Way back in pre-Internet, pre-cellphone 1981, Ted Mooney wrote a novel called Easy Travel to Other Planets that described a disease called information sickness, a manifestation of information overload that leaves its victims disoriented and numbed to the meaning of what they are taking in. There is some palpable evidence that this disease is now upon us:

• People in groups talking and preparing their responses, but not listening, so that to the observer it is as if everyone in the group is thinking out loud to him/herself, as if the other people in the room or on the line weren’t there at all in real time, as if what they were saying were in an article or blog post that had been written some time in the past.
• People thinking they have communicated when they have not. Try this exercise: After a speaker has made his/her presentation, go and ask five people in attendance what they thought the most important point in the presentation was. Then relay this to the speaker. I can almost guarantee you the speaker won’t believe you. Or another exercise: Have two people at a presentation or meeting keep a mindmap of what was discussed and agreed upon, and then compare them. No one will believe they were ‘recordings’ of the same event.
• People making nonsensical and vapid but brilliantly rhetorical speeches that flatter or reassure their completely gullible and non-critical audience that they (the audience) are doing/have done something wonderful, and getting a standing ovation in response.
• People writing florid and inflammatory criticism that is totally ad hominem, logically flawed, tautological (e.g. that the AIG exec bonuses paid from taxpayer bailouts are immoral) or otherwise devoid of any critical value (e.g. anything said by Rush Limbaugh), and having readers (or listeners) proclaim the blather as genius.
• People thoughtlessly interrupting, changing the subject, and forgetting what they were saying.
• The fact that the “most e-mailed” articles and Op-Eds are usually neither actionable nor thought-provoking (so why are people e-mailing them?)
• The fact that e-mail is reducing productivity, when it was supposed to improve it. And don’t get me started on the purpose, clarity and brevity of most e-mail.
• The fact that the substance of most works of non-fiction can be effectively captured in a couple of pages, and that the best-selling fiction authors (Grisham, Brown etc.) are verbose and terrible writers.

The fact that we’re writing and talking more, less succinctly, less coherently, less thoughtfully, less attentively, and really reading and understanding less, is just part of the the information sickness tragedy. What we do (and don’t do) with the ‘information’ we have gleaned compounds the tragedy:

• We still make decisions in an information vacuum: Example: uninformed (or misinformed) and overpaid ‘experts’ and executives make flawed decisions that their sycophants declare to be brilliant, but which are actually ineffectual (or worse), or not even implemented (instead, they’re “worked around” by front line employees who know better what’s really needed).
• We take actions that, in the long run, have no effect: Example: consultants are handsomely rewarded for recommending and/or making changes in organizations, when six months or five years later there is often no evidence the change brought about any improvement, or indeed that the change was still in effect (or had been implemented in the first place).
• We take actions in spite of information showing them to be unwise: Example: being swayed by people with money or power, or emotional influence, to do what we know to be suboptimal or worse.
• We get paralyzed by information: Sometimes we get so much conflicting information that we end up taking no action at all.
• We act on false dichotomies: Thanks to our inattentiveness, lack of time, and media oversimplification, we decide on one of two alternatives, when the truth is more complex and neither alternative is appropriate.
• We mistake deciding for acting: We think deciding that something is right, is sufficient, without actually doing something about it.
• We get persuaded to give our proxy for action to someone else: By voting for someone we don’t really know, or signing a petition, we think we’ve discharged our responsibility to do something that makes a difference.
• We get persuaded that everything’s OK when it isn’t: We’re so overwhelmed that it is tempting to believe Lomborgians who deny there is a problem, or who tell us “don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of it for you”.
• We get persuaded that there’s nothing we can do: Those vested in the status quo will try to persuade us there is no alternative, that the result is inevitable, that it’s only a matter of time, so why bother trying to do anything?

Change management ‘experts’ will tell you that to bring about behaviour change you have to do one of three things: (a) change mandatory processes, (b) change the technology people use, or (c) change the culture/attitudes/beliefs/values. I know a lot of people who’ve worked in organizations for more than a quarter century, and they tell me that (a) process is dead — there are no standard processes anymore, so you can’t ‘change’ them, (b) people will simply refuse to use technology that makes them do things they find ineffective or unintuitive, and (c) the only way you can change an organizational ‘culture’ is by firing everyone and hiring all new people who agree with a proposed change.

There’s also a lot of evidence that technologies, even those that seem in the short run to be ushering in great improvements in our lives or activities, inevitably cause more problems than they solve.

What’s the point of all this information, overloading us to the point of illness, if it doesn’t help us change for the better? What’s the point of being informed if it doesn’t help us do things better, or do better things? Is information getting in the way of learning and understanding, and conversation in the way of communication and appreciation?

The purpose of communication in all species, it seems to me, is to build trust, learn (and teach) capacities and learn about others’ capacities (for purposes of collaboration, survival and innovation). One-way communication of information (reading, watching, listening) is also about learning capacities and about learning about others; it’s also, to some extent, about entertainment — an audience activity. One problem is that the major media — TV, radio, and even the press and publishers — have found it cheaper and more lucrative to provide entertainment than to provide information, to the point that most of the stuff we are fed now has almost no information value at all.

How much of the information we process every day, and the communications we participate in (with varying degrees of engagement), actually provides us with useful (actionable) knowledge and useful capacities? Very little, I would argue. Just as most of our processed and ‘fast’ foods give us mostly empty calories and nothing of nutritional value (and lots that is toxic), so too, most of our information ‘diet’ is empty entertainment, designed to make us feel better without actually making us intellectually ‘healthier’ (and sometimes making us intellectually unhealthy).

Perhaps what we need, then, as a cure for our information sickness, the ‘bloat’ of information overload, is an information diet — less overall, more slowly and carefully selected and ingested. Michael Pollan’s advice for food consumers is “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”. Perhaps our advice for information consumers should be “obtain actionable and thought-provoking information, be selective (don’t overindulge), and ensure adequate context”.

I’ll have a New Yorker please. And a side of Robert Pinsky.

Mashups of Staggering Genius: Reviewing some of Michael Wesch‘s great videos, I stumbled on the work of mashup expert Jordan “DJ Earworm” Roseman. He combines audio and video of popular and dance music to create works of art much better than any of the component songs. This guy is freaking brilliant. If you haven’t seen/heard his work, you’re in for a treat. And you can download all his mp3s from his website. Huge fun. Here’s his best stuff:

• United State of Pop 2008 – Mashup of the Top 25 Billboard Hits of the Year
• Together as One – Mashup of songs about togetherness by the Beatles, U2, Mariah Carey and Diana Ross (and it works!)
• No More Gas – Priceless mashup of 11 hip hop and pop songs about cars, stopping and going (can’t get this mashup out of my head)

Why It’s Dangerous to Be a Witch in a Recession: Dave B worries that as times get worse, envy for those who have more will bring out dark and ancient hatreds.

An Idea For Finding Partners: One of the key components of Open Space methodology is the practice of Invitation, of crafting an invitation that will be powerful enough to inspire people to show up at an event (like a networking or partner-connecting event), even at their own expense. Chris Corrigan and Geoff Brown suggest that a great tool for invitation is the ‘trailer’, the compelling multi-media teaser that film studies use to invite people to see their films. How might we craft a great ‘trailer’ to attract the kind of people we were meant to live with, or make a living with?
The City That Ended Hunger: Frances Lappé describes a simple initiative in Belo Horizonte, Brasil that eradicated hunger and reduced poverty by making adequate and healthy food a right for all, and then acting accordingly.

Has Civilization Constipated Our Brains?: An interesting review of the work of psychologist Julian Jaynes, who argued that the way our human brains ‘worked’ was very different before modern civilization culture ‘rewired’ them. As a result, he argued, we have become much poorer artists, less intuitive and perhaps more neurotic. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Lessons About Ego From Ojibway Etymology: Chris Corrigan explains the original meaning of two Ojibway words that speak volumes about their culture, and ours. The word they had to invent for ‘chief’ or ‘leader’ (they had no need for such a word before contact with Europeans), oglimaw is taken from the word for the gentle poplar tree and literally means “one who influences others through kindness“. And the word for ‘all my relations’ - dineamaaganik – actually means “belonging to everything.”

Is Tom Friedman Becoming Progressive?: Several people pointed me to an Op-Ed by the conservative globalization apologist in which he acknowledges that our current economic model is unsustainable and that perhaps the economy recently passed a point of ‘inflection’ with no return to ‘normal’ possible or desirable. There have been a lot of sarcastic responses from progressives, and I tend to think that this ‘awakening’ is just the pretext for Friedman’s next go-with-the-flow book, which I suggested might be called The World Is Flat — Broke.

The Opposite of a ‘Military Academy’?: Robert Koehler writes about the foundations of a new national Peace Academy.

Town in Maine Strips Corporations of ‘Personhood”: A bold move from the town to recognize the insane power that politicians and lawyers have given corporations. The town also passed a community-based declaration of independence asserting its right to self-government and bestowing rights to the natural environment. It’s all part of a struggle with multi-nasty-al corporation Nestle, which wants to privatize and export Maine’s water. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Transition Town Movement Gains Momentum: The UK-originated Transition Town movement, which prepares local communities for self-sufficiency after the End of Oil (and now Climate Collapse as well), is picking up steam in the US, and gained a foothold in Australia. The movement so far is based on more theory than practice, but anything that advances community-based society, economy, permaculture and sufficiency is a step in the right direction. Thanks to Cheryl for the link, and the one that follows.

Our Online Networks Get Bigger But Real Friendships Don’t: A new study from Facebook: “The average [male Facebook user]—one with 120 “friends”—generally responds to the postings of only 7 of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or ‘wall’. An average woman [Facebook user] is slightly more sociable, responding to 10. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only 4 people and the average woman with 6.” This ties into the group satisfaction chart above. Wonder what the numbers would be for bloggers?

France’s 16 Million Lost Acres: Tens of millions of unexploded shells from World War I mean that 16 million acres of French forest remain off-limits to the public to this day. It will take centuries of dangerous work to clear these munitions.

China Worried Over US Debts: As holders of $1T of US indebtedness, China is justifiably worried that either (a) if interest rates spike, the value of these debentures tanks proportionately. And if they’re held to maturity, there’s a chance a collapse of the value of the US dollar will make them worthless anyway. But they’re stuck — if they tried to sell or re-denominate even a tiny portion of these assets, it would precipitate just such a US dollar collapse.

More from Orlov: Rob P points us to a video interview with Dmitri Orlov explaining his argument that bailouts can’t work and inevitably the US economy will collapse just as the Soviet one did. I linked to his main paper on this subject previously.

Not Coming Soon to a TV Station in Your Community: Patti catches an ad that shows that Argentina’s way ahead of us in progressive thinking and social tolerance.

Hawken Joins the Global Collective Rising Consciousness Cabal: This is really sad. This is the Rapture, salvationism (Hawken uses the word ‘salvation’ in this sermon — all he’s missing is the robes), wrapped in new age garb. We are not going to be saved by a collective rising consciousness. This is not in the nature of the human, or any, species. This group-hug we’re-gonna-be-OK crap is dangerous. Like any well-crafted preachy cult rhetoric, it’s seductive. Don’t get sucked in.

Just for Fun:

Thoughts for the Week:

Repost of one of my articles from May 2006

Image: Suicide by Scandinavian artist Joakim Back.
Caveat: Some possible book ‘spoilers’ here. But not really, unless you’re already part way through the book.

The novel has the typical Hornby sense of impending doom running throughout it, and the typical Hornby lame ending (it’s as if the author doesn’t want the novel to end, so it doesn’t, really), but it is still wonderful, utterly engaging, and thought-provoking. Perhaps this is why the movies made from his books don’t quite work — there just isn’t enough time in a two hour film for all the action plus all the reflection that the ideas in his novels warrant. Because of Hornby’s cleverness and his wry, delightful sense of humour, his novels cry out for cinematic treatment (since most movies today are so utterly lacking in both). Jess’ critique of Virginia Woolf is the most hilarious piece of writing I’ve read in a decade, and is alone worth the price of the book, but I suspect in the movie it will be just too much too fast to work — the audience will be laughing so hard they’ll drown out half the funny bits.

But it is the ideas in the book that had me shivering as I read, putting the book down and wandering around and thinking. I suspect his novels are Hornby’s cathartic way of getting these profound and troubling ideas out of his head where they can be examined more objectively (Hornby has an autistic child). There are three in particular that resonated with me, and they are all somewhat related, and a book about suicide is the perfect vehicle to illustrate them.

The first idea is that in life, as Jess puts it, we have no choice. We are who we are and we will do what we will do. This is the concept of ‘free will’, but reduced to immediate, personal terms. Despite all the New Years’ resolutions (A Long Way Down begins on New Years’ Eve), despite all the plans and self-help books and Getting Things Done tools we employ, we will ultimately do what were going to do anyway, and, more importantly, not do what we were not going to do anyway. Those who go up the tower with the intention of killing themselves consist of those who will go through with the plan, no matter what happens, sooner or later, and those who will not, no matter what happens. Hornby is saying that suicide prevention hotlines will only prevent those who would be prevented somehow or other anyway. The city of Toronto has spent a small fortune building walls and fences around its ‘popular’ suicide sites (mostly buildings and bridges) and is considering similar infrastructure in subway stations. They understate the creativity of those who will do what they will do. And those who lack imagination or knowledge or opportunity will find other, metaphorical ways to kill themselves: alcohol or other drugs, or just shutting down, disengaging. We are surrounded by the living dead, but not of the type you see in the movies.

The second idea, and the one that I think his title most refers to, is what is holding you back? Not just from committing suicide, but from doing other things you think you should be doing or wish you were doing. Here’s how Jess puts it:

The distance from the top of the tower to the bottom, from intent to realization, seems short, but is, in fact, a long way. While we are who we are and will do what we will do, it is not quite that simple. We are social creatures, and as we go through life we find ourselves limited by people, and held back, not so much by who they are as by what they stand for, the role we, or they, or fate, has chosen for us. Are these ropes, these people and things and circumstances that hold us back, imposed on us, or are they our own self-imposed lifelines? If we have no choice, is that to some extent because of the restrictions we have somehow chosen to impose on ourselves?

When I met my wife, I was pretty messed up, and she has kept me on a pretty short lead ever since. I owe her everything for that, I think. In recent years, though, now that our* amazing children no longer need our support, she has loosened the lead somewhat. Or maybe I tugged the lead out of her hand. Or perhaps it wasn’t ever there at all, just a figment of my imagination, self-imposed. (It’s a good thing she doesn’t read my blog; I wonder if that is deliberate, too?)

You can perhaps guess at the third idea in this book, since it follows somewhat from the other two: What happens when we suddenly lose our lifeline? Martin says:

We cling to our presumed choices, our dreams, our distant plans and hopes, as if they were lifelines keeping us from careening off into space, and perhaps they are. I imagine myself an activist, a much-published and influential author, a founder of intentional communities, an incubator of natural enterprises, a change agent revolutionizing the way we teach, the way we treat animals, the way we produce energy, the way our economic and political systems work, the way we think about the world. All of these valiant roles I picture myself filling, yet I inch towards them so slowly that progress can barely be measured. Are these my lifelines, my tower ledge, and do I know in my heart that none of these heady roles is my destiny? Is that why I grabbed onto the non-philosophy of John Gray, giving me permission to fail at all of these because, as he says, it is not in human nature that any of these changes can occur on any meaningful scale? Is his infuriating belief that the best we can do, all we can do, is to be a good model for those in our immediate communities and to be open to and aware of and fully participating in life’s astonishing joys — is this my new lifeline, thin and frayed and shabby as it may be in comparison with the awesome, grandiose ones I clinged to before?

And what would become of me if I were to lose this lifeline too?

The questions in the two paragraphs above are rhetorical, but these three are not — the great take-away from Hornby’s book is how we, each for ourselves, decide to answer these questions when we close the book’s cover:

• If we have no choice, how can we best stop fighting the inevitable, stop wasting time trying to be what are not and cannot be (and trying to make others what they are not), get real about our hopes and dreams, and accept and understand the way things are and why, and make the best of who we are and what we are inevitably going to do and be anyway?
• What is holding us back? What is keeping us from being what we are going to be and doing what we are going to do? Why is it holding us back? Unless it is self-delusion (the dangers of idealism again) that is holding us back, there may be no changing these restrictions, no loosening of the ropes, but at least we should be able to recognize them and understand their purpose. In Jess’ ‘stupid dog’ analogy, we can accomplish a lot within the constraints of the leash without unnecessarily and foolishly choking ourselves all the time.
• What happens when we suddenly lose our lifeline? There is a terrible story in today’s Toronto Star about a water-loving dog who slipped his leash, ran off, and ended up drowning in a municipal reservoir whose sides were too steep to climb. Some lifelines are useful, even essential to our health and sanity. Others merely hold us back, delay us from being who we really are and doing what we are meant to do, waste our lives away in illusionary imprisonment. What is frightening is that we don’t know which is which, and we don’t know what we will do, and feel, if we suddenly lose our lifelines. But perhaps by imagining what would happen if we did lose them, we might free ourselves from the ones that are merely unhealthy, merely holding us back from being something more than who we are. 

Nothing simple here. Beneath the brilliant raucous humour of Hornby’s writing lie some very dark issues, matters of life and death, like a black hole twinned with a star going nova.

(*hers biologically, though I am honoured and humbled that they call me their father, considering the deliberately small role I played in their upbringing)

In a post last summer I wrote:

When I wrote last month about What is the Name That is Big Enough to Hold Your Life? I was speaking metaphorically. It is not enough, I asserted, drawing on the work of Meg Wheatley and Chris Corrigan, to identify yourself by what you do “for a living”, or by your affliction, or your role or status. Who you are is much more than that. But I was not recommending that we all change our given names, as some of you seemed to think. What I was talking about was ‘naming’ in the sense of clarifying, specifying, everything you are and do and intend to be and to do. This we should do mostly for our own purposes, so that we do not constrain ourselves to how others see us, define us in terms of everybody-else, but also because, when we start to identify ourselves to others in a certain way, we tend to start to move towards and embody that broader, more self-aware and aspirational, intentional self-identification.

So when I say that the name big enough to hold my life is “a writer who helps people imagine possibilities”, that is not merely a reflection of what I have done, but also who I am, where I find meaning and purpose, what I’m competent at but have not been recognized for, what I love and want and intend to do and to be. It’s a shorthand version of my story, past, present and future.

It occurred to me in writing yesterday’s article about attention and appreciation that the process of learning about ourselves, which I encouraged in order to better understand and wean ourselves off our addiction to the attention and appreciation of others, could also be useful in coming up with this “name big enough to hold your life.” I suggested using the three-circles diagram above, from my book Finding the Sweet Spot, to find your own sweet spot, the place where what you are uniquely good at, what you love doing, and what is needed in the world that you care about intersect. Is the ‘name’ of what is in that sweet spot also the “name big enough to hold your life”?

I think it is in part. Part of our lives should be to be of use to others, but that is not all we should do, or be. There are things we love doing, things that bring us joy and meaning, that are not in the sweet spot, either because they are not needed, or because we are amateurs at them, not good enough to ‘make a living’ at them. The word ‘amateur’ literally means ‘lover’ — to be an amateur at something you need only love doing it. It is only, tellingly, in the last two centuries that the word has come to mean a dabbler, someone who is not a ‘professional’. Similarly, the word ‘profession’ literally means something you have declared openly, “put forward”, and only later came to mean something you declare yourself skillful at.

So, in the chart above, you are an ‘amateur’ at anything in the red circle, in areas 1-4, and you are (our could say you are) a ‘professional’ at anything you are good at, anything in the green circle, areas 2, 3, 5 and 7.

What, then, is the name that is big enough to hold your life, that, as Chris puts it, “what you tremble to live into”? Is it how you would describe yourself in a personal ad about yourself seeking someone to love? Hopefully not. Is it how you would describe yourself in a resume, including your “career ambitions”? Definitely not. Is it how you would describe yourself at a business social, or a cocktail party*? 

I don’t think “the name big enough to hold your life” is how you describe yourself in any of these ‘selling’ or ‘matchmaking’ occasions. Such events will inevitably cause you to identify and define yourself in others’ context, in the context of ‘everybody-else’.

I come back to Passions: the the things you love doing, and being. I don’t think the things you do just because you’re good at them, or just because they’re needed, define you at all. Your “big enough name” is everything in the red circle, in areas 1-4. The fact that some of these things are in your sweet spot, or aren’t, and why, is part of your “big enough name”. The “ten things I do” — exploring/discovering (people and places), reflecting/imagining possibilities, writing, loving, learning, conversing, sensing/being present, playing, coaching/showing, self-managing — are mostly (except imagining possibilities and writing) outside my sweet spot, but all of them are in areas 1-4.

Perhaps my full “big enough name” needs to embrace all ten things, and the two in my sweet spot (“a writer who helps people imagine possibilities”) is my “big enough nickname”.

Why is this “big enough name” so important?

• It gives our life direction, helps us decide what to do, and not to do.
• It gives our life intention, and purpose.
• It can help make us happier, by knowing better (and telling others more honestly) who we are and what we care about and what we’re capable of.
• It can help us decide where we belong, and with whom, and what we’re meant to do, what we can do that is of use.
• It helps us rediscover nobody-but-ourselves, and fend off the gunk that makes us everybody-else.

Does this make sense? Is it useful? Do I need to add more exercises that people can try to discover what’s in their sweet spot, and what they have a passion for (that they may not realize) that is part of their “big enough name”?

(*As an aside, I remain infatuated with NTag technology for such social occasions, an MIT spinoff that just, to my surprise, filed for bankruptcy — has anyone reading this used it?)

For a million years, the desire for social interaction with other humans has been coded into our DNA, because social human groups survive better than lone wolves. Not surprising then, that almost from the moment of birth we begin to crave the attention, and later the appreciation, of other humans.

When I was a young child, my peer group was happy and stable, and so was my family environment. Laughs and mutual compliments and the near-automatic pleasure of others’ company was something I just came to expect. At this age, love and affection were abundant, and I thought nothing of them.

As I got older I realized that a couple of people just outside my peer group were troubled. We tended to avoid them, but they were aggressive and relentless. Soon, it seemed, their behaviour had begun to affect ours. We became less generous with our affection, and then less honest. These unhealthy behaviours were reinforced by others propagated in the school system: reticence replaced enthusiasm, bullying replaced playful debate, silent obedience to (and fear of) authority replaced openness and honest dissent. A social ‘pecking order’ emerged, based on who had power, who used force, who was more physically attractive, or more socially clever, or more facile.

It was a rather brutal indoctrination into the insidious power of pathological people and institutions to corrupt everyone they touched, until we were all poisoned.

As we emerge as adults from this toxic cauldron, it only gets worse. The media seem to be designed to inure us to the pain of our endemic social brutality by presenting us with incessant numbing graphic violence. The workplace is a continuation of the pathology of the schoolyard, except the power dynamics are more explicit, and, thanks to its elitist hierarchy, attention and appreciation are even scarcer, since criticism (and enforced self-criticism, the type on most “performance self-assessment forms”) and anxiety-creation are far more effective at achieving the desired obedient behaviours. Advertisements, clubs, and other influencers of social behaviour are designed to exclude, to make you feel inadequate, and even to belittle and ridicule. Cowed, self-loathing individuals who do what they’re told out of ignorance and fear and peer pressure are ideal passive, ‘productive’ citizens in a world that is horrifically overcrowded, with far too few resources to go around. Just as the Chinese built the great wall, not to keep the Mongols out, but to keep the stooped, malnourished peasants in, our modern societies are prisons of psychopathic intimidation and cultured self-imprisonment.

No surprise, then, that for most of us, social activity is not sought for pleasure as much as to sate a desperate and unfulfilled longing for attention and appreciation. The world, our teachers, our bosses, our bullying and strutting and fiercely competitive peers, may all hate us and ignore us and shun us, but we love each other, right, and we’re going to cocoon ourselves and console each other for all the hurt the world has ever inflicted on us.

This addiction to attention and appreciation is the sign of a culture in the throes of crisis and collapse, a consequence of the violence and antisocial behaviour that is evident in all overcrowded and mostly-starving cultures of all species. And now, like true addicts, we crave attention and appreciation continuously, and we envy and begrudge others who have more of it than we do. The damage this has done to our individual and collective self-esteem is massive.

Although it’s a generalization, it’s been my experience that most men crave attention more than appreciation, and most women crave appreciation more than attention. So many men speak louder and dominate conversations, to the point they are so busy trying to get others to pay attention to them that they fail to listen to or hear anything anyone else is saying. And many women live for stingily doled out compliments, as if it were their life’s sustenance.

This makes us as a society completely dysfunctional. We become selfish and introspective, filled with fear of losing, or never finding, love. We buy things that we hope will attract attention and appreciation, regardless of their lack of any intrinsic value. We don’t say thank you or give spontaneous compliments privately or unless it’s absolutely called for, because giving attention or appreciation without appropriate fanfare (an awards ceremony, or some other major “appreciation event”) could be considered gratuitous and insincere.

Contrary to Maslow’s hierarchy, I would argue that attention and appreciation are now, for most, our greatest needs. They’re what drives politicians to run, and to lie. They’re what drives the unsustainable consumer economy, from muscle cars to cosmetics and cosmetic surgery to self-help books and psychotherapy and new age spiritualism to diet fads and penis enlargers and logo clothes and knock-off jewelry. They’re what drives our endemic levels of stress, which is now producing the greatest health crisis in a century. They’re what drives so many of us to misery, tears, all-consuming jealousy, violence and despair.

It is a vicious cycle, which serves the rich and powerful corporatists very well, but it is also largely a result of our own doing and acquiescence. As long as attention and appreciation are scarce, anyone who is generous with either is likely to be so swamped with needy takers (telemarketers and hucksters, sob-storytellers, the lovelorn, stalkers, cult followers etc.) that she will likely rein in that generosity out of sheer self-defence. We come to hoard attention and appreciation because it has become dangerous to do otherwise. This is tragic, monstrous.

There is no top-down societal solution for this. It’s something we have to fix inside each of us. It starts with self-knowledge and self-understanding — knowing why we feel unduly needy for attention and appreciation (there’s nothing wrong with liking and wanting these things; it’s when it becomes a pathological need that it becomes a problem). The next step is taking control of our own lives, or what I’ve called writing (and acting in) our own story. It’s only when we feel helpless to fulfill things ourselves that we become desperate to get them from others. This helplessness can be overcome by giving ourselves attention and appreciation, realizing that we do have the power to write our own story.

I have found that the ‘sweet spot’ model I describe in my book is helpful in doing this — learning enough about ourselves to appreciate what we are uniquely good at and what we really love doing (it’s amazing how few people have this self-knowledge, because most of us have only had the courage to try a few possibilities), and then finding an application in the world outside where those Gifts and Passions can be put to good use, and will hence get attention and be genuinely appreciated (area 3 in the chart above). To the extent battered self-esteem is behind our addiction to attention and appreciation, I think this is a way forward.

My book also describes how to do world-class research, and I think this is also a skill that can help us overcome our addiction to attention and appreciation. Such research is mostly primary i.e. face-to-face not done online, and entails a lot of listening to others, asking important questions, and helping them to imagine something better. It’s my favourite form of learning. And learning, as we’ve been told, is the best way to overcome sadness, even when it is caused by feelings of not having enough attention and appreciation in one’s life.

That leaves us with the age-old problem of how to find life partners — the people who will give you the attention and appreciation you want, without having to be compensated for it, and who you will likewise get personal satisfaction and joy from giving attention and appreciation to. I confess I’m still working on this, though I’m increasingly convinced that part of it is developing the capacity to love many others unjealously and unexclusively. It just seems to be illogical to expect one person to be everything you want in a partner. To the extent you are getting a bit of attention and appreciation from a lot of people (and reciprocating as generously as you can, without exhausting yourself or allowing people to get addicted to you because of it*) I think it can help wean you off your own addiction, and perhaps help others do the same.

My final thought is that you will be less likely to crave an excessive amount of attention and appreciation from others if you learn to enjoy your own company, and that entails finding something that you genuinely love to do alone, that you can get lost in, completely caught up in. That is probably something in the red “Your Passions” circle above, but it need not be something in area 3. Our society has a strange propensity for laying guilt trips on us when we do something alone and purely self-indulgent, and that can of course cause problems if we let ourselves feel guilty. But if we’re also doing something in the area 3 sweet spot, why should we feel guilty for indulging our own private passion?

What do you think? What other things can we do to help ourselves and others overcome our addiction to attention and appreciation? How can we move “receiving attention and appreciation” from a consuming need, to just something we want and love?

* There is a real risk that if you’re generous with love, affection, attention and appreciation, people will start to want more and more of it, to the point they will expect too much of you, and end up making you both unhappy.

Scrambling to catch up after neglecting to do links of the week last week; more from this week next week, as a result.

No One Is In Control: Stunning photography, beautiful music, ambitious objective, but the remarkable 25-minute documentary “What Would It Look Like?: Global Oneness” filled me with despair. The argument is for the need for cultural diversity and equality, while at the same time for unity and collaboration and staggering collective human effort to deal with accelerating crises. Obama and others are shown making rhetorical speeches, talking about hope and change and human capacity and meaning and the power of love, but all I could see and hear was our culture coming apart like (as David Ehrenfeld** described it) a giant flywheel, with gears and springs and pulleys flying off in all directions, and I kept hearing the words of Ronald Wright: “If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.” (thanks to Tree for the link, for the Gobekli Tepe link above, and for the link that follows)

Retrofitting Suburbia: A new book suggests that as oil runs out and demographics change, we can redesign the world’s suburbs to keep them functional. Interesting idea, but our history has been to abandon areas that are no longer useful, rather than fix them up. Just look at any of the brownfield areas in the inner cities (polluted, abandoned, toxic industrial sites). Or look at New Orleans.

All That We Can Do…: Well, Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry and Jim Hansen and a crowd of supporters managed to shut down a coal plant in Washington DC — for four hours. Berry has been protesting mountaintop coal removal in Kentucky since 1964. Is this progress?

...And What We Must Do: The 1000th and final edition of Rachel’s News (named after Rachel Carson) lists the 17 things we must do to deal, at last, with the limits to growth and the threats to our planet. It’s an imposing list. Thanks to Eric Lilius for the link (the end of the newsletter also summarizes an interesting new study of the relationship between environmental toxins and the epidemic increase in chronic diseases in affluent nations).

1. Learn to live within limits
2. Commit seriously to the precautionary principle (if in doubt, don’t do it)
3. Limit the means to commit violent acts
4. Shift to a steady-state economy
5. Work towards a global culture of fairness and sufficiency
6. Promote cooperation and full employment
7. Identify and communicate achievable alternatives (“show people the lifeboats”)
8. Acknowledge and combat our self-deception and denial
9. Recast environmentalism as a “democracy movement”
10. Create infrastructure that supports a better, less selfish way to live
11. Support the union and cooperative movements
12. Understand the three “environments” that need renewal: natural, built, social
13. Move towards zero waste and cradle-to-cradle production
14. Enable local living economies
15. Reform the political financing system so that money cannot buy political influence
16. Reform corporations to reduce their power and ‘rights’ and increase their responsibilities
17. Replace all current sources of energy with clean, renewable sources

Taking the Job: Hendrik Hertzberg, one of the finest essayists on the planet, says that, at least, if anyone is up for the job, Obama is. To me, supporting Obama is not something one does because one believes he is on the right track, or that what he is trying to do will work; it’s about being hopeful, keeping an open mind, and giving him, and all of us, a chance.

Context is Everything: Great Op-Ed in the NYT explaining the dangers of listening to mass media sound bites out of context, and assuming you have absorbed what the speaker really had to say. We have to learn to take time, Stephen Carter says, to really listen. But who has time?

How to Make a Map of Every Thought You Think: A 5-year old article by Lion Kimbro. Absolutely fascinating. I have absolutely no idea if it works. He promises: “Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you’ll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your mileage may vary.” This guy is very smart. Tell me what you think, please, especially if you’ve actually tried it.

Alberta Tar Sands in National Geographic: Scraping bottom, indeed. Every time I see or think about this I start to cry. If we can justify this, we can justify anything. Thanks to Graham Clark for the link.

The Prometheus Project: Could low-power community-based radio stations be the micromedia lubricant to re-creating meaningful, self-sustaining communities?

A Better Way to Measure ‘Progress’: We have to stop referring to and using GDP as a measure of anything other than wasteful consumption. Edward Kennedy has a plan.

Thomas Homer-Dixon on Complex Adaptive Systems: The author of The Upside of Down talks about the inevitable loss of resilience of growing complex systems, in the context of economic and civilizational collapse in an online podcast. As long as we try to sustain growth, he says, the harder and more severe the crash will be. Listen to minutes 7-22 and 27-36. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

(Not) Just for Fun:

Thoughts for the Week: