I’m extremely happy to report that my new podcast has launched! Check out:
The Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More at http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com. You can subscribe via iTunes by doing this:
Cheers!
Stever
Amazing. Utterly amazing.
The New York Times is reporting that Churches are now attracting teenagers to the church by having “Halo” nights. That’s when teenage boys get together and play a videogame that’s rated “M” for mature (which means teenagers can’t purchase it without a parent’s permission).
First of all, isn’t there a commandment about “Honoring Thy Father and Thy Mother?” Shouldn’t the churches require parental permission? Remember the bum standing outside the liquor store, buying alcohol for teenagers in return for a few bucks. This time it’s the church buying violent videogames. This does not sound wholesome.
(Of course, we just came off the Catholic-Church-as-teenage-sex-ring scandal, so I’m not sure we should be surprised.)
But let’s say it’s fine for the church to override parental wishes, since they have a direct line to God and the parents, presumably, do not.
They say it’s harmless fun. They must not know how to use Google. It took me less than 30 seconds to visit the American Psychological Association’s web site and look at the 2005 survey of 20 years’ worth of videogame studies. Playing violent videogames heightens aggression, both short-term and long-term.
Now I wasn’t raised in a Judeo-Christian household, so I don’t know the Bible in great detail. But an Orson Wells special on Nostradamus I saw as a kid outlined Armageddon in brief terms (and without attending Bible study classes, it’ll have to do). One of the highlights was when people acting in the name of God and the Church began doing the devil’s work, all the while believing they were doing God’s work.
I would say luring teenagers to Church by exposing them to non-parentally-approved games that are known to increase violent behavior just might fit the bill.
Have you seen this story? Our Boston leadership (and I use the term loosely) is once again promoting terror, fear, and ineptitude, in one happy package. An MIT student had a “bomb hoax” on her shirt.
“Hoax” implies she was trying to pull one over on the police. No, she had a piece of wearable electronics that (a) looks NOTHING like a bomb–it looks like two batteries and a breadboard, and (b) had no intent to blow up or deceive anyone.
They’re almost proud as they discuss how, thanks to her cooperation, they didn’t shoot her dead on the spot.
So what’s the point of this story? My takeaway is that their security people are scared by a battery and a piece of wire that doesn’t even remotely resemble a bomb. That doesn’t fill me with confidence. Yet they seem to want to tell us that they somehow saved us from some would-be evildoer.
Is this the world we’ve created? Where inadequately trained security people can’t tell the difference between AA batteries and a bomb, and we’re proud of our restraint in not killing a science student in our overreactive frenzy? Absurd!
Just returned to the so-called “real world” after a week camping at a festival. Well, car camping. We had running water, a little shack happily selling us gyros, port-a-potties, and garbage collection. So we weren’t really roughing it. But happily, the campground had no internet access or cell phone. So it was a truly un-connected week. The week was spent hanging out with friends, attending an occasional workshop, building bonfires, and reading books.
Today I got back to stacks of mail, email, etc. Looking at it all, I realize that most of the daily stuff that occupies so much of my time is extra. It’s stuff that doesn’t give me joy or pleasure. Some of it is necessary, but it’s put in stark relief how much of my daily life and crap is just that: crap. It’s not building a happy life. It’s not bringing in immediate income. It’s busy-ness. Twitter? Busy-ness. The four dozen social networking sites intended to revolutionize my life? Busy-ness. Email (1400 email backlog from one week)? Busy-ness, except for three or four of the messages, should I ever be able to dig them out of all the rest.
I’m not sure what to do with this new realization. I may just drop a lot of stuff on the floor. A whole lot of stuff. Concentrate on the things that pay off most in the currency of happiness, short-term or long-term, and relax about everything else. Cheryl Richardson says a high-quality life often has more to do with what we remove from it than what we put in.
So go take a week’s vacation, totally un-tethered from the modern world. When you return, be careful and deliberate about which of your projects you pick up again. You just might end up doing less and living more!
I’ve totally internalized the media images of the Ideal Male Body. Abercrombie & Fitch, galore. So, in a very 21st-century way, I often feel inadequate with my body. Like every time I walk past a mirror. Especially in summer. The amazing thing is that we’ve created these images of beauty for marketing purposes, so people will feel inadequate and will buy our products in some gut-level attempt to capture that beauty. It works.
Today a friend passed me a link to Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty at http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com. How refreshing! I especially like the video of the transformation from woman to Beauty.
I’m watching Congressman Vitter reporting back to work, after being exposed as a hypocrite, being a big proponent of the Sanctity of Marriage, despite having visited the DC Madame.
I was wondering why it always seems to be the Conservatives who ooze hypocrisy. Rev. Haggard, preaching hatred against gays while happily enjoying “massages” from a male escort (not to menton buying drugs. He claims, however, that he didn’t inhale). Congressman Foley chairing the anti-online-predator board while using Instant Messages to ask teenage congressional pages to describe themselves masturbating. Let’s not even consider the $600 million judgment against the Catholic Church for its systematic cover-up of child molestation. It almost seems epidemic.
Upon reflection, though, it isn’t. And I don’t believe it’s due to a moral failing intrinsic to social conservatism(*); it’s structural. Socially conservative positions are characterized by restricting behaviour. In short, “thou shalt not …” It’s easy to be a hypocrite when you preach against a certain behavior, just do the behavior.
Liberal positions are typically pemissive. “It’s your choice what to do in the privacy of your own home.” There’s no way to be hypocritical with a permissive stance, since it’s perfectly find to support someone’s right to do something and still not exercise that right itself. There are certainly ways in which a liberal position can create hypocrisy, as can be seen with the pro-alternative-energy Kennedys protesting the Cape Wind wind farm (it would alter the ocean view from their family mansions). But it’s less common, I believe, for the structural reason described above.
So if you want job security and the respect of your neighbors, take liberal social positions and you greatly reduce the chances of being labeled an accidental hypocrite.
(*) This should not be construed to mean that I believe social conservatives have moral positions, only that moral issues aren’t the root cause of the hypocrisy.
I’m going to be working with an experienced PBS Producer on how to break into the media. Before we meet, she’s asked me to poll some colleagues as to what qualities make me stand out, and what they find special about me.
Being typical, non-emotional, task-oriented guy, I thought of this purely as a request for information. So I sent it out to about 30 people and promptly forgot it.
Then the responses came in. My reaction was anything but task-oriented. By the fifth or sixth message, I was crying (in a good way). I get so wrapped up in my own struggles (or perceived struggles) that my attention is always on where I’m falling short, what’s not working, where I’m not achieving or connecting or loving or doing or being. These messages really hammered home how I’m special, and how others perceive my great qualities.
If you’ve never asked your friends what they love about you, give it a try. It’s very, very powerful.
How much of our prosperity is driven by innovation, hard work, productivity, yada, yada, yada, and how much is simple demographics?
The Long Now is an organization that encourages long-term thinking. The have free seminars about long-term perspectives. I just finished listening to The Depopulation Problem. The author talks through many economic and social issues, all related to fertility rates and the aging population.
The speaker makes some fairly eye-opening observations. For example, demographically, religious fundamentalists tend to have larger families. Does that mean the population of 2050 will be more fundamentalist than we are now? He extrapolates to some pretty outrageous scenarios, but the basic issue is worth a listen. As fertility rates drop and lifespans lengthen, there are more and more old people for every productive young person. So at the end of the day (or the lifetime), the working population has to work longer and harder just to support the old people, leaving a lower standard of living for the middle classes.
Give a listen. It’s an important issue and, by definition, it will become an issue during our lifetimes.
Loved Nora Ephron’s take on email today. You can find it at http://SteverRobbins.com/r/m1nog.
Have you noticed that people don’t like to say,
“I’m making this decision because it’s convenient for me. It may hurt others. It may even hurt them a lot, but my convenience is more important.”
They don’t like to say it because it forces them to face up to their own selfishness. While I’d love to say something warm and supportive, like, “You go, Girl! You deserve to put your convenience ahead of your responsibilities to your family, community, etc.”
Sadly, I don’t believe it.
Here are some of the excuses I’ve recently heard for people justifying doing crappy things to other people so they don’t have to take responsibility for owning their own actions:
Oh, crap!! I just realized this entire post probably counts as a complaint (see a Complaint Free World below). I’ll stop here and move my bracelet to the other wrist. And I was going on 3 days, too. Rats!!