Actual Journaling

Notes from Covid-19 . . . 

It's taken two months of working from home, but this week I've begun feeling out of touch, irrelevant, and unmotivated. My actions haven't noticeably changed, I'm just feeling like they're a bit pointless, that I'm merely playing mental games to entertain myself and not contributing anything worthwhile to society. It's all to be expected, I suppose, all part of the experience for everyone, and I'm guessing I'm lucky it's taken me so long to get here. Now I just need to figure out what to do next so I don't get stuck in . . . well, I suppose I could call it acedia (Acedia contains within itself so many concepts, Norris writes: weariness, despair, ennui, boredom, restlessness, impasse, futility.)

Though, to be fair, my actions have been mildly different. It's Thursday, and I haven't yet attended any online meetings or other remote video interactions this week. I generally don't care for communicating with people in that fashion and thought I wouldn't miss it, but maybe it makes a difference. More likely, this is the first week I haven't (yet) made sure I actually produce something from my work, whether a list of book recommendations to share or web page with resources or remote presentation or the like. I've done lots of reading and learning and absorbing, but no creating or sharing or imparting. Thus my sitting down to write this as a way to coax myself out of my current state.

My library has started its first phase of gradual reopening, bringing people back to start working in the buildings and offering the public limited access to the collection next week. A first wave of those furloughed is back, which is good. It also means those of us who have the ability to work from home will continue to do so until everyone is unfurloughed and things are closer to normal. So this is my status quo for now.

It's been unusually dreary for a good week now. Lots of cloudy grey without rain.

I need to start having music in the background of my work environment (a chair in the corner of our bedroom). My wife goes back to work next week and the kids both have summer camp/school arrangements, so for the first time I'll truly be alone by myself. That will be an adjustment, but will allow me to have music without disturbing anyone.

And I need to move my body more. Both cause and consequence of feeling blah is that I've been less active lately. Not that I've done any actual exercise for a long time, just taking walks and stretching and doing work around the house. There hasn't been much of that this week, just lots of sitting.

I've collected a few word images and phrases that have come to me, but I don't know what to do with them. Here they are, minimally connected into something that might be a bit evocative.

"The elevator won't go to that floor

without this," he says, holding up a key.

"But then, maybe you don't need it. After all,

you have mysterious powers inside of you.

You know how to see the magic spells

tattooed on the skin of the world."

What I'd really love to create is something like Shaun Tan's Tales from the Inner City, I just don't know how. Yet, anyway.

An excellent quote:

I'm always really interested in what books people are reading here. A lot of the books I'm putting back are ones that I've read too . . . I think about that for a while. Most of these kids ignore me, and some do worse than that--but we still like the same books. We've imagined fighting the same epic battles and laughed at the same jokes.

― Michael Northrop, On Thin Ice 

A few recent shares from parent land . . . 

While "keep the mud outside" might appear to be an extremely simple, straightforward statement, studies show it is in reality an exceedingly difficult concept to comprehend.

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This morning, Spouse and I were trying to sleep in and asked the boys to take care of themselves for a while. They kept coming in to try to wake us for various things. Finally Older walked in and said, "Mom, Dad, some bad news: Younger just poured out both bottles of (Elmer's) glue all over a piece of paper." Then a moment later, "It gets worse: now he's smearing the glue all over the piano bench." That finally got me up. Younger met me at the door, his hands full of a big glob of glue he was smearing around. When he saw me he started running, drops of glue trailing him. He made it back to the bench to refill his hands, then began rubbing them through his hair as I caught him and carried him to the shower.

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"Hang on, I'll go get a dead rat!" Recently Older developed a big interest in snakes. Spouse managed to find an Australian show on Prime called "Snake Boss" about a residential snake catcher. Today the boys started making paper snakes. At first they were feeding them and taking care of them. Now the snakes (and their eggs and babies) have spread all throughout the house and the boys are reenacting the show.

They also, for the first time ever, found a baby garter snake nesting among some bricks in our yard recently. And we came across a couple of copperheads on our most recent outdoor excursion.

For Young People, Emotions Are Highly Contagious Social Viruses

There is a growing body of scientific evidence showing that our internal mental states, including our emotions, might also be socially transmissible. Understanding the nature and dynamics of this emotional contagion is crucial in highlighting how social interactions might impact on our wellbeing. . . . 

Using sophisticated mathematical models, they demonstrated that the inhabitants of Framingham were more likely to have depressive symptoms if a close friend did too. Rather strikingly, this effect held to three degrees of separation, with a depressed friend of a friend of a friend also increasing one’s chance of depression. Interestingly, it wasn’t just low mood that clustered among friends: the very same pattern was also found for people’s levels of happiness. . . . 

Emotional contagion at this age is unsurprising: compared with adults, teenagers find emotions more difficult to control, and are also more likely to be influenced by their peers. Their susceptibility to emotional contagion reinforces the impact that friendships can have on mental wellbeing. Fostering supportive friendships should be a key focus for any intervention aimed at reducing the incidence of depression or low mood in young people.

These days, many of our social interactions occur via the internet, and our online social networks are also sites of emotional contagion. . . . 

A surprising study from the Netherlands in 2012 found that emotions might even be transmitted via the smell of other people’s sweat. . . . 

Contagion is undoubtedly more than a biological phenomenon. Unlike the spread of viruses, emotional contagion is not necessarily a bad thing. Although some aspects of low mood might be contagious, happiness is too – possibly even more so. Knowing that mood can ripple through close groups like this has important implications for how we behave. On a personal level, this might affect whom we want to spend time with. On a bigger scale, it could encourage leaders and managers to model positive attitudes and consider the kind of norms that are established among their teams. Finally, emotional contagion can inform interventions to support people’s wellbeing. Investing in our positive social relationships appears to reduce our own chances of developing depression and could also have a positive rippling effect throughout our social networks. Seeking out and fostering positive friendships might not only improve our own mental health but could benefit the mental health of others too.

markmanson.net

Humans Are Too Optimistic to Comprehend the Coronavirus

That kind of naive optimism in the face of encroaching disaster is a pitfall of owning a human brain, several experts on the psychology of risk perception told me recently. People have trouble appraising exponentially growing problems, seeing exactly how they themselves might be affected, and understanding the best way to help when disaster arrives. Our brains aren’t designed to anticipate threats such as pandemics, which allows the tiny, brainless pathogens to get the upper hand as we fumble along. The only way to counteract these biases, experts say, is to prepare ahead of time. Which is, alas, something the United States also failed to do.

Perhaps for the good of entrepreneurs, American Idol hopefuls, and buyers of real estate on Miami Beach, humans are remarkably bad at imagining everything that could go wrong in a given situation. “We’re likely to have an excessively rosy outlook on life,” says Hersh Shefrin, a behavioral-finance professor at Santa Clara University.

One reason for this subconscious Pollyannaism is that we don’t use the deliberative part of our brain very much. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow, our brain has two modes: A fast, intuitive method that’s driven by feelings, and a more analytic (and evolutionarily more recent) way of thinking that’s driven by data. The intuitive process tends to dominate, says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. “We don’t go around calculating things in a scientific way; we just kind of are guided by our feelings, which are very much influenced by our experiences,” he told me. . . . 

The “fast” instinct in our minds tends especially to minimize risks that are harder to picture. Abstract dangers, such as invisible diseases, seem less threatening to us than do tangible threats, such as terrorists or tornadoes. Our brain interprets low-probability events as having a practically zero chance of happening, and it’s basically hopeless at contemplating exponential figures—such as, say, the way infections spread through a population. The number of cases starts out small, so our fast, intuitive brain tells us it will stay small forever. . . . 

People have trouble envisioning themselves as the kind of person something bad might happen to. . . .  

On top of that failure of imagination, a concept called “motivated reasoning” falsely reassures us that the bad thing we don’t want to happen probably won’t. . . . “Things that we are motivated not to believe, we’re very good at not believing.”

When the disease finally arrives, and people start dying, our brains fall into a different snare: The number of people affected is too large to be psychologically meaningful. Slovic has found that when many people are affected by a disaster, a kind of psychological numbing occurs. Though people are capable of feeling deeply for a single victim and her plight, “compassion fade” can set in when a tragedy involves two or more victims. People’s positive feelings about donating to a needy child decline for two needy children. This perhaps helps explain why Americans can round up thousands of dollars to donate to individual sick people’s GoFundMe campaigns, but hesitate to support a universal health-insurance system. Similarly, a disease that is likely to wipe out 60,000 Americans, most of whom are strangers, can seem less dangerous than it really is.