The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

WHO SHOOK THE JAR?

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Pretty good story and even a better way of having Mark Twain, uhhh, tell it, right?  What made me dig a little deeper about this is the following:

Did you know that if you put 100 black ants and 100 red ants in a jar, nothing will happen? But if you shake the jar hard, the ants start killing each other. The red ants consider the black ants their enemies, and the black ants consider the red ants their enemies. The true enemy is the one shaking the jar. The same thing happens in human society. So, before we attack each other, we should think about who is shaking the jar!

Credit: Kurt Vonnegut
I sent this to my friend, Joe and we both concurred, “OH, YES!  This is classic Kurt” who is one of our favorite authors going waaaaaay back to our high school and college days.

Where is gets even more interesting is that I searched exactly what book or article of Kurt’s did this come from only to find out it was often attributed to his great book, CAT’S CRADLE, but alas, further digging led me to another of my favorite, author’s, Mark Twain.

WHICH LEADS ME TO ASK ONE MORE OF A GA-ZILLION TIMES

WHO’S SHAKING YOUR JAR.          .          .          ?
AND AN EVEN MORE IMPORTANT QUESTION:

WHO’S JAR ARE YOU SHAKING?

REGRETS. . .WE’VE HAD A FEW

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We are all
s  h  a  t  t  e  r   e   d
in so many places
we can barely call it
B r O k e N e D
so we reframe it and call it
R       E       G       R       E       T       S
and not always the ones that
Frank Sinatra
belts out in
MY WAY.          .          .
which is exactly why we need to understand

How Regrets Can Help You Make Better Decisions

A new book explains what makes people prone to regret and how it affects our lives, for better and worse.

Which JILL SUTTIE a Greater Good’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good.  I  love  Jill’s  way  of  looking  at  difficult  things  and  making  them  a  little  softer.  L  I  K  E:

Have you ever regretted something you did or didn’t do in life?

If you’ve lived a long life, you probably carry many regrets, large and small. Some of my own regrets relate to my career (why did I never become a teacher and a basketball coach; a full-fledge writer), past relationships (why did I lose a good friend over a small disagreement), and parenting (why didn’t I respond instead of react well to my kid’s worries and unmet expectations?). No matter the regret, it’s hard not to wonder how things might have turned out if I’d only made a different—and better—choice at the time.  I thought I was reading this book to help some of the patients I families I meet every day in the hospice setting.   .    .well.     .     .

Ruminating on past mistakes is a downer and can lead to depression or anxiety if it continues unabated. But a new book by psychologist Robert Leahy, If Only…Finding Freedom from Regret, suggests that regrets don’t always have to bog you down. If you understand how regrets work, recognize their effect on your decision making, and find ways to manage life’s inevitable disappointments, you can suffer less from regret and, instead, use your regrets as helpful guideposts for your life.

“Regret is a part of life, but it doesn’t have to take over and hijack you,” he writes.

The nature of regret

Regret can come in different forms—for something we did (like overeating or hurting our loved one) or something we didn’t do (like not graduating from college or not asking someone out on a date). Most people have a mixture of both types, though the latter tends to make us feel worse, writes Leahy.

According to research, the most common sources of regret involve our education, career, romance, and parenting (in that order). That’s because we tend to regret things that reflect bigger concerns and opportunities in life, rather than what we ate for breakfast.

Culture can affect how people experience regret, too, with people from more individualistic cultures usually having more regrets about their personal situation (like achievement or career) and those in collectivist cultures having more regrets about their relationships. And women and men differ some in how they experience regret, with women typically regretting romantic and sexual relationships more than men and men regretting inaction more than action.

Regret is associated with unpleasant emotions, like sadness, disappointment, guilt, and shame. But people also regard it as one of the most beneficial negative emotions, because it can be instructive. For example, if we regret how we behaved the last time we drank too much, we’re less likely to order a third round the next time we’re at the bar. Or, if we regret yelling at our child when angry, we may take a breath the next time we’re upset and respond with compassion.

Our regrets can teach us about ourselves, help us to avoid repeating mistakes, and encourage us to make better decisions in the future. On the other hand, if we use our regrets to beat ourselves up, or if we ignore them completely, they will not lead to growth. The key is finding the right balance, says Leahy.

“Regret doesn’t have to lead directly to self-recrimination,” he writes. But “never feeling regret is not a sign of wisdom or righteousness. It may be a sign you don’t learn from your mistakes.”

Why some people suffer from regret more

Some of us are more prone to regret than others, and Leahy provides multiple questionnaires within his book to help you identify where you fall on that scale. Though there is no way to eliminate regret completely—and the world would be worse if we did—there are factors that increase our chances of experiencing regret in a more negative way and suffering from it, says Leahy. Here are some of those risk factors.

Not tolerating ambivalence. Many life choices have pros and cons, and there are no guarantees about the future. But, if you can’t stand uncertainty, you are bound to avoid making hard choices, leaving you vulnerable to later regrets.

<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1462549675?ie=UTF8&tag=gregooscicen-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1462549675”><em>If Only…Finding Freedom from Regret</em></a> (The Guilford Press, 2022, 246 pages).If Only…Finding Freedom from Regret (The Guilford Press, 2022, 246 pages).

Falling prey to biases. We all have cognitive biases, but some influence regret more than others. If you suffer a lot from negativity bias (discounting or not even seeing the positives in your life), black-and-white thinking (thinking things are either all good or all bad), or catastrophizing (thinking that if something goes wrong, you won’t be able to handle it), it’s bound to affect how much you suffer regret.


Worrying about “buyer’s remorse” or how bad we’ll feel in the future. If you’re the kind of person who often anticipates feeling awful for making a choice, it may keep you from deciding on a course of action that could bring you happiness, increasing the potential for regret.

Having too many choices. “Regret is an opportunity emotion—the more opportunity we see, the more likely we are to regret something,” writes Leahy. For example, a college graduate with multiple job offers might regret taking one over another, especially if it doesn’t pan out. Having too many choices increases your potential for making the “wrong” one.

Being a perfectionist. If you expect to have an ideal, happy life all of the time and are not easily satisfied, you will be more prone to regret. “Maximizers” (people who seek out optimal outcomes) tend to feel more regret than “satisficers” (people who are content with good-enough outcomes), unless they can take steps to lessen their maximizing tendencies.

How regret can guide our decisions

“Regret is a possible element of any decision that we make,” writes Leahy. “But the likelihood that you will regret your decisions will depend on how you think about making your decisions and how you cope with living with the result.”


If you’re someone who lets past regrets fester in your mind, Leahy recommends that you fight against irrational thinking and think more realistically about where you are in life. He suggests using approaches from cognitive-behavioral therapy to question your assumptions. Here are some of his tips.

Remember that you don’t know things would have turned out better.If you imagine your life would have been better “if only…,” keep in mind that your assumption is not based on real evidence. Instead of focusing on where you might have been, turn toward the future and remember it can change based on the choices you make now.

Focus on the positive aspects of your current life, to balance out the negative feelings that come with regret. Your negativity bias can keep you preoccupied with what’s wrong rather than what’s right. So, it’s a good idea to practice gratitude for the good in your life—even for the small, simple things.

Don’t forget that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you wanted them to, even with your most thoughtful planning. Life can hand you lemons, but that’s not necessarily your fault. You cannot be omniscient; so, you need to accept that sometimes you will regret your choices. But that doesn’t mean you should criticize yourself endlessly. Better to learn from your mistakes than to punish yourself.

Accept tradeoffs and compromises. Not everything has to turn out just the way you wanted it to. You will stymie your progress if you insist otherwise and make yourself miserable in the process. So, aim to be a satisficer rather than a maximizer.

Overall, Leahy advises that, once you’ve learned whatever lessons regret can teach you, you can let go of unrealistic expectations about what might have been, enjoy your life as it is, and start planning for a better future.

“Look around you at what is in the present moment and hold on to it with a warm embrace,” he writes. “Because your regrets will only keep you from what you have and who you are and trap you in a fictional world that never was—and never could have been.”  

Life isn’t always
(forgive the pun)
CRACKED UP
what it’s suppose to be
but then again.          .         .
when it comes at us in
BITE SIZE
Pieces
We have a better way of
NOT REGRETTING
and savoring all of the goodness out of it
we can.          .          .

SELF LOVING

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It can be really hard to
SELF LOVE
when you don’t much
SELF LIKE.         .         .
It’s been three years since we have
SHELTERED IN PLACE
and literally defined what
LONELINESS
is or now
will forever be defined
d i f f e r e n t l y.         .          .
REARVIEW MIRROR LIVING
always shows a little more than what
the Windshield can ever reveal
at first glance.       .       .
N            O            W
there’s some studies and evidence-based-data
that’s coming out and showing
what these past three years have
caused/done/begun in us

Self-Love Is Making Us Lonely

Getty Images
  MAYTAL EYAL=is a psychologist, writer, and speaker. She is the host of the podcast Heal With It  and she shares with us some of her findings.

Extolled by politicians and pop stars alike, it seems like everyone is talking about self-love these days. In a Vogue make-up tutorial, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains that loving yourself is “the one foundation of everything.” Nicole LaPera, the clinical psychologist behind the popular Instagram account, @theholisticpsychologist, tells her 6.4 million followers, “Self-love is our natural state.” And in her most recent chart-topping hit, “Flowers,” Miley Cyrus sings proudly, “I can love me better than you can.”

Self-love has become the core tenant of modern wellness culture, with the promise that what follows self-love is good health and freedom. In her book, The Self-Love Experiment, author Sharon Kaiser claims, “Whether you want to achieve weight loss, land your dream job, find your soulmate, or get out of debt, it all comes back to self-love and accepting yourself first.”

At this point, it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to say that the self-love phenomenon is bordering on a societal obsession. The question is: why?

Today, we live in a climate where needing help can evoke shame and embarrassment, where cut-throat competition takes precedence over compassionate collaboration, and where self-sufficiency is celebrated as the ultimate achievement. To navigate the harsh terrain of radical individualism, self-love has emerged as our tool for survival. But it can come at a cost, especially when the type of self-love we turn to is the kind that has been manipulated by corporate ad campaigns and social media. In its commodified form, self-love is not really self-love at all; instead, it’s more like self-sabotage, convincing us to hyperfocus on ourselves at the expense of connecting with others.

While the exact origin of self-love remains unclear, one of the first psychologists to address the concept was Eric Fromm. In his 1956 book, The Art of Loving, he wrote, “Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love toward themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.” For Fromm, self-love operated as a necessary condition for relating with our fellow humans.

Going back further in history, we see other cultures referring to self-love as a channel for connection. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle claimed that self-love in its most virtuous form serves as a model for how we should love our friends. In the 13th century, Sufist poet Rumi wrote of the importance of recognizing the divine within oneself to feel one with the greater universe. And the ancient Buddhist practice of Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, involves practitioners directing love inwards so that they can then extend love outwards.

The self-love many of us have grown accustomed to today, however, veers from its authentic origin. Chewed up and spit out by toxic consumerism, it has been drained of its relational potential. Instead, it is often used by corporations and influencers alike to sell products and keep people hyper fixated on themselves. It is a force of isolation, rather than attachment.

When we take a moment to consider the culture we’re living in, where loneliness rates are at unprecedented highs, touch deprivation is a serious concern, and polarizing animosity has replaced empathic connection, it begins to make sense why we’ve sought refuge in self-love. To survive in our fractured world, we’ve been left with little choice but to turn inwards for affection.

Study after study shows that we’re living inside of a growing loneliness epidemic. In a recent survey conducted by Cigna, researchers found that almost 80% of adults from the ages of 18 to 24 reported feeling lonely. In 2018, even before the start of COVID-19 pandemic, one study showed that 54% of Americans felt like no one in their life knew them well.

Dr. Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, attributes such jarring isolation to what he calls our “culture of separation.” In his latest book, Intraconnected, Seigel writes that our society “emphasizes separation rather than connection, independence rather than interdependence, individuality rather than a shared identity.” Ultimately, our prevailing cultural emphasis on excessive autonomy and self-reliance has engendered a society rife with disconnection.

We can see examples of this on social media, where it is common for women to be bombarded—under the guise of self-love and self-care—with advertisements for Botox and pilates machines, advanced skin care wands and organic hair growth serums. Such products don’t serve to bring women closer together; instead, they promote self-preoccupation, negative social comparison, and rattling insecurity.

Influencer culture, as another example, keeps the lines blurred between self-love and self-involvement. Narcissism is not only normalized, but rewarded by likes, follows, and corporate sponsorships. This, of course, comes at the detriment of influencers and followers alike, as both report experiencing a diminishment in psychological well-being.

When self-love becomes entangled with self-absorption and materialism, serious consequences emerge for our collective mental health. Studies show that too much focus on oneself is associated with anxiety and depression. Past research has also documented the vicious feedback loop of consumption and loneliness: When we purchase material possessions (even in the name of self-love), we surprisingly feel lonely, so we try and soothe ourselves through buying more, but this only makes us feel worse. This takes a toll on our health, as loneliness has been linked to increased inflammation, heart disease, and even premature death.

Self-love is a powerful tool; it can be used for good or bad, for connection or disconnection. And at a time of such immense social fragmentation, we need to cultivate the kind that brings us together. So how exactly do we do this?

Primarily, it requires introspection. We can know we’re practicing healthy self-love when we feel connected to our bodies and our communities. There are many iterations of what this may look like. Perhaps we choose to prioritize rest and replenishment one night so that we can be more engaged the next time we see our friends. Or maybe we decide to quit our high stress job, so that we can stop neglecting our needs and spend more time with the people and places we enjoy. True self-love not only bolsters our capacity for connection, but it also helps us become an actualized version of ourselves.

On the other hand, self-love through the warped filter of radical individualism tends to make us feel alienated, disconnected, and stuck in our own heads. This looks like buying a “self-care” product that causes us to ruminate on our appearance or justifying our anxious avoidance of meaningful social commitments through the co-opted language of self-compassion. It’s vital, then, that we begin actively recognizing when more nefarious forces are being disguised and packaged to us as self-love, and when we, ourselves, are consciously or unconsciously buying into them.

Our culture of separation carries a strong current. It’s easy to get pulled in, to become swept away by its riptide. But if we can achieve the balance between caring for ourselves and caring for others, real self-love may just very well be our life raft.

It can be really hard to
SELF LOVE
when you don’t much
SELF LIKE.         .         .
(but just remember)

 

SUPERNATURAL PRESENCE

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IT IS A SUPER POWER
and we all possess it
but don’t always access it
P     R     E     S     E     N     C     E
Some call it:
HOLDING SPACE
and I’ve blogged on it before
but as a striving to always be better
CARING CATALYST
I can’t learn enough about it
or dare to believe
I’ve always provided it
to my utmost ability
.          .          .and then this article from
TIME MAGAZINE
found me:

The New, Strange Science

Behind Felt Presences

Chris Dale—Getty Images
IDEAS
BY BEN ALDERSON-DAY
Alderson-Day is an Associate Professor in Psychology and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University. A specialist in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. He is the author of Presence

Many of us have had this uncanny feeling before: Entering a silent room, walking through a dark night, or waking from sleep—and suddenly, it’s there. A sense that someone is with us, without any sight or sound. A feeling of a presence.

It’s a sensation that occupied the forefathers of psychology for a long time, including William James. Writing in the Varieties of Religious Experience, James wrote of “a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses.’” It was an experience he recognized as key to many a spiritual occurrence, but also one with an often sinister and foreboding air. A friend of James’ recounted a night-time encounter of his own that he experienced as a student: “I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense and yet there was a horribly unpleasant ‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception.”

If you’ve had this experience and you’ve tried to explain it to someone, you may be met with a blank look, or even skepticism. It sounds like something out of a ghost story, and indeed, William James was a kind of 19th-century ghostbuster. He was a key member of the Society of Psychical Research, which was set up to examine the truth behind telepathy, spiritualism, and apparitions of the night.

But what we now know is that James’s friend was correct. This isn’t a ghost story, or even a sixth sense, but something at the roots of our being. Contemporary neurology, cognitive neuroscience, and psychiatry shows us that such presences truly belong to us because they are linked to how our bodies and minds give us a sense of self.

The first piece of evidence comes from case studies of people affected by epilepsy, brain tumors, and other major changes to brain functioning. For instance, in a 2006 study, a 41-year-old man, whom the study called “PH,” presented to a hospital clinic complaining of fatigue, dizziness, and seizures. The one night in hospital, he awoke to feel he had split into three parts: his left side, which felt normal; his right side, which felt somehow detached; and then off to his right, another man who wasn’t him. This figure mirrored his body position, and when he tried to look at him, he looked away; PH felt as if “they shared the same soul.” Beyond the man stood a woman, again mirroring PH, and beyond that, some girls; he called them his “family.” After a few days the image of these figures receded, but the feeling of their presence remained.

PH’s experiences were the product of an aggressive tumor in the left hemisphere of his brain, which affected two areas in particular: the posterior insula and the temporoparietal junction. The former is a key brain area for processing internal information about our bodies (like heart rate or gut feelings), while the latter is involved in integrating our senses to make a map of where we are in space. Damage to those areas would have changed PH’s internal model for where he felt his body was. So when he was visited by this presence, in a way it did share his soul. It was where he should have been (or his brain thought he was).

The next piece of evidence comes from cognitive neuroscience, and a team led by neurologist Olaf Blanke in Geneva. Since 2014, they have used a robot to induce feelings of presence in healthy individuals and clinical disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. The robot works to disrupt your sensory expectations: Whenever we make a movement, our brains are thought to make a set of predictions about what will happen to our senses. Go to clap your hands, and your brain is ready for a new sight and sound, all at the right time. But if you mess with that, strange things start to happen; things don’t feel like “us” and instead start to feel like they belong to someone else. With the presence robot, you make random pressing movements into the air in front of you, while the robot presses you in the back at exactly the same time. In sync, it almost feels like it’s you pressing your own back—you brain takes the cues from your own movements, and the sensations on your back, and comes to the conclusion that the only person in this process is you. But when the touches start to then go out of sync—slowing and dragging, not quite hitting where they should—participants suddenly feel like a person, not just a robot, is controlling the touches from behind. Lots of people with Parkinson’s have feelings of presence as part of the condition, and this makes them particularly susceptible to the phantom touches of the robot.

Lastly, we’re now beginning to recognize that feelings of presence are a missing piece in the story of psychosis. Not long after William James was writing, figures like Karl Jaspers were describing examples of presence in some of the first textbooks of psychiatry. But the trail ran cold for a number of years—until very recently. There’s now evidence that people who hear voices (or have auditory hallucinations) also describe high rates of felt presence—literally voices than can be there without speaking. And grassroots work such as Rethink Psychosis, led by people with experience of psychosis themselves, are calling for more recognition and understanding of the phenomenon through projects like “Psychosis Outside the Box,” a collection of the more neglected and unusual aspects of psychosis.

The strangeness of presences makes them all too easy to miss in a time-pressured doctor’s appointment, but for many people, it may be the figure behind voices or visions that matters the most. If you’ve ever had your own personal space violated, or dreaded to go into certain places because of who might be there, you will know how much the presence of another can affect you, even without a word being uttered. Thinking about presences, and not just voices, poses a whole new set of challenges for our scientific models of psychosis and how we deliver psychotherapy. It’s even part of some of the newer psychotherapeutic approaches to psychosis, such as AVATAR therapy.

The through-line in all these examples is the self. In Western societies, we are used to the idea of a unitary, consistent self—the core of us that never changes. But psychologists and neuroscientists know that the self is something that can be disrupted in multiple ways; it’s less of a one-man band, and more of an ensemble piece. In clinical disorders, case reports, or through ingenious experiments, we can observed how radically the self can altered to produce a presence.

It goes beyond that, too. Given the right conditions, all of us could have this is experience, whether as a result of grief, exhaustion, trauma, or even sleep problems. In this way, the new science of presence isn’t about a mysterious “other,” after all. It’s a way of learning about ourselves.
W  H  O  A,  Right
And yet the not-so-big-surprise
WE ARE LIKE OCEANS.          .          .
THERE IS SO MUCH WE KNOW ABOUT EACH OTHER
AND SO VERY, VERY MUCH MORE THAT WE DON’T.     .     .
with the biggest question of
JUST HOW WILLING ARE YOU TO FIND OUT?
Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
FIND  OUT

FRIENDLY(LESS)

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Come on everybody.          .          .
Let’s break out in a robust chorus of TOY STORY’S
YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME
o  r
did the Pandemic take care of
T  H  A    T,
t  o  o?

Did the Pandemic Make Us Less Friendly?

A new study observed rapid changes in personality during the pandemic, with people becoming less open, conscientious, agreeable, and extraverted.      .      .

JOLANTA BURKE Ph.D., is a chartered psychologist specializing in positive psychology and a senior lecturer at the Centre for Positive Psychology and Health at the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. She has authored eight books, the latest one The Ultimate Guide to Implementing Wellbeing Programmes for School published by Routledge.  She  recently  wrote  an  article  about  what  we  knew   had  to be  coming  after  these  past  few  years.

For many of us, some personality traits stay the same throughout our lives, while others change only gradually. However, evidence shows that significant events in our personal lives that induce severe stress or trauma can be associated with more rapid changes in our personalities.

A new study, published in PLOS ONE, suggests the COVID pandemic has indeed triggered much greater shifts in personality than we would expect to have seen naturally over this period. In particular, the researchers found that people were less extroverted, less open, less agreeable, and less conscientious in 2021 and 2022 compared with before the pandemic.

This study included more than 7,000 participants from the U.S., aged between 18 and 109, who were assessed before the pandemic (from 2014 onwards), early in the pandemic in 2020, and then later in the pandemic in 2021 or 2022.

At each time point, participants completed the “Big Five Inventory.” This assessment tool measures personality on a scale across five dimensions: extroversion versus introversion, agreeableness versus antagonism, conscientiousness versus lack of direction, neuroticism versus emotional stability, and openness versus closedness to experience.

There weren’t many changes between pre-pandemic and 2020 personality traits. However, the researchers found significant declines in extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness in 2021/2022 compared with before the pandemic. These changes were akin to a decade of normal variation, suggesting the trauma of the COVID pandemic had accelerated the natural process of personality change.

Interestingly, younger adults’ personalities changed the most in the study. They showed marked declines in agreeableness and conscientiousness, and a significant increase in neuroticism in 2021/2022 compared with pre-pandemic. This may be due in part to social anxiety when emerging back into society, having missed out on two years of normality.

Personality and well-being

Many of us became more health-conscious during the pandemic, for example by eating better and doing more exercise. A lot of us sought whatever social connections we could find virtually, and tried to refocus our attention on psychological, emotional, and intellectual growth—for example, by practicing mindfulness or picking up new hobbies.

Nonetheless, mental health and well-being decreased significantly. This makes sense given the drastic changes we went through.

Notably, personality significantly impacts our well-being. For example, people who report high levels of conscientiousness, agreeableness, or extroversion are more likely to experience the highest level of well-being.

So the personality changes detected in this study may go some way to explaining the decrease in well-being we’ve seen during the pandemic.

If we look more closely, the pandemic appears to have negatively affected the following areas:

  • our ability to express sympathy and kindness toward others (agreeableness);
  • our capacity to be open to new concepts and willing to engage in novel situations (openness);
  • our tendency to seek out and enjoy other people’s company (extraversion);
  • our desire to strive toward our goals, do tasks well, or take responsibilities toward others seriously (conscientiousness).

All of these traits influence our interaction with the environment around us and, as such, may have played a role in our well-being decline. For example, working from home may have left us feeling demotivated and as though our career was going nowhere (lower conscientiousness). This in turn may have affected our well-being by making us feel more irritable, depressed, or anxious.

What next.        .        .        ?

Over time, our personalities usually change in a way that helps us adapt to aging and cope more effectively with life events. In other words, we learn from our life experiences and this subsequently impacts our personality. As we age, we generally see increases in self-confidence, self-control, and emotional stability.

However, participants in this study recorded changes in the opposite direction to the usual trajectory of personality change. This is understandable given that we faced an extended period of difficulties, including constraints on our freedoms, lost income, and illness. All these experiences have evidently changed us—and our personalities.

This study provides us with some very useful insights into the impacts of the pandemic on our psyche. These impacts may subsequently influence many aspects of our lives, such as well-being.

Knowledge allows us to make choices. So you might like to take the time to reflect on your experiences over the past few years, and how these personality changes may have affected you.

Any changes may well have protected you during the height of the pandemic. However, it’s worth asking yourself how useful these changes are now that the acute phase of the pandemic is behind us. Do they still serve you well, or could you try to rethink your perspective?

QUESTIONS WORTH EMBRACING
as we go about
not so much discovering
A n S w E r S
as actually
LIVING THEM
in new ways.          .           .

As we
Caring Catalysts
help others along
Their W a Y s

 

 

L I F E and it’s MEANING

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Meaning in Your Life

Sounds like a haunting kind of a headline, doesn’t it.          .          .
BUT
isn’t that what we’re all trying to find
with every turning page in the book of our lives.        .       .

Struggling to find a sense of meaning in life?
Researchers have identified three different pathways to it

 

Joshua A. Hicks, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University. His primary lines of research focus on the experience of meaning in life, authenticity, and true-self knowledge and Laura A. King, Ph.D., is the Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri have combined forces to give us a peek at what we all want a long gawk at, HOW TO FIND MEANING IN OUR LIVES.     .     .

Feeling that your life has meaning is fundamental to the experience of being human, and people who feel this way tend to be healthier and happier. Given the importance that most people place on meaning, how might we cultivate the feeling that life is meaningful?

For most of the 20th century, philosophers, psychologists, and psychiatrists argued that meaning in life is a rare, profound experience, attainable through an active search, deep self-reflection, or some other arduous way of creating meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. But we now know that most people, most of the time, report that their lives feel more meaningful than not. Although actively constructing meaning may be required in some cases—for example, when your world is turned upside down after a traumatic event—cultivating meaning in life may be as simple as detecting the meaning that is already there.

Researchers’ definitions of meaning in life typically incorporate three themes: the belief that your life and contributions matter to others and yourself, the feeling that your life makes sense, and the feeling that you are actively pursuing fulfilling goals. Other research further corroborates the idea that significance (mattering), coherence (making sense), and purpose(orienting toward goals) represent three interrelated facets of, or perhaps direct pathways to, the experience of meaning in life.

Based on those three pathways, here are some relatively simple things you can do to maintain or enhance your experience of meaning in life.

The experience of significance in life

There is great comfort in believing that your life and actions matter in the grand scheme of things. This conviction is referred to as “existential mattering” and is a strong component of the experience of meaning in life. While the concept of existential mattering often evokes images of famous (and infamous) people who have done extraordinary things in their lives—like Mother Theresa, Cesar Chavez, or Bill Gates—many people gain a sense of mattering through avenues more easily traversed.

Research shows that feeling that you have made a positive influence on others is, unsurprisingly, almost always associated with the belief that your life is meaningful. Existential mattering then is often rooted in a sense that you matter to others—from helping strangers in need and providing social support to loved ones, to simply being a reliable friend.

The feeling that your life is significant is related to more than feeling that your actions are influential to others. Significance is augmented when your behaviors, or experiences more broadly, matter to yourself. This aspect of significance is related to psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s idea of finding beauty and meaning in life through lived experience. For example, the experience of meaningfulness can be found by enjoying riveting musical performances, being in awe of natural beauty, or simply appreciating an authentic interaction with another person.

One way to perceive more significance in your life is to actively seek out intrinsically rewarding experiences, like (re)connecting with nature or people who make it easy to express your true self. Moreover, many cognitive or emotional regulation strategies, such as practicing mindfulness, savoring the positive aspects of situations, cultivating a grateful disposition, or learning to evaluate your experiences more positively, naturally foster the detection of significance in your life experiences.

Although such experiences may lead the self to feel small in the context of vastness, they may also remind us that we belong to that vastness—that we are an indelible part of the wider universe in which we exist.

Sensing coherence

Coherence is the feeling that your life makes sense. For most people, most of the time, understanding life isn’t a problem requiring a solution. We are natural sense makers, automatically comprehending most situations effortlessly. In fact, a likely reason we don’t think about meaning in life too much is that our lives simply feel right (that is, things simply make sense). Our lives are embedded in a natural world characterized by regularities—sunrises and sunsets. We overlay these regularities with our own routines—morning coffee or an evening walk. The regularities of life provide the rhythms that undergird the feeling that life is meaningful.

Of course, life does not always make sense. For example, you may feel a sense of incomprehensibility after experiencing trauma or, counterintuitively, trying too hard to understand why your life has meaning.

Of all of the facets of meaning, coherence likely represents a basic psychological need. Similar to the anguish we feel when our need to belong is thwarted, our world seems to fall apart when things suddenly do not make sense. Restoring a sense of coherence during these times can be challenging and often requires feedback and reassurance from others (like a therapist or parent), as well as the mysterious healing power of time to help the mind restore a sense of equanimity. Reconnecting with the natural order of the world, reinstating routines that give structure to life, and finding respite in the arts may help you make sense of life again.

Although the inability to make sense of your life can detract from the experience of meaning, simply making sense of it doesn’t necessarily mean that life will feel meaningful. It is easy, for example, to think of an individual who possesses a cynical belief about how their life has unfolded. This worldview may help the individual make sense of their situation and life more broadly, but it seems unlikely to foster the belief that their life is full of meaning. This example illustrates how meaning is not simply about “connecting the dots” but also finding beauty in the picture that emerges.

Imbuing life with a sense of purpose

“Clear eyes, full hearts (can’t lose)” was the mantra of the Dillon Panthers, the fictitious football team familiar to fans of the popular TV show “Friday Night Lights.” One reason clearing one’s eyes, and subsequently filling one’s heart, is a successful strategy for football players and, perhaps, everyone is that people in this psychological state can pursue their goals with a greater sense of purpose. Feeling a sense of purpose helps us sustain motivation though the thick and thin of everyday life, and purposeful people tend to be more satisfied with their lives and even live longer. Purpose, therefore, is tied to both the quality and quantity of our existence.

One factor that facilitates purposeful action is possessing a clear reason for engaging in whatever you are doing. Knowing the “why” of your actions can infuse even trivial behaviors with value. Nietzsche famously noted that the person “who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” By developing a clear reason for pursuing a goal, the “how” of your goal-directed actions becomes more tolerable (and often more enjoyable) because those actions are now connected with a more long-term objective. For example, although most students would rather socialize with friends than study before an exam, clearly understanding that this minor hedonic sacrifice will help them obtain a rewarding job down the line should make it easier to commit to exam prep.

Even as your nose is firmly “to the grindstone,” clear eyes can be trained on a broader life dream. The overarching reason for existence can be found in “God’s plan” or a life calling, but a sense of the why of behaviors is not limited to such grand experiences. Taking time to reflect on your life dreams—to write the next chapters of your life story—can help to connect everyday life and daily goals to broader aspirations. Instead of wandering aimlessly, having “clear eyes” gives you a sense of direction and the motivation (a full heart) to help you achieve your goals and allow those accomplishments to imbue your life with meaning.

Some reasons for goal pursuit may be better than others, though. A person who feels they should perform a task only because their supervisor asked them to do it is unlikely to enjoy a sense of purpose while performing that work. Instead, purposeful behaviors are by definition pursued for more intrinsic reasons, often related to core aspects of one’s identity. For example, people may volunteer at a homeless shelter for various reasons, but the person who does so because they feel their actions are consistent with an internalized value of helping others in need are more likely to derive a sense of purpose from the experience.

The capacity of meaning to allow us to wake up every morning and do what needs to be done requires that meaning be present even in suffering. And this is where a sense of purpose is powerful. Although all human lives matter, they all also end and, in the grand scheme, may not hold the promise of a place in history, threatening our sense of significance. Similarly, although life very often makes sense, random, senseless events do occur that can destabilize our sense of coherence—from natural disasters to random acts of horrific violence. But purpose may be the facet of meaning that is least dependent on happenstance. No matter the circumstance, purpose—the capacity to invest in goals—is available, promising to imbue life with meaning.

Although it may be common folklore that ardently searching for, and effortfully creating, meaning in life is the primary way to truly experience this sought-after feeling, research suggests that most of the time meaning is actually quite easy to detect. Trying to understand why our life is meaningful may serve a function when life becomes incomprehensible, but ultimately it may never yield a satisfying answer. Meaning is not just found in one place. It is all around us—in our relationships, work, and spiritual and religious beliefs, as well as through the appreciating of life itself.

PHONE ZONE

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THE PHONE ZONE

.           .            .hardly right?
Most don’t remember phones like this that sat on end tables or night stands securely wired to the wall and many more might be wondering, “HOW DO YOU TEXT WITH THIS THING?” or Google or TikTok or SnapChat or.            .           .
M  A  Y  B  E

Instead of Pulling Out Your Phone, Let Your Mind Wander.   .  .
Talk about
MIND BLOWING

When we’re waiting, we often have the urge to distract ourselves—but a new study finds we’d enjoy doing nothing but think.

Maybe years from now the Psychologists will tell us how telling it has been for us to be sooooo PHONE DEPENDENT; for now JILL SUTTIE Psy.D., who is Greater Good’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine explores the subject that we are so subject to: OUR PHONES.  She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good.

If you commute on a bus or train, you’ve probably noticed that most people spend the ride looking at their cell phones. No doubt, they assume doing nothing but sit there would be boring, so they prefer distracting themselves. This squares with past research showing people will do almost anything to avoid boredom—even administer electric shocks to themselves.To

But results from new research suggest we should rethink that choice. We are probably underestimating how enjoyable and interesting it is to do nothing but pay attention to wherever our thoughts take us.

In a series of experiments, researchers brought Japanese university students into a lab and told them that they would soon be going into a room without their belongings to wait and do nothing but sit for 20 minutes. They were further instructed that, while waiting, they could think about anything they wanted to, but were not allowed to sleep, walk, or exercise; look at a smartphone; or consult a watch.

Before entering the room, they were asked to predict how much they’d enjoy waiting and thinking, how interesting or boring it would be, and how much it would engage them so that they’d lose track of time. Then, they went in the room to wait. Afterward, they reported how waiting actually felt—how engaging, pleasurable, interesting, or boring it was. (In some variations of the experiment, they waited in a dark room without any stimulation.)

Either way, researchers found that the participants were not good at predicting how much they’d enjoy doing nothing but think. Even in a dark room with no stimulation, they ended up being more engaged and interested than they’d anticipated.

“People don’t appreciate the real value of waiting/thinking,” says researcher Kou Murayama of the Motivation Science Lab at the University of Tübingen in Germany and coauthor of the study. “Once they engage in it, though, they appreciate it.”

To test this idea further, Murayama and his colleagues recruited another group of students and repeated the experiment. But first they asked students whether they’d rather have a 75% chance of being in a room without any stimulation or with a computer they could use to check the news. Not surprisingly, most students wanted the latter and predicted they’d enjoy waiting more if they had computer access.

Then, the researchers randomly assigned students to have a computer in the room or not and asked them to report afterward how the experience went. Despite predictions, there were no significant differences between those who waited with or without a computer; both groups liked the experience equally.

Why would this be? The students didn’t report on their actual thoughts, so it’s hard to know exactly where their minds went. But spontaneous thinking often involves mind-wandering, daydreaming, thinking about the future, or recollecting memories, all of which can have upsides. For example, daydreaming and mind-wandering have been found to improve our mood, creativity, goal-setting, and job performance (especially during a repetitive task). And thinking about the past in a nostalgic (rather than ruminative) way can make us happier and more resilient to stress.

Though it’s hard to know if these results with students would apply to the rest of us, Murayama did at least compare German students to Japanese students and found both groups underestimated the pleasure of waiting to a similar degree. This implies that it’s not necessarily a culturally-driven phenomenon, though more research would need to be done to verify that.

Overall, says Murayama, the results suggest we rethink whipping out our cell phones every time we are waiting or bored. Instead, we might benefit from having a moment to think freely about whatever catches our fancy—and enjoy ourselves just as much.

“If you find yourself checking mobile phones when there is nothing to do, try to take a moment to entertain yourself with thinking,” advises Murayama. “You may have new refreshing experiences that you did not expect.”

  •  

THE GREAT IN GOOD

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Want to Do More Good?

This Movement Might Have

The Answer

(If you dare take the time to read this)

Illustration by The Project Twins for Time
IDEAS
NAINA BAJEKAL/OXFORD, U.K.  (Bajekal is an Executive Editor at TIME) recently contributed a pretty inspiring article in Time Magazine but we most likely all have thought about but most likely never enough:
WHAT’S GREAT ABOUT GOOD?

Thirteen years ago, William MacAskill found himself standing in the aisle of a grocery store, agonizing over which breakfast cereal to buy. If he switched to a cheaper brand for a year, could he put aside enough money to save someone’s life? It wasn’t the first time he’d been gripped by this kind of angst. His life has often felt like a series of difficult choices: Should he donate even more money to charity? Should he quit academia and work in politics—even if he hated it—in the hopes of having a greater social impact? What if he moved to a different city—could he do more to help others elsewhere?

For anyone enjoying a comfortable life in a world of horrifying inequality, examining your choices closely might spark similar questions. For MacAskill, a 35-year-old Scottish philosopher who co-founded a movement dedicated to doing the most good possible, the stakes of even mundane decisions can feel especially high.

He seems to have found a way to carry that load. In fact, for a man who’s spent the past few years thinking about how humanity might permanently derail its future, he’s surprisingly cheerful. He’s just returned from a week of surfing with his partner Holly Morgan on the south coast of England. After years of suffering from depression and anxiety, he now prioritizes sleep, exercise, and meditation. He enjoys swimming outdoors, playing the saxophone, and holding “fire raves” in fields with friends, dancing around a bonfire to house music until the early hours. “There are many things in my life I care about for intrinsic reasons,” he says, “not because I’ve done some 12-dimensional maths about how it contributes to the greater good.”

The greater good has been the focus of his work for more than a decade, since he helped start the effective altruism (EA) movement, Reswhich aims to use evidence and reason to find the best ways of helping others, and to put those findings into practice. EA holds that we should value all lives equally and act on that basis. It is the antithesis of the old do-gooder’s credo “Think global, act local.”

The expansion has been fueled by a substantial rise in donations. In 2021, EA-aligned foundations distributed more than $600 million in publicly listed grants—roughly quadruple what they gave five years earlier. While this is a minute fraction of global philanthropy—and only 0.1% of U.S. giving, which amounted to $485 billion the same year—the movement is growing and has the support of a new generation of young philanthropists planning to funnel their fortunes into EA causes.

The vast majority of EA’s newfound wealth comes from two tech billionaires: Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Bankman-Fried. Open Philanthropy, which is primarily funded by the Facebook and Asana co-founder Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, distributed more than $440 million in grants in 2021, a third of which went to global health and development, 28% to longtermist interventions (such as biosecurity and EA community growth), 18% to animal welfare, and the rest to research in areas such as economic policy and criminal-justice reform. Four months after launching in February this year, the FTX Future Fund had committed more than $130 million in grants, mostly to longtermist causes. The money comes from Bankman-Fried, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who was inspired to pursue a high-earning career after meeting MacAskill in 2012.

Bloomberg estimates Bankman-Fried’s net worth at $12.8 billion (down because of this year’s crypto-market crash) and Moskovitz’s at $13.8 billion. Both have committed to giving away most of their wealth, with EA-aligned organizations as the tributaries. Between them, that’s more than $26 billion. That far surpasses the endowments of two of America’s oldest private foundations, the Ford Foundation ($16 billion) and the Rockefeller Foundation($6.3 billion). Like those foundations, Open Philanthropy and the Future Fund function as grantmakers for projects, non-profits, and individuals they deem high-impact.

The EA movement has proved remarkably expansive, allowing those who might be inclined toward radical individualism to work alongside the more collectively minded. But for it to deliver on its aim—to improve as many lives as possible—it needs to help answer an impossible question: How much comfort should we be willing to trade for potentially enormous gains to society?

Many of the people who helped give rise to EA felt compelled to do good from a young age. At 11, Niel Bowerman tried to encourage his London classmates to carpool to help combat climate change. As a 13-year-old in suburban Richmond, Va., Julia Wise began giving away her allowance. The summer before his senior year at Stanford, Alexander Berger signed up to donate a kidney to a stranger. Sixteen-year-old Benjamin Todd conducted an audit to show how his school could reduce carbon emissions; in response, the school started an organic garden. “That wasn’t really what I had in mind,” he says now, laughing.

As a teenager in Glasgow, MacAskill was similarly interested in big ideas and helping others. Born William Crouch (he took his ex-wife’s grandmother’s maiden name when they married in 2013), he was the youngest of three sons. His mother worked as a geneticist for the National Health Service while his father worked in IT for a clothing company. He wrote in his journal about the philosophy of love and harbored aspirations of becoming a poet; he volunteered at summer camps for children with disabilities and worked at an eldercare facility. “My mum was honestly always pretty confused by it,” he says. At Cambridge University, MacAskill became vegetarian, got involved in climate activism, and started attending lectures on political philosophy, feminism, and global governance. It was during his final year that the urge to do good began to bubble more strongly. He spent the summer after graduation working for a humanitarian nonprofit. “All day, every day, I was thinking about extreme poverty,” he says.

Shortly after he arrived at Oxford for graduate studies in philosophy, MacAskill was introduced to the Australian philosopher Toby Ord, who had pledged to give more than half of his future earnings to charity and was thinking about how to connect others interested in doing something similar. The 22-year-old MacAskill volunteered to help him, and in 2009 they launched Giving What We Can to encourage more people to take the 10% donation pledge.

Two years later, in 2011, MacAskill and Todd, a fellow Oxford graduate, co-founded the nonprofit 80,000 Hours (named for how long the average person spends at work over their lifetime) to provide advice on using your career to make a positive difference in the world. After debating a bunch of terms for their burgeoning community—from “good maximizers” to “rational altruism”—MacAskill and his colleagues founded the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) in 2012, as an umbrella organization for the two projects. Their first significant donations came from a couple in Boston: Julia Wise, the former allowance gifter, who was by then a social worker donating a significant portion of her salary, and her husband Jeff Kaufman. After years of working in cafés and libraries, CEA rented its first office in the basement of a real estate office; about a dozen people worked there, eating bread and hummus for lunch.

Associate philosophy professor William MacAskill, at his office in Oxford on July 14
Sophie Green for TIME

Nine years on, I meet MacAskill outside Trajan House in Oxford, a sleek, glass-walled building that several EA organizations share with Oxford University. There’s a small gym, weekly yoga classes, and a nap room. Our lunch from the office canteen is a Tuscan ribollita stew, garlic bread, and salad provided by vegan caterers Greenbox. MacAskill sometimes misses the bread-in-the-basement days, which felt consistent with the mission. But CEA now has an annual budget of $28 million, which allows for the sorts of amenities one doesn’t typically associate with shoestring nonprofits. MacAskill says the comforts help to maximize productivity and well-being, and they’re cautious about not overdoing the perks. “We don’t want to go for obscene luxury,” he says, “but the main thing to focus on is how much impact we’re having.”

When assessing a potentially worthy cause, EAs calculate impact using three components: importance or scale (how much good could arise from working on it), tractability (how solvable it is), and neglectedness (how overlooked it is in terms of committed resources). One result of filtering the world’s problems through a lens of where an extra dollar or hour would have the most impact is that EA donations can seem to lack any obvious connection: among Open Philanthropy’s causes are South Asian air quality, farm-animal welfare, and the risks of advanced AI.

The emphasis on neglected causes has led many EA leaders to focus more on how to maximize the good not just for those alive today, but also for the many, many generations to come. As more intellectual excitement and resources have started flowing to causes like existential threats, some in the movement have worried that the reasons they all got into this—to help tackle urgent, overlooked suffering—could end up falling by the wayside.

MacAskill seems acutely aware of the trade-offs of prioritizing future people, though he believes they are uniquely disempowered by the incentives of our current political and economic systems. “If you’re a small force in the world, then there’s an argument that you should be going all in on one thing,” he says, noting that far more money goes to foreign humanitarian aid than to pandemic preparedness, AI safety, and preventing nuclear war. “EA is always fundamentally asking: What can be done on the margin? Moving the global allocation of resources potentially just a little bit in one direction can have an outsize impact,” he says.

But MacAskill wants EA to be an adaptive community, not an intellectual monoculture—which means he favors a breadth of causes. “When I start thinking in practice, if you’ve got some things that look robustly good in both the short and the long term, that definitely makes you feel a lot better than something that is only good from a very long-term perspective,” he says. This year, for example, he personally donated to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, which aims to end childhood lead exposure, and the Atlas Fellowship, which supports talented high school students around the world to work on pressing problems. Not all issues are equally tractable, but MacAskill still cares about a range; when we met in Oxford, he expressed concern for the ongoing political crisis in Sri Lanka, though admitted he probably wouldn’t tweet about it.

With countless problems worth addressing, he knows “moral vertigo” can feel inevitable. Suppose you decide you’re going to raise money for people dying of malaria, he says. Then what about all the people dying of tuberculosis, because you’re choosing to focus on malaria? “We are in this horrific situation where you’ve got to make trade-offs about what you do,” he says.

The answer, he believes, is to be honest about it. In philanthropy, big donors typically choose causes based on their personal passions—an ultra-subjectivist approach, MacAskill says, where everything is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good. He doesn’t think that’s tenable. “If you can save someone from drowning or 10 people from dying in a burning building, what should you do?” he proposes. “It is not a morally appropriate response to say, well, I’m particularly passionate about drowning and so I’m going to save the one person from drowning rather than the 10 people from burning. And that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in.”

A big part of MacAskill’s work these days is trying to persuade very wealthy people to change how they give away money. Like so many others in philanthropy, he both counts on the largess of billionaires and worries about the risks of dependence. “Look at any moral movement in the past, you will find examples of the ideas being misused to justify actions that aren’t in line with the best thing,” he says, positing that liberalism was used to justify colonial atrocities, and Marx and Engels’ concern for the working class was exploited by Stalin.

That’s partly why he thinks it’s crucial that EA continues to have culture-setters who are serious about their moral obligations. MacAskill and Ord see it as especially important to stick to the “Further Pledge” they both took to donate not just a certain percentage of their earnings, but everything above a set sum. MacAskill currently lives on £26,000 ($31,000) a year, which is slightly above the median household income in the U.K., and the proceeds of his new book all go to the Effective Altruism Funds. “It’s a legible demonstration that I’m in this because I really care, I’m not getting any financial benefit,” he says. That kind of commitment helps signal the moral seriousness of the EA community, he hopes, and is also personally reassuring. “I might worry, am I drifting in values? OK, no, if I’m still doing these things, I guess I must still be a good person.”

It’s possible that MacAskill wouldn’t still be thinking about doing good at all, if not for that chance introduction to Ord. Like many young people, he had a sense that the world was full of injustice and a desire to make a difference, but he didn’t know where to channel it. There was plenty of discussion about how terrible the world was, he says, but little offered in the way of concrete action. “I was feeling really bad, but what I really wanted was to make the world better, rather than to make myself feel worse,” he says. “It’s quite plausible to me that I would have had this wave of moral motivation, not found an outlet for it, and it would just have faded away over time.”

​I was in a similar position when I first encountered effective altruism as a university student. I’d grown disillusioned about a planned career in international development after a year working at a nonprofit when I came across the 80,000 Hours career advice. At the time, it was promoting a strategy called earning to give, encouraging students to pursue lucrative careers doing, for example, quantitative trading at hedge funds, in order to donate a significant portion of their salaries—rather than working directly for nonprofits. (80,000 Hours has now de-emphasized this approach.) That strategy is controversial and certainly wasn’t a good fit for me. But as soon as I graduated in 2014 and got my first internship at this publication, I signed the Giving What We Can Pledge. I now donate about 15% of my pretax income, mostly to EA-recommended charities working on global health, climate, and animal welfare. (I had never attended an EA event nor met any key figures until I began reporting this story.)

I was interested in EA as a set of ideas, if less in the community. Even today, the typical effective altruist is a white man in his 20s, who lives in North America or Europe, and has a university degree. (While geographic diversity is growing, gender diversity still lags.) I was glad to know that there was a group of people taking seriously the question of how to do good, but they just didn’t seem like my people.

Even for MacAskill, the community can have its downsides. Back in 2015, effective altruism felt like the majority of MacAskill’s identity; he recalls attending the wedding of his best friend from high school and realizing that he wasn’t one of the groomsmen because he had let the friendship fallow. That year was a turning point: he separated from his wife, the philosopher Amanda Askell, got his Oxford professorship at the exceptionally young age of 28, and began actively cultivating a more multifaceted life.

Still, EA remains a lodestar. “It doesn’t impact my feeling of happiness in the way that dancing might impact my feeling of happiness,” MacAskill says. “But there’s this deeper sense of satisfaction or even harmony with the world.” He might still worry about how bad everything is, or how much worse it could get, but he is largely doing his best to find solutions. “The mode of ‘everything sucks’ is not helpful. Maybe it’s true, but the relevant question is: what can we do?”

Many EAs echo that sentiment: that doing something, even when the right course of action is unclear, is better than giving in to fatalism, which is often where I find myself. It can be tough to work in journalism—a field that stares right at the world’s problems—and not become cynical. When things feel particularly bleak, I sometimes tell myself that even if I had the time and energy to try to make the world better, I’d probably fail.

Effective altruists try anyway. They know it’s impossible to take the care you feel for one human and scale it up by a thousand, or a million, or a billion. Rather than getting overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem, they focus on the difference a single person can make. “Some people would think that what we do is just a drop in the bucket,” Ord says. “But it doesn’t really matter what size the bucket is. If what you can do in your life involves really saving hundreds of lives, or transforming the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, that’s just as big no matter how many other people need help.”

Is doing any of this actually a moral obligation? Effective altruists tend to be divided on the subject. MacAskill says EA explicitly doesn’t make moral demands. It tries to answer the question of how to most effectively use a given amount of resources, whether a dollar or an hour, to improve the world, but it doesn’t tell you how much money or time to give to these efforts. Ord and MacAskill have left the question open in how they’ve framed Giving What You Can. “The general approach is: if you hear this message and you’re excited about it, come join us,” Ord says. “Let’s go do it.”

Both have, however, been influenced by the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. In his famous 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Singer argues that if you would feel morally obliged to wade into a shallow pond to save a drowning child, even if it would destroy your clothes, you should feel equally obliged to save the lives of people you can’t see by forgoing the cost of a new outfit.

This line of thought can lead to a crushing sense of responsibility. In the 2015 book Strangers Drowning, journalist Larissa MacFarquhar describes a frustrated and isolated Julia Wise, then in her 20s, as believing she was not entitled to care more for herself than for others. In one memorable episode, her boyfriend buys her a $4 candy apple and she weeps bitterly, feeling immense guilt that she might have deprived a child of a lifesaving anti-malarial bed net.

Wise says that mindset predated any encounters with effective altruism. “Young adults want to be hardcore about something, and I decided to be hardcore about sacrifice,” she tells me, with a soft laugh. Once she connected with like-minded people in Boston and Oxford, she began to wonder if choosing the right problems to work on could have far more of an effect than simply working harder and sacrificing more. “Just feeling that I was on a team with other people mattered a lot. I realized this isn’t about how hard I can drive myself,” she says. ol

Like many EAs, Wise—who is now CEA’s longest-serving employee—finds Singer’s arguments compelling, but she believes obligation is not a strong motivator in the long run. She also doesn’t hold quite the same attitude as Holden Karnofsky, the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy and co-founder of GiveWell, who has written about “excited altruism,” which stresses that being able to make a significant difference to others is an exciting opportunity. To Wise, the fact that it’s relatively easy and cheap to save a life is an indictment as well as an enticement. “A better society would have prevented this by now,” she says. Because it hasn’t, what she feels is a kind of determination—hope that the world could be better, and resolve because the problems are so appalling.

In a 2015 review of MacAskill’s first book, Doing Good Better, the philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes that “effective altruism takes up the spirit of Singer’s argument but shields us from the full blast of its conclusion,” which is that small luxuries may be morally unacceptable. To Srinivasan, effective altruism is essentially just collective decency with better branding and organization. As she wrote, “either effective altruism, like utilitarianism, demands that we do the most good possible, or it asks merely that we try to make things better. The first thought is genuinely radical, requiring us to overhaul our daily lives in ways unimaginable to most … The second thought … is shared by every plausible moral system and every decent person.”

The EA movement believes it lies somewhere between the two. In encouraging a norm where people give 10% of their income—significantly more than the 2% of disposable income the average American gives—to causes that are unrelated to their immediate emotional satisfaction, effective altruism is asking more of people than to simply “try to make things better,” says Alexander Berger, the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy. On Twitter, he recently wrote that one of the core insights of effective altruism is that “comfortable modernity is consistent with levels of altruistic impact and moral seriousness that we might normally -associate with moral heroism.” A world where college-educated Americans gave 10% to GiveWell-recommended charities (or similar) would be a massively better world, he argued, with far lower child mortality and poverty.

That EA is more comfortable meeting people where they are is probably why it’s taken off in a way that Singer’s arguments haven’t in the past 50 years. “EA doesn’t require you to refashion your sense of self,” Berger tells me. “You can have a lot of impact without becoming a radical ascetic.”

Another critique is that EA is too deeply rooted in the values underpinning current power structures and it shouldn’t be up to individuals to fix seismic problems. MacAskill agrees, pointing out that EAs are doing a lot of work to try and change things at the policy level, but he also believes the argument can be used as an excuse by well-off people to defer responsibility. “Society just consists of individuals; governments consist of individuals; corporations and so on,” he says. That leads him to argue that EA should focus on both trying to change what big institutions do, and on individual action.

Believing that it’s truly possible for one person to make a difference can inspire people to reorganize their priorities. Niel Bowerman was a climate scientist and activist when he met MacAskill and decided to change tracks; he helped set up 80,000 Hours, where he now works.

In such a young movement, though—a 2020 survey put the median age at 27—that belief can also lead people to put immense pressure on themselves to optimize all their life choices. “When I first encountered EA, there was this slightly alluring idea of: Why don’t I just dedicate my whole life to this thing?” Bowerman says. He soon came to realize that wasn’t sustainable, nor was it the best way to do the most good.

Many older EAs—those in their 30s qualify here—say doing good has become one of many goals, not the only one. Wise has three children, which has helped ground her. “It’s both not realistic and probably not desirable to be so absolutist about this that you don’t have other significant pulls in your life,” she says. “We all need to make decisions that work for us as humans and not as if we’re only optimizing machines.”

On MacAskill’s desk in Oxford are portraits of three people: Mozi, the ancient Chinese moral philosopher who taught that morality should involve equal, impartial concern for all; Benjamin Lay, the Anglo American Quaker who was a prominent early opponent of slavery; and Irena Sendler, the Polish humanitarian who rescued Jews during the Second World War.

Looking at them reminds him of the long path from these moral pioneers to the widespread uptake of their ideas. The first public protest against African American slavery was the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition. Slavery was only abolished in the British Empire in 1833, decades later in the U.S., and not until 1962 in Saudi Arabia. History encourages MacAskill to favor gradual progress over revolution. Abolition, he says, is “maybe the single best moral change ever, it’s certainly up there with feminism, and they’re extremely incremental. They don’t seem that way because we enormously shrink the past, but it’s almost 300 years we’re talking about.”

The moral pioneers on William MacAskill’s desk: humanitarian Irena Sendler, abolitionist Benjamin Lay, and philosopher Mozi
Sophie Green for TIME

As MacAskill works to advocate for the generations to come, he tries to keep in mind how ideas play out over decades and centuries. In What We Owe the Future, MacAskill argues that a flourishing future is not fantasy; it may not be likely, but it is possible. “It’s a future that, with enough patience and wisdom, our descendants could actually build—if we pave the way for them,” he writes.

Part of that task requires cultivating imaginative compassion. At the end of the hardback edition of MacAskill’s new book, a QR code takes you to a short story, “Afterwards,” dedicated to his girlfriend Holly. Set thousands of years in the future in a eutopia (meaning a “good place,” whereas utopia means “no-place”), there is a scene where a character describes how she has been reading some history. She is incredulous that people once traveled around in trains underground, crammed together, making one another sick. “And they’d do it every day. And they’d hate it. But they’d keep doing it, because they had to, just to have a life that was barely good at all. And they hardly thought about how much better life could be.”

I find this surprisingly moving. If I think about my ancestors even 200 years ago, they would never have been able to picture my life now. It’s no wonder that it’s hard for me to imagine a future that’s much better than what MacAskill calls a “global Scandinavia,” where everyone has about as good a life as the most well-off people alive today have.

“We could really make things very good in the future,” he tells me. “Imagine your very best days. You could have a life that is as good as that, 100 times over, 1,000 times over.”

In the days that follow, I find myself thinking of that conversation—of the moments in my life that have shimmered with beauty and joy and love and laughter, and the stability and safety that made those moments more possible. I think of all the people alive right now who deserve to have such moments, and all the lives still to come that could be so much better and richer in meaning—or so much worse. If that depends on what we all do in the next few decades, I don’t know exactly how to help ensure our actions are for the better. But if the future could be as vast and good as MacAskill thinks, it seems worth trying.       .          .

THE GAZILLION DOLLAR QUESTION:
DO  YOU.          .          .

A HOPELESSLY DEVOTED CARING CATALYST

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I was in college and trying to pay my way through as best as I could when of all things my grandmother, Vi got me a job that no one knew the implications.  It was working at a Pipe/Tobacco store where I sold expensive Meerschaum pipes down to ones that look like Popeye would toke on in between downing cans of spinach.

The real behind the scenes stuff was the great stuff.          .          .I would cover for Charlie my boss, who was either out cheating on his wife or playing poker with the boys when his wife would call and he’d look the other way when I took REESES CUPS and SNICKERS for dinner; it was a good deal made better when the Pipe shop would close and I would go a half of a block down the street to his retail store where he sold a host of mostly unnecessary plastic objects and a few vinyl records.  It was there that I sold hundreds of Olivia Newton-John’s records:

I never tagged her as Country-Western but that’s the section Charlie wanted to peg her under and I spent a lot of time hitting the cash register tune of glorious sales for him and her.

THIS is hardly what anyone would remember about Olivia Newton-John after hearing of her death earlier this week.  WHAT IS BEING REMEMBERED AND CELEBRATED is just what a ferocious Caring Catalyst she has always been.  Having been diagnosed with Breast Cancer well over 30 years ago, she never took the “WHY ME?” stance or the “I WILL NEVER DIE” denial position; Olivia made sure that something way past her last song would not just be remembered but used her platform to become an advocate, a Caring Catalyst for all cancers–spending tons of time, energy, and money building research organizations, clinics, and more.

Craig Marshall is a guy I met through National Speakers Association who often tells the story:

There’s still Olivia Newton-John…. When I was a monk, I had an coaching session with a man that told me the saddest story I ever heard. He’d been in a car accident, which killed several of his children. His wife was in a coma for months and then died. He lost his job and his dog died. It was sad beyond words. But when he ended telling me his litany of loss, he paused and looked at me and whist-fully said, “But you know what? There’s still Olivia Newton-John!” Years went by, and I found myself sitting at an outdoor restaurant table in Malibu, designing a book cover with my good friend Fred Segal.

 After discussing some graphic possibilities, Freddie said, “We’re guys. We need some different input,” and he yelled over to two ladies sitting at a nearby table, “Come over here please.” They came over, sat down, and Fred started asking them about what they thought his book cover should look like. After awhile, for whatever, reason, everyone at the table got up and began talking to friends who’d entered the restaurant, leaving me alone with this poised blonde lady with an English/Australian accent. It suddenly hit me, and I said, “Are you Olivia Newton-John?” and she said yes. I told her, “I’m so glad to meet you because I want to share with you a story of a man who lost almost everything in life, but clung to you as his only inspiration.”

 Olivia was always charming, and I ended up hosting several workshops at her home. She was always thoughtful, genuine and just lovely.

 I don’t know why people hope their departing loved ones “rest in peace”. I wish for Olivia great music, great fun, and great friends. Her smile is what I’ll remember. It was so dazzling that she never needed to wink. Like that guy, I also believe that there will always be Olivia Newton-John.

ONE OUT OF ONE OF US DIES
is one of the harshest realities ”
any of us with a pulse
will ever wrestle
B          U          T
there’s something that
goes beyond the Life
we live here
and that’s the
L               I               F               E
and that’s the
E  X  I  S  T  E  N  C  E
we inspire
in others
even make possible
way after we are gone
.          .          .that’s a huge part of what it means to be a Caring Catalyst
to begin in others
what will outlast us and even them
but never goes into extinction
as long as we keep sharing our very Best
for the Best of everyone else.          .          .
Yes, there’s still Olivia Newton-John
a Hopelessly Devoted Caring Catalyst

M A T T E R I N G

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Why Mattering Is So Important 

to our Mental Health.       .     .

New research on “anti-mattering” and

overcoming loneliness.

I recently read this article from Psychology Today by Susan Krauss Whitborne, Ph.D and reviewed by Abigail Fagan that has me thinking about what Matters about Mattering.     .     .

There may be times that you’d like to feel invisible, but for the most part, people like to feel that other people notice and care about them. If you’ve ever walked into a social gathering and waited five minutes for someone to greet you, then you know how painful it is to feel like you’re blending into the background. Alternatively, consider the agony you can suffer when you’ve sent a text to a friend, only to have it sit there “delivered,” but unanswered.

When you stop and think about it, though, why should you care so much about whether people notice you or not? After all, the people who know you might be busy and preoccupied with other things. It shouldn’t make a difference, either, whether people who don’t know you acknowledge your presence. And, in reality, aren’t there those times when you’d be just as happy to get in and out of someplace without having to stop and talk to anyone?

In positive psychology, the quality of “mattering” is considered, in the words of York University’s Gordon Flett and colleagues (2022) to be “a key psychological resource.” Although you might occasionally enjoy the cloak of invisibility, Flett et al. propose that feeling chronically insignificant can become a “meta-pathology” that can interfere with the ability to obtain “optimal health and well-being.”

Why Does it Matter to Matter?

According to the Canadian researchers, rather than simply feeling invisible, when you suffer from what they call “anti-mattering,” you define yourself as someone whose “personal identity is dominated by the sense of not mattering to others.” You adopt this identity as a shield for the specific reason of protecting yourself from the stress of being ignored or regarded as irrelevant by others. The “anti” here, literally means “against” mattering, not simply being low in the feeling that you matter.

In the words of the authors, anti-mattering “should be regarded as a unique and specific vulnerability unlike any other risk factor… [it] can become a cognitive preoccupation that is internalized and results in self-harm tendencies and an inability or unwillingness to engage in self-care.”

The anti-mattering stance can come from many sources, such as facing constant rejection from potential romantic partners, employers, or even those rude people who never reply to your texts. However, the Canadian researchers propose that its most likely source can be traced to early childhood experiences of neglect by distracted and unresponsive parents. The hard shell around your need to matter eventually forms so that even the worst experiences of rejection will fail to penetrate.

Unfortunately, the more resistant the shell becomes to rejection or dismissive treatment, the harder it is for others to get through to you. Rewarding relationships become that much more difficult to attain as others learn that it’s easier just to stay away from you.

5 Ways to Test Your Anti-Mattering Tendencies

To tap into the unique qualities of anti-mattering, the Canadian researchers set about to develop a new 5-item Anti-Mattering Scale (AMS). Across a series of studies using young adult and adolescent samples, Flett et al. first built and then compared their AMS to an existing “General Mattering Scale” (GMS) in its relationship to measures of depression, loneliness, and anxiety. You can best get a sense of what’s at the heart of anti-mattering by testing yourself on these five items (rate yourself from 1, not at all, to 4, a lot):

  1. How much do you feel like you don’t matter?
  2. How often have you been treated in a way that makes you feel like you are insignificant?
  3. To what extent have you been made to feel like you are invisible?
  4. How much do you feel like you will never matter to certain people?
  5. How often have you been made to feel by someone that they don’t care what you think or what you have to say?

Most of the participants in the undergraduate sample scored between 7 and 15 on this scale, with an average of just about 11.

Key to the idea of the AMS is that it’s not just feeling unimportant (or low in mattering). These five items from the GMS show this nuanced difference. Rate yourself with the same scale as the AMS:

  1. How important are you to others?
  2. How much do others pay attention to you?
  3. How much would you be missed if you went away?
  4. How interested are others in what you have to say?
  5. How much do other people depend upon you?

Participants tended to receive higher scores on the GMS than the AMS, with the average at 16 and the majority scoring between 13 and 18.

From these averages alone, you can see that it is more common for people to feel that they have a valuable role in the life of others than to feel that they are not worth anyone’s attention.

Does Being High on Anti-Mattering Matter?

Now that you’ve tested yourself on AMS and seen how it differs from GMS, it’s time to turn to the psychological consequences of turning away from others as a self-protective mechanism. As shown in the Flett et al. findings, the patterns of scores on key indicators of mental health, including depression, loneliness, and anxiety, showed that anti-mattering wasn’t simply the opposite of mattering.

Most importantly, the findings across the young adult and adolescent samples confirmed the predicted relationship between anti-mattering and loneliness as well as the incremental effect on depression of high AMS vs. low GMS scores. This pattern reflects, in the words of the authors, “ties between low mattering and a maladaptive early schema reflecting disconnection and alienation from others.” Combined, high AMS and high loneliness scores produce what Flett et al. refer to as the “double jeopardy of feeling alone and insignificant.”

To sum up, feeling that you matter is clearly a contributor to positive mental health. Anti-mattering can become part of a larger identity in which you feel that you lack value to others, even contributing to a sense of marginalization. Although the York University findings established the negative consequences of anti-mattering among young adults and teens, this basic need appears to be one that can form an important cornerstone of healthy development throughout life.

TAKE AWAYS.          .          .
IF YOU TRULY BELIEVE THAT
E            V            E            R            Y            O            N            E
M A T T E R S
no if’s
no and’s
no but’s
no except’s
no until’s
no or’s
(NO CONDITIONS)
PLEASE:
Never fail to
ACT  LIKE  IT

 

 

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man