This well-constructed, crescendoed post by John Halamka really strikes a chord. Stress Acceleration is worth reading start to finish for the writing quality as well as the content. A few snippets below:
Does this acceleration of stress bother me? Over the years of medical training and leading large complex organizations I’ve learned to adapt to just about anything. For every issue there is a process to resolve it.
Is it sustainable for society? I don’t think so.
…Can we sit and enjoy a meal without thinking about work or checking email? Can we go to a movie or concert for an evening without needing to stay connected? Can we turn off our social networks for a week without suffering withdrawal?
The level of stress I see around me is leading humanity to increase consumption of pharmaceuticals (have a problem – take a pill), eat poorly, and reduce the baseline of human kindness (driven in Boston lately?).
John Robb’s writing has been on my mind a lot lately. He’s coming at ideas wearing many hats and most of them very different from mine. Hence, the initial attraction. I keep being pinged though by his idea of a Darknet, which I imagine he will have to rebrand. It sounds too ominous and few would appreciate the irony.
My understanding of resilient, networked tribes is that it’s a representation of hyper-localism. Similar to slow food or open-source networks that band around specific themes, these tribes would come together based on mutual needs and interests. What differentiates that from a special interest group? Not much actually, but it harks back to the original idea of a special interest group, before corporate donations and government lobbying made them a little too special for the rest of the public.
I’ve seen the hyper-local idea in many places, in fiction within For Us, The Living, Childhood’s End, and Speaker for the Dead, in the real world within spas & resorts, elderly homes and foreign communities in India, Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore funded by the non-resident superrich. The latter is the closest the idea comes to reality.
Robb puts it best here:
My solution is to form a tribal layer. Resilient communities that are connected by a network platform (a darknet). A decentralized and democratic system that can provide you a better interface with the dominant global economic system than anything else I can think of. Not only would this tribe protect you from shocks and predation by this impersonal global system, it would provide you with the tools and community support necessary to radically improve how you and your family does across all measures of consequence. Of course, this may not be the right solution for you, but if it is…
The ancient Rome of Caesar, Crassus and Pompeius differ from modern America primarily on the education level and resources of the middle class. Power is slightly more distributed and in the event of downfall, there are more alternatives than diaspora and cross-pollination of cultures. Preservation of culture isn’t as important as preservation of information and human capital. Realizing this, people will band around similarities not on political viewpoints, but ideological ones. And what separates the ideologues of today from the Lockes, Kants, Humes and Marxists of the 19th century that spawned some of the most disturbing and historic wars of the 20th?
Technology. Specifically the communication networks developing over the internet. Transparency IS important and Robb poses a lot of questions on where to draw the line between privacy and security. While history teaches us where we went wrong, it also glaringly points out how much we thought we were right. So is the point to doubt our thinking now and stall? I don’t think so.
Evolution requires iteration and we’re simply at one point of the cycle. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for past mistakes. Just another reason to keep doing and risking, without worrying about making mistakes since they only help speed the cycle of iteration. This is what “Beta” really means. Google being the best example, of course.
What we can’t do is continue to do business as usual. It isn’t working. Next steps are tenuous and may not happen as a mass whole. Disbanding and communicating across shared networks is another version of a population coexisting. We’re experimenting with Life 2.0, or whatever version we’re in now based on historical viewpoint.
Jay’s always writing sensibly, especially when it comes to healthcare. His ideas are offbeat, novel, and make you do a double-take in your head about what’s really going on in the world.
His doing more, buying less post struck a chord on a different level. The picture in the post reminds me of Will Hunting’s room in Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite movies of all time. Just a place to crash, recharge and start anew.
Living simply is difficult at first because you’re forced to prioritize. To each his own though; personalized living. Some earn money and do great things for stuff, which may be their personal drive. Cant knock that. Problems arise (as in the current financial crisis) when people start buying into what others are doing, just because.
What’s your own definition of living? Cut out the media, your friends, your family, your social status and what’s “required” of you. How would you choose to live?
Work is about learning a language. Anyone can teach themselves the various work languages; programming, business, science, art, etc. Developing the personal skills to learning them is more important than knowing the languages themselves. Losing a job is much easier to handle when you know you have the ability to learn another language as opposed to thinking you have to prepare yourself to figure out a whole new job.
I’ve seen too many curious and adaptable friends work endlessly at grueling, unfulfilling jobs when they already have the natural skills to do something else. Money, always the quoted scarce resource, is only as limiting as your desire for change. That desire – an ache for more- is powerful enough to influence how you handle your money to make it work for you (rather than you working for it). When you flip the desire switch, the movement to a new you progresses at blinding speed. Potential goes from being a word to becoming a realization.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character;
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
I got the above from an email chain and it struck a chord. It all starts with you.
Why don’t you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see, and baby, baby, baby, do you like it?
There you sit, sitting spare like a book on a shelf rustin’,
ah, not trying to fight it.
You really don’t care if they’re comin’; oh, oh,
I know that it’s all a state of mind.
It breaks old habits. Especially those learned in stress, during times you couldn’t control and reacted to instead.
Personally, I’ve made great strides stopping myself from biting my nails and cracking my knee. These simple but annoying habits were a natural part of my day and signaled various emotional states; nervousness, hunger, exhaustion, so on. The sabbatical has eliminated the cause – the root stressors – which in turn got rid of the effect – the bad habit.
Will they reemerge? Most likely. Yet I have a deeper understanding of how relative a state of mind really is. It’s a matter of time and place. Your context affecting your self. Change your setting and you change how you react, how you feel. I’m counting on this to make a difference.
As I sit here typing away on a computer in India, I think of all the alternate ways people are living right now. Just thinking of the endless traffic, I’m awestruck at the constant, continuous nature of everyday life all over the world.
As Robert Frost said, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
Rather than getting me down, it gives me the freedom to know that the life I’m living is one of an endless number of possibilities. All I have to do to change it is change my context.
Fort Minor’s “Right Now” describes this all too well. So does one of my favorite movies of all time, Run Lola Run.
Self-improvement tactics like posture correction, speech intonation and maintaining eye contact almost seem deceiving. On the receiving end, it looks like charm and confidence. Even those knowledgeable of such methods succumb to them.
They make a presentation more powerful, a marketing message more provocative, a simple introduction more meaningful.
Whether purposeful or natural, these techniques aren’t deceptive at all. They’re rooted in our cultural perception. We define the words, “charm” and “confidence”, in such an exact way that the components of each can be practiced and replicated. It’s a game like any other.
If someone tells you they’re a salesman or psychologist, you start looking for the telltale signs of their profession. If they don’t mention their line of work, they’re simply great conversationalists and listeners.
We’re actually allowing ourselves to be deceived. Priming and classical conditioning prove this easily. Non-verbal cues are extremely powerful. In conversation, we subconsciously note things like pupil dilation, forehead creases, body positioning, voice modulations and such. Used effectively, one person can guide another through a whole maze of experiences. It’s what successful storytellers do best.
Bottomline: Learning how to manipulate a conversation may seem like a deceiving exercise, but our cultural frame is set in a way to allow for that deception to occur. We’re simply playing a game within a boxed point of view. If it’s possible to master this game, taking a person at face value takes on a new light.
We have little choice but to do that though. Relationships, conversations and trust evolve over time. If the charm and confidence are a charade, it’ll be known. The initial interaction is only a beginning.
One of the best ways you can prepare for the future is to train yourself to become an entrepreneur — essentially a person that makes their own economic opportunities. It’s going to become a major differentiator between those that succeed and those that fail in a harsh global system (this expertise has been deprecated by a system that prides itself on manufacturing salaried consumption bots).
He gives 10 survival tips. Here’s a great one:
Deconstruct any business you see. Estimate revenues. Evaluate competition and competitive advantage and marketing. Etc. Find out how they make money and how much.
