About Doing the Next Right Thing.

"Do the Next Right Thing" is a phrase that has often focused me.  Where did this phrase originate?  The Marginalian explains that on December 15, 1933, Carl Jung responded to a woman who had asked his guidance on how to live. Jung wrote:

Dear Frau V.,

Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. With kind regards and wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C.G. Jung

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Men versus Women: Some Comparisons

2020 Report Card on some of the achievements and struggles of men compared to those of women.

Before a woman decides that men have it easier, she might want to consider this list. This is not a comprehensive list. Admittedly, women fare worse than men in many situations.

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Tourette Symptoms: Possibly a New Social Contagion

Are Tourette Symptoms a new form of social contagion? A new article from the Wall Street Journal intrigued me.  The title: "Teen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor." Here are the opening paragraphs:

Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic.

Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first. Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.

According to a spate of recent medical journal articles, doctors say the girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.

No one has tracked these cases nationally, but pediatric movement-disorder centers across the U.S. are reporting an influx of teen girls with similar tics. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who specializes in pediatric movement disorders and Tourette syndrome, has seen about 10 new teens with tics a month since March 2020. Before the pandemic, his clinic had seen at most one a month.

I'm intrigued for a couple reasons. Back in college I spent some timing hanging around with guy who was smart and funny. He was also a really good tennis player and he had an easy going confidence.I was a several years younger than he was and I was not feeling confident about who I was at age 17. He also had a tic. Occasionally, his head suddenly jerked while he talked. This happened every couple minutes. After a while, I noticed that I was starting to do that too. The fact that I started doing this seemed odd, because I didn't decide to do it. It just started happening. I consciously clamped down on that behavior and I stopped doing it a few after I noticed myself doing it.

I'm also interested in this article because of the social contagion angle related to the sudden spike in teenaged girls who claim they were born in the wrong bodies. I'm speaking of the transgender social contagion phenomenon discussed extensively by Abigail Shrier (and see here).

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National Crisis of Smartphone-Inflicted Loneliness Hurting our Teenagers

Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge warn that we need to separate teenagers from their smartphones:

Teenage loneliness was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012, with fewer than 18 percent reporting high levels of loneliness. But in the six years after 2012, rates increased dramatically. They roughly doubled in Europe, Latin America and the English-speaking countries, and rose by about 50 percent in the East Asian countries . . . All young mammals play, especially those that live in groups like dogs, chimpanzees and humans. All such mammals need tens of thousands of social interactions to become socially competent adults. In 2012 it was possible to believe that teens would get those interactions via their smartphones — far more of them, perhaps. But as data accumulates that teenage mental health has changed for the worse since 2012, it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories. Just imagine what teenagers’ health would be like today if we had taken 50 percent of the most nutritious food out of their diets in 2012 and replaced those calories with sugar. So what can we do? We can’t turn back time to the pre-smartphone era, nor would we want to, given the many benefits of the technology. But we can take some reasonable steps to help teens get more of what they need.

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