Plenty of Nothing
Have you ever had one of those days where you just want to do nothing? It's one of those free days, a day different than a vacation day or a day where you are sick. Rather, it's an unexpected day, a day full of free time, time to do whatever --clean that room, finish that book, watch that video-- and all you really want to do is...nothing. As George Gershwin wrote in Porgy and Bess: I got plenty o' nuttin,' an nuttin's plenty for me. A day like that recently popped up for me and it found me puttering about, checking in on this, peeking at that, but overall really accomplishing nothing. No bills paid, no shows watched, no books read, just a lot of time wasted...only, it wasn't. That is, it felt as if I just needed that day of nothing. For by the end, there was nothing there, no relief, no guilt, just a day that had somehow passed and had seemingly encased me in Jell-o for a day and was now gone. There it was, and there it went. Strange, like a scene from Fringe.
Several of the books I've recently read also seemed to bring some of this into question, this idea of what we should or shouldn't feel guilty about, everything from our relationships to our role in society. The odd part is that those things weren't supposed to be the main themes of the books. Take this excerpt on couples from It Takes One to Tango by therapist Winifred M. Reilly: "Defining a self or becoming one's own person is a task that one ultimately does alone," says psychologist Harriet Lerner...When under pressure from our partners to be or do what they want, maintaining that clarity becomes all the more challenging. It can seem that the problem is that our partner is pressuring us --if she would only back off; if he''d just stop making demands-- but the real issue is our poorly defined sense of self...As children we all experienced pressure similar to the pressure we get from our partner: pressure to conform, to please, not to disappoint. In one way or another and to varying degrees, we were pressed by our parents and teachers, our families and our peers, to be more how they wanted us to be and less how we actually are. Maybe not totally different, but definitely "improved. You, minus your wandering mind or your interest in dance or your dream of becoming an astronaut...Whether we're too much of this or not enough of that --too bossy, too shy, not generous to others-- we got a clear message that "being ourselves" might not be the best way to go.
Then there was the quick read by consultant and best-selling author Andy Andrews about The Little Things (subtitled: Why You Really Should Sweat the Small Stuff): If you could choose, what kind of life would you live? Where? With whom? What would you do to create value for other people? Whom would you mentor? Who would mentor you?...Has anyone ever asked you questions like these before? Yes, of course they have. In speeches, books, sermons, and classrooms, most of us have heard these questions or others like them. Most of us even answered them...(but) Read the first sentence of this chapter again. Do you see the trap? Do you see why so many of us are indifferent to the question and completely disregard the answers -- our own answers? No? Look again. Look at the first four words. It is there that the danger exists...Those first four words --if you could choose-- have been used by egomaniacs and tyrants throughout history to mentally and physically enslave entire populations. That's because the words impose a belief that is stronger than shackles and chains...stated another way, a person cannot achieve beyond what he really believes to be the truth about himself.
Okay, part psycho-babble and part wake-up call, because isn't it all the people and experiences of life that help to form and guide us? We choose and make our own decisions, at least to some degree, whether it's a career or a spouse, a home or a lifestyle. Dreams give way to reality as we enter adulthood, resistance is futile (say the Borg). As one of the main characters says in the film La La Land (this after hitting wall after wall trying to pursue her dream), "It's time to grow up." But what if, lurking in the background, were other influences consciously trying to make some of those decisions for you? These were some of the premises discussed in The Undoing Project, the new book by Michael Lewis (author of Money Ball, The Blind Side, and others), this story highlighting the subtle manipulations that marketers seem to be testing out...make you think that you're making up you're own mind and nobody's the wiser. According to Lewis' book, the technique is called "priming" and was described in a review in the New York Review of Books as: ...one of the most important areas of psychological research, a technique that involves offering people cues unconsciously (for instance flashing smiley faces on a screen at a speed that makes them undetectable) in order to influence their mood and behavior. He insists that there are predictable and coherent associations that can be exploited by this sort of priming. If subjects are unaware of this unconscious influence, the freedom to resist it begins to look more theoretical than real...The deeper concern that Lewis’s happy narrative omits entirely is that behavioral scientists claim to have developed the capacity to manipulate people’s emotional lives in ways that shape their fundamental preferences, values, and desires. Amazon, Facebook, Nike, and Groupon are among the giant digital retailers reportedly eager to continue exploring this field in depth. As the review notes: Facebook, too, has embraced the behavioral insights described by Kahneman and Thaler, (pioneers in the fields of behavioral science and behavioral economics) having received wide and unwanted publicity for researching priming. In 2012 its Core Data Science Team, along with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco, experimented with emotional priming on Facebook, without the awareness of the approximately 700,000 users involved, to see whether manipulation of their news feeds would affect the positivity or negativity of their own posts. When this came to light in 2014 it was generally seen as an unacceptable form of psychological manipulation. But Facebook defended the research on the grounds that its users’ consent to their terms of service was sufficient to imply consent to such experiments...Psychologists at the World Well-Being Project, at the University of Pennsylvania, have collaborated with Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, computational psychologists from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and developers of myPersonality. This was a Facebook application that allowed users to take psychometric tests and gathered six million test results and four million individual profiles. Scores on these tests could be combined with enormous amounts of data from the user’s Facebook environment. The application has been used in conjunction with personality measures such as the “big five,” also known as the OCEAN model, which purportedly measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Words such as “apparently” and “actually,” for example, are taken to correlate with a higher degree of neuroticism. The architects of myPersonality claim that these tests, in conjunction with other data, permit the prediction of individual levels of well-being. The book dives deeper, suggesting that the newest techniques at such mental manipulations have already entered a new arena...that of influencing political elections.
Aarrgghh! No matter how interesting the readings were, who really wants to be told that at this point in life, you are really not you and that you're possibly a person you didn't want to be, that you somehow got "manipulated" into becoming that person by subtle forces...your parents and lovers (okay, we knew those), your teachers and bosses (those too), and your online accounts and screen time (hmm, should have read those consent forms all the way through). There are forces at work here, as the saying goes. And you know, we should really do something. On the other hand, perhaps that was why that day popped up for me; there was no one telling me to do something, no voices inner or outer, no conscious or subconscious. No guilt, no pain, no thinking, no accomplishments. But all in all, it sort of felt good to just...do nothing.
Several of the books I've recently read also seemed to bring some of this into question, this idea of what we should or shouldn't feel guilty about, everything from our relationships to our role in society. The odd part is that those things weren't supposed to be the main themes of the books. Take this excerpt on couples from It Takes One to Tango by therapist Winifred M. Reilly: "Defining a self or becoming one's own person is a task that one ultimately does alone," says psychologist Harriet Lerner...When under pressure from our partners to be or do what they want, maintaining that clarity becomes all the more challenging. It can seem that the problem is that our partner is pressuring us --if she would only back off; if he''d just stop making demands-- but the real issue is our poorly defined sense of self...As children we all experienced pressure similar to the pressure we get from our partner: pressure to conform, to please, not to disappoint. In one way or another and to varying degrees, we were pressed by our parents and teachers, our families and our peers, to be more how they wanted us to be and less how we actually are. Maybe not totally different, but definitely "improved. You, minus your wandering mind or your interest in dance or your dream of becoming an astronaut...Whether we're too much of this or not enough of that --too bossy, too shy, not generous to others-- we got a clear message that "being ourselves" might not be the best way to go.
Then there was the quick read by consultant and best-selling author Andy Andrews about The Little Things (subtitled: Why You Really Should Sweat the Small Stuff): If you could choose, what kind of life would you live? Where? With whom? What would you do to create value for other people? Whom would you mentor? Who would mentor you?...Has anyone ever asked you questions like these before? Yes, of course they have. In speeches, books, sermons, and classrooms, most of us have heard these questions or others like them. Most of us even answered them...(but) Read the first sentence of this chapter again. Do you see the trap? Do you see why so many of us are indifferent to the question and completely disregard the answers -- our own answers? No? Look again. Look at the first four words. It is there that the danger exists...Those first four words --if you could choose-- have been used by egomaniacs and tyrants throughout history to mentally and physically enslave entire populations. That's because the words impose a belief that is stronger than shackles and chains...stated another way, a person cannot achieve beyond what he really believes to be the truth about himself.
Okay, part psycho-babble and part wake-up call, because isn't it all the people and experiences of life that help to form and guide us? We choose and make our own decisions, at least to some degree, whether it's a career or a spouse, a home or a lifestyle. Dreams give way to reality as we enter adulthood, resistance is futile (say the Borg). As one of the main characters says in the film La La Land (this after hitting wall after wall trying to pursue her dream), "It's time to grow up." But what if, lurking in the background, were other influences consciously trying to make some of those decisions for you? These were some of the premises discussed in The Undoing Project, the new book by Michael Lewis (author of Money Ball, The Blind Side, and others), this story highlighting the subtle manipulations that marketers seem to be testing out...make you think that you're making up you're own mind and nobody's the wiser. According to Lewis' book, the technique is called "priming" and was described in a review in the New York Review of Books as: ...one of the most important areas of psychological research, a technique that involves offering people cues unconsciously (for instance flashing smiley faces on a screen at a speed that makes them undetectable) in order to influence their mood and behavior. He insists that there are predictable and coherent associations that can be exploited by this sort of priming. If subjects are unaware of this unconscious influence, the freedom to resist it begins to look more theoretical than real...The deeper concern that Lewis’s happy narrative omits entirely is that behavioral scientists claim to have developed the capacity to manipulate people’s emotional lives in ways that shape their fundamental preferences, values, and desires. Amazon, Facebook, Nike, and Groupon are among the giant digital retailers reportedly eager to continue exploring this field in depth. As the review notes: Facebook, too, has embraced the behavioral insights described by Kahneman and Thaler, (pioneers in the fields of behavioral science and behavioral economics) having received wide and unwanted publicity for researching priming. In 2012 its Core Data Science Team, along with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco, experimented with emotional priming on Facebook, without the awareness of the approximately 700,000 users involved, to see whether manipulation of their news feeds would affect the positivity or negativity of their own posts. When this came to light in 2014 it was generally seen as an unacceptable form of psychological manipulation. But Facebook defended the research on the grounds that its users’ consent to their terms of service was sufficient to imply consent to such experiments...Psychologists at the World Well-Being Project, at the University of Pennsylvania, have collaborated with Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, computational psychologists from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and developers of myPersonality. This was a Facebook application that allowed users to take psychometric tests and gathered six million test results and four million individual profiles. Scores on these tests could be combined with enormous amounts of data from the user’s Facebook environment. The application has been used in conjunction with personality measures such as the “big five,” also known as the OCEAN model, which purportedly measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Words such as “apparently” and “actually,” for example, are taken to correlate with a higher degree of neuroticism. The architects of myPersonality claim that these tests, in conjunction with other data, permit the prediction of individual levels of well-being. The book dives deeper, suggesting that the newest techniques at such mental manipulations have already entered a new arena...that of influencing political elections.
Aarrgghh! No matter how interesting the readings were, who really wants to be told that at this point in life, you are really not you and that you're possibly a person you didn't want to be, that you somehow got "manipulated" into becoming that person by subtle forces...your parents and lovers (okay, we knew those), your teachers and bosses (those too), and your online accounts and screen time (hmm, should have read those consent forms all the way through). There are forces at work here, as the saying goes. And you know, we should really do something. On the other hand, perhaps that was why that day popped up for me; there was no one telling me to do something, no voices inner or outer, no conscious or subconscious. No guilt, no pain, no thinking, no accomplishments. But all in all, it sort of felt good to just...do nothing.
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