psychology | Ascension Lifestyle

23 Jun 2024
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How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Relationships

While navigating the treacherous world of dating, the concept of “attachment theory” often crops up. You can identify your own attachment style by taking online quizzes like those used to identify the Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs personality types. Unlike those quizzes, however, the theory of attachment styles is widely accepted in the academic psychology community.

When I first heard of the theory, after my divorce at age 24, it made sense to me that early childhood bonding patterns and trauma would drive how we seek intimacy and solve conflict as adults. I recognized that my own attachment style had evolved significantly over time and wanted to understand why that was, and learn how to intentionally develop a more secure attachment style.

Here, five experts in the mental health and social services fields help unpack the theory to help explain each attachment style, why people of certain styles tend to be drawn to each other, and how to become more secure in your relationships.

What is attachment theory?

Attachment theory comes from the work psychoanalyst John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth (whom Bowlby mentored) did together in the ‘60s and ’70s. As part of their larger focus on the effects of family bonds on the emotional development of children, they researched the behavior of infants who were separated from their mothers and how they behaved once reunited.

Based on their observations, they surmised that during the first year of a child’s life, children learn how to connect with others and express their needs. Those whose caregivers are consistently responsive, mirror emotions back to them, meet their needs and provide comfort help them form a “secure” attachment style. According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, this means that they’re more easily able to form connections later in life, express what they need, and ask for help without fear of abandonment or criticism.

But if this key period of childhood development is consistently disrupted, it may tamper with the development of secure attachment. This gives rise to the other attachment styles: anxious and avoidant, sometimes referred to as maladaptive attachment styles. Laura Young, a social worker in Charlottesville, VA, points out that minor fluctuations during the first year of a child’s life won’t doom them to a non-secure attachment style. “The research varies some, but ‘good enough’ parenting is typically classified as being tuned in to your child — if it’s an infant, soothing them to full calm — 50 to 70 percent of the time,” she says. (This statistic comes from a study that came out in Child Development in 2020.)

As psychology as a field has shifted from Freudian methods and theories, attachment theory has become a foundational theory for much of contemporary psychology, taught almost universally in Psych 101 courses (the experts interviewed for this piece all reported first encountering attachment theory in undergrad classes). It has become a useful system for thinking about myriad relationship dynamics, for reexamining early childhood traumas, for improving communication between family members and couples, and for helping individuals choose the right romantic partners.

So, what exactly is secure attachment?

Ainsworth posited that 70 percent of people have secure attachment styles, and 15 percent of people have each anxious and avoidant styles. A study by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver at the University of Denver found that just over half (56 percent) of participants had a secure attachment style, while the other two attachment styles were split fairly evenly (25 percent avoidant and 19 percent anxious/ambivalent). The book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love by Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller simplifies things a bit, and states that roughly 50 percent of people are secure, and the rest of the population is split evenly between avoidant and anxious styles. Regardless of which statistic is most accurate, the point is, it’s likely that the majority of the population is able to securely attach to others. Furthermore, those with secure attachments may positively influence those with whom they’re in relationships.

Young explains that “while primary attachment styles are formed in the first 12 months of a child’s life, childhood is full of literally millions of cycles of rupture/distress and repair/soothing between parents and children. Attachment is formed in the repair, too.” (She attributes this idea to Edward Tronick, who writes about the rupture/repair dynamic in his book The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children, and an experiment he did called “the Still Face.”) A secure attachment style, therefore, isn’t so much about absence of trauma, but about having needs met and emotions validated by the child’s primary caregiver. In adulthood, a secure attachment style in a partner relationship means someone is “attuned to their partner’s emotional and physical cues and know[s] how to respond to them,” as Levine and Heller write in Attached. Noncrisis levels of tension in a relationship don’t make the securely attached person totally shut down or react with an activated or outsized fight or flight response.

Christina Tesoro, a therapist in Brooklyn who specializes in sex education and works with primarily LGBTQIA+ clients, affirms that secure attachment is more about self-regulation and being unafraid of open communication than about a childhood free of trauma. “[Secure attachment is] not so much about not experiencing ‘negative’ emotions in the relationship, but it’s about… being able to communicate [negative] feelings to their partner or partners from a grounded place with self-awareness, especially around things like projection,” she says.

If you can see yourself clearly and are able to stay grounded and talk through difficult things in an open manner without getting emotionally flooded or shut down, you probably have a secure attachment style. Baltimore-based therapist Mary Rimi says, “Someone with secure attachment is more likely to look at situations more objectively, without overindulging in self-blame, while still being able to take ownership of mistakes.”

For me, feeling the sense of a secure attachment is usually about knowing that things that make me anxious are safe to bring up in a relationship without the fear of negative reactions to my vulnerability. It doesn’t mean that there’s no conflict or difficulty working through things, but it means that conflict produces greater intimacy, security, and growth, rather than a contact high of codependent enmeshment or a total shutdown of intimacy.

What are the anxious and avoidant attachment styles?

Then, we have the other attachment styles: avoidant and anxious. These two variant attachment styles exist on more of a spectrum rather than as black and white opposites, explains Esther Ehrensaft, a practicing psychologist in San Francisco. As attachment theory grew in popularity, practitioners found the assumption of someone being only secure, avoidant, or anxious to be less than accurate. The current understanding of attachment styles is more nuanced and includes mixed, or hybrid, attachment styles.

Avoidant attachment results when a child gives up on reassurance and assumes that their primary attachment object is not reliable, so they learn to fend for themselves, avoiding both connection and vulnerability. Tesoro notes that there are two variations of the avoidant attachment style: fearful and dismissive. Of the former, she says, “Fearful avoidant shows up in adulthood in individuals who feel driven to abandon their partners or pull away before their partners can pull away or reject them. They can respond to intimacy by feeling helpless or anxious and feel distrustful of others. You see this with folks who possibly grew up with abusive caregivers or, sadly, caregivers who were struggling with unprocessed trauma of their own.”

A dismissive avoidant attachment style may manifest as people who “have a really hard time being vulnerable with others,” Tesoro explains. “They’re used to doing things on their own, may rely too much on themselves for self-soothing, have difficulty interrelating, need a lot of space, and give a lot of space to others rather than turning toward and seeking intimacy.” According to her, this may be a result of neglect from early caregivers.

On the other hand, anxious attachment shows itself when the child is constantly monitoring their caregiver to reassure themselves that their primary attachment object is not going to abandon them. This can display in adulthood, for example, as the adult who texts their friends “Are you mad at me?” after a period of prolonged silence. Rimi explains, “Adults with anxious attachment are often seeking to please others, while constantly feeling like they fall short. There is often a preoccupation with how they are relating to others, and constant fear of being left, rejected, or abandoned.”

While sometimes these fears are unnecessary, when a relationship does happen to end, those with an anxious attachment style often see it as evidence that they were right to believe they were going to be left all along, according to Rimi. This may trigger a cycle of ongoing preoccupation and self-blame. “Someone who is anxious in attachment will often overpersonalize conflict,” she says, “particularly in close relationships.”

Ehrensaft tells Allure that understanding how someone was raised is important for knowing what their responses might be to intimacy and insecurity. From this contextual knowledge, we can learn what works for others: Do they like to have long conversations to process emotions, or are they more pragmatic and direct? Do they get emotionally overwhelmed easily? Asking these kinds of questions about someone you’re getting to know romantically is vital — it takes time and intimacy to accurately evaluate where a person’s attachment style falls along this spectrum.

Changing your attachment style is possible

Young always makes it clear to her clients that these attachment styles are not fixed forever, despite their deep roots in the early formation of the psyche. “They can be shifted,” she says. “If you have attachment wounds, they do not have to determine the course of your life or sentence you to miserable relationships. The brain is incredibly flexible; it can adapt to new information with repeated, gentle exposure to new ways of being grounded in a relationship with self and others.”

Compassion is crucial when dealing with maladaptive attachment styles. The solution to moving yourself or someone else toward a more secure way of relating is often about learning to ask the right questions and having some empathetic imagination: What might be causing these specific behaviors, and what might you or this person actually need? Ehrensaft says that with her clients, often adoptive parents and their adopted children who are struggling to forge a bond, she coaches the parent to imagine what the child may have experienced prior to adoption that’s prompting their anxious or avoidant reaction.

Before my divorce, I would have nightmares about my husband happily being in relationships with other women. Although he wasn’t actually cheating on me, these dreams caused me to experience frequent anxiety and panic attacks. I knew the end of our marriage was inevitable. When I started dating again, after my divorce, I didn’t want to repeat my earlier mistakes. Learning how to maintain that balance between asking for reassurance and self-soothing was the first step in applying attachment theory to my day-to-day relationships. I had to start small, practicing this with my close friends, siblings, and coworkers until I felt confident enough to really start dating again over a year later.

Tesoro affirms this experience, saying, “Thinking about what your needs are, how they’re being met, and how you feel if they’re not being met or unable to be met in these relationships…is a useful framing to understand the history of our attachment. Also, asking yourself how you might remain ‘over your own center of gravity,’ or rely on yourself when necessary, to act from a place of groundedness, is helpful.”

Whether it’s a therapist, a friend, or a partner, having secure figures in your life can change everything. Jessee Lovegood, an MFT candidate in the East Bay area in California, does a lot of reparative work with clients who have attachment trauma, and often serves as such a person. “[When] I work with my clients who have so much attachment trauma, the most important thing to me is to show up consistently for them,” Lovegood says. “Be there when I say I will, apologize when I’m not, continue to be a warm and calm presence in their lives. The most important thing is to show up for them.”

Finding the right partner for you

Not only is it tempting to go with what’s familiar, it can sometimes feel unavoidable, and relationships between anxious and avoidant people are extremely common. After all, this pairing replicates a lot of the patterns created in childhood. But once you’re aware of your patterns and behaviors, it becomes possible to change them. And while finding a partner who makes you feel safe will go a long way to help, it can only supplement the work you’re able to do on your own.

Pairings where two people are avoidant may feel safe, because there’s often less vulnerability involved — insecurities are rarely discussed or examined — but these couplings are typically unsatisfying to both parties, because there’s not much space for building intimacy and trust. But Rimi points out that it isn’t impossible: “I would encourage each partner to talk to the other about what sort of affirmations they need, as well as what they can offer. This is a particular dynamic [with] space for understanding, but the reverse response of that could be to trigger further anxiety. Partners can learn each other’s needs and signals to help them feel more comfortable and safe in the relationship.”

While the idea of maladaptive attachment styles might suggest that these are less than desirable traits in a partner, Rimi asserts that this is not the case. There may be some challenges, but these can be worked through if both parties are self-aware and invested in effective communication and growth. Finding secure friends who have been consistently invested in my well-being over the years has helped me learn to communicate in ways that don’t make independence feel like abandonment. And those with avoidant attachment may find that someone who is present and calm — who listens with openness and patience — can allow them to be vulnerable without feeling the need to run away and hide afterwards.

Of course, this is a long, slow process. Unlearning maladaptive attachment styles has to start with compassion for yourself, as these habits were formed to protect yourself as a child. They likely kept you safe, alert to untrustworthy bonds, and served you well. But in adulthood, you don’t need to use these behaviors any longer; it’s time to thank them for looking out for your emotional safety and ask them to take a rest.

Original article here

15 Jun 2024
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Doing Nothing Has Never Been More Important

We tend to position work against a series of opposites. Some of these are lauded, or at least tolerated: leisure, play, meditation, contemplation, rest. But one of the antonyms of work is, in most accounts, something of more dubious value: idleness. Apathy and a lack of care; laziness and slothfulness and inaction; indolence and shiftlessness; sluggishness. The synonyms are plentiful, and they take us from stasis and immobility to slow, languorous movement, and from a distracted kind of absent-mindedness to undirected activity with no set intentions. The expenditure of energy with no identifiable benefit, as in a car idling, or the dispersal of thought with no specific direction, as in idle daydreaming. In all these versions, idleness is something for upstanding citizens and responsible adults to studiously avoid.

Exhortations toward work as the path to truth, meaning, virtue, and salvation suggest the contemporary valuation of work is—although not universal—more than the legacy of a single cultural tradition. In the Greek poet Hesiod’s epic poem Works and Days, written in the eighth century BC, we learn, “When you work, you will be much better loved by the gods.” Even in the Garden of Eden, “where there was no neede of labour,” we are told by the English rector John Sakeld in the 1600s, “God would not have man idle.” It wasn’t a material imperative but a spiritual one, something existential. This was not just a Judeo-Christian tradition: work was also “the Way” for seekers of enlightenment in Japan in the 1300s. As explained by the monk and poet Kenko, “it is a wicked thing to allow the smallest parcel of land to lie idle.” He listed the things that should be planted—food and medicine—as he recounted the teachings of a lay priest who chastised him for his unkempt garden, urging more productive uses of the land.

Some thinkers and writers have interrogated the meaning of work over time: it may seem self-evident to many, as historian Andrea Komlosy writes in her genealogy of the term, something we all intuitively understand. But, “upon closer inspection,” she clarifies, “work proves to be quite the linguistic chameleon: everyone has their own, nuanced definitions, which themselves are in constant flux.” In her project, tracing a thousand years of changing understandings of work, she offers a sweeping definition that ranges from activities for survival to cultural expression to securing luxury and status, from subsistence to market exchange to the exertion of power. A wide-ranging term, then, that brings us beyond waged industrialized work. Komlosy’s project aligns with scholar Cara New Daggett’s extensive history of the changing meanings of energy, where she tracks how we arrive at contemporary perspectives that equate energy with fuel and both with work. The widespread uptake of the science of thermodynamics, with its history in the Scottish Presbyterian world of Glasgow in the 1700s, drove a particular understanding of energy that took on social as well as pragmatic industrial significance, Daggett explains. There is a clarity of sorts in a vision that equates fuel with energy and work—and work with productivity, employment, and morality. Work is understood as the central tool to survive, to prevail, and to succeed in a world that tends toward entropy and dissolution. With such a view, opting out of these equations is to reject progress itself, embracing a form of shiftlessness and even depravity.

But what to make, then, of this counsel from the writer Mark Slouka against filling our time with work: idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite for the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes, as well, a kind of political space, a space as necessary for the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press.

Slouka expands on this claim in a provocative essay, calling idleness “unconstrained” and “anarchic.” He suggests that idle time provides people with the chance to reflect on their values, beliefs, commitments to justice, and strategies for enacting change. Far from an embrace of sin or a dodge of responsibility, idleness is recast as a political project—and an unsettling one for those in power. “All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil,” Slouka writes, with indeterminacy at the core of his point. That fallow soil of our imagination, that undirected energy of our independent minds. At rest yet restless, unoccupied yet invigorated. Citizenship, for Slouka, especially a democratic version, requires time and unclaimed intellectual space in which each person can consider what they see as necessary for a flourishing society. Being constantly occupied, whether in waged labour or in commercialized forms of leisure, leaves no space to form our own values and views and ethical judgments and so leaves us ill-equipped to contribute to a collective social and political life. Instead, we are too harried to mount any challenge to inequity, servility, creeping authoritarianism, or even its fully fledged version. Idleness, then, might be a crucial emancipatory project.

A friend from the southern United States, with the self-proclaimed “deep anti-tyranny roots” befitting someone raised in Virginia, once gifted me the anarchist Emma Goldman’s three-volume autobiography. Goldman was born in Lithuania in 1869, then part of the Russian Empire; she fled to the US to escape the pogroms against Jewish people of the 1880s that followed the assassination of the czar. She became a garment factory worker in New York and, soon after, a labour organizer and a staunch anarchist. Anarchy is an oft-maligned term, at least in its misinterpretations. It is regularly understood as chaos, as randomness, as carelessness or violence, as selfishness and self-interest and even nihilism. But these angles offer little insight into a political concept that, at its core, eschews hierarchy as its organizing principle. For Goldman, anarchism paired a fierce belief in the value of the individual with a hopeful account of collective harmony. There was no tension between these, in her account, “any more than there is between the heart and the lungs”—two essential elements of social life that allow for individuals to thrive. Although the language of purity she uses in her work may unsettle readers in the twenty-first century, given the legacy that such ideas carry, her writing was not in service of nationalism or a racial order. The path to harmony, she explained in her pamphlets, was doing away with religion, property, and government: a trio of problematic forces that dominates mind, body, and spirit.

What rules are meaningful and valuable; which ones perpetuate inequality? At what point do we substitute deference to authority with our own autonomous consideration—and what might emerge if we were to choose our own distinct path? To hone our capacity for independent judgment, political scientist James Scott urges a daily practice of “anarchist calisthenics,” a form of small-scale rebellious action that cuts against the grain of authority; he envisions minor acts of law-breaking, in cases where this would not endanger others or undermine social well-being. Hierarchies that bring with them pogroms and violence, oppression and exploitation, are not easily overturned: such recognition of the stability of unjust systems requires him to “confront the paradox of the contribution of law-breaking and disruption to democratic political change”; law-breaking is needed to break the stranglehold of unjust rule. In Scott’s assessment, “Most of the great political reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”—among which he describes those for racial equality and civil rights—“have been accompanied by massive episodes of civil disobedience, riot, law-breaking, the disruption of public order, and, at the limit, civil war.” But, in societies defined by hierarchy, how do we develop the skills for anything else? Scott advises carefully chosen confrontations with imposed laws to assert and practise independence and autonomy without inflicting harm upon others.

Anarchism—or what scholar Marina Sitrin calls the “anarchist spirit,” noting the ideological diversity of anarchic ideas—can involve a vibrant social life, with fundamental operations that rely on collective care emerging without force and coercion. Far from a rejection of society and relationships and care, this understanding of social life suggests that order can arise not from following mandates set by higher authorities—monarchs and dictators, militaries and rulers, or even elected officials vested with enforceable powers—but instead from voluntary, co-operative agreement, continually renewed and renegotiated. Individual judgment is needed to enable this consensual collective.

As socialist scholar and ever-hopeful activist David Graeber wrote, “One cannot know a radically better world is not possible,” and anarchism, at least in some forms, can offer a path to that reimagined world. Idleness as anarchic, then, suggests a kind of self-determination. Slouka proposes that undirected consciousness is crucial for being in community as a meaningful political citizen, an engaged social participant—and, perhaps, an engaged participant in the wider world.

In our definitions and debates, we tend to consider work and the absence of work, or idleness, in human terms. When Kenko, amid essays on aesthetics and commentary on the lives of his compatriots in the fourteenth century, extols the virtues of a garden of “useful crops,” he fails to reflect on what else is growing in those untended beds. His idle land, among the “spring weeds,” likely hosted a thriving neighbourhood of hardy wildflowers, mosses, shrubs, and lichens, visited by all manner of insects and songbirds. His distaste for caterpillars is palpable in his writing, as they infest the late-blooming cherry trees. But how does he know that none of this is useful to the golden kites and giant crows circling above or to the roots of the wisteria and irises and five-needled pines that he so admires? We know so little of the needs of others. Beyond the human, self-determination describes the riot of life that erupted in Virginia Woolf’s imagined English drawing room, empty of human industriousness. In abdicating the conventions of a society that valorizes work above all else, the anarchy of human idleness leaves space for other relations to unfold. If idle time is needed to awaken our political selves, as Slouka suggests, it must be crucial to considering what citizenship might mean in a broader sense, beyond just a human context. The undirected attention that idleness allows can leave space for other relations, for other politics, for other ways of being.

Idleness has long unsettled powerful political figures, not least because of its temptations and pleasures. Historian Thomas Biggs writes of the tensions, during the wars of the Roman Empire of the third century BC and in the subsequent texts of Roman historians, between pastoral regions as places of necessary rest—part of military strategy—and as places of problematic escapism. Campania, an agricultural area in southern Italy of what Pliny called “blissful and heavenly loveliness,” was not only a region of fertile production, with its pastures and fields, but, according to Cicero, one of “indolent and slothful otium.” The Latin otium, akin to the Greek skhole, translates loosely to idleness, but context adds subtext, with the term varyingly evoking contemplation, a release from political life, virtuous human pleasure, freedom from practical activity, or, less virtuously, “leisure and retreat from public duty.” What the statesman Cicero and his contemporaries worried about were later described by historian Titus Livius as the “excessive pleasures of the region”; abundance came too easily in Campania. The wine, the bathing springs, and the music of reed pipes might tempt Roman armies, and even their leaders, to abandon their military obligations. They undid discipline and moral character. Of course, in the accounts of these Roman writers, the labours of shepherds and musicians, wine makers and farmers, and especially the fertile fields themselves, go unnoticed or at least unmentioned.

Mostly, the work of non-human entities—animal, plant, fungus, mineral, element—remains illegible to us. This is not for lack of effort: ecologists and physiologists and statisticians map territories and count offspring and track mates, overlay mealtimes and prey densities, measure brain activity and body fat and stomach enzymes. The result is ordered groups and categories of activity, confidently enumerated and named and labelled in terms of productivity. Least flycatchers engaged in aerial acrobatics to snag insects on the wing is sustenance, from this perspective, not entertainment. Wilson’s warblers hopping in the shrub birch branches, munching on little green inchworms, are engaged in functional foraging and not gustatory pleasure. The spruce grouse my black lab flushes from the woods is fleeing for survival, not searching for solitude and hermetic peace. But are we really seeing these lives in their entirety? The porcupine trundling along the trail; the lynx with its unhurried paces along the road; the moose, when not browsing willow, not surveying for wolves, just standing in the brush looking out at the mountains?

When we think we understand the imperatives of the world, we constrain the possibilities for deeper understanding. Our interpretations of the actions of others reflect our own judgments; we observe what aligns with our expectations. When we hold this confidence, we act as though we can rule and organize the lives of those around us. What is lost in that certainty is both the autonomy of the lives of others and space for their self-determination—for their anarchy, in both idle and productive forms. Legibility, after all, is the condition for power. In his critique of state-based versions of these impulses, James Scott writes, “A legible society is one that can be controlled and manipulated.” This compulsion to gain control is not always destructive in intent. In a time of damage, it gives us a strategy for undoing the harm we’ve wrought: if we have more information about these ecological interactions and these multi-species systems, there is hope we can remake and repair them. Organizing our trade-offs accordingly, we fool ourselves that we can evade the costs of expansion, of growth, of the march, so to speak, toward progress, which is typically understood as technological complexity and the fulfillment of all imagined desires. And so we manipulate genes to bring back long-extinct species or to stave off invasive ones; we swap out one wetland for another, confident these exchanges preserve the ecosystem services we need; we offset one harmful activity through another positive one, planting some trees in atonement for cutting others, sure that we can sequester the same carbon, house the same species, maintain the same overarching balance.

We persist with this optimism about our own understanding even as we continually discover how little we know. For years, North American forest managers replanted trees on logged lands, clearing out underbrush to reduce competition with the new saplings. But these new plantations were fragile and stressed, exhibiting little of the resilience that characterized the forests they replaced; only later, and reluctantly, did mainstream Western forest scientists consider that underground fungal networks link trees across species and ages, redistributing nutrients and sharing resources through linked root systems. This hoped-for equivalence of ecosystems, places, and lives is the logic both of contemporary restoration efforts and of mobile capital, a world governed by the fungibility of everything. One place exchanged for another, one tree planted for another felled, one stock sold for another purchased—the specifics of the materials can be blurred when the prices alone signal their worth. But, as philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy asserts, we need to recognize “the inestimable singularity of living beings and things.” Complex systems, as Scott reminds us, so often remain inscrutable from the outside—and in this irreducibility and incommensurability, political autonomy is possible. The integrity and complexity of the other beings with whom we share this planet remain beyond our grasp, beyond our control.

Different from distraction and daydreaming, meditation is a concerted practice; yet, at the same time, its goal is a release from doing, striving, or reaching. It is an act of being, entirely and completely. In letting go of the self, we come to know it better; or perhaps the self is only illusory, and what we come to know is the world. In any case, on everything from speed and slowness and creation to restraint and abandon and grief, I have less to declare and more to consider, and little to impart but lots to question. Uncertainty abounds—as it should. The writer Stacey D’Erasmo observes, “Doubt is like a divining rod; it begins to tug when it nears something fertile and fluid and underground.” And perhaps that is the crux of the need for idleness: the chance to reflect, and wonder, and imagine—the space to relax our self-assurance and invite doubt.

Leaning out, leaning back—these are not appropriate or ethical strategies in all cases. Reducing one’s individual work can be an excuse to offload responsibilities onto others, at least for those wealthy enough to do so. This displacement of labour creates layers of planetary injustice as we substitute various fuels and bodies for our own efforts, upholding energy- and materials-intensive ways of life through extraction from and of the lives and lands of others. This is not a call for self-care, or a simple admonition against (or urge for more!) technology, or a vehement manifesto against work.

Labour can give us meaning, dignity, independence, connection. We can take care of others through our work; we can find our place in the world. But don’t mistake this for a clear defence of work either—an instruction to find a mission, a purpose, a true calling through labour. The claim that you’ll never work a day in your life if your occupation is your vocation, as it is sometimes said, is in my view dangerous: a siren song of how to turn passion into profit. This can become a political strategy, as Graeber suggests, of underpaying workers by fostering resentment against those whose work is meaningful, whether care workers and custodial staff or teachers and artists. It becomes justification for the poor compensation and precarious employment conditions for those in fields that might bring non-monetary rewards. Work, that slippery term, is absolutely necessary—for us and by us—and we must reckon with what this means.

Work and idleness are neither as antonymous nor as dichotomous as they might at first glance seem. We are quite comfortable acknowledging the politics of work, even if debates rage about productive and reproductive work, forms of labour relations, supply chains and financial models and economic transitions. The interrogation of idleness must likewise be seen as a serious political undertaking, embedded in the study of work. We need to think about both what kinds of work and what kinds of suspensions of work are needed moving forward. More boldly, we must search for a more creative and expansive vocabulary that lets us imagine and articulate a radically different world. A less restrictive understanding of how we might spend our time. A more sweeping account of not only the activities of humans, our labour and our rest, but also of those around us, whose lives on this planet are so often shaped by our own.

For animals, as Henry Beston writes—and plants too, I would add—“are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” The travail of the earth. The French travail means work, although the English etymology is darker, the Latin translating to something like instrument of torture. Whether torturous or not, the earth’s own work needs attention and is often inhibited by our own. When human productivity is the cause of so much damage, why is it so often presented as a solution for salvaging the planet? What is sustainable work in and for a shared future? These questions have no straightforward answers. And so my attempt is to practise anarchist calisthenics—my effort at going to seed: a wandering, rambling, meandering look at the role—no, the vital urgency—for the idleness of some to enable the lives of others.

Original article here

04 Jun 2024
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Easing the Toll of Long-Distance Grief

When Amrita Chavan boarded her plane in Mumbai, India, grief was the last thing on her mind. This was a new beginning. She was 19, bound for Canada, the first of her family to go abroad to pursue higher education. The goodbye was heartbreaking, she recalls; all of her relatives came to the airport for the send-off. But at the time, it was difficult for Chavan and her family to fully grasp the sacrifice she was making. “We had no idea what it meant to leave home,” she says.

Then, inevitably, grief came knocking. Almost 12 years after Chavan’s departure, while she was sitting in her apartment in Winnipeg in early 2020, Chavan’s stomach dropped as her mom called with the news. Chavan’s grandmother, who lived in Sydney, Australia, had fallen sick, and over the course of a few weeks, had passed away. There was no way she could go to mourn in person for her grandmother, one of the most important people in her life. Flights to Australia were expensive, and she couldn’t afford to apply for the visa she would need to even get into the country. So instead, Chavan emotionally shut down. “I felt very frozen for a very long time,” she says.

Migrant researchers and psychologists call what Chavan was experiencing transnational grief, or transnational bereavement. It refers to the unique experience of losing someone you love while in another country. Although grief is already a difficult process, immigrants who experience transnational grief often go through additional layers of guilt, denial, and suffering since they are unable to attend the typical rituals associated with loss.

I did not feel like I had permission to grieve, because I had not been there.”

The inability to see their loved one in person makes it difficult to achieve closure, and the bereaved may be unable to process the loss and move forward. In recent years, this reality has become more apparent, as COVID-19 claimed millions of lives while simultaneously forcing border restrictions. The pandemic further highlighted the critical role of community support and immigration policy shifts to help those who grieve from afar.

The Toll of Long-Distance Loss

Experiencing grief from a distance has long been the reality of immigrants. Anyone who leaves their family behind also risks being apart from their loved ones during times of loss—and often this grief comes with a whirlwind of complicated emotions.

“There is a strong sense of guilt. There is a strong sense of regret that they weren’t able to be with their loved one as the loved one died,” says Zohreh Bayatrizi, a grief researcher at the University of Alberta. She recalls a conversation she had when she interviewed an Iranian-Canadian immigrant who had lost their brother during the lockdowns in the COVID pandemic. Because they were unable to travel back home, or even see his body before it was buried, they refused to accept that their brother’s death was real.

Chavan recalls similar experiences, being separated by borders. “I did not feel like I had permission to grieve, because I had not been there,” she says.

Without this space to mourn, grief can become difficult to move past—especially for immigrants who are undocumented. Kristina Fullerton Rico, a sociologist at the University of Michigan’s Center of Racial Justice, works with these communities, and continuously hears about how grief affects everyday lives. “People described these experiences of grief and long-distance mourning as one of the most difficult parts of being undocumented in the United States,” she says.

For instance, while studying this phenomenon between 2017 and 2023, Fullerton Rico met a woman whom she calls Florencia (a pseudonym used to protect her privacy) who said, “When you experience grief [as an immigrant], your only option is to accept that you can’t do anything.” Fullerton Rico also shares a conversation she had with a man she calls Felipe: “Felipe told me grief changes you deeply.” The depth of that grief is exacerbated by distance when you can’t get closure from saying goodbye or attending a funeral, he told her. “It’s a chapter with no ending, and it remains unfinished.”

To make matters worse, the weight of transnational grief often remains a burden borne alone. “It isn’t something that people usually talk about,” Fullerton Rico says.

Bridging the Distance

Social rituals, in any culture, are an important part of the grieving process. Wakes and other celebrations of life can help people actively engage with memories of an individual, says Zoe Donaldson, a neuroscientist who studies grief at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Thinking of these memories allows your brain to sort of remodel and think about how these memories now fit into your life,” she says. But for those who don’t witness deaths or funerals in person, this process may be disrupted or made more difficult.

They had to sneak away to the bathroom, or hide in a walk-in refrigerator to get glimpses of one of the most significant rituals in somebody’s life.”

Gabriela Encina, a psychologist who works with expats, helps clients construct their own rituals so that they can celebrate their relationship with their loved one. She walks them through the process of grieving from afar, through actions like letter-writing, eating a loved one’s favorite meal, or participating in a favorite shared activity. The process takes time. Several sessions of goodbyes and rituals are often necessary for someone to make peace with a sudden death, says Encina.

Similarly, during the pandemic, Chavan found her own turning point for bereavement in creative nonfiction. She had lost her job at the time and decided to attend a writing class, taking on a project that allowed her to dive into her experiences with transnational grief. Through the process of writing, Chavan slowly broke the ice that had encased her for eight months. She sobbed as she remembered all the details about her grandmother: the spirited debates they would get into, how she commanded a room despite her small size, how she brought the family together with her love.

“It was awful. It was devastating. It felt like losing her all over again,” Chavan says.

But it was this act of writing and remembrance that allowed her to reconnect to her memories—and start to heal.

Systemic Solutions

Ultimately, making space for transnational grief requires the restructuring of how we think about immigration and loss. Currently, it takes years for an undocumented immigrant to become a legal, permanent resident in the U.S., and the few who are able to adjust their immigration status typically receive work authorization before the ability to travel back home, Fullerton Rico says. And so the opportunity of visiting loved ones becomes a waiting game, even as family members age or pass away.

“If we pass laws that prioritize a fast path to citizenship, we could avoid having people go through these experiences,” Fullerton Rico says.

Many undocumented immigrants also have inflexible, low-wage jobs, which pressures them to make painful decisions, like watching their loved ones’ funeral on a smartphone in between helping customers or preparing meals at a restaurant. “Instead of being there in person, they had to sneak away to the bathroom, or hide in a walk-in refrigerator to get glimpses of one of the most significant rituals in somebody’s life,” Fullerton Rico says.

Giving time and space for a person to grieve in the form of paid bereavement leave can help. This allows grievers to take time off work without facing the potential consequences of losing a paycheck or their job. Chavan recalls the pressure to continue to work in the midst of her grief because she didn’t have the financial flexibility to lose out on paid hourly work, which gradually degraded her mental health. Currently, only five states in the U.S. mandate employers to give bereavement leave, Fullerton Rico says, only two of which require the leave to be paid.

Most importantly, it’s crucial to “let people know that they’re not alone in this pain,” Fullerton Rico says. She urges more immigrant-serving organizations to recognize this reality and help immigrants get access to counseling, other mental health resources, or religious rituals so they’re less at risk of conditions like clinical depression. She shares the example of a Catholic priest she interviewed in New York City, who has helped perform memorial Masses for transnational mourners since the 1990s. Today, these funeral ceremonies are held and streamed through Facebook Live, YouTube, or Zoom, helping families feel some sense of togetherness.

Experts agree that forming this social support is a key factor in the grieving process. “Grief is something of a social experience,” Bayatrizi says. “It’s an emotional experience that’s shaped through our social interactions.”

Chavan says that the only reason she finally felt ready to face the emotions was because her partner and her in-laws were supportive, giving her a small but strong community in an isolating time. After writing about the experience, she also started having more conversations with family and friends who had read the article, about the struggle of grieving from afar and how they coped.

“It meant that I had this community, this global community that I could reach out to essentially,” she says. “Learning that you are not alone in something that you have gone through can be very powerful.”

Original article here

31 May 2024
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Once Upon A Place In Today’s Mythic Stories

Two ideas feature at the core of all quest stories: these are the Abyss and the World Journey.

The Abyss is one of humanity’s oldest and most tenacious ideas that has been used for millennia to describe a place that is deep, inaccessible, extremely dangerous, and somehow at the core of understanding. In some ancient texts, it is synonymous with the deep ocean and is often portrayed as the sea in films today. But its broader meaning encompasses all the dark, deep places we go when we embark on an adventure to find answers. It’s where the obstacles lie and the challenges are found, often in the form of a beast or monster that must be overcome. The Abyss shapes the idea of what a challenge means.

The World Journey is a much newer term, adapted from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. You may be familiar with the storyline, or plot, of the Hero’s Journey, as it was coined by the Sarah Lawrence College professor of literature in the twentieth century. In it, the hero goes through a sequence of experiences designed to help them face and overcome the many challenges of life, often in the context of a quest or adventure. Campbell presented a structure for this process, and it has become a reliable plot outline for the stages of character development in modern film and stories, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or George Lucas’s Star Wars. Campbell’s process leads toward self-actualization with deliberate stages that create a plot which leads a man (or sometimes a woman) through each step in specific order to experience certain hardships and, ultimately, achieve epiphany or personal growth.

The Abyss and the World Journey — where the heroes go and what they experience — embody the very nature of human change, though many stories can be overlooked as simple child’s play, especially in fairy tales. Heroic knights fighting dragons or a girl carrying a basket to her grandmother? Many could dismiss these as bedtime tales. But while these stories may seem soft, they likely began as images directed squarely at those about to experience a profound life change, such as puberty. These tales and their enchanting symbols have influenced not only our idea of what a hero’s adventure should be, but also of what success looks like and how personal achievement is earned.

Originally etched into stone slabs and scribbled on papyrus, many of these stories and children’s fairy tales have become Disney blockbusters, printed best-sellers, and on-screen hits. The symbol of the Abyss perennially renews itself, showing up at movie theaters every month with its deep-rooted ideas of descent and resurrection, and films inspired by the World Journey, such as Jurassic Park and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? are enjoyed by people of all ages.

Why do they endure? Why are World Journey stories some of the most popular stories shared again and again in cultures around the world? Because we can relate to a situation where a person falls (or is pushed) into a terrifying cave and must survive. We understand what it means to find oneself in a frightening “wilderness” with no support, no skills, no training, no hand to hold. We’ve been there ourselves through adversities such as the loss of a loved one, by being orphaned, being the new kid at school, or failing in a business or relationship. Or as simply as missing a chance, forgetting an idea, or failing to live up to our own (or others’) expectations.

Today’s audiences love the same images that captivated people hundreds of years ago: water, darkness, dragons, beasts, labyrinths, forests, and caverns. These symbols endure because they don’t speak about money or politics. They don’t appeal to our wallets or even, in a direct sense, to our minds. Instead, they speak to our innermost fears and desires, to the obstacles we all face and the meaningful purpose we feel when we overcome them.

The story of a person who falls into the Abyss and is never seen again is not an inspiring story. It teaches nothing except to watch where you walk. But the story of a woman who braves the face of a lion to pluck its whisker, or of a desperate man who crosses the deep water in a small boat from the shore thousands of miles from his home, or of a scientist who plumbs the ocean’s depths in search of meaning and returns home as a much stronger person — that is an intriguing story and one that implies self-fulfillment and maturity.

In other words, Newton’s gravitational notion of “what goes up must come down” is not nearly as old or as relevant as “what goes down must come up.” Such a story inspires and motivates, and it even implies heroism, which is what most of these stories are mistaken for on the surface (and how Campbell named them). But the reason these stories have survived centuries, and in some cases millennia, is not because they celebrate heroism but because they teach that these traits of survival and fulfillment are attainable by everyone, even the most mortal of us. Even the silliest, poorest, most confused, and frightened of us can make changes in our lives to experience not only enlightenment but epiphany. Recognizing this when we have screens in every room, distractions at every turn, and challenges in every aspect of our lives is essential; the quest is not only for the hero, but it is for each of us.

The Value Of A Challenge

The ideas of adversity, hardship, and conflict are not concepts we are naturally drawn to. Parents and caregivers generally try to shield their children from hardship in an attempt to safeguard them from the hurtful obstacles of life and keep them safe. But the process of maturing means facing difficulties head-on rather than avoiding them. While it includes terrible adversity, the purpose of the World Journey is not to scare or punish us, but rather to support our growth, and to do that we must look in the face of that which frightens us the most.

Unfortunately, many of today’s stories of princesses and dragons are sugary and fluffy, diluted shades of what used to be quite powerful symbols. Modern adaptations of fairy tales would have us believe that success is easy — that if we only wish upon a star or wrinkle our noses our dreams will come true. The original versions, however, showed that change is far more difficult. Original fairy tales guide us down a darker path with frightening beasts and scary forests that no seeker truly wants to walk into.

And I would argue that while those original stories, especially those collected and recorded hundreds of years ago by Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, were indeed dark, frightening, and often overtly violent or callous, they should not be sugared over simply because they are scary, depressing, or harsh. They served a much needed purpose by symbolically painting a reality that most people experienced and still do experience in their lives: namely, challenging situations that push us to our limits and are, in fact, our very best opportunities for change and growth. Those storytellers and parents long ago knew that persistence allows us to become strong and resilient adults. That facing our fears can make us compassionate, forgiving, and joyful. That making difficult decisions instills in us a feeling of accomplishment and maturity. And, that experiences of confusion and uncertainty can open our minds to new ideas and creative expression that allow us as individuals, and as societies, to flourish.

World Journey stories teach us to overcome adversity, but more importantly, they teach us how to experience adversity in the first place. Successful myths, religious texts, and fairy tales — and modern screenplay and film — do not skirt the issue of hardship and conflict, nor do they encourage us to finish the hard work as quickly as possible. The characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter do not face obstacles and beasts simply to advance the plot, but to develop the inner courage and tenacity needed to grow as individuals within society. Mythic stories put us squarely in the middle of the hardest tasks we can imagine, and they force us to work hard, to guess, to take leaps of faith, and to test ourselves to the limit.

They also teach us that it’s worth it to “dive deep” and to experience a change so drastic that it is profound. In fact, though they seem superficial now in the age of animated princesses, the early stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White are popular precisely because they show these challenges, as do the Bible story of Jonah and the Mesopotamian poem of Gilgamesh, which is perhaps the oldest story we’ve ever found. Written more than 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh was an amazingly influential and well-loved character whose journey taught scores of generations of children the meaning of perseverance, curiosity, and spiritual growth. His tale depicts a hero in terribly dire circumstances who does not shrug off hardship but instead plows right through it, diving deep (literally and symbolically) to work through his fear of death. Only after completing difficult tasks and overcoming obstacles does he mature as a person. Of course, he fails to find immortality, but that’s the point.

It’s important to recognize that exploring and understanding these concepts is not only for the experts. In fact, it’s for every person to engage in these questions and to open their minds to the possibilities that exist within human nature and within the self, to explore stories and symbols and push into growth. Curiosity is what drives human transformation, and I invite us all to be curious. To be open and willing to see the metaphor in these stories as chances for personal growth is an opportunity for taking the symbols of storycraft and digging deeper into reflections of self-growth, core purpose, and even epiphany.

Original article here

24 May 2024
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“It’s like therapy”: how washing your hair can lift your mood – and change your life

Anya Hindmarch launched her first company as a teenager. At 53, she is an award-winning fashion designer with five children, a successful business and a CBE. One of those types. Which is why it is cheering that the secret of her success isn’t doing rocket yoga at 5am or leaving parties after 10 minutes or intermittent fasting at a standing desk, or any of that boilerplate alpha guff. Her most precious life advice – and the title of her new book – is If in Doubt, Wash Your Hair.

A good scrub with shampoo, she says, “makes me calmer and more confident and therefore better able to cope. That moment of me standing under the shower, eyes closed, not looking at my phone, is when I have some of my best ideas. It’s a bit meditative, for me – a fresh start, a new day.”

The life-changing magic of washing your hair is having a moment. While salons were closed over lockdown, lots of us dialed up our at-home hair care in an attempt to look presentable while overdue for a cut and colour. Sales of Olaplex, an intensive conditioner that has diversified from a salon treatment to rinse-at-home use, doubled in 2020, while specialist purple shampoos for bringing luminosity to silver hair multiplied, as women embraced their newly exposed greys, and learned how to look after them.

Jamila Lee-Smikle, a 27-year-old fashion publicist from London, launched an Instagram account, @girlfreethefro, to share what she was learning about caring for her afro hair at home, debating the merits of rose water and hair butters, and cautioning about removing rings so that they don’t snag on hair as you wash. “Before lockdown I usually went to the salon, but I’ve learned to really enjoy the process,” she says. “Now I wash my hair every Sunday morning. I make a tea, put some music on, and really take my time. Then I style my hair and I feel ready for the week ahead. It’s like therapy.”

George Northwood, stylist to Alexa Chung and the Duchess of Sussex, launched a range of home hair care products, Undone, this year. “The ‘skinification’ of hair care has really changed how people think about shampoo and conditioner,” he says. “We named one of our products Moisturising Cream because the language of skincare is starting to filter through to hair care.” In his reopened salon, clients are savouring being shampooed instead of doing it themselves, and how that brings the cared-for feeling of an experience connected with childhood. A friend of mine left her first post-lockdown appointment almost overwhelmed by the bliss of a professional wash and scalp massage. Hug-starved after spending lockdown alone, 10 minutes at the sink “was the perfect re-entry level of human intimacy,” she says. “I’m not sure I’m ready for hugs, even though I miss them. Having my hair washed was sensual, but also practical, so I didn’t have to feel weird about it.”

Hindmarch is not the first writer to wax lyrical about shampoo as therapy. I first discovered this life philosophy in the oeuvre of that national treasure of sunlounger fiction, Jilly Cooper. When a Cooper heroine is having a bad day – perhaps her lover is a double-crossing bastard, or the roof of the conservatory is falling in – she doesn’t crawl back to bed. She washes her hair, knocks back a stiff drink and cracks on. The scent of freshly washed hair is always a harbinger of good news in Cooper’s world. And she was on to something, because how you shampoo your hair might matter more than how you style it. “The mistake most people are making is using products that are too rich, and letting them build up,” says Northwood. “Healthy hair starts with getting it properly clean.” A professional will always wash your hair twice, because the first shampoo loosens the dirt, while the rinse-and-repeat gets it really clean.

Long before I ever heard the phrase “self-care”, I knew that washing my hair was the best way to turn a day around. Bubble baths make me hot and bored. Dry body brushing, jade-roller facials, foot exfoliation: all of those sound like chores to me. But washing my hair is a reset button for the day. It is cathartic, like having a good cry. (When needs must, you can do both at the same time, and not end up puffy-faced.) There is the olfactory rush of lemon or grapefruit or rose, the purifying sluice of water rinsing a bad day down the plughole, the satisfying chemistry-lab alchemy of bubbles and lather. Should you still need convincing that a hairwash can be spine-tingling, the scene in Out of Africa where Robert Redford gives Meryl Streep an alfresco shampoo is guaranteed to convert you.

One of the chapters in Hindmarch’s book is called Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First. “A lot of women my age work as hard as our dads did, while at the same time feeling like we should be doing all the things our mums did. We end up doing so much for everyone else that we don’t have the time or energy to look after ourselves, and that’s when things start to fall apart.” Taking the time to wash your hair before a big day rather than picking up other people’s crusty cereal bowls is one way of putting your own oxygen mask on first. It is about recognising that taking care of the person who takes responsibility for everyone else is essential, not an indulgence. “This has felt especially necessary recently,” says Hindmarch, “when it has felt to me that women have borne the brunt of a lot of the last year, often taking on the home schooling, even if both parents were working.”

Hindmarch is celebrating her book launch with a popup wash-and-blow-dry bar. “I saw a photo of a woman sitting under one of those old-fashioned salon dryers, with the sun on her face, drinking a cup of coffee. And I thought – after the year we’ve had, that’s where I want to be.” Before too long, touch wood, parties might happen again. But still, I might stay in and wash my hair.

Original article here

17 May 2024
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Boredom Makes Us Human

In a recent article in the Financial Times, Markham Heid shares with us a peculiar life crisis. At 41, he has built what many would regard as the good life: he has a family; he is healthy, productive, and creative; he has time to travel, read, exercise, and see friends. Yet, he feels that “something is off.” He gives this state a variety of names, including mid-life melancholy, ennui, and despair. He also diagnoses it in others all around him. To fight against it, some of his friends have turned to ayahuasca retreats, others to fitness. What renders Heid’s malaise somewhat strange is that it does not seem to arise from anything specific. If Heid had lost his job, had no time for himself, or was struggling in his marriage, some of these feelings would seem less puzzling.

In the history of philosophy, there have been many attempts to understand such powerful but objectless feelings. Boredom, anxiety, and despair are some of the descriptions these moods have received. In the novel Nausea, the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes someone who mysteriously experiences that feeling whenever they are confronted with ordinary objects, like a pebble on the beach. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes an uncanny unease we may feel when we are bored and searching desperately for distractions. The Danish philosopher Sшren Kierkegaard speaks of a silent despair in the background of our lives, a sense of discord or dread of an unknown something that can grab us momentarily.

Sadly, the philosophical descriptions of such moods have often been misunderstood as sombre or romantic moments of existential reflection where we recognize our mortality or the meaninglessness of life. Pictured in this way, these moments are bound to stay isolated from the anxiety, despair, and melancholy that we face in our ordinary life and seek help for. But if we look beyond the existentialist cliches, the philosophical ideas on such moods can offer a new way forward. What could Heid have learnt from the philosophers?

Moods of nothing

Despite Heid’s references to Heidegger, we do not read anything about the philosopher’s own ruminations of a very similar experience of flatness: a feeling that all things (and we ourselves) sink into indifference; a sense that things around us slip away or we slip away from ourselves; a malaise related to a vacant stillness. What is remarkable, for Heidegger, is that such intense affects arise despite the fact that nothing may have changed in our lives: one is still surrounded by the same people, events, and activities, but these do not engage us as they used to. It is this feature that makes him describe what he calls “anxiety” as a mood generated by nothing in particular.

This makes such feelings doubly unwelcome. Most of us can tolerate negative emotions if we see them as instrumental to something desirable—we do not run to a therapist to treat a fear if we think that it holds us back from doing something obviously risky. But unlike fear, what Heidegger calls anxiety and what Heid’s article describes do not protect us from anything specific. No wonder why Sigmund Freud called anxiety a “riddle.”

But this view is too simplistic for Heidegger. It risks concealing both the value and meaning of the feelings he describes. First, the human emotional life is much more complex than a simple battle between positive and negative feelings, or useful and useless emotions. Second, objectless moods can teach us something significant not about specific risks or problems in our lives but about the fact that we have a life to live at all. Learning from them can allow us to find what Heidegger describes as a sense of peace and joy within the malaise.

What’s missing?

Heid says that “some essential aspect of life is missing or not sufficiently represented.” He ends up attributing his melancholy to the lack of new experiences. Kierkegaard calls this the illusion of “crop rotation,” the idea that changing the soil frequently can save us from boredom and despair.

But what really drives such moods is not the need for new experiences. It is not even the particulars of our individual lives or the culture we belong to, but that we have been given a life to live in the first place, the taste of possibility that comes with being alive. The kinds of questions that arise are not questions like “have I married the right person?” “will parenthood enrich my life?” or “do I have enough hobbies?” It is the more fundamental questions like “what does it mean to be human?” “what am I supposed to do with the fact that I was given a life?” and “what kind of life is possible for me?” that best explain our human tendency for anxiety, despair, or boredom.

This is why such moods are likely to appear as a mid-life crisis. With many of our life goals fulfilled, we start to wonder what life is for, what is possible for human existence, and what we are doing for it. Humans are inherently ambivalent toward possibility, attracted but also repelled by it. On one hand, we can experience it as a radical openness, an appreciation of our life as a gift. On the other, the open-endedness of possibility, the sense that one could always be doing more with their life, can create a great sense of agony about who we are and how we should go on.

Throwing us out of our everyday lives, such moods make us ponder existence itself. They are cases where who we are and what we are for becomes an issue for each one of us. These questions never assume a final answer. Hovering over our lives, they can always leave us with a sense of unease. Recognizing that these questions are there, and that they matter, can at least allow us to know what may be missing, even when all is good.

Original article here

01 May 2024
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The man who turned his home into a homeless shelter

When Jade and John came across Stuart Potts early this year, they were sleeping rough in Manchester city centre. It was during January’s brutal cold snap, but the pair couldn’t find a homeless shelter that would take them in as a couple, and they didn’t want to be separated. “We’ve been on the streets together; we’ve been through some of the worst nights of our life together,” said Jade, who is 38, with a hoarse voice and a broad Rochdale accent.

Still, when someone from a local charity told them about a man putting homeless people up in his own house, they were suspicious. “I thought he was just going to be some fucking … ” Jade paused, looking for the right word, “teacher or something.” But when they met for a pint to scope him out, Jade was immediately reassured. “He’d been on the streets, and he’d been to prison. He was really normal, we just felt comfortable. He’s not judging.” They stayed at his flat that night.

Stuart Potts, or Pottsy, as his friends call him, is an unlikely do-gooder. He has a long criminal record (“mostly petty stuff”, he says), and has spent much of his life in and out of prison. For a period, he lived in a tent by the canal in Salford and in Manchester city centre. He was formerly addicted to crack cocaine. A stout, tough 43-year-old with close-shaved hair, he holds his body tightly: chest out, shoulders back, wide-open eyes darting about, observing and assessing as he talks. He speaks at a million miles a minute, swearing constantly, rattling off memories of being run over by a drug dealer, getting stabbed with a broken bottle, going to prison for kicking someone’s head in. Describing an abortive attempt to go to Cocaine Anonymous some years ago, he cackles: “Everyone was fucking talking about crack, and all I could think about was how much I wanted some crack.” The story of his nervous breakdown, he relays as a farce (“dancing naked under the apple tree like a psychopathical nutcase”). Many anecdotes are animated by a scathing contempt for authority: “the system”, the police, Council functionaries with “no fucking compassion”.

Potts talks with the cynicism of someone who has hit rock bottom, several times over, and had to pull himself back up. When he describes the worst moments of his life, however, it’s usually softened by a memory of someone helping when they didn’t have to. These days, helping others has become Potts’ focus. It’s not really a job, since he isn’t paid; it’s more of a need, something that eases his own anxiety and keeps his demons at bay.

Potts lives in a one-bed flat in Middleton, a town in Greater Manchester. Ever since he moved in, back in April 2020, he has let homeless people come and stay: an ever-changing cast of strangers who sleep on the sofa and in the caravan he has parked outside the flat. He doesn’t charge rent, but has a few basic rules: hard drugs and violence are forbidden, and everyone has to pitch in with housework. Space can be tight. The first time I visited, in February, there were six people staying: two in the caravan, four on the large U-shaped sofa. They shared the living room with Bullseye, a mixed staffordshire bull terrier Potts rescued when a neighbour went to prison. The most people he’s had staying at one time is eight. “That was too many,” he told me. “I was stepping over bodies.”

His work is entirely informal, operating outside the auspices of any governing authority, charity registration, funding body or council department. Last year, the council rang Potts, asking to inspect the flat since he was advertising it as a shelter. “They said: ‘We need to know if the cooking facilities are safe,’” Potts recalled. “I said: ‘All right, I’ll kick them out on the street and we’ll see what the cooking facilities are like in a fucking tent, shall we?’” He gave a dry laugh, shaking his head. (The council didn’t come: he successfully argued that since it’s a private property, they had no right to inspect.) The entire operation is funded out of Potts’ pocket: a universal credit allowance that after his rent – £595 a month – leaves him with less than £100 a week.

The drastic increase in homelessness and rough sleeping over the past decade and a half is visible on the streets of every major city in the UK. But even those who are distressed by this are unlikely to host strangers in their own home. Potts, though, sees his actions as logical and obvious: people need help, and if you can provide it, then you should. “I don’t need this space – I can sit in my bedroom and watch TV,” he said, motioning at his modestly sized front room. “If more people helped others, the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it?”

Potts stresses that his “mum brought me up good and proper” – but as a teenager growing up in Salford, he started getting into trouble. “We’ve had our hard times with Stuart, but a lot of it was typical boy stuff,” his mum, Pat Malone, said. “We used to say he was a lovable rogue.” Potts went to prison several times in his late teens and 20s, including an 18-month stint for beating up a burglar who had broken into a friend’s house. After he got out, he had a chequered career: working in factories, as a cobbler, locksmith and painter and decorator. But gradually, life stabilised. He got married, moved into a comfortable council house, and had three kids. Then, in 2016, after more than 15 years, the marriage broke down.

Faced with the prospect of losing his children, Potts went off the rails and started using crack. “It was a coping mechanism, masking the thing, but it made it 10 times worse,” he said. “The worst mistake of my life.” He used crack for about six months, then had a breakdown and was sectioned. “It was a really terrible time, seeing your child go through that,” said Malone. After three months on a psychiatric ward, Potts managed to rent a flat of his own, with help from benefits. But he was still struggling. To distract himself as much as anything else, he gathered donations of sleeping bags and tents from friends, and handed them out to homeless people.

The man who propelled Potts from giving out bedding to opening up his own home was a rough sleeper called Stephen Bolton. Potts encountered him sitting outside a Tesco near his flat. Bolton was in his 50s, a heroin and crack addict who had been homeless for years. It was raining and Potts asked if Bolton wanted to stay with him. “I told him I wouldn’t have any drugs at mine, but if he wanted help, he was welcome.” A few weeks later, Bolton decided to take him up on the offer. Potts helped him go cold turkey: “He was sweating his bollocks off.” He gave Bolton beers and the odd diazepam “to take the edge off”, gradually transitioning to vitamin C as a placebo.

Bolton stayed for nine weeks, until Potts proudly told a neighbour what he’d done. The neighbour informed the landlord, who admonished Potts for bringing a “smackhead tramp” into the flat and evicted them both. (“I wanted to go round and break the bastard’s legs,” Potts said, of the neighbour.) Within a few weeks of being back on the streets, Bolton relapsed, and died of an overdose. “He went down the rabbit hole again,” said Potts. “It made me so angry.”

Potts is bombastic and funny, full of righteous outrage and profane humour. But when I asked what made him approach Bolton – a stranger to him, someone with a serious drug addiction – and offer to take him in, he was uncharacteristically lost for words. “I’ve always done stuff like that,” he said, then tailed off. “Love of people I guess.” He can’t explain why he did it, and can’t understand why other people find it strange.

After being evicted, Potts was homeless too, sometimes sofa-surfing, sometimes sleeping in a tent. Time blurs when your only focus is where you’re going to sleep that night, and he can’t say exactly how long it went on for. But it was a dark period. “I’ve been kicked while I’ve been sleeping, pissed on, spat at,” he said. One night, when he was sleeping by the canal in Salford a group of teenagers picked up his tent and tried to throw it in the water. But he also remembers moments of kindness, such as the woman called Debbie who let him stay the odd night on her sofa when the temperatures got really cold. “Not everybody’s the same, are they?” he said. “If these people what helped me didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be sat where I am now.”

In 2017, Potts received a life-changing tip that would set him on a new, much more ambitious path. Another rough sleeper told Potts he sometimes squatted in empty buildings, and Potts decided to try it. Squatting in a residential property is illegal, and he was soon evicted. But it planted the seed of an idea: researching squatting law, he discovered it is far harder to evict squatters from commercial properties.

Potts had noticed a doctor’s surgery in Eccles, in Salford, that had been empty for more than a decade. “I thought, why are people sat out here freezing when the building’s empty? I’ll take it over.” He posted about the squat on Facebook and people rushed to help. (“I know a lot of people round Salford,” he said.) Within 48 hours, “we had beds, mattresses, cookers, fridge-freezers, microwaves, TVs, bedding, food in the cupboards, staff on board who were volunteering”. He went out to inform rough sleepers, and within a few days 18 people were staying.

Evicting squatters from commercial properties requires court action, and in this case, it took seven months. When they were finally evicted from the doctor’s surgery, Potts found another building, then another. For a brief period, Potts was running three separate squats at once. He developed a system for the people he was housing: “I had the ones that had more drug and alcohol issues at the vet’s. Once they’d progressed a bit, I moved them to the chemist, and once they progressed more from that, I’d move them to the pub.” By the autumn of 2019, they were set up in the Unicorn, an abandoned pub in Eccles. Potts dubbed it the Saving People Shelter Project, printed a banner and hung it outside the pub.

There is significant evidence that placing people in secure, long-term accommodation can go a huge way towards stabilising their lives. In policy-speak, this is called the Housing First model: giving people homes with no conditions attached, rather than the traditional approach of expecting them to tackle addiction or mental health problems first. Research shows that 80-90% of people in Housing First schemes maintain a tenancy for a year or more, compared with 40% for traditional approaches. Since 2008, Housing First has been Finland’s national policy, and in that time overall homelessness has decreased 47%, and long-term homelessness more than 70%. In his own, wildly informal way, Potts follows something akin to the Housing First model: find people accommodation and the rest will follow.

Life in the squats wasn’t always perfect. Paul Doyle, who was homeless after his release from prison, lived in the Unicorn and helped Potts run it. “We had some trouble – your smashed windows, or people using drugs. Then we’d just sling them out,” he said. But mostly, it was quite stable. There were about 14 of them at the Unicorn, some of whom were working, including a postman who had got into rent arrears and lost his home.

Potts speaks about this period with an evangelising zeal. “I haven’t got any money. If I can do that, surely to God the government or the local authority can do it, can’t they?”

Potts’ freewheeling approach has been an essential part of his success. But that impulsivity has also landed him in trouble. After being evicted from the Unicorn in October 2019, Potts opened a new shelter in another abandoned pub, the Albert Edward, also in Eccles. A few weeks after they moved in, it was Remembrance Sunday. About 300 people gathered around the Cenotaph war monument in Eccles, a few metres from the Albert Edward.

Shortly before the two minutes’ silence began, Potts leaned out of the window and set off two fireworks. He says it was intended as a mark of respect, something like the cannon that fire at Remembrance events in London. This was not the way it was interpreted. People panicked. Among them were war veterans, who told local media the sound had triggered PTSD symptoms. Potts was arrested. The next day he pleaded guilty to one count of throwing fireworks in a public place and one count of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress.

Potts apologised, but the judge was unconvinced of his remorse. He was sentenced to 16 weeks in prison. Potts was a prominent local figure at this point, and the Manchester Evening News even ran a live blog from the hearing. People were furious about the incident, seeing it as two fingers up to the war dead. “I didn’t do it for any malicious purpose, and my friends know that,” Potts told me. “But a lot of people still don’t like me.” Malone, Potts’ mother, has observed this too. “Stuart’s granddad was in the war, so he’s got a lot of respect,” she said. “But people don’t forget. Some people, when they’ve had a drink and they see him, they start on him for no reason.”

While he was in prison, the squat fell apart, and Potts lost his flat. When he was released, he was placed in a B&B the Council uses as temporary accommodation, then moved to other temporary accommodation in Middleton, just north of Manchester’s city centre. Soon after his arrival, the council said they were discharging their housing duty towards him because he had made himself intentionally homeless by going to prison. He relayed this with a cackle of disbelief: “I said: ‘Are you mad?’ I said: ‘I didn’t want to go to prison.’”

Potts needed somewhere to live and heard that a flat over the road was available. Potts spoke to the landlady and explained that he had no money for a deposit (typically, tenants have to pay a month’s rent upfront, plus another month), but would find a way to pay it if she’d let him move in. “I said: ‘I haven’t got a pot to piss in at the minute. I’ve got no money, but the benefits will pay for the rent, if you’ll trust me.’” The landlady agreed. “That was a massive break for me,” he said. “Otherwise, I’d still be squatting, or on the streets.”

In April 2020, Potts moved in, furnished the place and relaunched the Saving People Shelter Project. From the outset, he was upfront with the landlady about his operation. She didn’t object as long as there was no damage to the property or trouble with the neighbours. He has maintained warm relations, helped along by a habit of redistributing excess donations from the shelter – recently, several hundred pastries from a local bakery – along the street. “Ask anybody round here about Pottsy and they’ll tell you what a good heart he has and it’s true, he has a heart of gold,” one local resident told me.

Potts’ flat is on the ground floor. The front door opens straight into the living area, which is dominated by a large sofa and a big TV. The walls are covered with framed collages of family photos; Potts now has seven children, three from his first marriage, and four born subsequently to different mothers. Some live with their mothers, others are in the care system, and one has been permanently adopted. He sees and speaks to some of his children regularly, while others have limited contact with him, either through their own choice, or because they’re in care. Potts talks often about his mistakes: his breakdown, his self-destructive response to losing his family, his drug use. “I don’t like some of the consequences of my actions,” he told me. “But I don’t regret any of it, because without those experiences I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I wouldn’t be able to help people.”

The people who pass through are a cross-section of those who have fallen through Britain’s frayed social safety net: migrants with no recourse to public funds, men who aren’t considered vulnerable enough for housing support, long-term rough sleepers who can’t prove a connection to any local area. Since 2010, as homelessness in the UK has soared, barriers to getting help have multiplied. The demand for services is overwhelming. “Sometimes if we go through the council, it takes hours and hours and there still isn’t a bed for someone at the end of it,” said Jonathan Billings, who runs a local charity, Egg, which helps homeless people find work. “Stuart’s place is informal and there’s not really rules or structure to it, so from our perspective, it’s a very good emergency option. He’s got a good way with people – he’s relatable, as he’s lived through it himself.”

His mum worries about how dangerous it is for Potts to take strangers into his home, some of whom have serious issues. But she can see how it gives him a level of stability and purpose that seemed impossible a few years ago. She is not the only one who worries about his safety. “What he’s doing is remarkably generous, and he is a good guy, but you can’t get away from the fact it’s an unregulated project, which means it’s high-risk, both for him and for others,” said one person who works for a homelessness charity in Manchester. “I can see why he does it, since a lot of these people literally have no other options, but that’s a structural problem. The council should be providing beds, not this one bloke.”

Solving that structural problem in Manchester – and across Britain – has proven thorny. When Andy Burnham became Manchester’s mayor in 2017, he pledged to end rough sleeping. His flagship homelessness policy is A Bed Every Night, which promises that anyone who calls the council will be accommodated indoors. Like most cities in the UK, Manchester has a dearth of social or affordable housing to move people into. Over time, the system has bottlenecked: demand from new rough sleepers is growing, but beds aren’t opening up. Accommodation that was designed as a temporary stopgap is now accommodating people for weeks or even months.

Despite multimillion-pound investment in services in Manchester over the past seven years, overall levels of homelessness in the city are still increasing, and rough sleeping has increased for the past two consecutive years. This is partly due to changes way beyond the power of the Manchester mayor’s office – for instance, in the asylum system. There has been a 13-fold increase in the number of asylum-seekers sleeping rough in Manchester within the last year, which Potts has noticed. “My house is like the bleeding United Nations,” he said. Simultaneously, the number of no-fault evictions has risen sharply, while catastrophic funding crises at councils around the country have further curtailed homelessness services. “Provisions in Manchester are very, very good, but they can only do so much. What we need is more affordable housing and more social housing,” said Billings.

One of the central challenges of the homelessness crisis is making the leap from short-term fixes to long-term solutions. Providing a shelter bed for a night requires resources – but in many ways, it’s the easy part. For a person to make their way out of the world of emergency accommodation into a home of their own is astonishingly difficult. As well as the shortage of affordable housing, making the transition typically requires people to navigate a vast tangle of bureaucracy – and to do so when they may have no income, extremely limited resources and nowhere to live.

When someone arrives at his flat, Potts immediately starts trying to find somewhere more sustainable for them to live, and to clear any obstacles in the way of that goal. As 2022 drew to a close, Dave Lees arrived at Potts’ place, after someone he knew from the pub found it online. Lees is now 71, a tall, thin man with deeply cracked wrinkles and long grey hair. He had become homeless about five years earlier, when the house he shared with his dad had to be sold to pay for his dad’s dementia care. In March this year, I returned to Potts’ flat, and Lees was over for a visit. We sat on the sofa, daytime TV playing on mute, as Potts rolled Lees cigarettes. “One domino goes over, the next one, and the next one,” said Lees. “And that little phrase: ‘Things can’t get any worse.’” Potts laughed at this. “I never say that any more, mate. Never.”

After losing his home, Lees moved between friends’ places, with periods sleeping rough. “It was only a short while sleeping out,” he said. Potts interjected, kindly: “There’s no shame in it. I’ve done it, haven’t I?” One effect of moving around so much was that Lees didn’t have any documentation: no photo ID, no bank cards. Many people who experience homelessness are stuck in this vicious circle. Without a birth certificate, you can’t get a passport. Without photo ID, you can’t get a bank account. Without a bank account, you can’t get benefits. Lees was eligible for a state pension, but with no bank account and no documentation, he couldn’t claim it.

In many parts of the UK, people have to prove their connection to a local area in order to qualify for any kind of housing support. This can be impossible for those who have been sofa-surfing or sleeping rough, who don’t have utility bills or other proof of residence. Lees couldn’t prove his connection to Salford, although he had lived there for most of his life. Potts has seen this play out hundreds of times, but his voice rose in frustration as he described it. “I said: ‘He’s not living anywhere at the moment. He’s a man and a bag.’” Over a period of months, they took it step-by-step, gradually building up the documentation Lees needed to get a bank account, his state pension and benefits. This process – meetings, phone calls, endless form-filling – took a full year. Lees slept on Potts’ sofa throughout.

In November 2023, 12 months after Lees arrived, he moved into a one-bed flat in Potts’ own building. (Potts had been “on at the landlord” about it for months.) Potts gave Lees his TV, and Malone gave him her old sofa. “You can rest easy now, can’t you?” Potts said to Lees. “A door you can close behind you, without the chaos.” Lees is the second person he has moved into a flat within his own building.

Since he moved into his flat in 2020, Potts says “hundreds” of people have passed through. Some stay for a night or two, others – like Lees – for months. A Polish man is just planning to move after living in the caravan for two years, while he sorted out his EU settled status and trained as a forklift truck driver. Potts never asks for rent, but if people do find work or get benefits sorted while they’re staying, he expects them to chip in where they can – buy and cook the odd meal for the group, or contribute to bills. “He doesn’t have many rules, so the ones he’s got, you’ve got to abide by,” said Trevor, who moved in at Christmas, after a mental health crisis. Potts went on holiday in late February, leaving a group of four people in his flat. “If it was me, I’d be on pins the whole time about what was happening at my gaff,” said Trevor, shaking his head thoughtfully. “He’s a very trusting man. There’s not another one of him.”

Even so, Potts is tough about upholding the rules. Not long before my first visit in February, he kicked someone out after seven months. The man had got drunk and aggressive. Potts told him to leave, without hesitation, but he felt hurt. “I thought he was my friend, but he wasn’t,” he said. (A few months later, the man apologised, sending Potts an emotional WhatsApp video of a new flat he’d moved into, saying he’d never be able to thank him enough for getting him back on his feet.) Soon after that, Potts asked a transgender woman to leave, after she refused to help with cleaning and described the other residents as “savages”. She accused Potts of bigotry. “She said that’s why I was kicking her out,” he said, sounding astonished. “I don’t give a toss what your sexuality is. If you’re a cunt, you’re a cunt.”

Thanks to his work running the shelter, and as an activist and advocate, Potts has been propelled into the slightly uneasy position of being a respected spokesperson on criminal justice. Last year, he was due to give a speech about the difficulties faced by ex-prisoners at the Tory party conference, but was denied entry due to his criminal record, an irony that was not lost on him. Potts doesn’t see himself as someone doling out support from on high. He views himself more as a knowledgable friend trying to leverage a temporary run of luck to help others before things turn again. In his mind, even his current home can feel contingent and tenuous. “The truth of it is, I could be homeless again tomorrow,” he told me.

Knowing you have a bed is liberating, and can free the mind to start thinking about the future. Jade, the woman who was staying with her boyfriend, John, was full of this sense of possibility when I met her in February. She had deep bags under her eyes and wore a fluffy dressing gown adorned with the Disney characters Lilo and Stitch. “Stuart told us more information within 10 minutes of being here than our last hostel did in three months,” she said. She had big plans: applying for ID, finding work, saving for a deposit, moving into a flat. The two of them had been homeless for about a year. Jade had, in the past, suffered domestic violence, and struggled with drug addiction. Her three children are in long-term foster care. Despite the sleeping arrangements in Potts’ flat – sharing a sofa with two strangers and a large, snoring dog – she was relishing the feeling of normality. “I love having a hot shower every day,” she said. That night she and John were planning to cook a meal of roast pork and garlic potatoes for the group, as they’d got some money through from benefits payments.

But despite best intentions, it doesn’t always work out. A few weeks after Jade and John arrived, someone donated a Tesco voucher to Potts. He used it to buy a large joint of beef, thinking it would make a nice change from their typical meals of pasta and soup. A few days later, the beef went missing from the fridge. Jade disappeared for several days. Potts looked at the footage from the CCTV camera he has outside the house, and saw the car of someone he knew to be a crack dealer, parked up outside. When Jade returned, Potts said, she was “off her tits”. “I’ve been on crack, so I know, I recognise it, and I don’t want to be around it,” he said.

Potts didn’t have to kick Jade and John out, because he’d already arranged for them to move into a multiple-occupancy house owned by a couple he knows. Drug use is prohibited there, too, and Potts hoped it was a one-off relapse. The next time I visited Potts, Jade and John had moved out. They were doing well, and Jade was looking at getting a caravan. But a few weeks later, they had used drugs again, and were evicted. Potts lost contact with them entirely, and doesn’t know where they are now. “It’s sad,” he said. “But people really do have to want to help themselves.”

When it does work out, it’s a kind of magic. On a bright spring day, I went with Lees to his flat, which is on the floor above Potts’ place. The walls were freshly painted, and natural light streamed in through uncurtained windows. Lees had used some of his pension money to buy art supplies, which were neatly stacked in the bedroom. He used to be a sign painter, and was excited to start drawing again. Before I left, Lees showed me something: a blue ring-binder, full of plastic wallets, each holding a different document. Birth certificate, national insurance number, tax return, bank statements, tenancy agreement, gas bills. Proof of existence. So mundane, so vital. “I won’t be letting go of this again,” he said.

Original article here

28 Apr 2024
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There’s Power In How We Think About Things

When you walk or drive down a city street, what you are seeing all around you are manifestations of thoughts. Every building began as an idea in somebody’s mind.

Someone acquired the land. Someone designed the house. Someone had the idea to organize people together to build the house, either to make money or to live in it. The trees you see were planted for shade in the yard, on the sidewalk, along the street. The pavement that we accept as a natural part of our landscape was conceptualized, designed, engineered, installed, and is maintained via thought.

Thoughts create our physical reality, and they also create our larger reality. During ancient times, when there was an electrical storm, people perceived the thunder and lightning as the voice of a powerful deity.

If somebody got hit by lightning, that proved to others that the person had committed some crime or displeased the deity. When the thunder rumbled loudly nearby, people knelt to the ground and cried out their prayers.

They knew, when they saw the awesome streaks of light across the sky, that they were seeing the ﬁnger of their god writing messages or expressing an opinion. Today thunder and lightning are seen and heard as the discharge of electrical energy between ions in the air and the oppositely charged ground.

If somebody is struck by lightning, it is either due to their own stupidity (standing on the golf course with a club in the air) or just bad luck. If the storm is severe, we take cover out of fear of a dangerous natural phenomenon, rather than a wrathful god.

The same event creates a completely different feeling, thought, and behavior in the people who observe it today. The point is, the experience of reality is different, and what makes it different is thought.

A few years ago, I spoke at a conference sponsored by Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After the presentation, my wife, Louise, and I went for a walk through the Old City, down through the Arab Quarter where most of the tourist shops are.

It was a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, but not being Islamic, we doubted this would affect our sightseeing and shopping. It being a very hot May day, Louise was wearing a comfortable pair of walking shorts. As we moved through the streets, one shopkeeper came out of his store and started shouting at Louise, calling her a “Western pig,” a “whore,” and a “blasphemer.” “Don’t you know it’s a holy day, you bitch?” he screamed. “You have no right to show your legs!”

I mention this culture clash because the shopkeeper’s reality was that a woman (who, in Islam, has a different social status than women in most Western cultures) was ﬂagrantly breaking the law.

Louise’s reality held that it was a hot day in a tourist center and she was dressed comfortably in conservative shorts, according to Western standards, and being harassed for it.

My reality told me that a man was displaying bad manners and disrespect for my culture and religion, for women in general, and for another human being in particular, by shouting instead of quietly coming up to us and presenting his case.

We were all correct.

And so now all of humanity is presented with a dizzying set of conﬂicting realities. What we choose to do about them will determine our future as a species. Consider these various ideas different people might have about life:

“We need electricity to be comfortable and maintain our way of life,” or “Producing electricity with fossil fuel is pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to global warming and extremely destructive weather patterns.”
“Being able to drive where and when we want to at a low cost is freedom,” or “Americans’ driving habits are feeding the destruction of the planet.”
“All of nature is here to serve the needs of humankind,” or “Humans are no more or less important to the planet than any other life-form.”

These ideas are grounded in the stories — the myths of our culture, our paradigms, our beliefs — that form the core of what we tell ourselves is “reality.” Stories, in this context, are anything we add to our original experience that alters what we think is going on, or changes how we think about things.

Since so much of what we call reality is subjective, there are few right or wrong stories; instead, there are useful and not useful stories. This is dependent upon what culture you belong to, your status in your culture, and your relationship to the natural world and vision of the future.

Increasingly, the stories we’ve been telling ourselves for centuries are now moving from the useful to the not useful category. An example of such a story is the biblical order to have as many children as possible. In the days of Noah and Abraham, the tribe with the largest number of young men to create an army was usually the tribe that survived.

“Be fruitful and multiply” was a formula for cultural survival, even though in nearly all cases it then led to “and when you run out of resources and living space, kill off your neighbor and take theirs.”

We’ve rationalized this over the years by saying that this conquering and dominating lifestyle has brought us so many good things: television, visiting the moon, modern appliances, the eradication of many diseases.

Back when the planet had only a few million people on it (the world hit a population of 1 billion during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson), a person could probably have built a case for the value of huge families, growing populations, and the conquest of nearby (or distant) lands. It might have been of questionable morality, but it could have been defended by the norms of a culture that had survival and growth as its primary goals and had not yet hit the limits of nature. Now, however, such stories imperil the very culture from which they’re derived.

The ancient Greeks changed the world and established the foundations of Western Civilization with the idea of integrating democracy and the ownership of enslaved people. In fact, every time a culture has been transformed, since or before then and for better or worse, it’s been because of an idea, an insight, a new understanding of how things are, and of what is possible.

Ideas preceded every revolution, every war, every transformation, and every invention.

So, the good news is that if we re-deﬁne our cultural norms, re-tell the stories that make up the reality we follow, then humanity’s behaviors actually can change to conform to the new stories. It starts with us!

Original article here

15 Apr 2024
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Open-minded people have a different visual perception of reality

Psychologists have only begun to unravel the concept of “personality,” that all-important but nebulous feature of individual identity. Recent studies suggest that personality traits don’t simply affect your outlook on life, but the way you perceive reality.

One study published earlier this year in the Journal of Research in Personality goes so far as to suggest that openness to experience changes what people see in the world. It makes them more likely to experience certain visual perceptions. In the study, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia recruited 123 volunteers and gave them the big five personality test, which measures extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. That last personality trait involves creativity, imagination, and a willingness to try new things.

They then tested who experienced a visual perception phenomenon called “binocular rivalry.” This phenomenon occurs when each eye is shown a different image—in this case, a red patch in one eye and a green patch to another. Most people switch back and forwards between the two incompatible images, as the brain can only perceive one at a time. But some people merge the two images into a unified red-green patch. Participants who scored higher on openness were more likely to perceive this combined image.

This makes sense, according to the researchers, because openness to new experiences is linked with creativity. In an article on their results in The Conversation, they write that the ability to combine two images seems “like a ‘creative’ solution to the problem presented by the two incompatible stimuli.”

Anna Antinori lead author of the study, explains that we’re constantly filtering out what sensory information to focus on. For example, you might well be subconsciously ignoring the noise around you or the feeling of a chair against your back. And this then determines what we perceive. “The ‘gate’ that lets through the information that reaches consciousness may have a different level of flexibility,” she says. “Open people appear to have a more flexible gate and let through more information than the average person.”

This isn’t the only study that connects personality with perception. As the researchers note in The Conversation, an earlier study shows that those who score high in openness are less likely to experience “inattentional blindness.”

This visual phenomenon occurs when people are focusing so hard on one feature of a scene that they completely fail to notice something entirely obvious—such as in the video below.

Around half of people are so busy watching ball-passes that they miss the man in a gorilla costume.

Though the research suggests that personality affects the way we filter conscious experience, it’s not clear exactly how this process works. The authors speculate that overlapping neurochemicals in the brain may link perception to personality. “Thus the abundance of the same neurochemical, or lack thereof, may affect both one’s personality and low-level vision,” adds Antinori.

There is also evidence to suggest that personality traits aren’t fixed. One study has shown that meditation can affect binocular rivalry, and training can make people more open to new experiences. Then there’s research that shows psilocybin (the key ingredient in magic mushrooms) makes people more open.

But while studies show that personality can shift over time, there’s currently little research on whether perception also changes to correspond with new personality traits. But given the above cited evidence that meditation can shift perception, Antinori believes the way we see the world may well change in line with personality. “It may be possible that a change in people’s personality may also affect how they see the world,” she says.

The mechanics behind how personality is formed—and the effects it has—are still unknown. But mounting evidence suggests that our personalities are affecting our experience of the world in more ways than we realize.

Original article here

12 Apr 2024
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How to (Actually) Change Someone’s Mind

If you’re a leader, it’s likely that not everyone who works with you will agree with the decisions you make — and that’s okay. Leadership involves making unpopular decisions while navigating complex relationships with colleagues, partners, and clients. But often, you will need to get buy-in from these constituents, and therefore you will need to convince them to change their mind.

There is little friction involved in convincing people who are your natural supporters. But trying to change the mind of a dissenter, or a detractor, is a different story. How do you go about convincing someone who, for one reason or another, doesn’t see eye-to-eye with you? Someone who gives you a flat out “no”?

In the recent research we completed for Laura’s book, Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage, we observed, and then interviewed, more than 60 leaders who were trying to convince business associates and other constituents to change their minds on a course of action that they initially disagreed with. The leaders who were most successful in overcoming others’ skepticism were those who diagnosed the root of the fundamental disagreement before trying to persuade. They first asked themselves, “What’s driving my detractor’s resistance?” These leaders often pinpointed which aspects of their arguments elicited the most pushback and the most emotional reactions. Then, depending on the answer, they approached the situation with one of the following three targeted strategies.

The Cognitive Conversation

When to use it: The detractor may be opposed to your argument because of an objective reason. If they’ve clearly articulated a logical set of objections, and they don’t appear to be hiding ulterior motives, approach them with a cognitive conversation. This is especially useful when the detractor is known to have a no-nonsense attitude and can easily set aside emotions in their decision-making process.

How it works: A successful cognitive conversation requires two things: sound arguments and good presentation. Take, for example, a situation where you are pushing to switch suppliers and you’ve found one whose materials and products are superior to the current supplier, whose products have been causing numerous downstream issues. But your colleague is in favor of sticking with your current supplier with whom he has a long-standing relationship. He expresses his resistance to your proposal by pointing out the higher prices the new supplier charges. You want to prepare sound arguments that disprove the detractor’s objections. In this instance, you might point out that the new supplier is actually less expensive in the long run, when you take into account all the additional production costs cause by the current supplier. You also want to use a logical framework and clear storyline to force the detractor to reassess their thinking. For example, you can emphasize that the decision is based on cost, quality, and service, but above all, cost and quality.

Be cautious about not introducing emotions into the discussion, which could give the impression that you and your detractor are not on common ground. For example, you don’t want to make it seem as if you believe your colleague’s relationship with the former supplier is irrelevant. The goal is to show the person that, on an objective and factual basis, their initial stance on the situation isn’t as reasonable as your argument. Be warned, these detractors are not easily swayed by broad generalizations. Be ready to mentally spar with them and come prepared with facts that back up each aspect of your overall argument.

The catch: Don’t assume that getting a “yes” from this type of detractor signals a conversion into an everlasting supporter. You may have persuaded them on this specific issue, but they may disagree with you again in the future. If that’s true, expect to have another cognitive conversation on that separate argument.

The Champion Conversion

When to use it: When the detractor isn’t easily persuaded through cognitive arguments, or when they harbor a grievance in your relationship with them, engaging in debates may be futile. Take, for example, a management decision where you’d like to promote a qualified individual who performed brilliantly under your supervision, but a counterpart of yours argues that your subordinates often get promoted over hers. Even if your promotion candidate is objectively more deserving, others may still feel resentment and refuse to provide support.

How it works: Don’t jump in and try to convince the other person. Instead, invest time in personally learning about and building rapport with them. Here, it’s not about arguments or presentation, at least initially, but understanding their perspective and why they might feel personally affronted. For instance, you might ask questions about her team, and which team members she feels have the most potential. Gradually convert this detractor into someone who is your champion or advocate, perhaps by shedding more light on the qualities that you value in individuals, both on your team as well as your counterpart’s team, or showing how you value her leadership style. By the time the decision must be made, try to make sure you’re both on the same page as to which qualities matter for promotion decisions and that you’ve clearly articulated how your candidate exemplifies those qualities.

The catch: No matter how much of a champion the other person becomes, don’t expect them to agree with a decision that’s fundamentally illogical. You can’t rely on relationship alone; your stance still needs to be backed by clear logic. Additionally, these types of detractors can easily sense if you’re trying to manipulate the situation to get them on your side. Authenticity is key: allow the other person to see who you are so that they can more fully understand your point of view.

The Credible Colleague Approach

When to use it: There are times when the detractor’s deeply held personal beliefs make them fundamentally opposed to your proposal. Take, for example, a colleague who might disagree with you on the need to run a necessary clinical trial for a new product. Because they believe that the clinical trial might be harmful in some way or run counter to their values, they oppose the idea, even though the evidence shows that the benefits outweigh the harm. It’s sometimes tough to pinpoint where these personal beliefs stem from, but some combination of the person’s upbringing, personal history, and unspoken biases will, at times, make it seemingly impossible for them to accept a decision, no matter what logical or emotional argument you throw their way. In these situations, there isn’t much you can say or do to change their mind.

How it works: Rather than trying to argue with someone who seems resistant, bring in a credible colleague. A champion of your position from another part of the organization, whether they are a peer or superior, may be better suited to convince this detractor. This forces the detractor to disentangle who you are from what your argument might be and evaluate the idea based on its objective merits. If you and the detractor are at an impasse, the credible colleague might just tip the scales in your favor.

The catch: Calling in an external supporter is a double-edged sword. While it can achieve the outcome you want, it may exacerbate your detractor’s opposition, especially if the detractor feels that the credible colleague has forced them to take your side. It’s critical to find the right colleague who can tactfully advocate for your position while maintaining a cordial relationship.

It’s not easy to have detractors, and it’s even harder to change their minds. The key is to understand the source of their resistance and use a targeted strategy that best resonates with your particular detractor. You’ll have a much better chance of getting a “yes.”

Original article here