Thought Shrapnel

This image, from Grayson Perry, is incredible. As he points out in the accompanying article, he's chosen the US due to an upcoming series of his, but geographically this could be anywhere, as culture wars these days happen mainly online.

I've added the emphasis in the quotation below:

When we experience a background hum of unfocused emotion, be it anxiety, sadness, fear, anger, we unconsciously look for something to attach it to. Social media is brilliant at supplying us with issues to which attach our free-floating feelings. We often look for nice, preformed boxes into which we can dump our inchoate feelings, we crave certainty. Social media constantly offers up neat solutions for our messy feelings, whether it be God, guns, Greta or gender identity.

In a battle-torn landscape governed by zeroes and ones, nuance, compromise and empathy are the first casualties. If I were to sum up the online culture war in one word it would be “diaphobia”, a term coined by the psychiatrist RD Laing meaning “fear of being influenced by other people”, the opposite of dialogue. Our ever-present underlying historical and enculturated emotions will nudge us to cherrypick and polish the nuggets of information that support a stance that may have been in our bodies from childhood. Once we have taken sides, the algorithms will supply us with a stream of content to entrench and confirm our beliefs.

Grayson Perry, Be it on God, guns or Greta, social media offers neat solutions for our messy feelings (The Guardian)

A few years ago I read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, which is even better than people say. I was reminded of this quotation via Oliver Burkeman's Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life... perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

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Quotation-as-title by Albert Camus. Image from top-linked article.

This NPR article about the oil industry's cynical manipulation of us when it comes to recycling plastic blew my mind 🤯

Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.

Laura Sullivan, How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)

Now that China isn't accepting the world's plastic for 'recycling' (i.e. landfill) domestic initiatives have a problem.

The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

Laura Sullivan, How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (NPR)

The world really is monumentally screwed every which way at the moment. And I feel like an absolute chump for being in any way enthusiastic about at-home recycling.

One way of thinking about the pandemic is as inevitable, and just one of a series of life-changing events that will happen to you during your time on earth.

Whereas some people seem to think that life should be trouble- and pain-free, it's clear by even a cursory glance at history that this an impossible expectation.

This article is a useful one for reframing the pandemic as a change that we're literally all going through together, but which will affect us differently:

Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a book called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. After interviewing hundreds of people about their transitions, he found that a major change in life occurs, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Huge ones—what Feiler calls “lifequakes”—happen three to five times in each person’s life. Some lifequakes are voluntary and joyful, such as getting married or having a child. Others are involuntary and unwelcome, such as unemployment or life-threatening illness.

Arthur C. Brooks, The Clocklike Regularity of Major Life Changes (The Atlantic)

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Quotation-as-title by Josh Billings. Image from top linked post.

I listened to this episode of The Art of Manliness podcast a while back on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and found it excellent. I've discussed ACT with my CBT therapist who says it can also be a useful approach.

My guest today says we need to free ourselves from these instincts and our default mental programming and learn to just sit with our thoughts, and even turn towards those which hurt the most. His name is Steven Hayes and he’s a professor of psychology, the founder of ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and the author of over 40 books, including his latest 'A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters'. Steven and I spend the first part of our conversation in a very interesting discussion as to why traditional interventions for depression and anxiety — drugs and talk therapy — aren’t very effective in helping people get their minds right, and how ACT takes a different approach to achieving mental health. We then discuss the six skills of psychological flexibility that undergird ACT and how these skills can be used not only by those dealing with depression and anxiety but by anyone who wants to get out of their own way and show up and move forward in every area of their lives.

Something that Hayes says is that "if people don't know what their values are, they take their goals, the concrete things they can achieve, to be their values". This, he says, is why rich people can still be unfulfilled.

Well worth a listen.

I've been skeptical about the motives of philanthropic organisations for a while now. This article in The Guardian is a long read, but worth it.

Here's an excerpt:

The common assumption that philanthropy automatically results in a redistribution of money is wrong. A lot of elite philanthropy is about elite causes. Rather than making the world a better place, it largely reinforces the world as it is. Philanthropy very often favours the rich – and no one holds philanthropists to account for it.

The role of private philanthropy in international life has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s 260,000 philanthropy foundations have been established in that time, and between them they control more than $1.5tn. The biggest givers are in the US, and the UK comes second. The scale of this giving is enormous. The Gates Foundation alone gave £5bn in 2018 – more than the foreign aid budget of the vast majority of countries.

Philanthropy is always an expression of power. Giving often depends on the personal whims of super-rich individuals. Sometimes these coincide with the priorities of society, but at other times they contradict or undermine them. Increasingly, questions have begun to be raised about the impact these mega-donations are having upon the priorities of society.

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Quotation-as-title by Marcus Aurelius. Image from top linked post.

I really needed to read the following quotation this morning:

Everything that happens is as normal and expected as the spring rose or the summer fruit; this is true of sickness, death, slander, intrigue, and all the other things that delight or trouble foolish men.

Marcus Aurelius

Thinking about the trials and tribulations a Roman emperor must have gone through puts my tiny problems into a bit of perspective.

Some people think it's the Protestant work ethic, others that it's a genetic predisposition. Me? I think it's to do with the highly competitive nature of western societies.

Whatever you think causes it, the inability of adults, including myself, to spend a day doing nothing is kind of problematic. It's something I often discuss with Laura Hilliger (and she refers to it regularly in her excellent newsletter)

There's a university in Hamburg, Germany, giving out 'idleness grants' for people to do absolutely nothing. Emma Beddington's answers to the questions on the application form aren't too different to how I'd answer:

What do you not want to do? I want not to compare my achievements, or lack of them, with others’. If successful, for the duration of my idleness grant I will crush the exhausting running mental commentary that points out what those with energy, drive and ambition are achieving and enumerates my inadequacies. When one or other of my nemeses tweets the dread phrase “some personal news” (always the precursor to an announcement of professional glory), I will not feel bad, because I will have accepted that “being quite lazy” has inherent merit in 2020.

Emma Beddington, Doing nothing is so easy for me. But how to feel good about it? (The Guardian)

It's always possible to do more and be more, but sometimes it's important to just spend time being who you already are.

There is something very strange about walking up mountains only to come back down again. But I love it, as did the French surrealist poet, philosopher, and novelist René Daumal:

You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again…

So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully.

René Daumal, via Brain Pickings

While you're in the midst of self-imposed adversity you can also escape your self-imposed psychic prison.

👋 Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life

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🤔 ten recent thoughts

Quotation-as-title by Benjamin Jowett. Image from top linked post.

As someone who struggles with perfectionism on a daily basis, I needed to read this morning:

Perfectionism is more toxic than you imagine. Watch yourself and notice how often you’re being a perfectionist without even realising it. And see how it chips away at your happiness.

Rebecca Toh, ten recent thoughts

The other thoughts in the list are also worth reflecting on, especially the one about writing being the medium of learning.

As a parent and former teacher I can get behind this:

ADHD is not a disorder, the study authors argue. Rather it is an evolutionary mismatch to the modern learning environment we have constructed. Edward Hagen, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Washington State University and co-author of the study, pointed out in a press release that “there is little in our evolutionary history that accounts for children sitting at desks quietly while watching a teacher do math equations at a board.”

Alison Escalante, What If Certain Mental Disorders Are Not Disorders At All?, Psychology Today

This is a great article based on a journal article about PTSD, depression, anxiety, and ADHD. As someone who has suffered from depression in the past, and still deals with anxiety, I absolutely think it has an important situational aspect.

That is to say, instead of just medicating people, we need to be thinking about their context.

[T]he stated goal of the paper is not to suddenly change treatments, but to explore new ways of studying these problems. “Research on depression, anxiety, and PTSD, should put greater emphasis on mitigating conflict and adversity and less on manipulating brain chemistry.”

Alison Escalante, What If Certain Mental Disorders Are Not Disorders At All?, Psychology Today

Incredible.

/via ajamesmccarthy on Reddit

By this point in the year, I would have travelled away from my home office at least once per month to see real, live 3D human beings who aren't other members of my family.

Even if you are ensconced in a pandemic pod with a romantic partner or family members, you can still feel lonely — often camouflaged as sadness, irritability, anger and lethargy — because you’re not getting the full range of human interactions that you need, almost like not eating a balanced diet. We underestimate how much we benefit from casual camaraderie at the office, gym, choir practice or art class, not to mention spontaneous exchanges with strangers.

Kate Murphy, We’re All Socially Awkward Now, The New York Times

As the author points out, our skills can atrophy just like muscles if we don't use them, and interacting via screens is often quite different to interacting offline.

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Quotation-as-title from Seneca. Image from top linked post.

TL;DR: Going forward, Thought Shrapnel will be a bit more random.

One of the benefits of a pause in doing something for a while is that you get to reflect on its upsides and downsides. We've all had a chance to do this during the pandemic, to re-evaluate what we do and why we do it.

Every year, I take a couple of months off Thought Shrapnel, which allows me to recharge myself a bit and commit myself anew to the project. Usually, I come back raring to go and, indeed, have written some stuff to publish as soon as I'm back.

This time, though, was different. I think that's for a couple of reasons:

• The #100DaysToOffload challenge has got me writing regularly on my personal blog again.
• Having supporters puts pressure on me to 'produce' something worthwhile, when this was supposed to be a space for stuff 'going in and out of my brain'.

So, with huge thanks to those people who have supported Thought Shrapnel over the past couple of years, I've decided that I'd actually prefer to not have the pressure of patronage. As such I'm deleting my Patreon account.

I'm keeping the weekly newsletter, for the moment at least, which will probably evolve into a slightly different format than it has been. Bear with me as things might look a bit strange around here while I move things around.

If you like my writing, you might want to head over to dougbelshaw.com/feeds which is where you can see the latest posts from the various places I write. I'm still posting updates to Twitter, but am only interacting with people via Mastodon and LinkedIn these days.

Again, thanks to everyone who has supported Thought Shrapnel with their attention and, in some cases, money over the years. It's still going, it's just changing along with me...

Image by Denny Luan