My initial enthusiasm for writing this blog was to figure out what I found so annoying about the mindfulness movement. Something is wrong here, my emotions said. No, no, no!
To help me figure out if it was just me or if those feelings were on to something, I decided to study the matter further and read a canonical work, Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (2013).
...they describe cleaning chemicals as "unnecessary" and propose that microfiber cloths and water are "enough for most purposes". The lead author, Oistein Svanes, summed up the take-home message of the study: "in the long run cleaning chemicals very likely cause rather substantial damage to your lungs".
Of course, we must remain vigilant! But measured optimism is not the enemy.
It's not all that hard or time-consuming to check the actual study behind a headline. If the article doesn't provide a link to the academic paper being cited, judge the publication (shame on them!) and then Google Scholar the paper...
...all this contributes to segregation along class lines, as families, friends, co-workers, and neighbors form increasingly homogeneous clusters of people with similar education, income, and norms. For many individuals, less class mixing means less first-hand exposure to success stories, which in turn undermines the confidence, motivation, and perseverance needed to get ahead in the world.
On the OOH website, there were some middle-class jobs that did not require even a high school diploma, but I don't want to encourage anyone to drop out of high school. Also, through sheer talent, hard work or luck, some people have successful careers in occupations that typically require more education than they have. But planning to be the exception to a rule is usually not a good move.
Assortative mating is thought to contribute to income inequality when the better educated marry mostly each other and create a privileged class that hoards the best genes, parenting, education, and neighborhoods while the rest of society gets stuck in a socioeconomic rut. That's the theory anyway. What's actually happening on the ground?
The argument in brief: an increase in assortative mating, in which highly educated women are more likely to exercise the near-universal preference of women to marry men of higher education, income, or status (“hypergamy”) has lead to increasing inequality....
A select group of Americans really did see their incomes rise spectacularly and not just on paper. These were executives, managers, financial professionals, and technology professionals - occupations that often come with wealth-based income streams, such as stock options.
Is that it? Is rising inequality mostly an illusion, a matter of how income is being categorized and counted? A shift in accounting practices? No. There's more to the story.
If you don't count the income of the top .1 percent, then the income share of the top 1 percent in the US has actually gone down over the past 30+ years.
We should plan to have mini-mastery experiences every day: something a bit challenging but still doable to gets us closer to our goal. Doesn't mean to avoid the hard stuff, but it's nice to sprinkle the hard with the pretty easy to keep us motivated.
You might have to start with repetition, rote learning, and a lot of falling down flat, but then something clicks, and you're on the road to mastery. You know what to do and if you don't, you know what to do.
The possibility of failure beckons and is transformed into something exhilarating.
... a lot of people want to grow their wealth, especially for retirement. That's where risky assets come in. Risky assets are where the big bucks are made and lost. Risky assets include volatile investments, real estate other than one's own home, or a business. Households heavily invested in risky assets tend to experience big swings in wealth.
...the rich often own businesses or are self-employed professionals, and many grow their money in the stock market - either directly invested or through mutual funds, annuities, trusts, and pension funds...
...something to the effect, “wealth matters much more than income anyway”. And then they point out the super-rich own the lion’s share of wealth in the US and the world...The implication being if we just redistributed a bunch of that wealth, the war on poverty would be over! Is that so?
Tell subjects they scored in the bottom 20% on some performance measure and they'll feel rotten. Expose women to a 15-minute video of gorgeous models and their self-esteem will take a beating. So, sure, you can make experimental subjects feel bad by exposing them to certain conditions in a lab, but do those conditions prevail in everyday life?
Beliefs serve decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Without uncertainty, we just act. I don't "believe" the ground will stop my foot when I walk....That's just the neural prediction and reward-seeking machinery running smoothly. It's when the machinery gets stuck that the brain shifts into belief mode to help break the logjam.
Jumping the groove from dopamine to self-efficacy: here we go!