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The Cost of Engaging With the Miserable
Every morning, I wake up and grab my doom machine. My phone is a piece of revolutionary technology that puts the entire world a scroll away, its every pixel an industrial miracle. It’s also a cataclysm-delivery device. I roll over and click the blue “f” logo to watch older friends and relatives grow angry and entrenched in their politics. I click on Twitter and drown in a torrent of terrible news delivered by shouting messengers. On apps like Citizen, push alerts warn me of violence and petty crimes happening right now in my area, while neighborhood narcs and NIMBYs feud and name-call on Nextdoor. On the doom machine, feeling helpless and hopeless is easier than ever.
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Aha! Moments Pop Up from below the Level of Conscious Awareness
Most of us have had the experience of struggling mightily to solve a problem only to find, while taking a walk or doing the dishes, that the answer comes to us seemingly from nowhere. Psychologists call these sudden aha! moments “insight.” They occur not only when we are faced with a problem but also when we suddenly “get” a joke or crossword puzzle clue or are jolted by a personal realization. Scientists have identified distinctive brain activity patterns that signal moments of insight, but there is still some debate about whether insight is simply the final, most satisfying step in a deliberative thought process or a wholly separate form of thinking.
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Why Workplace Frenemies are Our Most Stressful Colleagues
Among immediate colleagues, it’s easy to spot two groups of people: genuine friends, who make each workday a little brighter; and sworn enemies – the people who will deliberately make your life hard for no reason. But what about all those people in the middle? These colleagues may offer a sympathetic ear to your woes, but then go and gossip about them behind your back. Or they’ll defend you from criticism, but then take sole credit for a joint project, erasing your contributions without a backward glance.
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This is No Way to be Human
Recently I met the astronomer Pascal Oesch, an assistant professor at the University of Geneva. Professor Oesch and his colleagues share the distinction of having discovered the most distant known object, a small galaxy called GNz-11. That galaxy is so far away that its light had to travel for 13 billion years to get from there to here. I asked Professor Oesch if he felt personally connected to this tiny smudge on his computer screen. Does this faint blob feel like part of nature, part of the same world of Keats and Goethe and Emerson, where “vines that round the thatch-eves run; to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees”? Oesch answered that he looks at such distant smudges every day.
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Are New Year’s Resolutions Powerful or Pointless?
Almost every year of my adult life, I’ve started the New Year with a set of resolutions that I’ve been determined to keep. The results, predictably, have been variable. In 2021, I mostly kept to my fitness goal of doing one 20-minute HIIT workout each day, but I failed miserably at my aim of quitting social media. According to my weekly screen-time reports, I still spend between two and three hours each day on my phone, much of that time doomscrolling.
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Three Ways to be More Rational This Year
Many people use the New Year to turn over a new leaf - to act in a way that is more rational and in our better interests. Yet we all have to confess this is more difficult than it might seem. Here are three examples from my series - Think with Pinker - of common irrationality traps and how to avoid them. 1. Future you When people contrast what they are "thinking" with what they are "feeling", often what they have in mind is the difference between immediate and longer-term enjoyment. For example - a feast now and a slim body tomorrow; a trinket today and sufficient funds when the rent is due; a night of passion and the facts of life nine months later.
