A comment from a reader of my previous column on Philippe Petit, the 'Man on Wire,' reminded me that sometimes, we can draw Bad from the Good.
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The pursuit of happiness...it sounds so great, why wouldn't everyone want happiness?
Maybe everyone should, but there is an unsettling idea about happiness creeping over the conversation.
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Recently, I was asked to provide some tips for people who work in the veterinary industry for how to stay positive during the holidays, with one big challenge in mind: Veterinary team members often have to work when the rest of us are home for the holidays. While it's true that having to give an alpaca an enema isn't a great holiday gig (to my mind at least), it's also true that other folks working other jobs have to work when the rest of the world gets to play. So, here are some ideas for staying positive at work when everyone else is at play. (You can read the original version at the My Exceptional Veterinary Team website)
Think about who will be working this holiday season while you're spending time with your family, stuffing yourself with chocolate, cookies, turkey, or latkes. Cops, ambulance drivers and EMTs responding to accidents. Restaurant servers, sales clerks, flight attendants, and call center and hotline workers trying to help customers. Utilities...
Here are some tips for staying positive at work when everyone else is at play.
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Is there a Mackenzie Phillips-sized family secret lurking in the heart of psychology? I take a look at the often-profound disagreement over how can our profession best serve our clients.
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With kids heading back to school, parents can be stretched thin. So it's time to get back to the basics with three strategies for better parenting.
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My wife and I were watching news coverage of recent Presidential talks and "town hall meetings" on health care reform. I started off finding all the hysteria over this issue pretty, well, hysterical. It reminded me of exploding cell phones or Manbearpig, all topics that are pretty darn absurd, and - at least from the outside - amazingly bizarre things to get so worked up over.
Then the guns started showing up. People are bringing loaded guns to Presidential appearances! And we're at an Orange level of terrorism alert! (I'm not really sure what that means, but we've been at an Orange level of risk for all of my children's lives). Remember the kid who got suspended because he wore a Coke shirt to Pepsi day? He should have shown up with bazooka I guess. It seems insane that a country with a history of presidential assassinations would allow this sort of thing, but health care insurance plans are apparently menacing enough to allow it.
Two days...
Assault rifles, death panels, and the end of democracy. No, it's not Invaders from Mars, it's the health care debate. Here's a look at some of the reasons why this debate has gotten so out of control.
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Our bodies apparently have 10-20 times as many foreign, microbial cells in them as they have human cells, and research increasingly focuses on our colonization by these critters as a factor in our health. Are we simply Microbe Motels?
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We tend to focus more on living long than on living well. Why can't we do both?
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So, I drank the Kool-Aid, jumped the shark, sold my first-born for a tulip. However you put it, I joined the ranks and now engage in behavior that is difficult to describe with any dignity. In times gone by, saying what I do out loud was likely to get your shins rapped with a cane, your ear yanked from its socket, and your teeth flossed with a redolent bar of Glenn's Sulphur Soap. Let's be frank and cut to the chase. I tweet.
I suppose I could say that I twitter, but that probably doesn't help me.
I joined Twitter, and I blame Psychology Today! Specifically Pamela Rutledge and Moses Ma, who recently reported on their experiences with Twitter.
Now, I am the social media equivalent of the guy at the party who keeps trying to talk about serious things while other people are trying to concentrate on their next beer pong shot or figure out whether to cue up the Taylor Hicks playlist or the Taylor Swift playlist (I have been assured that they are different...
A recent report suggested that we prefer confident rather than diffident experts...even when the confident ones are wrong. There are two kinds of experts: the folks who are very, very confident about what they know - and the folks who are very, very aware of the limits of what they know.
A football running back is a confident expert - hit the hole, hit it fast, hit it hard. (Even the Minnesita Vikings recognize this!) Running back-style experts say things like - DRINK TWO GLASSES OF RED WINE A DAY!!!!!
A scientist is usually a tentative expert - see the data, see the limits in the data, present the highly qualified possibilities of what the data might mean if we can get more data that look a lot like the data we just reported.
Can we get people to listen to the second kind?
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A well-known story relates the following encounter (adapted from Ryan, 1977):
Three men are found smashing boulders with iron hammers. When asked what they are doing, the first man says, "Breaking big rocks into little rocks." The second man says, "Feeding my family." The third man says, "Building a cathedral."
Today's column focuses on the third man, the one who saw each hammer blow as contributing to the construction of a cathedral, a home for human dreams and sacred aspirations. To many of us who study and consult in occupational and organizational contexts, we would call what this third man does meaningful work.
There are many perspectives on meaningful work, ranging from Marxist ideas about work that resists the dehumanizing influences of the Industrial Revolution to religious ideas about being called by a transcendent spirit to do Good Work in the world -- with everything in between. I have come to see meaningful work as consisting of three, central...
A famous story relates the following encounter:
Three men are found smashing boulders with iron hammers. When asked what they are doing, the first man says, "Breaking big rocks into little rocks." The second man says, "Feeding my family." The third man says, "Building a cathedral."
To many of us who study and consult in occupational and organizational contexts, we would call what this third man does meaningful work.
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When I talk to people about meaning in their lives, in their work, or in their love lives, the conversation invariably reaches a point where I can see the gears of their mind start to work furiously. This is the point in our chat where I've asked them what makes their lives feel meaningful and they start to feel like their answer isn't fancy enough. I guess it doesn't seem like enough to create strong and mutually nurturing relationships, parent a child, feel spiritualy inspired, venture forth into the world to find your niche in the vast global economy, or wrest occasional moments or serenity from the pinging, flashing pinball machine of life!
(The fact that my curiosity about what fills people's lives with meaning often provokes these kinds of responses is the leading bummer of being a meaning in life researcher!)
Right before my eyes, I can see their perspective on such things as being an inspired parent, generous lover, conscientious worker, or tranquil contemplator...
The Flash of Insight, The Grand Gesture, The Rousing Speech, The Last Straw. All of these are doppelgangers of The Big Thing, which too many of us wait for to come along and change our lives. The secret is, of course, that it's not coming. Worse, by waiting for The Big Thing, you could let the little things that make life rich, and accumulate into the important experiences of your life, slip away.
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One Friday evening in January, I went to the lone, independently owned coffeeshop on my side of town to do a few hours of work. When I got there, though, I found out that the coffeeshop was going out of business. What happened next was a stirring brew of passionate leadership, meaningful work, community mobilization, with a little new social media to sweeten things up.
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In Samuel Beckett's masterpiece "Waiting for Godot," two characters anxiously wait for a man they both claim to know but whom neither would recognize. Too often, it seems like people act like Beckett's characters, passively waiting for a meaning for their lives to come up and poke them in the chest and shout, "I am here!" How can we break out of this passivity?
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Somewhere around 2500 years ago, a little argument developed among a bunch of free Greek men with too much time on their hands and too many neurons for their own good. They were trying to create a definitive description of the Good Life. Their argument stretched across several decades, and many luminaries joined in; Gorgias, Aristotle, Aristuppus, Epicurus, Epictetus, Plato, etc.
Believe it or not, their argument isn't really settled even now.
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"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less."
-Vaclav Havel-
For the sake of argument, let's say that the esteemed Vaclav Havel is right and we are bothered less and less by the question of meaning in our lives...is that bad? Several decades of research have been conducted on this question, and the evidence is strong.
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Posted by Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. | Posted in Happiness | Posted on 25-03-2009 | 
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Wild-eyed Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann recently called on her constituents to get "armed and dangerous" to protect America. Congresswoman Bachmann invoked the spirit of Thomas Jefferson to urge a revolution, so we don't lose our country, you know. Who is the threat? President Barack Obama. Twice in eight years, some Americans have wondered whether the guy in the Oval Office is the president. What do these sentiments say about the meaningful life?
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A child's art is a glimpse of a hidden world. (And apparently there are no jobs for art critics in that world). Let's be honest, kid art is objectively bad. Yet, kids have the seemingly magical ability to see their self-expression for what it is, not for what it is not.
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We all have that friend who is never fazed by anything. "Hey Chip, sorry to hear you lost your job." "Oh, that's OK, it gives me more time to write my memoirs." These people drive us crazy. Their response to set-backs seems insane at best, and designed to torment us at worst. Perhaps some part of us wishes we could be so laissez-faire, but wouldn't we be missing some crucial piece of living if we didn't have to overcome hardship? Many psychologists believe that people grow through their stressful circumstances by making meaning from them.
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Meaning can be found in the strangest places. It's not just the joyful things that help us feel our lives matter; often it's the most painful things. It's a venerable paradox. The more you dive into life and love those around you, the more you risk losing when death comes. Yet, if you don't love strongly, fully, and heedlessly, life is hollowed out and is just a shadow of what it could be.
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The ubiquitous ritual of beginning conversations with strangers with some version of "Hi, I'm so-and-so. What do you do?" creates the impression that the most important thing about us is our job. Perhaps we are what we do? What happens, though, when the sacrifices you've made for your employer are repaid in worthless company stock or a pink slip?
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Psychologists don't study "The Meaning Of Life" (cue portentious music). Instead we study the meaning in life...
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