The time is now to start listening – to your body that is
It’s not uncommon, especially lately, at one point or another, to start asking ourselves some of the following questions: Am I working too hard? Why does life feel as if I can’t keep up? Why am I constantly feeling stressed and Exhausted? If any one of these questions resonant with you, it is very possible you are one of many experiencing burnout. But what exactly does the term burnout even mean?
Burnout can look like different things to different people, yet it is almost always is characterized by an overwhelming feeling of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion. Burnout is often the result of prolonged exposure to stress, but there is a nuanced difference.
Being stressed out means there is too much going on, but being burned out means not enough positive input causing a feeling of emptiness (such as; no motivation, not caring or ability to see hope or potential for positive change).
Usually burnout is associated with work, but there are definitely other factors that can contribute outside your job, including personal lifestyle (e.g. too much responsibility and not enough support) or even personality traits (e.g. type A or need for perfection).
Below are a few books that can help you recognize and take action to help better cope with the omnipresent burnout in our world, learn to listen to your body, and find methods to deal in healthier ways the many stressors and demands that today’s life can hold.
This book focuses on helping women identify and explain burnout and how we experience it very different than our male counterparts.
A best-seller that relies on science-based finding also lays out realistic ways in which women can recover from burnout to live a more joyful life by minimizing stress and managing emotions.
Also comes with worksheets and exercises that makes self-care and wellness within the realm of the possible. Click to see “Burnout“.
This hugely popular best-selling book delves into traumatic stress and how it impacts our body. Using scientific data, Van Der Kolk breaks down how trauma literally reshapes both the brain and body.
In addition he explores ways to retrain the brain by activating parts of the brain that can help including: sports, yoga, meditation, and much more.
Bad habits and unhealthy ways of thinking are part of what it is to be human. Author Groeschel understands that battle with negative thinking and helps you identify such “false thinking” and rewire your thought processes.
He also incorporates faith, allowing you to bring in a higher power to enable a life that brings more peace and joy. to Click for more on “Winning the War“.
The same people behind the January 6 insurrection are now trying to overthrow the government in a slow-motion coup.
If they succeed, you can kiss our democracy goodbye.
Trump ultimately failed to overturn the 2020 election because a few election officials — secretaries of state in particular — rightfully certified the results despite heavy pressure from him and his enablers to overturn them.
In 37 states, the secretaries of state are the chief elections officers. That means they oversee elections and voter registration. In 2020, they held the United States’ rickety democracy together by certifying Joe Biden’s win.
But what happens if secretaries of state won’t protect democracy?
Trump’s choice in Georgia is Jody Hice (high-se), who voted against certifying the 2020 election in the Georgia House.
His choice in Michigan is Kristina Karamo (kah-rah-mo), who falsely claimed to have witnessed election fraud as a pollster.
In Arizona, Trump has endorsed Mark Finchem (fin-chum), a QAnon-supporting member of the Oath Keepers militia who participated in the January 6 insurrection.
At least 20 other candidates now running for secretary of state do not believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
The plan is to take over the machinery of our democracy from the ground up – so that in the 2024 presidential election, only Trump loyalists will be certifying elections.
[CLIP: “We’re taking action. And that action is we’re taking over school boards, we’re taking over the Republican Party through the precinct committee strategy. We’re taking over all the elections.”]
Thousands of Republicans who have taken up Bannon’s call have also signed up to be local elections officials and poll workers.
We can’t allow our democracy to be overtaken like this.
These positions, especially secretaries of state, are the last lines of defense in a democracy.
And we’ve seen what happens when secretaries of state put partisan interests ahead of election integrity.
Trump and Bannon’s goal is to replicate these abuses across America and put into power Trump loyalists who care more about electing Trump than upholding democracy.
Voter suppression is nothing new. But it’s now occurring on a scale we haven’t seen before: an entire party’s election strategy aimed at thwarting the will of voters.
So what can we do about this?
First, spread the word about the GOP’s authoritarian plan. Make sure your friends and family know what the stakes are this fall.
Next, get involved locally. Volunteer to be a poll worker or join a campaign. From school boards to secretaries of state, every position matters.
And of course, vote! Check your registration early and make a plan to cast your ballot.
In 2020, millions of people organized, volunteered, and voted to keep American democracy alive. We, the people, must work to elect public servants who will uphold democracy and stand up to those who are hellbent on undermining it.
But is it really necessary for you to know that I am female, love only cats (no dogs) and just got engaged?
No? Good, cause none of that is true. (Except the female part) That’s only one example of the odd twists that can come with the current trend of people going viral when they show “realness” and vulnerability.
Heard of acting? That’s what Meryl Streep does when she plays a person that never went to Yale and is not a rich famous actor, wink wink.
I suppose, as with so many online phenomena these days, it’s TikTok leading the way. No longer a place for young girls to dominate using only dancing, beauty and feminine wiles, it’s now a place where less objectively attractive people can blow up by showing, ostensibly, who they are.
This trend towards realness has, based on informal research, also spilled over into places like LinkedIn, Medium and even Twitter.
On the whole, I think it’s a great thing. If Meryl Streep was only able to play herself, movies would be much less interesting, no doubt!
And maybe at least half of all the realness really is real. Just take it with a grain of salt if you see posts of someone getting engaged 3 times. In the same week.
All kidding aside this trend is part of a bigger, important evolution in digital communication
The evolution from journalistic norms, such as never referring to yourself directly but only as “your scribe”, “the writer”, “your correspondent” or just “one”, as in “one can only wonder…” to today’s norm of writing like the whole world wants to read your diary….
These journalistic conventions seem archaic and even ridiculous when the formerly forbidden “I” is commonplace and the authenticity of direct TikTok style casual presentation is already dominant and growing as a trend.
But the overall shift has more than just a style preference behind it, if you ask this writer (me).
It’s also far more than just the outgrowth of armies of non-journalists communicating spontaneously in every format and on every platform.
It’s really the early beginnings of what has become a common topic of late: the transition to the so-called Metaverse.
Not the Zuckerbergian Metaverse where people run around without legs and have joyless celebrations of themselves.
But rather, the real life cyber world where billions are on their phones communicating in various ways basically all the time. Even while jaywalking.
And as we do this more in every imaginable format, the desire to see “beautiful” landscape photos that have been photoshopped to death, instagram style, is eventually diminished to zero.
And what follows in a new hunger for the “real” or at least the honest seeming portrayal of the real (hi there Meryl!) and content that pushes an entirely different layer of psychological buttons.
As I mentioned above, dear reader, I love this! In spite of the fact that it leads to really scary TikToks (just check out the posts of some of the people that follow you on Tiktok (to see what I mean, the ones that follow 8753 people and get followed by like, 23 have nice videos…) where the frightening reality that’s out there (the banality of empirical unattractiveness you might call it) is already on full display, and how.
But that’s just the price to pay for a deeper and more authentic experience. And for the benefit of the real and valuable advice and knowledge you can get directly from “non-professional” actors who are not acting (presumably). We are reaping the profits of real life experiences, in exchange for nothing more than our attention, and clicks, likes and follows. And I say, Amen to that, bro.
Data-driven personalized ads are the lifeblood of the internet. To a growing number of lawmakers, they’re also nefarious
Earlier this month, the European Union Parliament passed sweeping new rules aimed at limiting how companies and websites can track people online to target them with advertisements.
Targeted advertising based on people’s online behavior has long been the business model that underwrites the internet. It allows advertisers to use the mass of personal data collected by Meta, Google, and other tech companies as people browse the web to serve ads to users by sorting them into tens of thousands of hyperspecific categories.
But behavioral advertising is also controversial. Critics argue that the practice enables discrimination, potentially only offering certain groups of people economic opportunities. They also say serving people ads based on what big tech companies assume they’re interested in potentially leaves people vulnerable to scams, fraud, and disinformation. Notoriously, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used personal data gleaned from Facebook profiles to target certain Americans with pro-Trump messages and certain Britons with pro-Brexit ads.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote, according to Jan Penfrat, a senior policy adviser at European digital rights group EDRi, were “wake-up calls” to the Europe Union to crack down. Lawmakers in the U.S. are also looking into ways to regulate behavioral advertising.
What Will the European Parliament’s New Regulations Do?
There’s been a long back and forth about how much to crack down on targeted advertising in the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s big legislative package aimed at regulating Big Tech.
Everything from a total ban on behavioral advertising to more modest changes around ad transparency has at some point been on the table.
The bill also includes a ban on so-called dark patterns —“design choices that steer people into decisions they may not have made under normal conditions—such as the endless clicks it takes to opt out of being tracked by cookies on many websites.”
That measure is critical, according to Alexandre de Streel, the academic director of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe, because of how tech companies responded to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s 2016 tech regulation.
In a study on online advertising for the Parliament’s crucial Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, de Streel and nearly a dozen other experts documented how “dark patterns” had become a major tool used by websites and platforms to persuade users to provide consent for sharing their data. Their recommendations for the DSA—which included more robust enforcement of the GDPR, stricter rules about obtaining consent, and the dark patterns ban—were included in the final bill.
“We are going in the right direction if we better enforce the GDPR and add these amendments on ‘dark patterns,’ ” De Streel told The Markup.
German member of European Parliament Patrick Breyer joined with more than 20 other MEPs and more than 50 public and private organizations last year to form the Tracking Free Ads Coalition. Though its push for a total ban on targeted advertising failed, the coalition was behind many of the more stringent restrictions. Breyer told The Markup the new rules were “a major achievement.”
“The Parliament stopped short of prohibiting surveillance advertising, but giving people a true choice [of whether to be targeted] is a major step forward, and I think the vast majority of people will use this option,” he said.
Despite passing the European Parliament, the DSA is far from settled. Due to the EU’s unique law-making process, the legislation must now be negotiated with the European Commission and the bloc’s 27 countries. The member states, as represented by the European Council, have adopted an official position considerably less aggressive—opting for only improved transparency on targeted advertising—and, according to Breyer, are “traditionally very open to [industry] lobbying.”
Whether the DSA’s wins against targeted advertising survive this process “will depend to a large degree on public pressure,” said Breyer.
How Has Big Tech Responded?
So far, Big Tech companies have publicly tread lightly in response to the European push to limit targeted advertising.
In response to The Markup’s request for comment, Google spokesperson Karl Ryan said that Google supports the DSA and that it shares “the goal of MEPs to continue to make the internet safer for everyone….”
“We will now take some time to analyze the final Parliament text to understand how it could impact us and our different users,” he said.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
But privately, over the last two years, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have ramped up lobbying efforts in Brussels, spending more than $20 million in 2020.
The advertising industry, meanwhile, has been public in its opposition. In a statement on the recent vote, Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe director of public policy Greg Mroczkowski urged policymakers to reconsider.
“The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”
On Wednesday, the Belgian Data Protection Authority found IAB Europe–which developed and administered the system for companies to obtain consent for behavioral advertising while complying with GDPR—in violation of that law. In particular, the authority found that the pop-ups that ask for people’s consent to process their data as they visit websites failed to meet GDPR’s standards for transparency and consent. The pop-up posed “great risks to the fundamental rights” of Europeans, the ruling said. The authority ordered IAB to delete data collected under its Transparency and Consent Framework and has six months to comply.
“This decision is momentous,” Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told The Markup. “It means that digital rights are real. And there is a significance for the United States, too, because the IAB has introduced the same consent spam for the CCPA and CPRA [California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act].”
In a statement to Tech Crunch, IAB Europe said it “reject[s] the finding that we are a data controller” in the context of its consent framework and is “considering all options with respect to a legal challenge.” Further, it said it is working on an “action plan to be executed within the prescribed six months” to bring it within GDPR compliance.
Google and Meta may be preparing for whichever way the wind is blowing.
A handful of European companies like internet security company Avast, search engine DuckDuckGo (which is a contributor to The Markup), and publisher Axel Springer see tighter rules around data privacy as a means to push the industry toward contextual ads or tech that matches ads based on a website’s content, and to therefore break the Google-Meta duopoly over online advertising.
What’s Happening in the U.S.?
On Jan. 18, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation to Congress to prohibit advertisers from using personal data to target advertisements—particularly using data about a person’s race, gender, and religion. Exceptions would be made for “broad” location information and contextual advertising.
“The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence,” Booker said in a statement announcing the bill in January.
While there is bipartisan desire to rein in Big Tech, there is no consensus on how to do it. The bill most likely to pass the divided Congress is designed to stop Amazon, Apple, Google, and other tech giants from privileging their own products. Congressional action on targeted advertising does not appear likely.
Still, it is possible the Federal Trade Commission will take action.
Last summer, President Biden issued an executive order directing the FTC to use its rulemaking authority to curtail “unfair data collection and surveillance practices.” In December, the FTC sought public comment for a petition by nonprofit Accountable Tech to develop new data privacy rules.
Meanwhile, many U.S. digital rights activists, such as nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, are hopeful that new rules in Europe will force changes globally, as occurred after the GDPR. “The EU Parliament’s position, if it becomes law, could change the rules of the game for all platforms,” wrote EFF’s international policy director Christopher Schmon.
It’s still early days, but many see the tide turning against targeted advertising. These types of conversations, according to Penfrat at EDRi, were unthinkable a few years ago.
“The fact that a ban on surveillance-based advertising has been brought into the mainstream is a huge success,” he said.
There’s a Neal Stephenson Renaissance Going on Due to one Single Word
Metaverse. In case you’ve not heard of it, metaverse is the term that was coined by Stephenson in his dystopian novel “Snow Crash” to denote a virtual artificial world of corporate exploitation. In all its ironic glory the name, or a shortened version thereof, “Meta” was appropriated as a re-branding vehicle for that empire of corporate greed and exploitation… Facebook.
So then, what better backdrop for the new novel to launch, and with a potentially even more timely theme, could there be other than, namely, the looming destruction our planet faces due to climate change and excessive carbon emissions. Moreover, the lack of human cooperation needed to overcome greed and stupidity in order to resume ourselves.
If this particular perspective on a fictional, but perhaps, soon, all too real, set of circumstances, is not spot on, there is nevertheless a great need for these questions to be addressed.
After all it is ultimately the cooperation and consensus of the entire planet that will be necessary to find, and more importantly, implement a solution that will prevent armageddon.
Perhaps the newly intensified focus on the future – fantasies, but also concerns and disaster aversion planning, is just what is needed. Perhaps authors, artists, engineers and even an average citizen can begin today and find the thread of change in thinking, and ultimately, living that’s needed for all our survival.
From Bookshop.org:
One man – visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D. – has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied?
Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shockbrings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming. Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?
Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, Termination Shock sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential solutions and dire risks, and wraps it all together in an exhilarating, witty, mind-expanding speculative adventure.
Meet the researchers making science more sustainable.
The lab is quietly bustling with scientists intent on their work. One gestures to an item on her bench – a yellow container, about the size of a novel. It’s almost full to the brim with used plastic pipette tips – the disposable attachments that stop pipettes being cross-contaminated. She stares down at it, despondently. “And this is just from today.”
We’re at the Francis Crick Institute, a towering biomedical research facility in the heart of London. The scientist in question is Marta Rodriguez Martinez, a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Every day in her lab, pipette tips, petri dishes, bottles and more are used and discarded. The scale of the waste is immense – research by the University of Exeter estimates that labs worldwide generate 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year.
Newsletter:
Alongside her research, Rodriguez Martinez doubles as a sustainability rep, tirelessly working to reduce the plastic waste her lab produces. The Crick’s sustainability team consult her about the unique behaviours of scientists. In return, she encourages colleagues to stop using unnecessary plastic and teaches them about sustainable alternatives.
It’s a difficult task, but one she feels passionate about. “We have in our heads that plastic is a one-use material, but it is not. Plastic can be autoclaved, it can be washed. Most plastics we use in the lab could be re-used as efficiently as glass.”
The Crick is taking behaviour change seriously. Alongside reps like Rodriguez Martinez, it offers sustainability workshops and waste training to employees. A pipette-tip audit is underway, which will show which products come with the lowest excess plastic. It’s also developing an interactive dashboard for teams to see how their waste compares to other labs’.
But behaviour change is only the beginning. Rodrigo Ponce-Ortuño oversees the Crick’s contract with an eco-friendly waste-management company. He points out that the journey of plastic lab equipment stretches far beyond its short service on the workbench.
Take media bottles – the plastic containers that hold nutrients to grow cells and bacteria. “It’s just glucose that goes into the bottles,” Ponce-Ortuño explains. The liquid is non-hazardous, but in his experience, recycling companies are wary of the scientific jargon on the labelling.
“If it just said sugar, it would be fine,” he says. Instead, many companies reject the waste because they don’t understand the chemistry. But, by using contractors with the right expertise, the Crick now sends all its media bottles for recycling.
For Rodriguez Martinez, this is a milestone. “I use maybe four media bottles a week, and there are 1,200 scientists here. That we can rinse them and have a contractor recycle them is a big success.”
This tactic – of building companies’ confidence in handling lab equipment – has led to other successes, too. Cooling gel packs, polystyrene boxes and the bulky pallets used to transport products are all collected for re-use. Boxes for pipette tips are also collected – after they’ve been stacked and re-used in the labs themselves.
In fact, the Crick’s labs send no waste at all to landfill. Hazardous waste is safely incinerated, but anything else that can’t be recycled goes through a process called energy-from-waste, where electricity, heat or fuel is harvested from the material as it’s disposed of.
And they’re just as keen to reduce the amount of plastic coming in. The institute recently held a green procurement fair, where suppliers had to meet a set of sustainability criteria to attend. “Normally when you buy a product, you look at the quality and the price,” says Rodriguez Martinez. “We want to add sustainability to that equation.”
The team know that change won’t happen overnight. They need to win people over with practical measures to reduce plastics – without reducing the quality of science. So the institute is discussing best practice with other laboratories, to grow the movement for low-plastic research.
“We’re trying to educate people into a more sustainable science,” says Rodriguez Martinez.
Wellcome, which publishes Mosaic, is one of the six founding partners of the Francis Crick Institute.
The lab is quietly bustling with scientists intent on their work. One gestures to an item on her bench – a yellow container, about the size of a novel. It’s almost full to the brim with used plastic pipette tips – the disposable attachments that stop pipettes being cross-contaminated. She stares down at it, despondently. “And this is just from today.”
We’re at the Francis Crick Institute, a towering biomedical research facility in the heart of London. The scientist in question is Marta Rodriguez Martinez, a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Every day in her lab, pipette tips, petri dishes, bottles and more are used and discarded. The scale of the waste is immense – research by the University of Exeter estimates that labs worldwide generate 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Newsletter:
Alongside her research, Rodriguez Martinez doubles as a sustainability rep, tirelessly working to reduce the plastic waste her lab produces. The Crick’s sustainability team consult her about the unique behaviours of scientists. In return, she encourages colleagues to stop using unnecessary plastic and teaches them about sustainable alternatives.
It’s a difficult task, but one she feels passionate about. “We have in our heads that plastic is a one-use material, but it is not. Plastic can be autoclaved, it can be washed. Most plastics we use in the lab could be re-used as efficiently as glass.”
The Crick is taking behaviour change seriously. Alongside reps like Rodriguez Martinez, it offers sustainability workshops and waste training to employees. A pipette-tip audit is underway, which will show which products come with the lowest excess plastic. It’s also developing an interactive dashboard for teams to see how their waste compares to other labs’.
But behaviour change is only the beginning. Rodrigo Ponce-Ortuño oversees the Crick’s contract with an eco-friendly waste-management company. He points out that the journey of plastic lab equipment stretches far beyond its short service on the workbench.
Take media bottles – the plastic containers that hold nutrients to grow cells and bacteria. “It’s just glucose that goes into the bottles,” Ponce-Ortuño explains. The liquid is non-hazardous, but in his experience, recycling companies are wary of the scientific jargon on the labelling.
“If it just said sugar, it would be fine,” he says. Instead, many companies reject the waste because they don’t understand the chemistry. But, by using contractors with the right expertise, the Crick now sends all its media bottles for recycling.
For Rodriguez Martinez, this is a milestone. “I use maybe four media bottles a week, and there are 1,200 scientists here. That we can rinse them and have a contractor recycle them is a big success.”
This tactic – of building companies’ confidence in handling lab equipment – has led to other successes, too. Cooling gel packs, polystyrene boxes and the bulky pallets used to transport products are all collected for re-use. Boxes for pipette tips are also collected – after they’ve been stacked and re-used in the labs themselves.
In fact, the Crick’s labs send no waste at all to landfill. Hazardous waste is safely incinerated, but anything else that can’t be recycled goes through a process called energy-from-waste, where electricity, heat or fuel is harvested from the material as it’s disposed of.
And they’re just as keen to reduce the amount of plastic coming in. The institute recently held a green procurement fair, where suppliers had to meet a set of sustainability criteria to attend. “Normally when you buy a product, you look at the quality and the price,” says Rodriguez Martinez. “We want to add sustainability to that equation.”
The team know that change won’t happen overnight. They need to win people over with practical measures to reduce plastics – without reducing the quality of science. So the institute is discussing best practice with other laboratories, to grow the movement for low-plastic research.
“We’re trying to educate people into a more sustainable science,” says Rodriguez Martinez.
Wellcome, which publishes Mosaic, is one of the six founding partners of the Francis Crick Institute.
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo on Unsplash
Kurt Thigpen clenched his hands around the edge of the table because if he couldn’t feel the sharp edges digging into his palms, he would have to think about how hard his heart was beating. He was grateful that his mask hid his expression. He hoped that no one could see him sweat.
A woman approached the lectern in the center aisle, a thick American flag scarf looped around her neck.
“Do you realize the mask, the CDC said it’s only 2% effective?” she demanded. “You’re failing our children, you’re failing our country, you’re failing our students’ future ….”
Thigpen fixed his eyes on a spot in the back of the blue-and-green auditorium. He let the person speaking at the lectern fade. It will be over soon, he told himself.
A dark-haired woman in a red vest removed her face shield as she moved to take her turn at the mic. As she began to speak, the school board employee responsible for queuing up public commenters interrupted: “Ma’am, I’m gonna have to ask you to please keep your shield on —”
“No, you’re not the boss of me, you work for us, I can’t breathe with it on —”
“Ma’am —”
“Don’t you dare cut my microphone —”
The crowd cheered. Thigpen focused on his breathing.
It will end soon, he told himself. It must. His sweat turned cold under his suit.
“The science isn’t there, take the kids outta the masks and let’s move on.”
It was March 2021, Thigpen’s second month as a school board trustee in Washoe County, Nevada. He had planned his campaign around local issues like improving the district’s diversity and equity policies and fixing an intersection where 20 students had been injured in traffic.
Public comment periods at school board meetings felt endless. Parents’ angers — over masking, over politics, over the “LGBTQ agenda” — fed off each other.
“I came here to speak about your fascist propaganda and ideology …”
He concentrated on making it to the next break period. His thoughts had begun to turn toxic. Why am I not good enough? Why am I the one struggling? They would turn darker. I don’t want to be here anymore. If something happened to me today, that would be fine.
“We will work tirelessly to remove you if you don’t focus on what’s important ….”
When the eight-hour meeting finally ended, he would drive home and pull off the suit and rip off his shirt. He would only take care with his rainbow tie, resting it gently in the closet. It still hangs there today. He would close the door, lay down on his bed, and let himself cry.
The stories of cruel, seemingly irrational and sometimes-violent conflicts over coronavirus regulations have become lingering symptoms of the pandemic as it drags through its second year. Two men on a Mesa-to-Provo flight got into a cross-aisle fight after one refused to wear a mask. A Tennessee teenager asking his school board to impose a mask mandate in honor of his grandmother who died of COVID-19 got jeered by the crowd. A California parent angered by the requirement that his child wear a mask allegedly beat up a teacher so badly that the teacher had to go to the emergency room. An Arizona father showed up to an elementary school with zip ties, allegedly intending to make a “citizen’s arrest” over COVID-19 rules. A Missouri medical center has distributed panic buttons to about 400 employees after an increase in assaults on health care workers by people frustrated over coronavirus-induced visitation restrictions and long wait times.
Many of the altercations have begun over masking because, unlike your vaccination status, a mask is right there on your face. Depending on your point of view, the mask can symbolize an erosion of personal freedoms or a willingness to protect others, a society that accepts tyranny or one that embraces science. A person’s reaction to a mask — or the absence of one — can be driven by an entire network of beliefs and emotions that have little to do with the face covering itself.
“What the hell is happening?” said Rachel Patterson, who owns a hair salon in Huntsville, Alabama, and who has been screamed at, cussed out and walked out on for asking clients to don a mask. “Like, I feel like we are living on another planet. Like I don’t — I don’t recognize anyone anymore.”
On Julie Simanksi’s first day of teaching for the fall 2021 semester, she tried to get her students to wear masks using the only method she was allowed: an emotional appeal. Simanski teaches at Des Moines Area Community College in Iowa. By state university policy, she can’t instruct her students to wear masks. Almost none did.
Simanksi told her students about her 20-year-old daughter, Olivia, who has a neuromuscular condition and requires 24-hour care. She didn’t know how Olivia’s body would cope with the virus. She was scared.
That night she sent an all-class email. She attached a picture of Olivia, smiling to her gums in blue sunglasses.
“I cannot mandate you to wear a mask in my class,” she wrote. “However, for the sake of my daughter and potentially others, I will make a continual plea to wear one.”
Simanksi brought a box of paper masks and put them in the back of the room. Some students took them. In each of her two sections, she has a group of four or five students who will not put one on.
“I’m surprised and I’m disappointed and a little bit angry that they just didn’t have the compassion to wear a mask for 55 minutes,” she said.
People’s pandemic views aren’t just preferences. They’ve evolved to fundamental beliefs. And when that happens, social psychologists say, people are more likely to accept incivility to achieve what they want.
“When people feel that their attitudes reflect strong moral convictions, that gives them permission to dehumanize those who oppose them,” said Linda Skitka, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who’s researching ideological divides. “And it doesn’t take a lot for the shift into perceptions of good and evil. So if the other side is basically evil, it’s not a far stretch to say it’s OK to yell at them.”
Courtney, a 29-year-old office worker living in Virginia who has asked that her last name not be shared for fear that she might lose her job if she’s identified, sat up on a medical bed surrounded by portraits of expectant mothers and their babies. In one, a brown-haired woman smiled at her 32-week mark, hands cupping her round belly. In another, the woman’s 6-day-old baby lay swaddled in a blue-and-white quilt, eyes closed. Courtney had just listened to her unborn child’s heartbeat. It was Aug. 17, two months out from her due date, and she had never before gotten so far along in a pregnancy without a miscarriage.
Courtney said her doctor went through the standard questions about her physical condition. Then the doctor asked if Courtney was working from home. No, she said. She had to go in twice a week.
Courtney looked at the pictures of the happy mothers. She’d undergone fertility treatment and had two miscarriages in less than a year. Both times, she’d asked herself: Was it my fault?
She knew that, even though she’d been fully vaccinated since May, a severe breakthrough infection could mean a ventilator for her and premature birth or death for her baby. She walked out of the office with a doctor’s note: Either everyone had to wear a mask around her, or she needed to work from home.
She saved a copy of the note on her phone and brought it with her the next time she went to the office. She recalls that as she sat at her desk, a colleague she considered a friend walked through her open door and sat down across from her. The colleague had just returned from a weeklong vacation and hoped Courtney could catch her up on what she’d missed.
The woman wasn’t wearing a mask.
“I actually have this note,” Courtney recalls saying. She pulled it up on her phone and held it out. “Do you mind wearing a mask?”
Her colleague didn’t look at the phone. She didn’t need to mask, the woman said. She had antibodies.
Courtney tried again. She told her colleague she was worried about what the virus could do to her baby. Even if there was no damage, she said, they might have to take the baby after birth to isolate her.
Courtney said that her colleague looked at her across the desk and said: “I’m not worried about it.”
She sat across from Courtney unmasked for the next 30 minutes.
Two weeks later, Courtney’s doctor wrote her another, sterner note: “It is my professional opinion that due to the lack of support for CDC recommended mask wearing indoors, please allow Courtney to work from home for the remainder of her pregnancy.”
Courtney forwarded it to her boss. He replied that he would remind the colleague who had sat in her office unmasked to follow the policy. But she still had to come in to work. They needed staff consistency.
She is due within the month.
If it looks like we’ve forgotten each other’s humanity, it’s because we’ve evolved to do so.
Humans are tribal creatures, and our responses to the pandemic have been tribalized almost since the beginning: A Pew Research poll from June 2020 found support for masking divided along partisan lines. Almost a year after the Pew poll, Fox News host Tucker Carlson urged his supporters toconfront people wearing masks.
Because the mask has become so polarizing, the extreme reactions aren’t really about being asked to wear one for an hour. It’s about communicating what side you’re on.
David Chester, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies aggression, puts it this way: If you see members of the opposing group as human like you, you’ve failed as a tribalist.
“It really makes adaptive sense to treat out-group members not like people, because then it’s much easier to hurt them and to act against them,” he said. “One central piece of intergroup conflict is a switch in viewing your enemies from full-blown humans to dehumanized entities that you do not ascribe all the things that you typically ascribe to a person. That makes conflict so much easier.”
Seeing someone else wear a mask in a grocery store becomes what Chester calls “a threatening proposition from an out-group member.” It triggers anger. And giving in to anger can feel good — especially after months of frustration.
In a viral incident from June 2020, a woman who has cancer was shopping in a Florida Pier 1 when she had a confrontation with another shopper, later identified as Debra Jo Hunter. The incident culminated in Hunter, maskless,coughing in the woman’s face. In a virtual sentencing hearing nine months later, as Jacksonville’s First Coast News reported, Hunter submitted 23 pages of threats that she and her family had received. Hog from hell. I hope your whole family gets COVID and suffers immensely, then dies. Kill yourself.
Hunter’s husband testified on her behalf. It had been a hard couple months leading up to the incident, he said. They’d had a house fire and lost most of their possessions. A family member had been in a boating accident.
No one from the family responded to requests for comment.
“It was like air being inflated into a balloon, and it finally got to the point where she couldn’t handle any more air,” Hunter’s husband testified. “And then she finally rubbed up against something and just popped.”
The paper was written sometime around the turn of the third century. The author was philosopher-slash-medical writer Claudius Galenus, known today as Galen.
Two millennia later, the fundamental idea holds true. It’s one of the main tools in modern-day cognitive behavioral therapy: Learn how to pull yourself back from getting swept away by strong feelings, and then evaluate the situation with your rational side.
“There’s a lot of research that says that if people think about injustice from a first-person perspective, they’re more likely to respond aggressively,” said Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in children’s mental health and violence prevention. “If they think about injustice from a third-person perspective, they’re less likely to be aggressive. And it’s because, in a sense, now they pulled back and are able to take the perspective of both parties that are involved.”
On a societal scale, one of the fastest ways for two deeply entrenched, opposing groups to start seeing each other as fellow humans again is to give them something bigger to fight against together. It’s an “Independence Day” sort of scenario, Chester, the Virginia Commonwealth University professor, said: If aliens invaded, countries who hate each other in normal times would suddenly work together against an external threat.
But the external threat with the potential to unite a deeply polarized country, he said, should have been the pandemic. And it didn’t happen.
“I think fundamentally, it’s because we have different perceptions of this pandemic,” he said. “It’s really hard now that it’s so entrenched, that masks are viewed as this group symbol. It’s really hard to get people out of that.”
It’s possible that signals from authority figures — at least the ones you already trust — could sway individual behavior, Chester said. Then again, former President Donald Trump got booed at an August rally in Alabama after suggesting that his followers get vaccinated.
When Skitka, with the University of Illinois at Chicago, saw Trump get booed, she thought it might be too late for even political leaders to temper their constituents’ passions. “We’re still trying to figure out what will work,” she said.
Kurt Thigpen resigned from the Washoe County School District on May 24, citing medical reasons. Later, he wrote an op-ed explaining what he really meant. The anxiety and the panic that had been triggered by the school board meetings had mutated into passive suicidal ideation. Even when the board transitioned to virtual meetings, he could barely get out of bed and make himself presentable for Zoom. He wished he could stop existing. No job was worth that.
“I thought I had things handled,” he wrote, “but my coping skills were no match for the events of the last seven months.”
He had sought therapy and worked with a psychiatrist to find medication. He got diagnosed with ADHD. He learned new coping mechanisms.
The initial reaction was positive. People were angry on his behalf. They wished him well. They thanked him for his openness.
And then the op-ed was mentioned in anAssociated Press article on toxic school board meetings around the country. Thigpen had no idea until a friend on the city council texted him. His original op-ed got reshared on Facebook. The commenters rushed in.
“What a whiney person,” someone wrote.
“Where do these woke zombies come from?”
“I have a lot to say to this young fragile individual.”
“Perfect example of a PACB= Professional Adult Cry Baby”
“You have no idea how badly I wanted to stop reading that article, but he is such a trainwreck of an individual I couldn’t stop,” one woman posted. She added: “You know, upon re-reading my post, I apologize for being so cruel. Clearly this man is severely mentally disabled and belongs in an institution.”
No one, Thigpen said, has reached out to apologize.
The Ways in which we Talk to Ourselves is Meaningful
Do you talk to yourself? Of course you do, most people have some sort of internal dialogue, whether it comes in the form of helping you remember a sequence of numbers, talking-out a big meeting presentation or motivating yourself, etc.
Click to see “Chatter“ and help Independent Bookstores. Also available on Amazon.
There is usually some sort of self-talk in-motion within our brains. Some have even gone as far to say that people who frequently talk to themselves have a higher IQ, and could even be considered geniuses.
In an interview, in WSJ magazine, neuroscientist and experimental psychologist, Ethan Kross, who specializes in regulated emotions, provided some additional insight into how we can practice replacing negative thoughts with more positive ones:
“There is a lot of research that shows we are much better at advising other people than ourselves. So it can help to think of yourself as if you are someone else. One way to do this is to use ‘distanced self talk’ and coach yourself as if you were advising a friend. Use your own name. ‘Ethan, here is how you do this.’ Many people do this intuitively without knowing why.”
If you are like me, I self-talk aloud (literally) a lot, which may sometimes get strange looks from others, but it can also be just to yourself, like a whisper. However, when you have a dialogue with yourself, the ways in which we do it is actually really important.
“When we experience chatter we narrowly focus on our problem. What we want to do is zoom out. Think about our experience as something that many people deal with. Think about other people who have experienced something similar and have endured it.”
-Ethan Kross
Experts in psychology have found that people that have more positive and helpful talks, rather than negative or self-sabotaging chatter, have a higher quality of mental health, generally more satisfaction towards life and even have physical benefits like better cardiovascular health.
There can certainly be times where our thoughts and the ways we speak to our inner self could be negative and damaging. Like you make a mistake at work, said something embarrassing to a crush, dropped your eggs as you were about to make an omelet, the list goes on.
“We experience awe when we are in the presence of something vast that we have trouble explaining. When we experience chatter we are narrowly focused on our problems. Experiencing awe shows us how much broader the universe is. And that puts things into perspective pretty significantly.”
-Ethan Kross
There could be a tendency to want to judge ourselves too harshly for not being “better”. Furthermore, our world has experienced some very real instability lately, with the pandemic, which could easily push our propensity for negative self-talk or chatter downhill towards more anxiety and be more “worry driven”.
The negativity we internalize when we self-talk, based on research, makes problems worse, causes stress and is ultimately toxic. Stepping back and trying to see something bigger than ourselves could be one way shift our perspective.
We should instead learn to curb or greatly reduce and replace any negativity with more helpful talks.
