Showing all posts tagged: psychology
The way we treat service staff says much about who we are
25 July 2024
Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:
I suspect restaurant and cafe customers have little idea of the profound, quiet stigma directed towards service workers. There is an assumption in this country that wait staff above a certain age are where they are because they lack the skills or gumption to “get a proper job”.
There’s an old aphorism that goes something along the lines of “watch the way the person you’re on a date with treats the staff of the restaurant you’re dining at.”
The general idea being that if someone looks down on, or treats hospitality staff poorly, you might want to think twice about having a romantic relationship with them. The way they treat someone — in this case, likely a complete stranger — says a lot how they treat everyone else. Including you.
But it seems to me this wisdom can be applied more widely. Anyone — anyone at all — treating hospitality staff poorly, or other service workers for that matter, doesn’t seem to be worth the time of day. Unless, that is, a server threw hot soup in their face, or something, for no good reason.
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cafe, psychology, trends, work
An extremely simple way to detect potential late bloomers
5 June 2024
Colonel Sanders founded KFC at age sixty-two. Anna Mary Robertson Moses AKA Grandma Moses, started painting when she was seventy-six, and had an illustrious career spanning twenty-five years. American actor Kathryn Joosten began her Hollywood career aged fifty-six.
These are just a few examples of people who are considered to be late bloomers. Those who found their calling in life at around the same time their contemporaries were either retired, or gearing up to cease working. That potentially means if you’re of a certain age, someone in your peer group may be about to step into the starting blocks.
But who might that be? According to London based writer and speaker Henry E. Oliver, there a few tell-tale signs:
- Look for people who have been successful in the past
- Look for people with secret lives
- Look for the people who don’t fit in
- Look for loners and those who are happy to change their context
- Put up a beacon
Yah, put up a beacon is an obvious one (actually, I have no idea what that means). But forget the beacon. If you’re looking to find a would-be late bloomer among your friends and acquaintances, look-out for the ones with secret lives. Shouldn’t be too hard. Oh wait.
If someone has a secret life, that means — or is supposed to mean — no one else knows about it. While that may sound like a problem, it’s in fact only a detail. All we need do now is work backwards to identify the late bloomers in our lives. Start with the beacon. I assume that’ll stand out. Then pick out the loners, and those who don’t fit in. After that, anyone who has been successful previously.
Once you have four out of five, it’s just a case of finding out if they have a secret life. And that’s a simple matter of posing a discreetly worded question. You could say something like, “Oh hey, did I tell about an old friend of mine, [insert name of fake friend here]? Turns out they’ve been living a secret double life for a couple of decades.”
If your acquaintance seems startled, it might mean you’re onto something. Then you could follow-up, by saying “But that’s nothing you’d know anything about, right?” If their immediate response is a hasty successions of no’s, that it’s as good confirmed: your friend has a secret life, and could well be a late bloomer in the making.
Spotting potential late bloomers is easy when you know what you’re doing…
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Running clubs, the IndieWeb of the dating realm?
23 May 2024
Konrad Marshall, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald:
Run South Yarra co-founder Tom Adair is wary of any suggestion that run clubs are the new Tinder, yet relationships are born here, and side-by-side chats while jogging, he notes, are definitely less pressurised than face-to-face interactions. (Plus, you can always pick up the pace and scoot away if a chat isn’t going well.) “It’s almost like a nightclub, but no one’s drunk, and you’re actually making meaningful conversation,” Adair concedes.
If you can stomach the unearthly start times, six o’clock in the morning, maybe earlier, weekends included, it all makes sense. You’re sharing a bonding experience with likeminded people. How could run clubs not be somewhere you’d potentially meet a romantic prospect? Aside from the fact you’re there to run of course, not anything else.
But here’s a thought. Granted, one that could probably only occur to me. If there is a movement online, a turning away from social media, a return to the small web, and personal websites, might the rising popularity of run clubs represent a similar movement away from dating apps?
Imagine meeting, then building rapport with someone — maybe in time, more — in a safe group setting, while partaking of a shared interest, such as running? Though it could be something else. Who needs a meddlesome, intrusive, dating app, for that?
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The health benefits of giving up drinking coffee
21 May 2024
As with many things we consume, the science on coffee can be conflicted. One decade caffeine consumption is a no-no, the next it seems coffee is quite beneficial. Regular readers will know I’m a coffee drinker, but in — what I consider to be — moderation: two (large serve) cups per day.
But some people struggle with coffee addiction. And the same people say their general health, and mental well-being, much improved when they stopped drinking coffee all together. Jesse Downes, based on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, says he used to drink seven cups of coffee a day, before giving up completely about three months ago:
Three months into his coffee-free life, Mr Downes is noticing some changes. “The anxiety levels generally seem to be more managed, or reduced, if you like, and I would have to say there’s a sustained energy level,” he said.
Good for him. Just because many people enjoy something, doesn’t mean everyone will. I guess we all have our no-no vices. Mine would be alcohol and soft drink, both of which I only partake of a couple of times a year.
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It is a mistake to think all mistakes have a silver lining
1 May 2024
Social media is awash with motivational quotes extolling the virtues of making mistakes. I probably glanced sideways at some quote or other on Instagram — like, five years ago — because now my search tab is full of the things.
Daily I’m reminded that experience is simply the name we give our mistakes, or remember that life’s greatest lessons are usually learned at the worst times and from the worst mistakes.
Mistakes and missteps are a part of life, but spend too much on social media, and anyone would think errors are roads paved with gold. After all, mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before. That’s comforting.
Except it may not be the case. Janan Ganesh, writing for the Financial Times, says that while people can bounce back from some mistakes, others can have a profoundly negative impact:
A mistake, in the modern telling, is not a mistake but a chance to “grow”, to form “resilience”. It is a mere bridge towards ultimate success. And in most cases, quite so. But a person’s life at 40 isn’t the sum of most decisions. It is skewed by a disproportionately important few: sometimes professional, often romantic. Get these wrong, and the scope for retrieving the situation is, if not zero, then overblown by a culture that struggles to impart bad news.
We err, but we go on. Getting it wrong with the big calls in life doesn’t mean someone will be doomed to an existence of abject misery. There’s always a plan B. It may not be as alluring as plan A, but it might still be pretty good. As for the social media mistake-advocates, they’d serve more good if they instead advised people not to wallow in their errors.
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lifestyle, psychology, social media, trends
How crush proof is the average marriage? Maybe not much
16 April 2024
Gabe Trew, owner of Australian market retailer POP Canberra, decided to run a Valentine’s Day competition this year. He invited social media followers to send him, anonymously I believe, stories about the great love crushes of their lives.
Entrants would be in the running to win what was described as a “dream date.” But something strange happened. Two weeks after Valentine’s Day passed, submissions, or romantic confessions, were still rolling in.
Now, nearly two months on, and some five-thousand people, with stories to tell about their secret crushes, have been in contact with Trew. As a result of the promotion, eight couples — people previously staring down the barrel of possibly a lifetime of unrequited love — have come together.
Of those who were united with their crush through the POP Canberra promotion, I’m not sure how many, if any, were married, or in a relationship, immediately beforehand.
But when ABC National Radio show, Life Matters, recently canvassed the subject of crushes, some listeners admitted to holding a torch for someone else, despite being married. And some of these people eventually deal with the dilemma. They end the relationship, or marriage, they’re in, and find it in themselves to tell their crush how they feel. Sometimes, it turned out the light of their life felt the same way. But for others, the path can be fraught with peril:
For Julie, another Life Matters listener, things haven’t worked out so neatly. She’s been dealing with a difficult crush on a friend that has left her feeling confused and distressed. She’s also married, and has been trying to work out how to protect both her relationship with her husband and her friendship with the object of her crush. “I don’t want to hurt my husband. I’m sort of trying to hold on to that,” she says.
While things may have worked out well for some POP Canberra contest participants, it’s not all bad for those who remain where they started. Professor Michael Slepian, an American psychologist, says having the chance to air their secret, albeit anonymously, can be beneficial:
“[Individuals] do want to get secrets off their chest, they do recognise that a secret can burden them … but those opportunities rarely present themselves,” he said. “It [the POP Canberra competition] provides people this outlet that is not normally available to them, to talk about the things they don’t normally get to talk about.”
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No one can interpret your dreams except you
12 April 2024
I sometimes write about books, novels, here. Usually Australian fiction, which I make a point to read as much of as possible. I’m currently (still) reading Before You Knew my Name, the 2021 debut of Melbourne based New Zealand author Jacqueline Bublitz. I guess therefore that’s close (in my book, if you’ll excuse the pitiful pun) to being an Australian title.
Perhaps though some people think this makes me worth approaching to write about other sorts of books, non-fiction even. Perhaps that’s why I was recently asked if I would read, and offer some thoughts here, about a recently completed book.
But I declined. It’s not because the title was self-published. As an online self-publisher, I have no problems with initiative based publishing. I’ve long been considering self-publishing a book, a novel myself, if I can ever finish writing it.
What bothered me was the subject matter: dream interpretation. Or, more succinctly, the regarding of objects, happenings, and other things that occur in dreams, as being symbols of some sort, that can be said to have a standard, or universal, meaning. For instance, two thousand people see a blackbird in a dream, and seemingly it means the same thing to each and every one of them.
Yeah, right.
Our dreams are our subconscious brain processing our individual thoughts, problems, concerns, hopes, you name it. How anyone else, another individual whom we’ve never met, is meant to know the significance of these visions we have — assuming we remember them — is beyond me.
As such, I have no interest in endorsing any books on the subject. The world does not need (and here’s hoping the author in question is not reading this) another pseudoscience title clogging the shelves at bookshops.
I have some wild crazy dreams sometimes. If my recollection of them is clear enough on waking, I try and jot down as much detail as possible, and self-analyse what I saw later on. Sometimes discerning a meaning is not hard, once going through the feelings, emotions, events, and of course, the people present, in the dream.
Often though, I’m just left with an intriguing notion to mull for a time, until something in the here and now distracts me.
I wrote back to the author, and told them their type of dream interpretation was not my thing, and wished them all the best with their work. By the way, I’m pretty sure I spotted a blackbird or two in a recent dream, but did not later end up buying a bunch of bananas, or whatever the sight of a blackbird in a dream is purported to mean.
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Loneliness is an affliction of epidemic proportions, a visual essay by Alvin Chang
28 September 2023
Twenty-four hours in an invisible epidemic is an especially poignant edition of visual essay magazine, The Pudding, produced by New York City based journalist Alvin Chang.
The epidemic in question is not Covid-19, though the lockdowns triggered by the pandemic have aggravated another malady: loneliness.
The pandemic exacerbated social isolation, and we’re still not back to pre-pandemic levels. Being alone isn’t necessarily the same as being lonely. But according to a meta-analysis of studies, more people have reported feeling lonely every year since 1976. In short, there really is a loneliness epidemic.
This is case study, Chang looks at the profiles of seventy-two fictitious persons, one of whom is probably similar to you. But look at the profiles of the people who differ from you. Some people are truly living in isolation, and their only interactions — for want of a better word — with others in the course of a day may only be a visit to the supermarket.
I know a number of these people will be introverts, and possibly not so bothered by social isolation, but think of those who are not. This cannot be easy on them.
For another perspective see The Loneliness Project, and also Why You Are Lonely and How to Make Friends, which offers some solutions, by Kurzgesagt.
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introversion, personality, psychology
The Loneliness Project, stories of loneliness curated by Marissa Korda
11 July 2023
I’m a little late to the party, the Loneliness Project, by Canadian graphic designer and illustrator Marissa Korda, has stopped publishing stories, but previous editions remain online for your reading enjoyment. I have to say I like the way each story is presented as a different apartment building (go to the website and see what I mean).
But the idea people can still be lonely, even though they live among a group of others, albeit separated by the wall of their dwellings, is poignant. Certainly, someone residing alone in an isolated house in a remote region may experience loneliness, but that it may happen in such close proximity to others seems unthinkable, even though of course it happens all the time.
But you don’t need to live alone, and not know your neighbours, to feel lonely. As these anecdotes about loneliness go to show, you can be surrounded by people, and still feel utterly alone.
And perhaps tangentially related, loneliness, particularly among young adults, has seen a rise in the number of friend-finder apps, not dissimilar to the likes of dating apps such as Tinder and Bumble.
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The best self-help book advice distilled into one blog post
25 June 2023
There are a million self-help books in the world, all filled to the brim with suggestions and methods to somehow make your life easier, better, or happier. But if you’re looking for the type of self-help these titles offer, which one — of the multitudes — do you choose?
Chris Taylor, writing for Mashable, may have saved you a lot of time. Time, you know, that can be invested in making desired improvements, instead of being wasted reading novel length books *.
Taylor has put in the hard yards on your behalf, by reading dozens of such books, and distilling the best of their often overlapping wisdom into a single blog post. Talk about breaking the job down into those much lauded baby-steps.
* this also leaves time to read actual novels instead.
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