Is there no limit to academic foolishness?

I was amazed to read in The Guardian’s blogs that a Professor Joseph Ferrari from DePaul University in Chicago claims procrastination is a serious disease that needs to be recognized and treated by clinicians. He blames the ‘condition’ for everything from depression, low self-esteem, and insomnia, to “discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor,” and “more accidents at home involving unmended appliances.” (“Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow”)

Another academic, Professor Piers Steel from Calgary University has calculated, apparently, that: “the beeps notifying the arrival of email are . . . causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.” How he works this out is beyond me — and I suspect beyond any kind of logic or commonsense. (“Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters”). Continued

“What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.” — Leo Buscaglia

Maybe it’s finally time to rescue the concept of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ from the hands of the so-called self-help gurus. That’s the message in an article in Huffington Post by Roger Fransecky (”Happiness Is A Choice“).

Starting from considering the popularity of a Harvard course in positive psychology, the article explores the study of well-being — not the traditional topic of psychology, which has tended to be more interested in mental problems than how to enjoy life more. 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

We can still avoid worse to come

I’m sure you’ll understand why this article by Michele Hanson on British newspaper The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ blog system appealed to me (“Everything is done at top speed. We need to slow down before we have a global nervous breakdown”).

Why are we so obsessed with speed? Does doing something faster truly make it better? I doubt it. The faster we rush through life, the less we are able to enjoy it. There’s no time to take in either the pleasures or the learning opportunities. Like someone gabbling the legal jargon at the end of a TV advert, it’s just about impossible to understand.

Road rage isn’t the only symptom of a society in which getting what I want now — the faster the better and don’t anyone get in my way — takes precedence over knowing whether it’s going to be any use to me when I do get it.

As Ms. Hanson says:

Everything now has to be done at top speed. We are all on a planet-sized bolting horse. No one can stop it. People are forever coming round here glaring crabbily at my computer because it isn’t fast enough. It takes one whole minute when it ought be taking a nano-second. They sit there, desperate to get online, and to them the huge seconds trundle by, each like the passing of the longest night. Unbearable. “You need a new computer,” they complain rattily. “This is ridiculous.”

Slowing down would do us all a great deal of good. For a start, we might begin to question our values and inquire into what our politicians are doing in our name. We would have time to think and time to consider alternatives. We might even have time to enjoy life, instead of rushing madly to the next task, convinced that any moments not spent on ‘getting things done’ are wasted.

Utter nonsense! What’s the point of getting anything done if you haven’t considered what it is, why it matters or whether you’ll like the result? Or if you’ll have no time when it is done to experience the results, for good or ill?

Our world has become manic-depressive: bipolar, if you prefer that term. We’re either running around furiously, convinced the good times will never end, or sunk in deepest gloom, watching our savings drop into oblivion and most of our income going to buy a tank of gas.

Is there still time to stop the madness? I hope so, but we’d better start soon.

Technorati Tags: haste, speed, stress, obsession with speed, choice, time to enjoy life, slowing down, setting priorities, getting out of the rat race

. . . now we have health issues linked to personality traits

It seems that just about every personality trait comes with its own characteristic type of disease, according to an article in Britain’s Daily Mail (courtesy of The Huffington Post>)(“Your personality type could decide what makes you ill”).

The article, by Roger Dobson, lists research that suggests personality traits are more significant than previously thought in future health. Quite how the mechanism works is unknown, though it may be a mixture of behavioral pressures and genetic tendencies.

The article then helpfully lists a series of personality traits and the diseases linked to them. Here are some examples Continued

In tough financial times, the traits of the chronic under-earner carry as heavy a penalty as those of the continual over-spender

Continental Congress Lottery Ticket
Source: Wikipedia

Over-spending is never a good idea and we’ve heard a great deal recently about the ways that people have been tempted into spending far too much by cheap and easy credit. Cutting back on your spending is certainly one way to cope with the financial downturn; one that many people are obviously taking, given the howls of anguish from industries facing lower sales. But what about under-earning? What if you find yourself in continual financial straits, not because you spend too much because you don’t earn enough?

Writing in BusinessWeek, Michelle Conlin suggests that “for every obscenely piggish ceo pay package, there’s legions of underearners crawling all over Corporate America. ” She bases her article on the book by Jerrold Mundis, Earn What You Deserve: How to Stop Underearning & Start Thriving. There’s also Barbara Stanny’s book, Overcoming Underearning: Overcome Your Money Fears and Earn What You Deserve.

In summary, under-earners may do great work, but they rarely get the financial recognition they deserve for it, mostly because they don’t believe their employers will pay them more. A few have the idealistic idea that money goes only to people who compromise their essential humanity or sell out their creativity to get it. Many simply won’t take responsibility for the problem or are too fearful to stand up for themselves. Continued

Here’s a ‘map’ you can use to get the most out of your siesta

The Boston Globe has published a simple, graphical guide to taking a nap. I guess Americans have never quite got the habit, which comes naturally to certain Europeans like the Spanish and Italians. Where I live in the desert Southwest, afternoon temperatures this past week have hovered between 106 and 111 degrees Fahrenheit (around 42 to 44 degrees Celsius). The only sensible thing to do in heat like that is take a nap. And we don’t even have to content with the high humidity that turns similar or lower temperatures into potential killers.

Besides, researchers are now telling us that even a short nap in the middle of the day — or any other time you need one — makes you mentally more alert and improves your judgment and decision making. It also improves blood pressure and lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke. I guess the main thing that still stops many people from heeding this advice is that quintessentially American bug bear: the Puritan Work Ethic. Continued

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

If every stage in humanity’s development has a typical cause of death, ours may be the diseases of abundance

You might think that advances in medical knowledge, living standards and nutrition would mean that most people today — at least in the developed world — should be able to live out their full life-span. Longevity has increased on average, but I suspect that may be more due to better sanitation and the ability to deal routinely with medical situations that, in the past, would have meant almost certain death (such as infected wounds, appendicitis and complications in childbirth).

This would certainly be consistent with the idea that each stage of human development comes with its own set of death-causing problems or diseases — as suggested in this article by William Saletan in Slate magazine (“Saturated Fat: The genetic limits of obesity”). Continued