for workers with social, emotional, and technological skills will be higher than ever.
McKinsey & Company
A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic.
Joe Keohane writing in The Atlantic
“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote in 1624, as he lay ill with a persistent fever, fearing death. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” In the solitude and delirium imposed by his illness, his connection to all others became manifest. Americans have always viewed the communitarian ethos with some ambivalence; our founding ideals are rooted in a rebellion against authority and duty, and reverence for individual liberty. Epidemics, Anne Applebaum recently pointed out in The Atlantic, “have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.” This one has caught us in a moment of profound weakness. Faith in science, government, media, and all our institutions has badly eroded, and we are deeply divided politically and culturally, viewing each other as enemy tribes, not countrymen. The coronavirus cares nothing for these distinctions; it is a reminder that our separateness is an illusion. We Americans, and all of humanity, are at war with a common foe. We can only defeat it together.
William Falk writing in The Week magazine
I used to think that community was as simple as having friends who bring a lasagna when things fall apart and champagne when things go well. Who pick up your kids from school when you can’t. But I think community is also an insurance policy against life’s cruelty; a kind of immunity against loss and disappointment and rage. My community will be here for my family if I cannot be. And if I die, my kids will be surrounded people who know and love them, quirks and warts and oddities and all.
Jenny Anderson writing in Quartz
A lot of the issues or problems we get into, we get into because we’re doing it all by ourselves. We’re relying on ourselves. We’re making decisions as our own island, if you will. And if we consult, chat, schmooze with other people, often we learn things or get different perspectives that can be quite helpful.
An active social life, active social bonds, in many different ways tends to be something that’s healthy for people. Social bonds can also be informationally healthy as well. So that’s more on a top, more abstract level, if you will. That is, don’t try to do it yourself. Doing it yourself is when you get into trouble.
David Dunning quoted in Vox
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