Maybe today’s financial crisis has an unexpected upside

That, at any rate, is the view of Terence Blacker, writing for Britain’s newpaper The Independent (“Reasons to be cheerful about the credit crunch”).

He cites a number of potential upsides: people realizing once again that a house is somewhere to live, not an investment opportunity or a source of never-ending income; less constant yakking about making money; a sense of disgust at some of the incomes of top executives; less indulgence in conspicuous spending; even a greater appreciation of what we all have today. Continued

Is the gap narrowing between TV reality-show fantasy and today’s economic activity?

Both current economic models and TV reality shows reward all-out competition driven by material self-interest. Both, as Lynne Truss described in her book “Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door,” consist of people being competitive, underhand, rude and aggressive towards one another in contrived and stressful situations.

How did it become entertainment to watch a rich guy with a seriously awful hairstyle fire people on camera? Maybe it’s the ultimate fusion between sport and the stockmarket: corporate life as a spectator event. Maybe people just enjoy seeing devious, smarmy, pushy and treacherous know-alls kicked in the teeth. Maybe it’s a symptom of an insane society.

Still, there it is. A big cheese showing off by firing small cheeses desperate to become bigger ones. In the past, being an apprentice meant signing your life away for years to serve and learn from a master of some craft. Now it means imitating a rich person with a dubious track-record and trying to knife your fellow contestants before they manage to knife you. Continued

To be free is a choice, not a right

Portrait of John Surart Mill
via Wikipedia

This article by Richard Reeves on The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ blog should be compulsory reading (“The value of a self-governed life”). John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential writers of his time, or the times since, and his exploration of the relationship between liberty and choice has probably never been bettered.

Despite all the protestations of commitment to liberty and freedom today, it has rarely been under greater threat, whether from those who wish to stamp their own religious or political views on the world at large; those who claim to be saving us from terrorism by removing our liberties to resist being saved in their chosen way; or those who see conformity as the best route to profit, and freedom as inefficient in economic terms.

For Mill, liberty was always a choice. As Reeves says:

Mill’s idea of liberty requires freedom of opinion, expression and lifestyle in order to produce the broadest possible palette of ways of life for us to choose from. The state should not impose a single view of the best way to live – for Mill, the idea of a centrally imposed national curriculum was horrifying. Equality before the law, and rights to fair trial were important precisely because they allowed people to live the way they chose, even if eccentric or even disgusting to the majority, so long as they did not actively harm others in so doing.

Continued

What are you wishing on your children?

Perfectionism is a form of control that lasts a lifetime. Parents who seek too much from their children leave them emotionally and mentally crippled. Adults who demand too much of themselves increase their stress, ruin their health, and destroy most of their relationships. Organizations that demand too much of their employees produce burnout, increased turnover and a corporate culture riddled with no-holds-barred competitiveness — and often dishonesty too.

The killer that lurks within perfectionism is that constant sense of criticism: the knowledge that whatever you do is never going to be quite good enough; the sense that every achievement will create an instant demand to do better. It is, in the words of Hara Estroff Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, in Psychology Today (“Pitfalls of Perfectionism”):

. . . an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.

Continued

Coaching and counseling may be getting out of hand in Australia

The ‘Modern Times’ blog for The Age, an Australian newspaper, has an article weighing in against the rise in counselors and the situations where their help is invoked. As the author says: “Is there a counsellor in the house? Bleeding well hope so because the counsellor is the new apple. You need at least one a day.”

Is the increase in the use of counseling a sensible response to the stresses of modern times? Or is it like the euphemisms everyone uses to get around saying things that sound ‘nasty’: a way of sending unhappy, feckless or angry people far, far away, where they can’t upset us; while managing at the same time to convince ourselves that we’re helping them — just so long as we don’t have to deal with them ourselves, naturally. Continued

You can’t avoid the truth by avoiding plain speaking

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

George Carlin, the American comedian, died recently. He was famous for his no-nonsense, sometimes crude attacks on all kinds of hypocrisy in society. One of his strongest dislikes was the use of euphemisms to avoid speaking the truth about aspects of life people don’t like to think about. Life, he proclaimed, is sometimes nasty and brutal. Sometimes it sucks. Pretending it doesn’t won’t help you avoid the bad times or find a way out of the difficulties.

Whether it was the indignities of aging, the rich manipulating the poor, the hilarious oddities of sex, or that ultimate taboo, death, Carlin pushed his audiences’ noses into the creative muck that life is made of — and most of them loved it. Continued

There’s always someone who tries to look on the bright side. This time it’s Foreign Policy magazine’s web site with an article listing the potential benefits of sky-high gas prices.

The writer thinks that, while the oil-price hikes are crashing the global economy and making everyone miserable, there’s an under-appreciated upside too.

Here’s the list (“The List: Five Reasons to Love $4 Gas”):

• A boom in the use of mass transit. Three quarters of Americans now believe more money should be spent on developing and improving mass transit systems, after decades of neglect and apathy.
• Lower obesity rates.Charles Courtemanche of Washington University headed research that found, for every dollar increase in the average real price of gas, overweight and obesity levels in the United States would decline by 16 percent after seven years.
• Fewer accidents. Less driving means fewer accidents, as does driving slower and more cautiously.
• Shorter commutes. Worry about rising gas prices has encouraged workers to move closer to their jobs.
• The biofuels craze. More of the world’s fuel is coming from renewable energy sources instead of Middle East oil drums.

I wonder how many of these we will see as benefits in a few years time?

I’d pick improvements in mass transit and shorter commutes. The American love affair with the automobile has been the major cause of urban sprawl. I’m also amazed as the number of my American friends who rave about the usefulness of mass transit systems when the take European vacations, yet fail to connect the dots and support similar systems in their own home towns.

What it takes to get what you want — whatever that is

It must be something in the air that is provoking Huffington Post to air a series of articles on love, marriage and sex. I found no fewer than three of them in my RSS feeds on a single afternoon. Beginning with “10 Unwritten Rules for Summer Love” and passing through “The Key to a Half Century of Marriage,” they end with “Honey, I Want to Sleep With Other People.” It’s quite a ride.

‘Summer Love’, it seems, is best in The Hamptons, though we are assured the rules “are universal and apply not only to the handful of semi-rarefied beach towns along the East End but anywhere where the mercury soars, strappy sandals are de rigueur and the whirring of nocturnal creatures sends pulses racing.” Here are a few of my favorites:

HAMPTONS UNWRITTEN RULE #24: Getting some is good; getting some in a house on the beach is better. [. . .] RULE #31: You may be “the one”…but probably not “the only one.” [. . .] RULE #40: Since temptation abounds, resisting it is (usually) futile. [. . .] RULE #42: August is prime time for getting bitten on the ass–and not only by mosquitoes.

If, like me, you’re way too old for such summer pastimes, you might like instead to muse on “. . . an American story of love and family ballasted by unified values, enriching adventure and engaged citizenship” with “the secret to keeping a marriage solid and fulfilling over the long haul of life . . .” in The Key to a Half Century of Marriage.

It turns out there are several keys:

My parents’ recipe for the pot au feu of a successful marriage is: a shared curiosity about the world, a shared inherent sense of justice and a shared delight in the social whirl of good friends and interesting people.

That sounds pretty good to me, but I’ve only been married for 33 years.

Last, but my no means least, comes a distinctly modern approach to relationships. I can imagine it would be pretty tough to tell your nearest and dearest that you have it in mind to spread yourself around a little more, but I’m sure it happens and Jenny Block obviously isn’t one to duck a challenge when it comes to handing out advice.

For such a minefield of a topic, what she says has something of the same excitement and inherent sexiness as handing out information on making an investment or deciding on a new car: make sure you know what you really want (Helpful questions suggested); do your homework via books and websites (No suggestions this time. Either I’ve lead a sheltered life and everyone else knows where these are or you’re expect to use Google as usual); then choose a time when you’re both feeling calm and happy to break the news (I suppose you’d best not start from any point other than zero animosity).

And in case you’re wondering by now whether all this advice is merely theorizing, Jenny is adds a reassuring finale:

Beyond that, all I can tell you is how it worked for me. My husband and I talked ad nauseam for months about how we felt and how it would work and whether it was a good idea and when we would attempt it and how would we do it. But the truth is this – we didn’t really know what would happen until we tried. All we knew was that we loved and trusted each other enough to give it a shot.

And if none of these topics cover what you need this summer, I guess you could always go back to Google. Just don’t ask me to do the research for you.

Technorati Tags: relationships, advice, relationship advice, love and marriage, getting what you want from a relationship, advice columnists

As so often, the forecasters appear to have created a doomsday scenario out of nothing

As a Baby Boomer, I have more than a passing interest in the forecasts of catastrophic breakdowns in healthcare and social security as the people of my generation all start to retire. So this article from Harvard Business Publishing piqued my curiosity (“The Baby Boomer Retirement Fallacy and What It Means to You”) by showing that most of the doom is based on fallacious reasoning.

It seems that, if you do the numbers correctly, you find far fewer will be dependent on social security benefits that the doomsters claim — and that’s without factoring in the increasing tendency of people to work until well past their ‘retirement date.’ In the area where I live, finding older people working in stores restaurants and other businesses is very common. I’m sure some only do it from necessity, but I suspect for many others what motivates them is the interest they get from working. As people live longer and stay fitter, many don’t want to spend their days in the rocking chair or on the golf course. They know they still have much to contribute and want to go on doing it. Continued

Is it possible that we need recessions for the economy to stay healthy?

That’s the message from this article by Drake Bennett for The Boston Globe’s blog (“The good recession”). While most people focus on the harm recessions do to earnings, employment and consumer spending, Bennett takes a look at some potential long-term gains.

Amongst the benefits he finds: a slowing economy, some economists suggest, can help you live longer. During recessions people drink and smoke less, get sick less, and even die less than during boom times. People who worry about losing their jobs do things to keep them from getting laid off — they drink less, they fight less, they become less risk-taking. If they have less disposable income, perhaps they will spend less on drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. Cut-backs in driving and car ownership should mean less traffic and fewer accidents. Continued