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I believe in “Medium Fidelity,” which means that I try to return all correspondence at the level it was sent or higher. Whenever possible I remain faithful to the means by which I receive a communication because as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.”

The sundry ways in which human beings interact in the 21st century can be ranked hierarchically according to their level of intimacy. Below are what I believe are the levels of communication between two human beings from most intimate to least intimate:

1. Sexual intercourse: When blood is coursing rapidly through intertwined mounds of flesh and one body has entered another, this act of intimacy is able to convey so much more information than spoken language. Lovemaking is a somatic poem, a dynamic sculpture, clouds dancing and breathing through each other. And sometimes it can even be entertaining, amusing, uplifting, enlightening and fun. This most intimate of primal encounters should command at least 10% of your conscious attention (unless, of course, you are with Bill Cosby.) Wildly intimate.

2. Surgery: Most people choose to be heavily anesthetized during surgery, so this sort of intimacy is rather one-sided (see Bill Cosby), but inserting fingers and medical instruments inside of another human being is often an extremely personal gesture. Extremely intimate.

3. Catheterizing someone or administering a colonic: Usually, both of these sections of the human anatomy are heavily concealed beneath trousers and undergarments. When another human is fiddling with them there can be even more shame than that of sexual intercourse. Being exposed and vulnerable in such a manner can cause unexpected emotions. Very intimate.

4. Having a cat or dog fall asleep on your neck: Anyone who has experienced this will attest to the fact that this is a great expression of trust and love. For both of you. Very intimate.

5. Telepathy: Although currently scientifically unverifiable, many people believe that they can share thoughts with other people without using spoken language. Being mentally connected to another human being and aware of his or her thoughts would be extremely intimate as little could remain hidden. On the other hand, when only one of the parties believes in such type of communication, that probably means that he is delusional, codependent, or both. Possibly very intimate, but unlikely.

6. In Real Life (IRL) face-to-face interactions: Looking into another person’s eyes while speaking is quite an intimate experience. Your subconscious is picking up pheromones, sweat, and other odors along with non-verbal cues, tiny expressions of pain, comfort, discomfort, joy, sarcasm, love, irony — there is literally a panoply of visual, aural, and olfactory information transmitted — a smorgasbord of cues, indicators, and sensations. Very intimate.

7. Facetime or Skyping: here the pheromones and other olfactory cues are lost, three dimensions are compressed into two dimensions, but visual cues and auditory inflections remain perceptible. This is just slightly less intimate than being face-to-face with someone. Fairly intimate.

8. Telephone calls: Now non-verbal cues have been removed. However, heightened emotions are still communicable and various shades of empathy are still possible. Moderately intimate.

9. Sign language: For those who cannot hear, sign language is an excellent way for signifying ideas, thoughts and emotions. Facial expressions, movements and hand gestures convey a wide range of information and olfactory sensations help also. Moderately intimate.

10. Faxes: Like books, faxes can convey much information symbolized in words formed by alphabetic letters and then interpreted by the receiver. When words are used for poetry they are able to connote diverse nuances, flavors, and rhythms. In business letters, they are able to convey precise legally binding information. The fax machine replaced the ancient tradition of letter writing, but there was still the ability to sign your name vivaciously or studiously and convey limited tones. Not terribly intimate.

11. Emails: Similar to faxes, but due to their widespread use it appears that people put a lot less time and effort into writing emails as they do into writing formal letters. Not much care goes into writing the vast majority of emails and most of them are just lifeless black words and white screen. Not terribly intimate.

12. Hieroglyphics: This form of communication used symbols to represent the daily lives of people in ancient Egypt. We do not know the precise lexicon for these images so we can only guess what they mean. Not intimate.

13. Cave paintings: this form of communication also used symbols to represent the daily lives of neanderthal people in Europe. We do not know the precise lexicon for these images so it remains difficult to translate into our modern language(s). Not intimate.

14. Text messages: although effective for conveying real-time information such as “running late” or “in a meeting will call you later,” the limited symbols and emoticons employed in text messages are unable to convey any of the nuances of the above forms of communication. Completely devoid of intimacy.

15. Smoke Signals: Native Americans employed this remedial form of visual communication to vaguely signal danger to others over long distances. Completely devoid of intimacy.

As you can see from the above list, when the history books are sealed, text messaging will fall somewhere between cave paintings and smoke signals in terms of intimately communicating information. And like all organized religions to which people are indoctrinated, the bad certainly outweighs the good. The downside of trying to communicate anything of importance by texting far outweighs the upside as misinterpretations are rife.

In particular, temporal lapses in putative text conversations often lead to subtexting, which is when your mind adds telepathic inferences while you are being “ghosted.” For example, in response to a non-response, your mind might query, “Why did he abruptly stop texting: does he (fill in the blank) disapprove of something I wrote? hate me? is laughing his ass off and convulsing so hard that he is unable to text back “lmao”? is he busy? did his boss just walk in? did he just orgasm? was he hit by a train? distracted? texting with mettle more fine?” Etc.

All in all, humanity will be spared infinite disorder and dysfunctionality when texting is filed into the dustbin of history along with 8-track tapes and smoke signals. And, like cats, we are able to hone our telepathic abilities.
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This post was originally published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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The post Levels of Intimacy in Communication appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Korina Marion Montenid

Ratings pretty much tell us if a TV show is good or bad. To maintain high ratings, producers play with the storyline and characters. However, changes are not always received well and sometimes lead to a show’s downfall – like these characters that ruined an entire show.

1. Poochie from “Itchy and Scratchy Show”

Poochie was the “cool dog” in the “Itchy and Scratchy Show.” It was supposed to help save the show’s declining ratings but failed. The ratings remained to be alarmingly low. Viewers think the character did not have a personality at all. Instead of completing an iconic mouse-cat-dog trio, people think Poochie ruined the duo.

2. Any Baby in a Sitcom

When an actress playing the mom gets pregnant, babies are usually added to the show. However, many people find this annoying and think that babies are burdensome and not significant. Also, they often grow up too fast – from 1 to 5 years old in a span of 1 year – which is unrealistic and disappointing because the grown-up version is usually less cute.

3. Randy Pearson from “That 70s Show”

Randy Pearson’s character in the “That 70s Show” was a replacement when Topher Grace left. This new persona was not received well by fans because of his sudden entrance. As if nothing happened, he just came into the story as Randy.

He was unrelatable, lacked charisma, and was a bad mix of several other characters. The viewers did not understand his personality and it was like he was injected into the show without careful thought.

4. Velma from “Velma”

Velma in “Velma” came from the “Scooby Doo” show. Although some people liked Velma when she was part of the gang, a lot of people were against her having her own show. Some say she just was not good without Scooby.

People did not find her personality appealing, and her attempts at being funny often failed. Viewers did not share the same humor and were unsure who the show’s target audience was.

5. Sparky from “Fairly Odd Parents”

Thinking that a new addition would help improve the show’s storyline, Sparky was introduced in “Fairly Odd Parents.” He was Timmy Turner’s hyperactive pet.

Despite him being a magical dog, his debut was not received well. He was responsible for other characters’ mishaps, which viewers found annoying. This led to him eventually being removed from the show.

6. Scrappy Doo from “Scooby Doo”

Though a lot of people think Scrappy Doo’s role in “Scooby Doo” is unlikeable, many also believe that he is one of the reasons why the show’s ratings somehow went up. So ultimately, the audience has a love-hate relationship with this character… and maybe you’re one of them.

Scrappy is Scooby’s energetic and aggressive nephew. And despite the criticism, this character had his own catchphrase and theme song.

7. April from “Gilmore Girls”

Many thought adding Luke’s daughter, April, to “Gilmore Girls” made no sense and was out of place. Some viewers say she was merely added to create more drama between Luke and Lorelei. However, there was not enough backstory, and her selfishness was annoying and irrational.

There are rumors that the writer deliberately created her character to put off viewers as an act of rebellion after a rift with the producers.

8. Mork from “Happy Days”

Mork is the alien Mindy, the smart and sweet female main character, meets in Happy Days. Many think he is the reason the show lost its fanbase after a good first season. But others think differently and say the show was already on the rocks before Mork was introduced.

9. James Corden from “The Late Late Show”

The host is the life of talk shows. Craig Ferguson was so good in “The Late Late Show” that people thought he was irreplaceable. That is why viewers did not give the same level of support when he left and was replaced by James Corden. Some even think that Corden killed the show.

To viewers, Corden did not look authentic and was even reported to be not as nice off-cam. He also tends to interrupt guests during interviews, which defeats the purpose of a talk show. So, despite being a good comedian, he just did not receive the same love as a host.

10. Oliver from “The Brady Bunch”

While there are characters to love in the “Brady Bunch,” there is one whom people like to hate. Cousin Oliver was described as a natural disaster. He was the one who often initiated the mishaps, which is probably why viewers hate him.

11. Gazoo from “The Flintstones”

Gazoo, the green alien in “The Flintstones,” is thought to be the reason the show was canceled. But even if the show was not canceled, Gazoo did not seem to have many fans. His character was too snobby, and the thought of a wish-granting alien in the Stone Age did not seem right.

12. Leonard, Sheldon, Penny, Howard, and Rajesh from “The Big Bang Theory”

The cast of “The Big Bang Theory” had perfect chemistry and timing. Until Leonard, Sheldon, Penny, Howard, and Rajesh were added to the show. At least, this is what a viewer named Cap thinks.

These characters have unlikeable personalities, such as narcissistic, selfish, and controlling. Penny and Leonard’s relationship also reflects societal stereotypes (pathetic guy falls for a not-so-smart but beautiful girl). These characters veered the story’s plot in a different direction, and many fans did not like it at all.

13. Debby from “Shameless”

Debbie, Frank’s daughter in “Shameless,” was portrayed as manipulative and shameless. She was one of the characters people considered “cringe.” Someone even said that she just went from bad to worse. Apart from being selfish and unmindful of other people’s feelings, she was used to getting what she wanted, even if it meant stepping on others’ toes.

14. Brian from “The Office”

Brian, the cameraman in “The Office,” was introduced in the show to add drama to Jim and Pam’s relationship. But people do not get why the lovers needed some shaking when they had a pretty perfect relationship.

It was probably because the writers thought the relationship was too smooth-flowing to be true. They needed to come up with something that would stir viewers’ emotions.

15. Nelly from “The Office”

Nelly is another controversial character in the office. She was one of those who were not believable, and her role was annoying. She was seen as manipulative and often took credit for other people’s achievements.

She was seen as a feminist who always tried to prove she was better than men. She did not care about equality, earning the ire of viewers.

16. Andrea from “The Walking Dead”

Andrea was one of the original cast of “The Walking Dead.” She was the type who acted like she knew it all but failed miserably when she attempted anything. When she finally turned into a zombie, fans were actually glad she did. This meant she would be the controlling character that she was and that she would soon be kicked out of the show.

17. Riley from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

Riley came in “Buffy’s” new season to add twists to the story. But fans were not happy with the change. Someone said he actually ruined “Buffy.” His character was unrealistic and

The storyline alone does not make or break a TV show. Characters play a huge part and have to be engaging and relatable to prevent a show from going down the drain. So, for shows to stay around, they must be mindful of the characters they’re adding.

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This post was previously published on Radical Fire.

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The post 17 TV Shows That Took a Dive Thanks to This One Character appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Estefanía Salazar, Sydney Allen, Anastasia Pestova, Nurbek Bekmurzaev

This post is part of Global Voices’ May 2026 Spotlight series, “Global crisis, local solutions.” This series offers stories of resistance and successful climate action, insight into how communities in the Global South are fighting back against the crisis, analysis of what this might mean for future generations, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

According to a sweeping 2019 report by the United Nations’ IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), over 1 million species are currently on the brink of extinction. This is an alarming figure, and the death of these plants, animals, and ecosystems could have grave ecological consequences up and down the food chain. Humans have caused most of this population decline as we have destroyed animals’ habitats, polluted ecosystems, fueled global warming, and hunted some species to the brink of extinction.

Scientists have been warning about human-driven extinction for over 70 years, and while many have ignored these warnings, some governments, environmentalists, and communities have stepped up and taken action to revive endangered populations and implement protections for them.

In this collaborative piece, Global Voices contributors from around the world share stories of successful conservation work that revived endangered populations in their own communities. These efforts span ecosystems, geography, and species, and can offer a model for future conservation work and population revival.

Wild horses return to their ancestral steppe in Central Asia

The return of Przewalski’s horses from extinction in the wild to their natural habitat is a rare and inspiring success story in animal reintroduction. By the late 1960s, the world had said goodbye to these creatures, as there were none left in the wild.

In contrast to the American mustangs and Australian brumbies, which are feral horses descended from domesticated animals, Przewalski’s horses are genetically and physically distinct from domestic horses, making them the only truly wild horses left in the world.

Named after Russian geographer and explorer Nikolay Przewalski, who in 1878 came across an unusually large horse skull and hide during one of his expeditions in Central Asia. After inspection by the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, researchers concluded that the remains belonged to a wild horse, assigning it the official name Equus przewalski.

The desire to witness and own one of these exotic animals drove many on hunting trips to present-day Mongolia, where these horses had roamed the vast Eurasian steppe for thousands of years — though Przewalski himself failed to capture one of them alive, describing them as “highly anxious” and possessing “an extraordinary sense of smell, sight, and hearing.” Those who were more successful managed to catch only foals, which were transported to Europe and sold to zoos and private collectors.

Between 1897 and 1903, 88 foals were caught in Mongolia, but only 54 survived the long journey by railroad. Eventually, only 12 gave birth in captivity, becoming ancestors of around 2,000 Przewalski’s horses alive today. In the wild, hunting, habitat loss, and competition from domestic animals for grazing grounds drove them to extinction.

“It’s not uncommon for humans to tame wildlife — but it’s much rarer for them to make tame animals wild,” notes Dashpurev Tserendeleg, director of the Hustai National Park in central Mongolia, where Przewalski’s horses were first reintroduced to the wild in the early 1990s.

This historic event was preceded by a decades-long breeding program by Dutch and Mongolian conservationists that started in the 1970s. The first batch of 16 takhis, as Przewalski’s horses are known in Mongolia, arrived in the Hustai National Park in 1992.

As of 2026, the park’s count has risen to 450, while the total number of takhis in Mongolia has exceeded 1,000, accounting for half of the global population.

The success of the initial reintroduction program has led to the creation of two additional protected areas in Mongolia: the Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area in the south and Khomiin Tal in the west, where around 650 takhis roam in the wild.

Additionally, takhis have been reintroduced in China, Kazakhstan, and even Spain, proving international enthusiasm and commitment to build and grow sustainable wild populations for future generations.

Women-led conservation efforts in South Asia

Some of the world’s most impressive conservation work has occurred in South Asia, where governments and local citizens have banded together to protect endangered species.

In Nepal, a coordinated national effort between authorities, NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund, and local communities helped the country nearly triple its Bengal tiger population from just 121 individuals in 2010 to 355 by 2022, making it the first nation to meet the Global Tiger Summit’s ambitious doubling target ahead of schedule.

One of the factors behind Nepal’s success is has partnered with Indigenous groups to lead conservation efforts. One example of this is the Pangolin Trail in Kathmandu’s Bagh Bhairav Community Forest, where the Small Mammals Conservation and Research Foundation built an ecotourism trail and handed it over entirely to the Indigenous Tamang community to manage. While this region was once known as a poaching hotspot, now, Indigenous women serve as citizen scientists and guardians of one of the world’s most trafficked animals, simultaneously boosting the region’s ecological profile and the local economy.

Across the border in India, a different kind of conservation story is taking shape in the jungles of Assam. At Kaziranga National Park, home to one of the world’s largest populations of one-horned rhinos, a cohort of young women from rural communities has taken up arms, literally, to defend the park against poachers and human-wildlife conflict.

Known as the Van Durgas, or “Goddesses of the Forest,” these female forest guards patrol the park’s most vulnerable zones armed with rifles and navigating flooded terrain, charging rhinos, and nesting cobras. Their presence has had measurable results: the park recorded its last poaching case in 2021, and during the devastating July 2024 floods, the Van Durgas helped guide animals through wildlife corridors while keeping human casualties at a record low.

A tenth life for big cats in Russia

Rare species are almost never saved by a single program, however carefully designed. Instead, multipronged efforts are needed: education, nature reserves, scientific research, rangers, camera traps, and community support. That community involvement can take many forms, including reporting animal sightings, donating money, promoting conservation work, or simply learning to live alongside a predator.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only a few dozen Amur leopards remained in the wild in the Far East (Russia). Hunting them has been banned in the USSR since 1956, but that was not enough: leopards continued to die because of poaching, logging, forest fires, and a decline in food sources. Today, the situation is much better: according to camera-trap monitoring, 129 adult Amur leopards and at least 14 cubs were recorded in Primorye, Russia, in 2024.

Each animal has its own pattern of spots, almost like fingerprints, so researchers can identify individual leopards with the help of camera traps and reports from local residents. There is also the Leopard Guardians program: participants become guardians of individual animals, support conservation projects, and can choose a leopard’s name.

In the case of the Amur tiger, working with the people who share its habitat became a crucial part of recovery. For ecologists, the tiger is a sign of a healthy Far Eastern taiga. But for a local resident, a tiger may not be a symbol of nature, but a threat to dogs, livestock, or people’s livelihoods.

That is why simple, practical education matters: what to do if you meet a tiger, where to report a conflict, and how to protect domestic animals. In Primorye and Khabarovsk Krai, there are teams that respond to such situations, and residents may receive compensation for livestock or dogs harmed by tigers. If people have a clear way to get help, they are less likely to decide to “deal with” the predator themselves.

According to the 2021–2022 census cited by the Amur Tiger Center, there were more than 750 Amur tigers in Russia, including cubs. Behind that number are not only protected areas and hunting bans, but also NGOs, donors, rehabilitation centers, cooperation from local residents, response teams, and compensation schemes. This is the part of conservation work that helps people and rare animals share the same territory without every encounter becoming a conflict.

Under the sea

While much conservation work focuses on charismatic megafauna — large, popular animals that humans tend to favor, such as elephants, pandas, and tigers — aquatic ecosystems are just as, if not more important, for maintaining Earth’s biome and protecting the planet.

Within the peninsulas and archipelagos of Southeast Asia, the deterioration of marine ecosystems poses one of the biggest threats to coastal livelihoods and global biodiversity. Southeast Asia’s coral reefs encompass about a third of the world’s total coral area and host roughly 76 percent of all known coral species and 37 percent of reef fish species globally, according to Asian Development Bank estimates.

These reefs support keystone species, such as krill and small fish, which act as foundations for the entire marine food chain. They also act as “blue carbon sinks,” absorbing CO2 emissions, much like above-ground rainforests do.

However, these essential ecosystems are under threat.

The World Resources Institute estimates that 88–95 percent of reefs in Southeast Asia are at extreme risk of bleaching, a process in which corals expel the algae living in their tissues, indicating they are under extreme stress and near death.

This process releases massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, kills the biomes that marine life, both big and small, call home, and creates a chain effect of biological collapse that will be devastating for humans and global conservation efforts. This bleaching can be caused by rising ocean temperatures, changing ocean acidity due to pollution and runoff, increasingly extreme tides, and human activities, such as excessive boat traffic or development. Some activists estimate that 90 percent of coral reefs could disappear altogether by 2050.

In the face of such a problem, some conservationists are working to simultaneously revive the reefs and repopulate the species that depend on them.

Environmentalists in Indonesia are leading the way in restoring coral reefs through a method known as coral gardening, in which scuba divers cultivate coral underwater and then transplant it to dead or dying reefs. Researchers in Malaysia and Singapore are exploring innovative ways to protect corals and promote growth, including 3-D printing nourishing bases to accelerate coral growth and selectively breeding corals to enhance resilience, with the aim of creating a crop that can withstand the pressures of the climate crisis.

Coastal communities are also pushing back on development projects and urging their governments to implement regulations and protections that will help efforts to revive the reef. Many Pacific Island nations, such as Palau, have implemented sweeping marine conservation efforts, including creating marine sanctuaries where fishing, development, and scuba diving are restricted or banned altogether.

While there is a long way to go, coastal communities in this region have made it clear that giving up is not an option.

Care about sharks? Keep them off your plate

Venezuela, home to the Caribbean’s longest coastline, hosts 123 shark varieties (including rays and chimeras), according to biologist Leonardo Sánchez, head of the Center for Shark Research (CIT), a Venezuelan non-profit.

However, up to 37.5 percent of shark species worldwide are critically endangered and at risk of extinction due to overfishing, according to a 2024 report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

This fact directly collides with Venezuelan culture, as meat from shark pups (commonly called cazón in Spanish) is one of the cornerstones of local coastal cuisine. Making empanadas de cazón — cheap fried turnovers consisting of pastry and shark filling — is a trusted source of income for many lower-income families, especially women. Cazón meat can also be found in other coastal countries in the Americas, such as Mexico.

CIT and other local organizations, such as Proyecto Tintorera, jointly raised their voices in support of sharks in April 2026 with a call to Venezuelan consumers: “Stop eating cazón.” Surprisingly, the campaign was also echoed by major local outlets and gained traction among social media users.

“Cazón meat comes from juvenile, non-mature sharks (several species). They have long gestational periods with few pups and cannot be replaced after intensive fishing. Rays [also eaten in the country] should not replace their consumption, for they are very similar to sharks. They only breed every two years,” said Sánchez in a CIT post. “If they are gone, what will the people who make a living by making empanadas do?”

The specialist proposes replacing meat from sharks and rays with that of other, more populous species. Some renowned local chefs, such as Daniel Torrealba, are already following this advice and do not incorporate cazón or ray meat into their culinary offerings, as noted by El Estímulo. Torrealba explains his decision:

The cazón and the raya (another endangered species) sit very high on the ocean food chain, and their extinction would cause significant harm to that ecosystem.

To date, the Venezuelan government has not commented on the CIT’s campaign.

The cases of cazóns, Bengal tigers, Przewalski’s horses, and other animals referenced in this piece highlight that making true progress in conservation and repopulation isn’t just a matter of implementing top-down restrictions. Success requires education, community involvement, research, and behavioral and societal change — and these cases have demonstrated that that change is possible.

These success stories are a model for community-rooted conservation that could help other countries and regions rebuild their withering ecosystems.

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Previously Published on globalvoices.org with Creative Commons License

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The post Countless Endangered Species Are Making a Comeback Due to Global Conservation Efforts appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Kate Yoder, Grist

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With the average price of gasoline in the United States above $4.50 a gallon — about a 40 percent rise since the Iran war began in late February — Americans have been climbing into their cars less often, and stepping onto trains and buses instead. It’s been declared the largest oil supply disruption in history, with U.S. drivers paying $45 billion more for gasoline and diesel compared to last year. Some 44 percent of U.S. adults say they’ve cut back on driving because of high gas prices, according to a survey in late April from ABC News, The Washington Post, and Ipsos.

Cities across the country have seen rising numbers of people riding public transit, from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. Sales of used electric vehicles and hybrid cars have grown substantially over the past couple of months. People are replacing car trips with bikes and scooters; railroads like Amtrak have reported more riders than usual. Much of America is built around highways and suburbs, however, making alternative transportation difficult. So, many people are cutting down on driving without ditching their vehicles, by carpooling, consolidating errands, or working remotely more often.

It could be the start of a green, global shift, according to some experts — even if most Americans eventually end up hopping back in their cars. That’s because the crisis is hitting the hardest in Asia, which was projected to account for nearly all the increase in oil and gas use over the coming decades, but is now rethinking its reliance on fossil fuels.

“If Asia turns around and says, ‘No, we’re not going to grow with fossil fuels, we are going to grow with electrotech,’ that means fossil fuels will peak, and will peak sooner than we think,” said Daan Walter, who leads strategy research on the future of energy for the think tank Ember. “It’s very likely that if this crisis continues to be as bad as it is, and we see this conversion happening, that we’re currently living in the peak year of oil, and that demand will just never come back to the level that it was just before Hormuz closed.”

With roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil shipments choked off in the Strait of Hormuz, households and industries have found ways to use less of it. This can create what economists call “demand destruction” for oil — meaning that the world simply won’t need as much as it used to. The phenomenon is already happening across the globe, according to the International Energy Agency. Last week, the agency reiterated that demand for oil is being destroyed, forecasting a contraction of 420,000 barrels a day this year. It’s a silver lining in an otherwise grim situation: Price shocks driven by conflict in the Middle East are nudging people away from fossil fuels.

While people sometimes use “demand destruction” as a dramatic way to refer to a short-term drop in demand, the phrase more accurately describes a deeper economic shift. “To me, the term ‘demand destruction’ really only makes sense if you’re talking about it as a longer-term thing. Like, it’s truly destroyed the source of demand,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale University.

The destruction in global oil demand has been concentrated in Asia rather than in the U.S., where the country’s overall wealth enables people to pay more for fuel relative to much of the world, even as it strains the budgets of low- and middle-income Americans. Factories in Japan are producing fewer petrochemical products — demand for naphtha, used to make plastics and chemicals, fell by a quarter year-over-year — amplifying the country’s “long-term declining trend” in oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency. Its report notes that gasoline demand in South Korea fell by about 5 percent as prices rose at the pump, suggesting that behavioral changes are also contributing to demand destruction. As the crisis in the Middle East deepened, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for a sharp shift to renewable energy, saying, “Our future will be at serious risk if we continue to rely on fossil fuels.”

Countries and companies are also decreasing their oil use in response to the crisis. Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka have all introduced four-day work weeks to encourage fewer commutes.

To what extent these fuel-saving adjustments stick around is an open question. President Donald Trump has promised that oil prices will “drop like a rock” once the war in Iran ends. But even after shipping through the Strait of Hormuz resumes, oil supplies could remain tight for months as facilities are repaired and wells get restarted. The Iran war is also the second oil shock in recent years, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and experts say that this pattern of oil crises is more likely to lead to a prolonged fall in demand.

“If prices are low for a very, very long time, and then you have a shock, it’s easy to write it off as not a big deal, not going to happen again. But if you continue getting shocks, then you’re like, ‘Maybe I should really start thinking about making some changes,’” Gillingham said.

A report from Ember, co-written by Walter, makes the case that the “twin fossil shock” of the 2020s opens up new political possibilities, just as the double oil shocks in the 1970s prompted investments in energy efficiency and nuclear power. “The parallels with the 1970s oil shocks are striking. But so too is the difference,” the authors write. “For the first time, there are scalable, cost-competitive alternatives. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs, and other electrotech offer a permanent route out of fossil dependence.”

The report predicts that Asia, affected the most by the current oil crisis, will fast-track electrification, switching to EVs and pushing liquefied natural gas out of power generation. The first sign that may already be happening: In March, after the bombing of Iran had started, China’s exports of solar, batteries, and electric vehicles surged.

“It really shakes countries and companies around the world out of this complacency of thinking that there is a path back to a normal stable fossil system,” Walter said. “Import dependency is just incredibly risky at the moment, and the second crisis kind of confirms that.”

And some of the new routines people adopt during the oil crisis could endure. “A shock like the big increase in gas prices, or an earthquake that closes a freeway, is really helpful in getting people to change behavior,” said Susan Handy, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. “It is really hard to get people to change behavior without those kinds of shocks — not that we want these things to happen, but it is what pushes behavior change.” When a bridge that collapsed reopens, for instance, most people will go back to driving, but some of them will keep their new biking routine, she said.

So what determines whether a habit sticks? It comes down to what people grow to like, Handy said. People might realize they enjoy riding a bike around town or reading on the bus, as opposed to sitting behind the wheel in traffic, once they have reason to try it. “I think there are probably more alternatives out there than people realize, or the alternatives may be better than they realize,” Handy said. Rising prices can also prompt people to adopt more energy-efficient vehicles or appliances, locking them into lower fuel usage going forward.

Of course, Americans are still driving a lot — and will probably continue to do so. “We’ve seen oil prices go up and down many, many times in our history, even in recent history,” Gillingham said. “Generally, those shorter-term behaviors tend to bounce back to where they were before.”

But in the global picture, it’s looking more and more likely that the second oil crisis in half a decade, at a moment when alternatives to fossil fuels are becoming cheaper and widespread, may lead to more lasting changes, accelerating the decline of oil — and the rise of cleaner replacements. As the author Rebecca Solnit wrote in a recent newsletter: “What if in a decade or a century people remember this as the point when the world really turned away from this filthy, corrupting, unreliable, destructive resource?”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/economics/iran-war-oil-demand-destruction-renewable-gas/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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This Story Was Originally Published by Grist.

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Photo Credit: unsplash

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Look at this upcoming Thrilljoy Pix!

Hey Arnold was a pretty good TV show. We saw a character who had a rather interesting life and they went on tons of wild adventures with their friends. Along the way a lesson or two was learned and some adventures changed them for the better. The popularity for this show continues to grow and fans of all ages enjoy collecting things based off of these characters. Recently an Arnold Pix! was announced and here is my thoughts on this news.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Arnold (Hero) Pix!

This is a rather cool looking Pix! The hero turned out great and fits the mood of this character perfectly. The chase makes sense for this character and captures the essence of this character quite well. The super chase looks wonderful and fans are going to be looking forward to adding it to their collections. You can learn more about this collectible here.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Gerald (Chase) Pix!

This Arnold ‘Hey Arnold’ Thrilljoy Pix! drops June 12th. You can follow Thrilljoy Collectibles on Instagram.

(c) Thrilljoy Collectibles

Baseball Arnold (Super Chase) Pix!

The post Take a Look at This Arnold ‘Hey Arnold’ Thrilljoy Pix! appeared first on The Good Men Project.

The people we find attractive online don’t necessarily have the best of life.

They have optimized their mindset as if it’s a skill or good taste.

Here are the five habits I’ve noticed.

1. A cactus personality.

Attractive online people are like cacti — very hard to discourage. They grow in the harshest environments, and even produce flowers.

Meanwhile, others are looking on, wondering how.

Most people have emotional fragility about hypothetical situations not working out. It takes one rejection, one sad result, then a terrible, soul-crushing season. What often happens next? Their mood changes, self-doubt grows, and their identity shifts into a pessimistic, villainous arc.

A successful person first survives their emotions.

And watching them do this is like a trip into the countryside after years of living in a stuffy city. Their infectious positive outlook, even when noting challenges and being unhappy, is inspiring.

2. Use storytelling moisturizer.

They get imaginative while most people would complain. Stop or quit.

They soften the reality made public. Whereas many would scream to anyone about the tough parts.

Lauren Sánchez Bezos told The New York Times she and her husband begin their day at 6 a.m. by listing 10 things they’re grateful for. Major caveat? No repeats from the day before. She also mentions them not touching their phones; what’s written on both of their coffee mugs. And how they workout and watch the sunrise from their sunroom. I’ve noticed influencers (cough) content creators do this too.

Share rose-colored stories to audiences to keep functioning.

To keep posting.

Some stories are painful to live through as they are to tell. Attractive personas refine the tales as their situation improves. Have you realized this, too? For instance, I’ve stuck around long enough to watch rose-colored initial stories about entrepreneurs evolve into cold truth shares of staring because they were laid off.

So, when naysayers are stuck reminding them of their past, they have already moved on. Contributing to an aura of resilience which is another source of inspiration.

3. Live in the mirror, even the fun house one.

Many think their problems are because of what’s happening to them.

“It’s always me who has to…” “Everyone’s picking on me.” Carl Jung and attractive internet people do the opposite. What you refuse to face bubbles up as symptoms. Anxiety, resentment, passive aggression.

These symptoms subside once you face the truth. And start healing when you start building with your life’s rubble rather than questioning why it’s yours. Like Sylvester Stallone did with his life to create the art: Rocky.

So, attractive internet personas double down on their quirks. The flaws most people want to hide away in a closet. And it’s magnetic to watch someone accept themselves in a world demanding you conform.

4. Know your whys for everything.

When you act without knowing why, you solidify the habit of doing as others do. You skip the process of choosing. Automate the behavior of mimicking your environment.

Most opinions are affiliations.

Attractive internet people show the behind-the-scenes of their thinking. They could have the most mainstream beliefs, like waking up at 6 a.m. in the morning. But because they’ve built routines around this belief rather than emotional connections. It preserves credibility and authenticity.

You can watch as they reform themselves going from doing A to practicing new B narratives. While others would stick with what no longer serves them. Why? Because it’s “embarrassing” to show any sign of being wrong.

5. Fill in the outlines.

The specifics matter. Attractive internet people allow others to be nosy.

Lots of people say interesting things. Then, when people get invested, they change the zoom on the camera lens. Act as if there’s nothing more to see.

Depth says, “I heard you. I understand you. You’re not alone in this. Even if you can’t relate, come be nosy.”

The writer Eve Arnold allows me a window into her writing habits and mornings. Even if this lifestyle isn’t for me, my curiosity can find a home in her articles. In a similar way. Media personality Alex Hormozi creates a world by rephrasing the same continuous idea for years. While someone else pulls you in with a great post. Then moves on. Thus, ending the magnetism.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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I’ve been trying to place the heaviness within me these days; the nagging sickness that resides in the pit of my stomach every morning, regardless of what I do to try and push it away.

It isn’t merely the growing nihilism that comes from realizing how quickly the bedrock of our Republic is dissolving.

It isn’t just the black despair from watching the rapid and seemingly inexorable erosion of human and civil rights.

It isn’t only the leaden grief that comes from witnessing so much unnecessary suffering, so much preventable pain, so much manufactured chaos.

Along with all of that, I think the real heart sickness comes from realizing my complicity in crimes against humanity.

As a taxpaying American, I am partnering in the genocide in Gaza.

I see the breath-stealing videos of Palestinian children torn apart by AIPAC-funded drone strikes, of elderly people executed by IDF soldiers, of Israeli political leaders applauding the barbaric destruction of Gaza, and I know that my taxable income is funding the carnage.

As a taxpaying American, I am murdering the people of Iran, Lebanon, Cuba, and Ukraine.

Watching our leadership waging or permitting deadly, wasteful, and unprovoked wars of greed, distraction, and geography all over the planet, and knowing that I am in some way aiding and abetting them is cause for mourning.

As a taxpaying American, I am starving people to death in New Jersey.

The tortured souls languishing inside the hellscape of Delaney Hall, forced to eat maggot-infested food, denied basic healthcare, shown no human comfort, enduring a deadly squalor that has no reason to exist other than the cruelty of the sociopaths who constructed it with the resources of my life’s work.

As a taxpaying American, I am assaulting girls and young women in Texas.

Realizing that the horrors inside an inaccessible compound in San Benito and the unthinkable brutality that is being visited upon the most vulnerable and helpless there do not happen without my unwitting, yet still real, financial assistance.

As a taxpaying American, I am viciously terrorizing immigrants.

Watching a masked Gestapo-esque army of perverse monsters relentlessly hounding my black and brown neighbors in the places they work, study, worship, and raise their families is made all the worse by the knowledge that the sweat of my brow is fueling them.

As a taxpaying American, I am violently persecuting queer people.

It breaks my heart to know that despite my work to try and be an LGBTQ ally and to advocate for the inherent worth of every human being, my taxes are bankrolling the homophobic and transphobic legislative assaults on transgender teens, on gay couples, on marriage equality.

Like most people who call this place home, I was weaned on a story of this nation that was part curated myth, part racist whitewashing, part genuine aspiration, and part American exceptionalism that steadfastly refused to admit culpability for inhumanity.

The central narrative I inherited from my pastors, teachers, parents, media, and politicians was that the United States was a place that, though terribly flawed, still endeavored to be a brilliant beacon for the vulnerable, hungry, and hurting of the world.

It may have been a mix of ignorance, privilege, and wishful thinking, but I bought into the lie, and it’s sobering enough to realize that this story was never true. That’s enough of an existential gut punch.

And it’s another matter altogether to realize that for your entire life, but profoundly in these present days, your work and creativity have funded the very hatred, inequity, and brutality you’ve spent a lifetime intending to eradicate.

There’s a futility that comes from when that truth settles in; when you are a person of peace who is subsidizing war. I think that’s what’s so hard for so many of us right now. We’re trying to fight for and with our country simultaneously.

I know that we are not powerless in these moments, but I confess that the road out of this is unclear.

All I can say for certain is that as a taxpaying American who loves humanity and who hates the nation we have become, it’s hard living with so much blood on my hands.

Note: Of course, we aren’t willfully participating in these atrocities, but it’s impossible to divorce ourselves from what our leadership does in our name, and this is the struggle so many of us find ourselves in.

iStock image

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Sandwiched between music producer Rick Rubin and author Neil Strauss, I struggled against a giant Nautilus machine in the basement of eighty-five-year-old Don Wildman’s Malibu home, churning out reps in what Esquire magazine had dubbed “The Hardest Workout in the World”: a puke-inducing two-hour suffer-fest that Don performs three times per week, humbling younger fitness enthusiasts like myself.

Afterward, as I lay flat on my back recovering on the carpet of Don’s basement, I pondered which was more difficult: the workout I had just completed, the three hours of ultimate frisbee I’d played with sixty-five-year-old primal godfather Mark Sisson, the extreme single-set-to-failure ARX workout with eighty-year-old longevity icon Art De Vany, my underwater pool workout with seemingly ageless big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, my rock-tower-building workout in the desert with fifty-seven-year-old fitness icon Paul Chek, my four-hour sauna foray with the crazy sixty-seven-year-old Finnish inventor and fitness icon Vessi Jalkanen, a weekend of bleeding hands at several Russian kettlebell certifications, three days of Spartan death race competition at thirty-six degrees below zero Fahrenheit in backwoods Vermont, or a full week of Spartan SEALFit training in Encinitas, California, complete with daily forays into near hypothermia from beatdowns in the Pacific Ocean.

From adventures like these and many more, I’ve had a few major learnings, including:

• Don’t fool yourself into thinking that masochistic workouts are good for you. They’re not, and I’ve since adopted a habit of striking a balance between climbing random personal Mt. Everests and allowing my heart, joints, and endocrine system a bit more of a careful approach.
• Occasionally having something physically intimidating on your calendar is a great way to maintain fitness motivation, but it doesn’t have to be an Ironman triathlon. A pickleball tournament, a breathwork course, or a Turkish kettlebell get-up personal best also counts.
• If you want to know how to reverse or slow years of aging, it turns out that walking speed, maximum oxygen utilization, grip strength, and muscle power are all mighty powerful and useful elements to focus on. .

Yet, perhaps the biggest takeaway for staying functional forever (or at least for an impressively long time) is to lift heavy stuff.

You can consider this article as your ultimate guide to preserving youth and building lean, functional muscle in the cleanest, most efficient way possible (and discover why lifting heavy stuff is one of the most potent tactics for defying age). I will delve into fascinating studies on anti-aging and weightlifting, the best type of muscle fiber to possess, the type of exercise that beats the pants off cardio and aerobics, how to turn your cells into tiny muscle-building machines, and much, much more—revealing the best anti-aging secrets from some of the fittest old people on the face of the planet.

If you’re not familiar with the funky “functional” term, think of it this way: functional fitness is all about training your body for the real world—not just the gym. It’s the art of building strength, balance, flexibility, and endurance through movements that mimic everyday activities, like lifting, squatting, reaching, or twisting. Think of it as preparing your body for life’s challenges, whether that’s picking up groceries, climbing stairs, or playing with your kids. By focusing on exercises that engage multiple muscle groups and improve core stability, functional fitness makes you more efficient, resilient, and ready to tackle whatever life throws your way, all while reducing the risk of injury. It’s fitness with purpose—designed for the way you move and live.

A fit body is a sound physical dwelling for boundless energy. You will leave this article equipped to get the body you want quickly, safely, and without spending oodles of hours in the gym.

Lifting Heavy Stuff Can Make You Live Longer 

Can strength training and powerlifting actually make you live longer?

A recent study showed that older adults who met twice-weekly strength-training guidelines had lower odds of dying. This study was the first to demonstrate such an association in a large, nationally representative sample over an extended period, particularly in an older population.

Sure, previous studies had found that older adults who were physically active had a better quality of life and a reduced risk of mortality. There’s a lot of research suggesting that regular exercise is associated with health benefits that include a reduced risk of early death, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer.

However, this study on the effects of strength training on mortality in older adults was a bit of a bigger deal. Researchers analyzed data from the 1997–2001 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) as well as death certificate data through 2011. The NHIS collects data on health, disease, and disability in the United States from a nationally representative sampling of all fifty states and the District of Columbia. The 1997–2001 survey included more than thirty thousand adults aged sixty-five and older.

The researchers found that during the survey period, more than 9 percent of older adults reported at least twice-weekly strength-training sessions. They then followed the participants for fifteen years through death certificate data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Death Index to get a long-term view of the association between strength training and mortality.

What did they find? Older adults who engaged in strength training at least twice a week had 46 percent lower odds of death for any reason than those who did not. They also had 41 percent lower odds of dying from cardiac problems and 19 percent lower odds of dying from cancer.

More recent 2022 studies showed that consistent resistance training is associated with a 10 to 17 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.

However, these studies also indicated that doing more than 140 minutes per week of hard resistance training, especially when training more than three times a week, is associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, particularly in the elderly.

In science, this is referred to as a J-shaped curve, meaning both too little and too much resistance training is associated with an increased risk of mortality, so the optimal amount is moderate. In addition, combining resistance training with regularly scheduled aerobic exercise and ample amounts of low-intensity physical activity throughout the day stacks up to a combined result of a 40 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality, so it’s important not to neglect cardiorespiratory fitness.

For more insights into longevity-enhancing fitness routines to keep you healthy and fit, you can check out these resources:

• How Plaque *Really* Happens, The Latest On Alcohol & Longevity, Weightlifting vs. Body Weight Training, Exercising (With A Time Crunch & Family Obligations) & More! Solosode 477
• Why Your Multivitamin Probably Has The Wrong Ingredients In It, Statin Confusion, The Best Kind Of Weight Training For Longevity & More With Warren Matthews and Ivor Cummins
  
• 6 Steps To Achieving The Ideal Combination Of Fitness, Longevity, And Looking Good Naked (A Hybrid Training Approach For Anti-Aging & Performance)
• Lifting and Longevity 101 Insights
• Ben Greenfield’s Top Tips For A Long, Healthy Life

Do Some Sports Make You Live Longer?

When it comes to sports and mortality, the research is quite interesting.

One study led by Oxford University and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine looked at eighty thousand people over the age of thirty to find out what effects different types of sports have on longevity. It turns out that people who play racquet sports (such as tennis or racquetball) on a regular basis can reduce their risk of dying prematurely by 47 percent. The next most beneficial exercise was swimming, which reduced the risk of dying prematurely by 28 percent, followed by cycling at 15 percent.

Activities like racquet sports (I’m even counting the ping pong table in my garage) and water sports are often associated with longevity due to their cognitive demands and the coordination required between the left and right brain hemispheres. This includes actions such as kicking, stroking, and breathing while swimming, or anticipating the ball and swinging in tennis.

Running, football, and rugby did not seem to impact longevity. But while the benefits of basic physical activity and aerobic exercise are well established, there is less research on strength training—although researchers have demonstrated the benefits of strength training for diabetes, osteoporosis, lower back pain, and obesity, and smaller studies have observed that greater muscular strength is associated with lower risk of death.

Older adults who met strength-training guidelines were, on average, slightly younger (closer to sixty-five, the minimum age for the survey) and were more likely to be married white males with higher levels of education. They were also more likely to have healthy body weights, engage in aerobic exercise, and abstain from alcohol and tobacco. But when the researchers adjusted for these demographic variables, health behaviors, and health conditions, the results remained the same.

Even after the researchers controlled for physical activity level, people who practiced strength training seemed to enjoy a greater mortality benefit than those who reported physical activity alone.

This groundbreaking study provided substantial, statistically significant evidence that strength training in older adults is beneficial for slowing the effects of aging.

You can find additional insights and my strength training recommendations listed below:

What Kind of Weight Training Is Best? 

Lest you rush to the gym salivating to engage in the ultimate antiaging, muscle-toning routine and launch into an Arnold Schwarzenegger–esque workout, I have one reminder for you: bigger muscles aren’t always better.

Compact and explosive muscle beats out pure muscle mass for slowing aging.

The healthiest muscles are those found on a wiry physique of modest size, capable of exerting a lot of force over a short period. Sure, you can certainly get strong and muscular doing CrossFit-type workouts that require maximum deadlifts in two minutes, or ungodly amounts of snatch reps, or body-building workouts that have you doing bicep curls until you are bleeding out the eyeballs—but when it comes to maximizing longevity, those approaches are unlikely to be sustainable. Remember, you want to be able to maintain strength and muscle in an uninjured state when you are forty, sixty, and eighty years old. For this, especially if you are just getting started or want the minimum effective dose of strength training (you can discover more about this topic here), I recommend performing two specific workouts each week.

The first workout is a super-slow lifting protocol similar to that described by Doug McGuff in his book Body by Science. For twelve to twenty minutes, perform a few multijoint exercises with relatively heavy weights, doing each rep over thirty to sixty seconds. The workout should include the following:

• An upper-body push (e.g., overhead presses, push-ups, chest presses)
• An upper-body pull (e.g., bent or upright rows, lat pull-downs, pull-ups)
• A lower-body push (e.g., leg presses, squats)
• A lower-body pull (e.g., deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, lower back extensions, reverse hyperextensions)

Why is this type of workout so darn effective?

The first benefit is that performing reps very slowly has low injury-producing potential. In addition, a recent study co-authored by Dr. McGuff highlights how super-slow resistance training to muscular failure results in the same type of cardiovascular adaptations caused by a long run.

These adaptations include a better ability to buffer lactic acid, increased mitochondrial density, and even better blood pressure. If you really want to take super-slow training to the next level, you can implement blood flow restriction (BFR) bands during your workout or use an ARX machine (you can check out my podcast about this incredible exercise tool here), which utilizes adaptive resistance technology and motorized 2-horsepower resistance to dynamically adjust the resistance you receive, in real time, for precisely the right amount of force you can handle on every rep of every set. The ARX holds a highly utilized location in my home gym and is the single best resistance training strategy I’ve ever used to get strong like a bull in a very short period. The downside is that it’s spendy at just shy of $40,000, but many biohacking centers and health clubs now have a unit that you can use as a membership perk.

The second workout is some kind of a quick, high-intensity bodyweight routine that also targets the explosive, powerful muscle associated with longevity. A perfect example, designed by researchers to maintain strength and muscle in as little time as possible, was featured in the New York Times as a “Scientific 7-Minute Workout.” Each exercise below is to be performed for thirty seconds, with ten seconds of rest between exercises. Aside from the wall sits, you should perform these exercises as explosively as possible. The exercises are these:

• Jumping jacks or burpees
• Wall sits
• Push-ups or clapping push-ups
• Crunches or knee-ups
• Step-ups or lunge jumps
• Squats or squat jumps
• Dips
• Planks
• Jump rope, stair sprints, or running in place with high knees
• Lunges or lunge jumps
• Push-ups with rotation (at the top of the push-up, alternately raise your arms and point them straight up)
• Side planks

This style of quick bursts of explosive training is a bit similar to the philosophy utilized by Russian kettlebell masters like Pavel Tsatsouline. In his book The Quick & The Dead, Pavel presents a compelling case that the excess accumulation of lactic acid, similar to what you would experience in a traditional multi-set, higher-rep, bodybuilding-esque CrossFit WOD, metcon, or strength training routine, can muffle the brain’s commands to the muscles, inhibit energy systems related to strength and speed, and interfere with optimum contraction and relaxation.

This theory is based on the idea that within your muscles are tiny bubbles called lysosomes, which contain enzymes that dismantle and dispose of metabolic components that are damaged or no longer needed. These lysosomes operate exclusively in an acidic environment. When acidity is moderate, they do what they are supposed to do and even help muscles grow. But when the “burn” is out of control, lysosomes go on a destructive rampage, and you feel sore and stiff a day or two afterward. (To discover how to lower lactic acid burn during exercise, you can check out this podcast.)

Pavel’s solution to the inhibition of strength and power adaptations due to excess lactic acid?

Quick bursts of strength and power lasting fewer than twenty seconds, accompanied by long, luxurious rest periods.

A sample routine using this approach would be thirty minutes of ten kettlebell swings and ten push-ups, with each set performed every ninety seconds, for a total of one hundred swings and one hundred push-ups. Single-set-to-failure training, such as the super-slow routine described earlier, can also mitigate the effects of excess lactic acid because rather than hitting the muscles over and over again in a workout, you’re exhausting them only once for a brief period of time.

Ultimately, if you want the minimum effective dose of strength training to help you find the sweet spot between longevity and muscle, you can get away with as few as two strength workouts per week—one with slow, controlled heavy lifting and one with high-intensity bodyweight movements. In a perfect strength-training week, I prefer to accomplish two super-slow workouts and two more intense bodyweight or kettlebell explosive workouts (which you can get started with here or here).

Can You Really Build Muscle with Bodyweight Training?

The conventional ways to build muscle are to perform big, compound lifts, such as squats and deadlifts, or to combine the super-slow approach and the fast, explosive approach.

But those aren’t the only methods for gaining size and strength. Contrary to popular belief, you can gain muscle (hypertrophy) by performing more reps with light weights or even your own body weight.

One study on the effects of high reps and low reps on muscle growth compared sets performed with weights at 80% of one-rep maximum (1RM) to complete muscular fatigue with sets performed with weights at 30% of 1RM to complete muscular fatigue.

Turns out that the weight of the load is not important.

Instead, what matters is whether a muscle is worked to complete fatigue. This study demonstrated that high reps and light weights can stimulate just as much muscle growth as low reps and heavy weights. So you can, for example, build chest muscles by doing a few sets of high-rep push-ups to complete failure. This is a potent tactic if you are stuck in a hotel or living room or if you have no access to bars and plates and still want to build muscle.

In another study, super-slow lifting at 55 to 60% of the participant’s 1RM increased both muscle thickness and maximal strength just as much as standard-speed lifts performed at 80 to 90% of the participant’s 1RM. In yet another study, both heavy lifts of eight to ten reps and light lifts of eighteen to twenty reps activated the genes involved in muscle growth. Research has also demonstrated that twenty-five to thirty-five reps with lighter weights lead to the same gains in muscle size as eight to twelve reps with heavier weights. Even in seasoned weightlifters, twenty to twenty-five reps with a light weight leads to the same muscle growth as eight to twelve reps with a heavy weight.

More recent research shows that the “hypertrophy rep range” is way larger than most people realize, demonstrating similar per-set hypertrophy with loads ranging from 30 to about 85% of 1RM, although dipping below 20% appears to be too low to create adequate muscle tension to maximize growth. But that 20% can include—you guessed it—your own body weight.

The key is to get as close to muscular failure as possible, which appears to be more important with lower loads or body weight. 

Ultimately, if you want to add muscle mass as fast as possible, you’ll get the best results in the shortest period of time by using heavy weights, since less volume is required.

But you can still build muscle with light weights and high reps—and research suggests this approach is particularly effective when training legs. This is especially useful information if you don’t know how to lift heavy weights, you’re trying to minimize your risk of injury, or you have limited access to equipment (for more information on this topic, this is a great article to check out).

Why Bigger Muscles Aren’t Better 

Do you ever try to move fast? No, I mean F-A-S-T.

When was the last time you were at the gym and tried to hoist a barbell over your head as explosively as possible? When was the last time you were running on a treadmill or riding a bicycle and moved your legs so fast that your brain hurt trying to keep up?

Fact is, when it comes to optimizing the performance of your nervous system and cementing the connection between your brain and the rest of your body, it doesn’t really matter how heavy you lift or how much muscle you build.

Sure, strength training and muscle building are fantastic tools for aesthetics, symmetry, musculoskeletal development, and even slowed aging. But when it comes to optimizing your brain and nervous system, recruiting more muscle fibers faster, enhancing nerve-firing speed, and optimizing brain-body coordination, it is far more important to focus on fast, explosive movements.

I was first exposed to the extreme benefits of moving fast when I interviewed a well-known sports performance coach named Nick Curson. Nick, the creator of a training system called Speed of Sport, trains some of the best UFC and NFL competitors on the planet. Rather than giving enormous weights to the men and women he coaches, he has them move light loads and their own body weight as freakin’ fast as they possibly can. As a result, his athletes are incredibly explosive and functional and don’t walk around with relatively useless slabs of extra muscle mass.

There is also a direct link between your power-to-muscle-mass ratio and your longevity, but what does that mean?

It means bigger muscles aren’t always better. Instead, when it comes to slowed aging and longevity, your ability to quickly recruit muscle fibers seems to matter most.

I became aware of the fascinating truth about why bigger muscles aren’t necessarily better when I spoke with author Paul Jaminet on my podcast about his theory that a smaller muscle capable of exerting more force is a healthy muscle, while a gargantuan but relatively weak muscle is an unhealthy muscle.

To understand how large muscles—muscles that are big and bulky but don’t necessarily produce much explosive force—may be unhealthy, look at cardiomegaly, or enlargement of the heart. When heart tissue is incapable of exerting as much force as it should, the heart often grows larger to compensate. Those who have cardiomegaly, including exercise enthusiasts, often die an early death because the heart has to work so hard to support its own bulk.

In the same way, old-school bodybuilding techniques or other exercise styles that are designed to produce pure mass rather than force can potentially damage your health. Indeed, Paul cited a study on guinea pigs that showed that lower muscle mass and higher muscle-force capacity, which is found in powerlifters and anyone training more for power and speed than for strength and size, could actually be associated with longevity.

In other words, the healthiest muscle strength gains might come with only small muscle size gains, because larger muscles take far more energy to carry and cool and require far more antioxidants for repair, recovery, and mitochondrial activity.

It is well established in exercise science that muscle contractions lead to elevated levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in skeletal muscle, and although these highly reactive molecules are beneficial for normal cell signaling, when in excess, they have many deleterious effects, particularly because they contribute to a net inflammatory state.

So if your goal is the ultimate combination of performance, aesthetics, and longevity, what you should pursue are functional, efficient, powerful muscles rather than unnecessary pounds of excess muscle mass.

You should also take into consideration that the more muscles you have, the more calories you must consume to maintain (or build) that muscle—which flies in the face of the proven science that moderate caloric restriction can enhance a variety of health factors, including, most notably, longevity.

Fact is, research suggests that pure muscle mass does not increase longevity. Instead, longevity is more heavily correlated with muscle quality and the ability of the muscle to support daily functional activities such as walking, sprinting, and lifting heavy stuff, all of which positively impact insulin resistance, fat-burning rates, mitochondrial density, mobility, muscle fiber type, and strength.

In addition, bigger muscles don’t necessarily mean you’re stronger. Plenty of other factors can have significant effects on strength, such as the strength of individual muscle fibers, muscle force, joint biomechanics, and body proportions.

Especially early on in training, there’s a surprisingly weak relationship between gains in muscle and gains in strength, and gains in muscle mass can explain as little as 2 percent of the variation in strength gains for new lifters. In contrast, for more experienced lifters, gains in muscle mass can explain up to 65 percent of the variability in strength gains. Ultimately, muscle mass definitely influences strength, but it’s not the single determinant of strength.

When it comes to muscles, bigger is not the same as better.

In simple terms, the greater the proportion of a muscle’s contractile tissue to its noncontractile tissue, the greater the amount of force it can produce for its size and the greater its muscle quality. In addition, higher-quality muscles developed for performance rather than size also have increased mitochondrial density and more energy-producing capacity per pound of muscle.

Perhaps this is why many professional bodybuilders die young or suffer from chronic inflammation-related diseases. The healthiest muscles are those found on a small, wiry, powerful physique with modest size but a high force-producing potential and the ability to summon significant amounts of power and speed.

Summary

Staying functional forever isn’t about bulking up to bodybuilder proportions or chasing the latest gym trends.

It’s about sculpting a body that’s lean, powerful, and bursting with vitality—one that not only looks incredible but performs like a well-oiled machine for decades to come.

By embracing a smarter approach to fitness, like super-slow resistance training and explosive, high-intensity bodyweight movements, you can unlock a level of strength and functionality that keeps you thriving and unstoppable.

Instead of fixating on sheer size, the methods you just discovered in this article hone in on muscle quality—building fibers that are sleek, dense, and packed with energy-producing mitochondria. This focus on performance, not just appearance, enhances your body’s resilience, minimizes inflammation, and fortifies your ability to tackle anything life throws your way.

The result? A physique that ages like fine wine: timeless, alluring, and endlessly capable.

—

Previously Published on Ben Greenfield’s blog

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He found out on a Tuesday.

He went to work on Wednesday. He sat in meetings. He answered emails. He drove home. He made dinner. He told his kids everything was fine.

He told no one.

This is not an unusual story. Among the thousands of people who have come through the infidelity support community I run, the pattern for men is consistent and striking: they find out, they go silent, and they carry it alone for far longer than is good for them.

This isn’t weakness. It isn’t indifference. It is, in large part, what we have trained men to do.

The Silence Has a Shape

When women discover infidelity, research shows they are significantly more likely to seek social support quickly — talking to friends, family, or a therapist within days or weeks of discovery.

Men are not.

A 2015 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that men report smaller support networks and are less likely to disclose emotional distress to those networks, even when the distress is severe. Infidelity hits the intersection of several things men have been socialized to suppress: vulnerability, romantic failure, and the particular humiliation our culture attaches to being cheated on.

The result is a man sitting alone with an enormous amount of pain and almost nowhere to put it.

What the Silence Costs

The people I hear from most often — the ones whose silence has gone on the longest — describe the same progression.

First, numbness. The first days after discovery are often dissociative. Men describe going through the motions, functioning on autopilot, not quite believing what they know to be true.

Then comes the obsession. The mind, starved of anyone to talk to, starts talking to itself. It replays the timeline. It searches for missed signs. It constructs explanations and then tears them down. Without an outlet, the loop just keeps running.

Then, for many men, comes the rage that has nowhere to go — followed by the depression that settles in when rage burns out.

This is grief. It looks and moves exactly like grief. But most men have no framework for recognizing it as such, no language for describing it, and no social permission to express it.

The Masculinity Trap

There is a particular cruelty in the way our culture frames male betrayal.

A man who has been cheated on is often met — when he does finally tell someone — with responses that emphasize the wrong things. Was he providing enough? Was he attentive enough? Was he, somehow, at fault?

The implicit message is that a man’s value is contingent on his ability to keep his partner loyal. That being cheated on is a referendum on his adequacy as a man.

This is corrosive and false. Infidelity is a choice made by the person who cheats. It reflects their values, their decisions, and their failures — not their partner’s worth. But the cultural narrative around male betrayal makes it far too easy for men to absorb blame that does not belong to them, and far too difficult to simply say: I was hurt. I need help.

What Actually Helps

I’ve watched enough men come through the other side of infidelity to say with confidence: the ones who fare best are not the ones who went silent the longest.

They are the ones who eventually let someone in.

This doesn’t require a dramatic breakdown or a therapist on speed dial — though therapy is genuinely useful and far too many men avoid it. It can start smaller than that.

It can start with one honest conversation. With a close friend who can be trusted to listen rather than immediately offer advice or judgment. With a men’s group. With an online community where anonymity lowers the stakes enough to say the true thing. A site like InfidelitySupportGroup.com is anonymous and free and many men have found their way there precisely because speaking out loud felt impossible.

That’s often all it takes to break the loop. Not fixing anything. Not having answers. Just saying it somewhere outside your own head.

The Conversation Worth Having

The Good Men Project has spent years asking what it means to be a good man in the 21st century. This is part of that conversation.

Being a good man does not mean being impervious to pain. It does not mean processing everything alone, in silence, while projecting calm to the people around you.

It means being honest about what you need. It means recognizing that asking for help is not a concession — it is a form of integrity.

The men who reach out, who find support, who let themselves grieve properly rather than pushing it underground — they come out of this different, but intact. Many of them say that navigating infidelity, as brutal as it was, forced them into an emotional honesty they had never practiced before. That the forced confrontation with their own pain turned out to be the most important growth of their adult lives.

That is not a silver lining. It is a hard-won outcome. And it is available to any man willing to break the silence.

—

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The post What Men Don’t Say When They’ve Been Cheated On appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Tennis developed within an upper-class culture in the UK that used the game to cultivate and display emotional control. One of the goals was to be able to watch your opponent completely outwit and outplay you, even to the possible level of humiliation, and to accept it with aplomb and even good cheer (“Jolly good play my boy! Jolly good! Wizard!”).

It required, in part, a perspective shift and an awareness of how one responds to a potential affront. The point win was due to your opponent’s cleverness and excellence, which should be applauded, and not your failure (you did your best). Even if your opponent gloated, that did not mean you needed to lower yourself and respond with anger.

Sports are supposed to build character according to generations of coaches, PE teachers and parents. They teach one to compete hard, never give up, show endurance and resilience, be a graceful winner, accept negative results without resentment, shake hands, learn humility. Yet, if you watch modern professional sports, you see something very different.

You see grown adults melting down over conscientious judgment calls, screaming obscenities at officials, smashing equipment and sometimes escalating things into outright violence. It happens largely because we are in a culture where anger is not just tolerated but monetized. Our children watch all of it, not absorbing the possible lesson that frustration does not have to lead to anger but that frustration justifies anger and aggression, and we have the right to verbally or physically attack those who seem to be the cause of our frustration.

Roland Garros is the perfect case study. It’s one of the last major tournaments that still uses old‑school officiating: no electronic line calling, no laser beams. When a ball is close, the umpire climbs down, inspects the clay, and tries to identify the correct mark among a dozen overlapping ones. Half the time, even with good faith, it’s ambiguous. The umpire makes the best call they can. Then the circus begins.

A player becomes convinced the umpire looked at the wrong mark. They throw their racket, scream, gesture wildly. Another player, certain their shot was in, crosses the net against the rules to inspect the mark themselves. Their opponent, a calm, decent person, points to two marks, both out, but admits uncertainty as to which one is the last. The first player calls the second a liar. The umpire arrives, confirms the ball was out, and now the umpire is a liar too.

The player spirals into aggressive outrage. Later, the accused opponent holds a tearful press conference. They don’t look like a liar and they don’t like being called one. They look like someone victimized by another athlete’s inability to regulate their own frustration. This has become a pattern. One suspects the tennis bigshots in the world got together and decided these shenanigans were good for profits, if not for our society’s children. And it’s not limited to tennis.

There’s a highly popular YouTube channel where a guy lip‑reads baseball arguments between players, coaches and umpires and he also analyzes baseball fights. What you see there is astonishing: grown men, many college-educated, managers, coaches, players, unleashing streams of obscenities at umpires over borderline calls. We do not see controlled disagreement.

We see full‑throttle, dehumanizing tirades. The umpires barely react because they’ve been screamed at so often that they can let it go. They eject the offender and move on to further abuse for trying to do their jobs as well as they can. I am guessing the baseball bigshots like this too.

Recently, a Chicago White Sox fan got close enough to a Cubs player to tell him that he “sucked.” They are cross-town rivals, South Side versus North Side, and she felt she had the right to scream negative, insulting stuff at a man because he was a “Cub” – a guy whom she doesn’t even know. So fans believe they can come to sporting events to abuse human beings as well.

But, honestly, “You suck!” is nothing. It’s the same as saying “I don’t like your team.” It’s the lowest-grade heckle in baseball. Yet, the Cubs player responded with a sexual statement calculated to offend, shock, and demean the woman. Afterward, he said he shouldn’t have dropped to her level, but he dropped far below anything she did.

He took something relatively benign and turned it into verbal sexual aggression. The response wasn’t proportional. Why did this happen? Maybe the answer is that professional sports do not necessarily build character, but instead build ego, entitlement, emotional volatility and raw aggression. So let’s take a closer look at what could be done in sports but what they are doing instead.

Frustration Leads to Anger: The Missing Link Nobody Teaches

Frustration is the primary source of anger. When an athlete believes something unfair has happened (a bad call, a missed mark, a borderline strike) frustration kicks in. The amygdala lights up, stress hormones spike, the body prepares for confrontation, the body prepares to achieve its thwarted goal by force.

Frustration is, however, merely a gap between expectation and reality. In a healthy emotional system, frustration is recognized, named and diffused; it does not have to lead to anger. You breathe, you reset. If you are a mature adult who has worked on themselves, you accept that not everything will go your way in life and verbally abusing another human being is just not acceptable. You maintain perspective instead of indulging in the bitter feelings of a bruised ego.

In sports, that “mindfulness” is rarely, if ever, taught. Instead, athletes learn that frustration is fuel. They’re told to “play angry,” “use it,” “channel it,” “show that fire in your belly.” They’re conditioned to believe that emotional intensity equals competitive edge. So when frustration hits, they don’t diffuse it, they escalate it and allow it to develop into anger, which is only one step away from violence. On the YouTube channel, as you watch the managers call the umpires every foul name in the book, you become almost certain that punches will soon fly. Only the composure of the umpires stops that. Also, the sanctions against hitting an umpire are quite extreme.

Anger narrows the mind, reduces empathy and amplifies threat perception. It primes the body for attack so the athlete/coach stops seeing the umpire or opponent as a human being and starts seeing them as an obstacle, an enemy or a target. Anger often dehumanizes and gives license toward harming another. They now feel they have the moral right to do something wrong. This is how a pitcher decides to throw a 95‑mph fastball at a human being’s head. The problem is the absence of emotional training.

The “He Deserves It” Impulse

The second issue is deeper and it’s the moral permission impulse athletes rely on when they go after another person. We can call it the “he deserves it” reflex or impulse.

Humans have a built‑in mechanism, which most people don’t even recognize let alone judge, that justifies aggression when we believe we’ve been wronged. It’s tied to the brain’s reward circuitry. When someone feels slighted, insulted, cheated or shown disrespect, the brain generates a surge of righteous indignation. That indignation feels like a clear moral imperative, but it’s actually a cognitive distortion: one believes that harming someone is justified because they “deserve” it.

This reflex is powerful because it’s self‑reinforcing. Anger produces adrenaline, adrenaline produces a sense of power, that sense of power feels like righteousness and righteousness feels like truth. So people do not even recognize that their behavior is being bizarrely manipulated through brain chemicals and they are being pushed into doing something wrong.

They do not realize they have a choice in this matter. They can say “no.” Regardless of all the neuroscientists writing books telling us we don’t have free will, we DO because each one of us can say, “Wait, I see this…it’s wrong…NO!”

So the athlete thinks: “The umpire was unfair to me, they deserve to be yelled at.” “My opponent questioned me, they deserve to be called a liar.” “That batter showed me up, he deserves a ball thrown at him.” “That woman said I suck, she deserves to be verbally sexually assaulted.” This often unrecognized impulse gets dirty, fast. We view it as entertainment, but it is wrong because we falsely think we now have the moral right to harm others. It’s a complete biochemical distortion of what’s ethical.

It is actually the impulse behind lots of dehumanization campaigns on a larger scale. “He’s in the country illegally. He deserves to be separated from his family and sent to some jungle prison.” “Those children are not from my ethnicity, race or religion, so it’s OK for them to be bombed.” Through this impulse, we often feel morally heroic for harming innocent people.

Sports fights are deceptive emotional reflexes suddenly masquerading as moral action. Because the athlete feels justified, they don’t see the harm they’re causing. They don’t see the umpire as a person doing their best. They don’t see the opponent as someone who might be confused, not deceitful. They don’t see the batter as a human being with a nose that can be broken. They only see the story their brain is telling them: “They deserve it. It is right for me to hurt them!”

The Cultural Incentive: Anger Sells

If sports truly wanted to teach character, they would train athletes to interrupt this reflex. They would teach emotional regulation, perspective‑taking and conflict de‑escalation. They would treat anger as a skill to be managed, not a spectacle to be monetized.

But modern sports are entertainment products and anger is entertaining. A smashed racket gets more clicks than a handshake, a dugout brawl gets more views than a clean double play and a screaming match between a manager and an umpire often goes viral.

Crowds respond to conflict with a hormonal spike. They cheer, they gasp, they suddenly feel alive and the industry knows this. So instead of discouraging anger, sports culture encourages it. When two hockey players want to fight, the referees clear out a little area for them to do so and the crowd goes nuts. Sports fights are becoming big in the attention economy. We monetize emotional immaturity and the inability to see what’s really pushing us to do what we do.

Sports can build character only if emotional regulation is part of the curriculum, only if athletes are taught that frustration is normal, anger is manageable, and aggression is a choice, better observed in the breach, not a necessity.

What Needs to Change

Many aspects of capitalism push us toward immoral behavior and that’s what’s happening in sports. If sports want to reclaim a moral purpose, if they want to be something more than lucrative anger theater, they need to address two core issues:

First, teach frustration management. Athletes should learn how to recognize the moment frustration arises and how to pause and diffuse it before reacting.

Second, expose the “he deserves it” reflex. Athletes need to understand that moral justification toward violence is often a chemical illusion. Anger can feel righteous but is rarely humane. Aggression is not strength and harming someone because you feel wronged is not justice.

Right now, our culture rewards anger, volatility and the illusion of righteousness. It rewards the spectacle of adults losing control. It rewards the “he deserves it” reflex and this reflex becomes a toxic social norm.

If we want sports to teach something better, something worthy of the priceless millions of children who watch it, then anger management and moral awareness must become a central part of athletic training: a requirement. Frustration is inevitable but anger is optional. Violence is a choice to be rejected. Character is not built by what you feel but by what you do when you feel something and can understand, judge and reject it.

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By Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.

There is a phase of awakening where the mind stops creating illusions based in time. It loses its ability to connect moments into a coherent line. Life continues to happen, experiences continue to arise, and memory still functions in a basic way. Yet something essential no longer operates. The glue that once linked thoughts, feelings, actions, and identity into a continuous experience quietly dissolves.

This article explores the dissolution of the narrative self, also called the continuous self. This is not a mystical abstraction or conceptual insight. It is a very concrete psychological and experiential shift. When the narrative self dissolves, thoughts fade faster than before, meaning does not stick, and continuity across time weakens across all domains of experience. What remains is functional, immediate, and neutral.

To understand this transition, we must first be clear about what the narrative self actually is.

During the later transition, opinions often stop arising altogether. When you look for a thought or position, there is no mental file to retrieve—404 file not found. Conversation becomes difficult not because of confusion, but because there is nothing real or permanent to reference. Others may perceive you as inconsistent or unreliable, even though nothing feels wrong from your side.

Implications
The practical impact is significant. Long term projects are near-impossible to sustain. Professional identity dissolves entirely because there is no continuous person to achieve, do, or even “be” something. There is no position to reference because there is no mental glue holding together discrete events.

2. Relational Continuity
Relational continuity depends on remembered (and identified with) emotional history. In ordinary experience, past interactions shape present behavior. You remember who hurt you, who supported you, and how relationships have evolved. Roles such as friend, partner, or parent persist across encounters.

The Transition
During the transition, each interaction begins to feel fresh. Emotional history loses its weight. You may forget that you were upset with someone. Grudges cannot be maintained because there is no meaning structure to extract a grudge from. People expect you to remember relational beliefs that you cannot access. This can make you appear detached or uncommitted, but it’s just that life is now a disconnected series of moments rather than a relationally continuous experience.

Implications
This can strain intimate relationships. Partners may feel that you are not engaging with a history that still seems real to them. You may need to be reminded that you had a conflict recently, and even then, the emotional reality of it cannot be found. Social rules feel arbitrary and unreal.

You cannot rely on caring as a motivational force because caring itself depends on the developmental stages where meaning-making still makes sense. Others may feel you do not care, when in reality, the mechanism that generates care (and non-care) has dissolved.

3. Somatic and Body Continuity
Normally, the body feels like it is consistently yours. Chronic sensations, energy levels, tension patterns, and pain become part of identity. The body provides continuity by carrying conditions forward.

The Transition
During the transition, bodily sensations still arise, but they do not congeal into “my condition”. They may feel dispersed throughout space and time. Hunger, fatigue, and arousal arise, but the thoughts that once converted sensation into action do not persist long enough to motivate behavior. You might notice hunger and then immediately be watering plants, having forgotten the hunger sensation entirely.

Implications
This can lead to forgetting to eat, sleep, or attend to basic needs. Physical self-care now often requires external structure such as reminders and notes because experience feels more like hopping between moments than moving along a trajectory.

This can sometimes be dangerous. Without narrative continuity, the body can be neglected. Physical safety no longer motivates in the usual way. Medical care may not seem compelling enough to initiate action.

Example
The hunger example illustrates this clearly. In normal functioning, hunger leads to a thought, “I’m hungry”, sustained awareness, planning, and action. In this transition, hunger arises, the thought flickers, and it is gone. The body remains hungry, but the mental thread and momentary awareness has dissolved before the body can take action. Thus, the “thought -> action sequence” no longer executes reliably.

4. Narrative and Story Continuity
Before this dissolution, life feels like it has a plot. Past events explain present meaning. Future goals make current actions feel worthwhile. The idea of a journey organizes experience.

Past events seem to explain why meaning appears in certain ways. e.g., “I meditated and had an awakening, therefore, meditation is important and impactful.” This “belief -> thought -> action sequence” is entirely constructed from past thoughts and meaning-making frameworks (or, in other words, a mixture of sanskaras, witness consciousness, and identification). There is nothing real about it.

The Transition
During the transition, the story collapses. You may ask why you are doing something, and the answer does not arise. Past accomplishments feel empty or unreal and can not be categorized as ‘accomplishment’ or ‘non-accomplishment’. Future events will obviously still occur, but without logic or meaning attached. Life continues, but it doesn’t mean anything (but without meaning, this can’t be interpreted as “bad”).

Implications
The practical impact includes the collapse of career trajectory, long term planning, and motivation to build or progress. To others, this can look like aimlessness. Internally, it just feels like the arising of ‘what is’.

5. Volitional Continuity
Volitional continuity allows the mental formations called ‘intentions’ to carry a story across time. You decide to do something, and that creates the thought form that we call ‘intention’, which carries a decision forward in time. Commitment to action is possible because a ‘doer‘ or ‘decision-maker’ remains intact.

The Transition
During the transition, a decision thought may arise, but it doesn’t initiate an intention. We may recognize that a decision was made to do something but there is no longer a belief that this mental formation (called a decision) will actually influence future behavior. The link between decision and action is gone. So decisions, intentions, and plans from yesterday feel arbitrary (at first) or inaccessible (a bit later).

‘Follow through’ requires that ‘thought forms’ link one moment to the next in some kind of coherent way. When these thought forms no longer arise, moving an experience from one moment to the next becomes nearly impossible. Often, you cannot recall what the plan was (thoughts from a previous moment are gone) or why it was made (meanings from a previous moment are gone). Yesterday is just no longer relevant or attached to today.

Implications
This creates practical challenges. Imagine trying to work a normal job without the ability to carry a thought forward in time. Even self-employment becomes unsustainable because it requires agreements made yesterday and plans for tomorrow to be accessible today. As we navigate this shift, other fundamental changes are occurring simultaneously related to our ability to make money and survive in a world that requires continuity.

6. Existential Continuity
Existential continuity is the sense that you persist as the same entity across time. It is what makes death feel like an interruption of something continuous.

The Transition
During the transition, this sense wavers. The self seems to arise anew in each moment, without a felt link to the previous one. While some moments feel connected together in a series, you start to notice that you “reboot” throughout the day. Each reboot disconnects this moment’s experience from the previous moment’s experience.

Often, there is a slight delay where the mind boots up again by looking to external cues: “Where am I?” “What was I doing?” “Oh ya, I am cooking spaghetti”, “Shoot, it’s burning!”.

Often, there are gaps in awareness. “How is it burning? It wasn’t burning in the last moment that I was aware.” This is because awareness is not fundamental. It is an arising, like everything else, in All That Is.

And after the reboot, the thoughts from the previous moment are gone. The thinking mechanism restarts, often with an inability to locate the thoughts from the previous aware moment. They are just moments that aren’t linked in time and without the continuity mechanism, they can’t be linked.

Implications
You no longer feel like you are the same person who woke up this morning—it’s obvious that you aren’t. These arisings of awareness, thought, experience, and everything else just pop in and out when mind-made time is no longer a structure gluing them together.

This can be freeing, destabilizing, or both, but it doesn’t really matter because those thought also just vanish the moment they arise. The ‘aware self’ is experienced as a temporary functional pattern that arises and falls away. Practically, future-oriented responsibilities such as savings, insurance, and legacy lose meaning. Existential fear can no longer be held (you die in every moment!), but future oriented responsibility can fall away too, which can create real operational challenges.

Managing the Transition

Everything Dissolving

—

This post was previously published on Awakening Collective.

***

You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism

Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box

The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

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The post The Dissolution of the Narrative Self: Beyond Continuity appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Here’s something that rarely makes it into the conversation about work in America: 15 million jobs at companies owned by foreign investors. That’s not outsourcing. That’s the opposite — it’s international capital coming here, building here, and putting Americans to work.

Becker & Poliakoff, a law firm that helps international businesses invest in the United States, released a new report on The State of Foreign Direct Investment in America after analyzing the most recent full-year federal data through 2024 and issued a report today.  

The report finds the United States attracted $279 billion in foreign direct investment last year — more than double what China pulled in at $116 billion. Behind that number are assembly lines, semiconductor fabs, auto plants, and distribution centers staffed by American workers.

The distinction matters because the debate around globalization and jobs has long defaulted to a single narrative: foreign means threat. The FDI data tells a more complicated story.

South Carolina is not a state that typically leads national economic conversations. But when it comes to foreign investment and employment, it sits at the top of every ranking that matters to working people. Eight percent of all jobs in South Carolina come from majority foreign-owned companies — the highest share of any state in the country. That is one in every 12 jobs, held by real workers, at companies headquartered abroad but operating right here.

That figure reframes what foreign investment actually means at the ground level. It is not an abstraction. It is a paycheck.

At the dollar level, Texas leads all states with $22.8 billion in new FDI — driven significantly by Samsung’s $45 billion semiconductor manufacturing expansion, one of the largest foreign investments in American history. Georgia, despite ranking eighth in population, came in second at $16.3 billion, fueled by Hyundai and Kia building out major electric vehicle manufacturing operations in the state. California ranked third at $12.9 billion, followed by Ohio, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Florida, New York, Virginia, and Washington.

Manufacturing now holds a cumulative foreign direct investment position of $2.4 trillion in the United States — more than double the next closest category. That is a global vote of confidence in American production capacity, arriving at a moment when rebuilding domestic manufacturing has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement.

For men without four-year degrees — a group that has faced decades of labor market erosion — manufacturing jobs represent some of the most accessible pathways to stable, middle-class employment. Foreign-owned manufacturers are building those pathways.

Japan is now America’s single largest foreign investor, with a cumulative FDI position that grew from $694 billion in 2020 to $819 billion in 2024, edging Canada’s $812 billion. These are not speculative financial flows. They are factories, facilities, and long-term operational commitments.

Foreign direct investment reinforces the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, expands Washington’s ability to impose economic sanctions when needed, and strengthens the web of allied economic relationships that define American influence globally. The U.S. attracting more than twice China’s FDI total is not just a business metric — it is a measure of where the world’s capital allocators see stability, rule of law, and long-term opportunity.

That combination — strategic leverage abroad and real jobs at home — is the case for why winning the FDI competition matters. And right now, by the numbers, America is winning it.

The post The Jobs Keeping American Men Employed Might Have a Foreign Address appeared first on The Good Men Project.

Leadership is not just defined by authority, years, or technical knowhow anymore. In today’s fast changing business world, organizations need people who can walk through uncertainty, rally the team, make good calls when things get tense, and still push for sustainable growth. And as expectations keep climbing, leadership coaching along with executive development has become one of those must have levers, for shaping high performing leaders.

Even though a lot of professionals step into leadership roles mainly because of their expertise, actually succeeding in leadership can hinge on a slightly different skill set. Stuff like communication, emotional awareness, strategic reasoning, flexibility, and the ability to persuade others matter a lot. Building these abilities takes more than the usual classroom type of training, it needs continued coaching, some honest reflection , and personalized development plans that fit the person instead of a generic template.

The Leadership Challenge

Many leaders run into complicated situations that, honestly, can’t be solved only with technical knowledge. They have to handle mixed groups, juggle conflicting priorities, go through organizational change and keep outcomes steady when everything feels uncertain. And then, as they move upward, another issue shows up a lot: isolation. When leaders progress in their careers, they often get fewer moments to hear candid feedback, or they lose the chance for neutral, objective guidance.

Without some kind of structured development, even capable leaders can start to build blind spots that quietly reduce how effective they are. Then you see things like fuzzy communication, delegation that is not really delegation, stubbornness toward change, and decision making biases that mess things up. This can drag down both day to day results for the person and the broader organizational outcomes too.

So this is where leadership coaching can play a genuinely transformative role, and yes it can change how they think and act.

Why Leadership Coaching Matters

Creating a Leadership Excellence Centre can assist a leader to assess his/her strengths and establish future opportunities for growth and create a strategy to improve. In comparison to traditional forms of training, leadership coaching is focused on an individual and therefore provides an opportunity for the person to assess their own unique challenges, created by their own leadership style, and establish their own individualised goals.

A good coach will work as an equal partner in a process known as ‘thought partner’ as opposed to ‘instructor’. The coach assists the leader to develop increased self awareness through the use of powerful questioning techniques, creating accountability through constructive feedback and by utilising the combined knowledge and experience of the coach and coachee  to develop the leader as an effective leader.

Importance of Self-reflection

Coaches place a great deal of importance on self-reflection. By regularly reflecting on their behaviours/assumptions, behaviours and decision-making processes are also better able to adapt to changes in their environment and make more informed decisions. Research and industry data continue to support the view that leadership coaching has a positive impact on communication, relationship-building, and overall leadership effectiveness.

Executive Development as a Strategic Investment

Executive development is more than just one-on-one coaching; it is a full-fledged solution for helping current and future leaders prepare to face the increasing complexity of their roles. Effective executive development programmes are built on a foundation that includes coaching, leadership assessments, experiential learning, mentoring, and the strategic development of skills.

When an organisation invests in executive development, it is not only enhancing the performance of individual executives but also developing the capacity for leadership within the organisation. Developing strong leadership pipelines ensures continuity within an organisation and supports succession planning while increasing the resilience of the entire organisation.

Modern executive development programs focus on several key areas:

• Strategic thinking and decision-making
• Change leadership
• Emotional intelligence
• Organizational influence
• Talent development
• Communication and stakeholder management
• Innovation and adaptability

By strengthening these competencies, organizations create leaders who can successfully guide teams through both opportunities and challenges.

The Growing Importance of Personalized Coaching

Generic leadership training often fails because it treats leadership development as a one-size-fits-all process. In reality, every leader faces unique circumstances, strengths, and development needs.

This is why personalized coaching solutions have gained significant traction among organizations worldwide. Platforms offering specialized skills such as leadership coaching and executive development provide tailored coaching experiences that help senior leaders address real-world challenges while accelerating professional growth. These programs combine expert coaching with scalable digital tools, enabling organizations to support leadership development across multiple levels and geographic regions.

Personalized coaching ensures that development efforts remain relevant, measurable, and directly aligned with business objectives.

Building Essential Leadership Skills

The most effective leaders keep investing in their own personal evolution, and not just because it looks good on paper. Coaching plus executive development really helps build up a handful of core leadership competencies, like more steady decision making and clearer influence— even if it feels a bit awkward at first.

Self-Awareness

Self aware leaders kinda understand how their actions affect other people, not just themselves. They get the picture of what they’re good at and where they fall short, and they actively look for chances to get better. When this inner noticing goes up, decisions tend to be more solid, relationships become stronger, and the team overall starts to perform in a more consistent, better way.

Emotional Intelligence

Leaders with high emotional intelligence are, in a sense, better prepared to handle conflict, build trust, and help collaboration grow. They manage not just their own feelings but also kind of tune in to the emotions of the folks they lead.

Strategic Perspective

Leadership coaching helps executives to step out of the daily operational issues and focus on long-term organizational goals. This broader perspective allows leaders to foresee challenges and recognize opportunities for improvement. 

Adaptability

In a world of constant change, one of the most important leadership qualities is adaptability. Coaching develops the agility leaders need to respond effectively to evolving market conditions, technological advances, and organizational changes. 

The Organizational Impact

Leadership coaching is not just about the individual leader. Executive development organizations report greater employee engagement, improved team performance, increased collaboration, and more consistent leadership.

Good communication, decision-making and a positive culture from leaders increases the likelihood that employees will remain engaged and productive. Leadership quality affects all aspects of organizational performance, including innovation, customer satisfaction, talent retention, and long-term growth. 

Conclusion

Experience does not equate to leadership excellence. It takes deliberate construction, constant study, and a dedication to improvement. Leadership coaching and executive development give leaders the structure, support, and insights needed to achieve their full potential.

Leadership development is no longer a nice-to-have for organizations facing ever more complex challenges; it is a strategic imperative. Coaching and executive development build better individuals, better teams and ultimately better organizations by enabling leaders to become more self-aware, more adaptable and more effective. 

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This post brought to you by Safdar Ali. On LinkedIn here. 

Photo: iStock

The post How Leadership Coaching and Executive Development Create Stronger, More Effective Leaders appeared first on The Good Men Project.

For a lot of people, the perfect Sunday morning has become oddly hard to find. In much of the country, weekends now feel almost as rushed as weekdays: chain coffee grabbed on the go, errands squeezed into traffic, and downtowns that seem to have lost their easy rhythm somewhere along the way.

But there are still places where Sunday mornings unfold the way people imagine they should: slow, walkable, comforting, and quietly full of life.

A new survey by Calgary.com, a real estate platform, asked 3,022 respondents to identify the towns and neighborhoods best suited to that ideal version of Sunday. The study looked at the kinds of places where people can linger over coffee, browse independent bookstores, wander farmers markets, sit outside at brunch, or simply stroll through streets that still feel personal and lived-in.

Old Village in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, ranked first. The neighborhood captures the quieter coastal version of South Carolina life that many people increasingly crave. Its cottages, waterfront views, shrimp boats, cafés, porches, and shaded streets create a Sunday atmosphere that feels deeply tied to both the water and the community around it. Even with Charleston nearby, Old Village still seems to move at its own pace, with Sundays built around walking, sitting outside, and letting the day unfold slowly.

Old Colorado City in Colorado Springs, Colorado, came second. Its Sunday rhythm feels lived-in rather than overly polished, with locals moving between old brick storefronts, coffee shops, bakeries, galleries, and quiet side streets with the mountains nearby. It has enough history to feel grounded, but enough everyday life to avoid becoming a postcard. Sundays here feel less about doing something impressive and more about lingering.

West Asheville, North Carolina, ranked third, offering a slightly scruffier and more neighborhood-oriented Sunday charm than Asheville’s better-known downtown core. Its cafés, bookstores, patios, bungalows, and independent shops create a pace that feels relaxed and deeply local. Sundays often seem to stretch out naturally here, with breakfast turning into lunch, errands becoming conversations, and people drifting through the neighborhood without much urgency.

Downtown Ocean Springs, Mississippi, also stood out. The town delivers the kind of coastal Sunday many people quietly fantasize about, with oak-lined streets, cafés, galleries, beach walks, and small restaurants all moving at an easy pace. It has enough artistic energy to feel lively, but not so much that it becomes hectic. Sundays here are less about plans and more about atmosphere: coffee, conversation, wandering, and staying outside as long as possible.

The Eureka Springs Historic District in Arkansas ranked fifth. Its winding streets, old staircases, hidden cafés, local galleries, and Victorian storefronts make the historic core feel built for slow exploration. Even when visitors are around, the town still carries an introspective, slightly eccentric calm. It is the kind of place where people can spend half the morning wandering without much of a destination.

Downtown Beaufort, North Carolina, followed with a softer coastal rhythm. The waterfront, old homes, cafés, docks, and oak-lined streets naturally encourage wandering. It feels historic without becoming overly touristy, and calm without feeling sleepy. Sundays here revolve around coffee by the water, slow walks past boats and porches, and simply enjoying being outside.

Historic Franklin Square in Franklin, Tennessee, captured the kind of Southern Sunday many people increasingly romanticize. Brick sidewalks, porches, cafés, boutiques, old churches, and tree-lined streets create a rhythm centered around wandering rather than rushing. Even with growth around it, the downtown still feels grounded in everyday community life.

Old Town Winchester, Virginia, ranked eighth, offering a quieter and more old-fashioned version of the perfect Sunday morning. Brick sidewalks, historic storefronts, cafés, porches, and tree-lined residential streets create a gentle, grounded pace. It is the kind of place where ordinary routines still shape the atmosphere of the weekend.

Historic Wickford Village in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, brought a more understated New England coastal charm to the list. Its old houses, tiny shops, cafés, marinas, and harbor views create a Sunday pace that feels almost naturally slow. Even with visitors around, the village still feels rooted in community life rather than tourism alone.

Rounding out the top 10 was the Starland District in Savannah, Georgia. It feels like Savannah’s slower, more creative younger sibling, with Sundays built around cafés, bookstores, bakeries, patios, galleries, shaded streets, old houses, and converted storefronts. The neighborhood has enough energy to feel alive, but never rushed.

Beyond the rankings, the survey suggests that the “perfect Sunday” is less about doing something grand and more about escaping the pace of the rest of the week. When respondents were asked what defines the ideal slow Sunday, the top answer was reading or relaxing at home, followed by sitting outside with coffee and walking through a quiet neighborhood.

The broader pattern is clear: people are not necessarily chasing packed itineraries. They are looking for permission to slow down. The most appealing version of Sunday seems to be simple, local, and low-pressure — the kind of day built around coffee, fresh air, a quiet walk, or doing very little at all.

When it comes to what makes a town feel “slow Sunday friendly,” quiet streets and low traffic mattered most. That ranked ahead of walkability and a friendly community atmosphere, suggesting that the mood of a place can matter just as much as its amenities. The biggest things that spoil a slow Sunday include noise, congestion, heavy traffic, pressure to stay productive, feeling unsafe while walking, limited green space, crowded chain businesses, and overdevelopment.

One of the strongest findings is how much this atmosphere matters when people think about where they want to live. A large majority said a neighborhood’s Sunday feel is important when deciding where they would want to live, which suggests that people are not just evaluating homes by bedrooms, commutes, or square footage. They are also imagining how life will feel there on an ordinary weekend morning.

The survey also found that genuinely relaxing Sundays are far from guaranteed. Only a small share of respondents said they feel relaxed every Sunday, while the largest group said they only feel relaxed occasionally. In other words, the slow Sunday is still something many people want, but not something most people consistently get.

That may explain why neighborhoods with coffee shops, quiet streets, parks, porches, water views, bookstores, and a strong local rhythm feel so appealing. They represent a version of everyday life that feels increasingly hard to protect.

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Photo: iStock 

The post Study Reveals America’s Best Places for a Slow Sunday appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Gabriela Ramirez-Perez

For years, Congress and elected officials across the country have sidestepped one of the clearest economic problems facing working families: the minimum wage no longer keeps pace with the real cost of living.

Today, even full-time work at the federal minimum wage doesn’t pay enough to rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. And too often, politicians have intervened to keep it that way.

For example, I live in Oklahoma, where the state minimum wage has been tied to the federal rate of $7.25 an hour since 2009. As a result, a full-time minimum-wage worker here earns about $15,000 a year before taxes — below the poverty line for an individual and wholly inadequate to survive.

This problem did not happen by accident.

In Oklahoma, some state lawmakers introduced bills to raise the minimum wage year after year — only to see those proposals die without a hearing or a vote. In 2014, the legislature went even further, passing a law that prevented cities and towns from raising local wages, even if local voters and community leaders supported the change.

That meant Oklahomans who wanted to see workers earn a fair wage were left with one remaining option: taking the issue directly to the people.

Again and again, voters in red, blue, and purple states alike have passed measures to raise their minimum wages. In the last decade or so, voters have approved minimum-wage increases in about a dozen states, including Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Washington, plus D.C.

In early 2024, Oklahomans turned to the state’s initiative petition process as well. Over 150,00 voters signed a petition to place State Question 832 on the ballot. If approved, SQ 832 will gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over several years and then index future increases to the Consumer Price Index after 2030.

Yet even as Oklahomans moved toward a vote, politics intervened. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt delayed the election for SQ 832 nearly two years. The wait is about to come to an end on June 16 — when voters will finally get their say.

In the meantime, the delay and political games have forced working families in Oklahoma to wait as costs continue to rise. While wages for our lowest-wage workers have been frozen for 17 years, housing, groceries, and utility bills have all become more expensive.

Today, a minimum-wage earner in Oklahoma would need to work about 93 hours a week — more than two full-time jobs — just to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.

No one should have to work that much simply to survive. That fact is proof that the current economy is failing many of the people who keep our communities running.

Workers most affected by legislative inaction are the very people we rely on every day: home health aides caring for seniors, child care workers helping parents stay employed, restaurant staff serving meals, retail workers keeping stores open, and hotel staff assisting travelers. Many of these essential workers still struggle to afford basic necessities.

Our working families have spent years shouldering the cost of federal and state inaction. They are paying the costs through financial stress, unstable housing, delayed health care, and less time with their families because they are constantly working to stay afloat.

Many other states have already raised the minimum wage above the federal level, recognizing a simple truth: an economy works best when working people can afford to participate in it.

SQ 832 gives Oklahoma voters the chance to move the state forward after years of legislative inaction. On June 16, Oklahoma voters can take an important step themselves.

But this issue should not rest solely on state ballot measures. Workers nationwide deserve wages that keep pace with the real cost of living — a goal that ultimately requires action from Congress, too.

Because hard work should mean stability, not poverty.

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Previously Published on otherwords.org with Creative Commons License

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The post Wages Haven’t Kept Up — and Working Families Are Paying the Price appeared first on The Good Men Project.

You may not realize it, but your phone has become an open door for corporations, scammers, advertisers, and marketers to access you at every hour of the day. Most people accept this as normal because the harassment comes in small bursts of text messages, robocalls, push notifications, and emails. The problem is that perpetual digital intrusion can have a negative impact on your life.

When you’re constantly engaged with your phone, you don’t get much time to sit with your own thoughts, and your brain can’t unwind. Constant digital stimulation creates unnecessary stress and anxiety, kills your attention span, and leaves you exhausted for no apparent reason. It’s taken years for this level of disruption to be normalized. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable.

Your attention is the most valuable commercial product

Companies want your attention because every view and click has the potential to turn into revenue. You think these companies are being cool by sending you coupon codes and deals, but they’re actually reeling you into a long-term marketing funnel where they’ll continue to send you emails and texts until you buy from them.

While emails and text messages are easy to opt out of, robocalls can be a little tricky. When you request to be removed from someone’s list, they’re required to remove you immediately. When you put your number on the official Do Not Call Registry, companies aren’t allowed to call you without your explicit permission. Still, millions of people get annoying robocalls every year.

Laws like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) were created to stop these calls, but many companies violate the law on a regular basis. If you’re on the do not call list or you’ve made unsuccessful requests to be removed from specific call lists, you might have grounds for a TCPA lawsuit.

Notifications train you into compulsive behavior

Studies have shown that people check their phones about 200 times a day. That’s a lot considering most people have jobs they need to focus on throughout the day.

Every time you receive a ding or push notification on your phone, it trains you to instantly click to see what just happened. This is intentional to keep you engaged and to influence you to spend money.

Constant interruptions hurt your ability to focus

Being subjected to digital harassment changes your brain with enough repetition. It gradually kills your attention span and your ability to concentrate for even just a few minutes. The more interruptions you experience, the harder it is to maintain deep focus.

Part of the problem is constant task switching between apps and text messages. If you’re constantly flipping between browser tabs and apps, you’re not fully focused on anything. If you do need to focus on a particular task, a single notification can throw you off.

It takes about 23 minutes to fully refocus after an interruption. When those interruptions happen all day long, it becomes impossible. Over time, this experience rewires you to seek fast dopamine hits that don’t require real engagement. If you’ve found yourself struggling to read long articles, books, or emails without jumping around to other apps, now you know why.

Social media induces hypervigilance

Social media platforms train users to stay in an emotionally reactive state. Algorithms are engineered to deliver content contrary to what people already believe, with the most inflammatory comments in view. For example, there could be 1,000 comments on a post and Facebook will display the comments that are getting the most negative attention. This is by design. Conflict generates more interaction and that means ads get more visibility and companies pocket more revenue.

Unfortunately, the experience of getting triggered constantly by social media content doesn’t stop when you put down your phone. Many people remain in a state of hypervigilance long after they’ve disconnected from a particular heated debate.

Boundaries matter

If you’re always accessible, digital harassment will follow you everywhere. However, it’s avoidable by setting boundaries. You don’t need to stop using your phone completely or delete all of your social media apps at once. Start slowly by reducing the time you spend using social media and designate periods of time for resting without looking at a screen. This will help you recover your attention span and you might even notice you’re getting better sleep and feeling less anxious.

Silence and time to yourself are valuable

It’s easy to feel like spending time on your devices is part of real life, but it’s really just digital noise competing for your attention to make corporations rich. Many people assume digital disruptions are unavoidable, but that doesn’t have to be your reality. Once you understand how your devices and apps are manipulating your behavior to make advertisers rich, you can reclaim your focus and protect your mental space from constant intrusion.

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This post brought to by by Larry Alton

Photo: iStock

The post We’re Living in an Age of Constant Digital Harassment appeared first on The Good Men Project.

By Alvin Powell | Harvard Staff Writer | Harvard Gazette

One of the first national efforts to combat loneliness as a societal health problem fizzled after the pandemic amid economic slowdown and political polarization. But the initiative also raised awareness sufficiently that is still recognized as a public health problem today.

“It started well, but I think it’s fair to say that COVID put a bit of a spanner in the works,” said Tracey Crouch, former United Kingdom minister for loneliness, of her nation’s efforts. “I do think there’s still a real drive from policymakers around the world to recognize the issue of loneliness, recognize the health impact, social impact of loneliness, and try to tackle it in their own unique ways.”

Experts from the U.K. and the U.S. agreed with that assessment at an event Tuesday hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Acknowledgment of the depth and breadth of the issue in the U.S. got a major boost during the pandemic, but efforts in U.K. began earlier.

Alex Smith, a Shorenstein fellow and author of a recent report on the U.K.’s efforts to address loneliness, said globally the problem has been made worse by increased social change toward individualism, fostered by the development of smartphones and social media.

In the U.K., the response to the problem was ignited by academic research highlighting loneliness’s impact, which created a ripple effect across society and drew the attention of Member of Parliament Jo Cox after her 2015 election.

Philanthropy became interested and started to invest in the matter, and community programs began to show impacts that encouraged others to get involved.

Cox helped press the issue among U.K. political leaders. Her murder in 2016 as she walked to a constituent meeting caused an outpouring of grief and further energized efforts.

“Jo knew that while loneliness is a deeply personal and subjective emotion, its drivers and solutions were really everyone’s business, and there are solutions,” said Olivia Field, chief executive of U.K.-based Jo Cox Foundation. “Her legacy ultimately shattered the myth that it only affects older people and proved that it impacts people of all ages and all backgrounds. She refused to accept living in a lonely country.”

The surge following Cox’s death was driven by nonprofit organizations and governmental cross-party collaboration, which resulted in a commission on loneliness, Field said. By 2017 the narrative had shifted to highlight that many people are affected by loneliness, making it less hidden and an open public health priority.

The next phase, Field said, was a unified call to action that included creation of the world’s first minister for loneliness, along with a national strategy, government funding, and a commitment to more research.

An important characteristic, Field said, was that the issue was a “blank canvas” politically in the U.K. That meant there was no institutional defensiveness to overcome and that working across party lines was easier.

“The winning formula included robust evidence alongside powerful storytelling,” Field said. “We used the hard data that had been collected for a couple of decades or longer to demonstrate the scale of the problem and its impact. We did that alongside human stories that made it relatable and undeniable. The sector consensus was absolutely critical, so we spoke with one unified voice.”

The health impacts of loneliness were recognized as important in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when isolation and social distancing were key responses, said Smith, who is also founder of the Cares Family charities in the U.K. But the energy around the issue waned as the pandemic wore on.

There’s not much you can say was good [that] happened in COVID, but one thing that did happen was that the stigma around loneliness was reduced.

–Tracey Crouch

The post-pandemic economic crisis, marked in the U.S. by the ending of government pandemic stimulus programs and beginning of high inflation, refocused public attention, as did other crises with global ramifications, such as the Ukraine War and increasing political polarization.

“There’s not much you can say was good [that] happened in COVID, but one thing that did happen was that the stigma around loneliness was reduced,” Crouch said. “People began to understand that it was a real feeling. Things could have been done differently but at least people were now talking about it.”

In the U.S., a high point in the fight against loneliness occurred in 2023, when then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about the ill health effects of loneliness.

Titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community,” the publication drew wide attention to the issue.

Trey Leveque, former engagement chief of staff to Murthy, said the advisory grew out of Murthy’s belief that isolation and loneliness are not fringe issues but global ones. Loneliness, Murthy felt, highlights broad problems of social connection in the same way that rising hunger highlights poverty and other major social problems.

“The evidence and research became impossible to ignore,” Leveque said. “Researchers were increasingly demonstrating that social connection and disconnection affect not only emotional well-being but physical health, mental health, emotional outcomes, workplace performance, even civic participation. What has long been considered a private struggle in so many situations and scenarios had started to become recognized as a public health issue, which led to the report that Dr. Murthy put out in 2023.”

Though public attention and political intention have both become fragmented in the years since, panelists agreed that the issue remains potent.

Cultural shifts are continuing to occur, with Asian societies seeing a shift toward individualism and the declining pull of the central family that has been seen in other societies. Artificial intelligence has spread rapidly in recent years and may impact the issue in ways still unknown.

An important date in the U.K. comes June 16, when the 10th anniversary of Cox’s death is likely to draw new attention to the issue.

“I’m hopeful that some of the same actors and a new generation of actors will see — particularly with the arrival of artificial intelligence, which is going to change again how we interact — that how we interact with one another and our communities is a fundamental part of what it means to be human,” Smith said.

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This story is reprinted with permission from The Harvard Gazette.

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The post How Loneliness Became Major Public Health Issue appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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Navigating the intricacies of family businesses and large corporations reveals distinct advantages and challenges for each. Family-run companies often thrive on close relationships, a shared mission, and the ability to focus on long-term goals rather than short-term profits. As Robinson Crothers explains, these factors can help create strong workplace cultures, can help foster employee loyalty, and encourage innovation driven by agility and personal investment. On the other hand, large corporations benefit from greater resources and reach but may struggle with bureaucracy, diluted values, and employee disengagement as they scale.

Core Strengths of Family Businesses

Family businesses often excel by prioritizing the long-term health of the company over quick profits. This allows them to invest in sustainable growth and weather market fluctuations more effectively. With a clear sense of shared values among family members and employees, these companies can help foster a workplace culture rooted in trust and loyalty. The absence of complex bureaucracy means these businesses can respond to challenges and opportunities much faster, keeping them competitive in a changing backdrop.

Where Large Corporations Struggle

Large corporations frequently find themselves caught in the race for quarterly earnings, often at the expense of long-term innovation and resilience. Their layered management structures can slow down the decision-making process, making it difficult to pivot quickly when market conditions shift. In sprawling organizations, promoting a unified culture becomes a formidable challenge as growth introduces diverse teams and priorities.

Even well-known retail chains have struggled to maintain their original identity as they expanded, leading to diluted values and a loss of customer connection. The sheer size and complexity of these firms can sometimes make employees feel disconnected from the company’s core mission.

The Value of a Mission

Shared beliefs act as a compass for family businesses, guiding decisions and shaping interactions internally and with customers. A bakery owned by siblings might be known throughout a neighborhood for its commitment to honest ingredients and warm customer service, helping to create a sense of trust that keeps people coming back.

This alignment cannot only help strengthen employee engagement but also help build lasting relationships with clients. When everyone in an organization is aligned around a common vision, it becomes easier to navigate challenges and celebrate successes together, further reinforcing the company’s reputation and resilience. Such a foundation can also inspire creative problem-solving and innovation, as employees feel empowered to contribute ideas.

Employee Commitment and Retention

Family businesses inspire loyalty among their staff, thanks to personal relationships and a supportive environment. Employees may feel a stronger sense of belonging, knowing that their contributions are recognized by people who genuinely care about the company’s future. It’s not uncommon to hear about workers staying with a family-owned firm for decades, passing down stories and traditions to new hires, which helps preserve a close-knit atmosphere.

Larger organizations often struggle to replicate this sense of connection, which can lead to higher turnover rates. When employees feel like just another number, their engagement and dedication can wane, impacting overall performance and customer satisfaction. These challenges can be exacerbated by frequent restructuring or leadership changes, which can create uncertainty and erode trust within the workforce.

Decision-Making and Organizational Agility

Quick, decisive action is often a hallmark of family businesses. Without layers of approval, these organizations can implement new ideas or respond to challenges almost immediately. A small manufacturer might shift production overnight to address a sudden market demand, while a larger competitor lags behind, tangled in meetings and paperwork. These rapid shifts can be crucial in industries where consumer needs and technology are constantly changing.

In contrast, the bureaucracy common in big firms can slow progress to a crawl, making it tough to adapt in fast-paced industries. The ability to stay nimble often gives family-owned companies a competitive edge, allowing them to capitalize on opportunities that others might miss.

Applying Family Business Practices to Larger Firms

There are valuable lessons big firms can draw from family-run enterprises. Integrating a long-term perspective and a strong sense of purpose can help anchor company culture even as teams grow. Simplifying decision-making processes and encouraging open communication can help foster greater innovation and employee satisfaction.

By borrowing these strategies, large organizations can strike a balance between scale and agility, ensuring they don’t lose sight of what made them successful in the first place. This blend of ambition and authenticity can drive sustainable growth, even in a rapidly changing business landscape.

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This content is brought to you by Robinson Crothers

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True story: my wife teaches grade school.

Each year, I hear stories almost daily from her and her friends who teach in public schools. Some are frustrating, others absurd. The ones I don’t forget are all, in their way, quietly heartbreaking.

Last fall, several teachers noticed that three siblings (third grade and younger) were digging through the garbage at school. Turns out they were looking for food to take home for the weekend since there would not otherwise be enough to eat.

Another story: one of my wife’s fifth-grade students broke down crying before a standardized test. The child admitted she was having trouble concentrating because she hadn’t eaten. A few teachers pooled money to buy food and snacks for her. Later they learned the family was homeless and living in a motel.

My wife, a veteran with more than a decade in public schools keeps nonperishable snacks in her desk for the kids who can’t focus because they’re hungry. This is not some deeply impoverished rural area, nor the most desperate pocket of an inner city. This is a county less than thirty minutes from the nation’s capital.

Another child once hoarded ketchup packets from the cafeteria to take home in case there was nothing else to eat.

The story that still haunts me most involves a student who regularly insisted he wasn’t hungry during lunch. My wife could nevertheless hear his stomach growling. Eventually, she understood he was pretending not to be hungry because he was embarrassed he couldn’t afford food.

Such stories are, of course, not unusual. Teachers across America routinely spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars of their own money every year on classroom supplies, snacks, winter coats, hygiene products, and emergency items not covered by existing school budgets and programs. Our public school systems increasingly are counted on to function not simply as educational institutions, but as food programs, counseling centers, social-service hubs, and after-hours points of contact for overwhelmed parents.

Which brings us to Jeff Bezos.

Recently, Bezos dismissed arguments for higher taxes on billionaires with the blithe remark that even doubling the taxes he pays “is not gonna help that teacher in Queens.”

This is the kind of statement—however nonchalantly and frequently it’s offered these days—that could only be expressed by someone who is completely insulated from and oblivious about ordinary life in this country.

It’s notable that so often these debates are framed around how much the wealthy are taxed and not on the loopholes and ever-shrinking rates they enjoy. No one, incidentally, is suggesting a single billionaire’s taxes might magically “solve” public education. But public schools are funded the same way roads, libraries, fire departments, water systems, and all manner of safety infrastructure are funded: through public investment spread across populations. This is how a modern society functions, and that society’s health can be measured by how well it serves its taxpayers.

What Bezos unintentionally reveals is something far more discouraging—that many ultrawealthy Americans no longer seem capable of comprehending public goods at all, and the types of tradeoffs that made the U.S.A. a superpower.

Teachers, on the other hand, understand them intimately.

Teachers understand hungry children struggle to learn or pay attention. They understand that students carrying trauma and instability into classrooms need the kind of support every child deserves. They understand that safety, nutrition, and emotional stability are not luxuries unrelated to education itself. Most importantly, teachers understand something too many billionaires—and politicians—seem determined to ignore: resources are the lifeblood of a functioning school, or society.

If resources did not matter, teachers would not allocate money from their modest paychecks to help feed students. If resources did not matter, millions of Americans would not experience food insecurity in the wealthiest nation on earth. If resources did not matter, public schools would not simultaneously be expected to solve poverty while systematically being blamed, underfunded, and scapegoated.

The truly remarkable thing about Bezos’s comment is not simply its indifference, but its failure of imagination. Teachers witness every day the ways small interventions materially alter children’s lives. A backpack of food for the weekend matters. A free lunch matters. A counselor matters. Smaller class sizes matter. Stable housing matters. Teachers know this because they live with the consequences billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk experience only as abstractions.

Put another way, public education in America is already being subsidized privately. By exhausted teachers stoically compensating for political failure and cowardly policy.

And yet we continue to hear from people insulated by unimaginable wealth that greater public investment would make little difference. Never mind the fact that people like Bezos and Musk lending their talents and riches toward helping innocent Americans would be a great act of patriotism, many of us would just like to see the 1% paying the same percentage of taxes everyone else does.

Bezos, through his wealth and arrogance, makes himself a convenient target, but the issue is both a national and moral crisis. The problem is not that the money doesn’t exist, it’s that enough of us—by the way we think, the way we vote—have determined it’s simply not important enough. Only in America could we have business geniuses accepting that it’s not imperative to invest in our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

Teachers, meanwhile, are reminded every day about what our elected officials and disconnected elite can afford to ignore.

Teachers see children arrive hungry. They see exhaustion, fear, loneliness, neglect, and need. How can they do it? Because they also see resilience, curiosity, humor, kindness, and the hope of possibility. They understand something our political and economic elites increasingly do not: a society’s soul is measured by the seriousness with which it treats seemingly impossible problems.

A final story. One of my wife’s friends, who teaches high school, had a student who was arrested for shoplifting. It turns out he had been doing this from a young age. He was stealing food. To eat.

Think of this kid, and all the other ones, especially the ones with increasingly fewer advocates who can defend or assist them. Right now, far too many teachers are doing the dirty work of holding together a social contract billionaires scoff at, if they think about it at all.

We should listen to them instead.

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