Cutting through the noise at the end of 2022
With links to excellent summary stories of the year. What were your big stories of 2022? Full of the usual dog memes, guidance and inspiration to lead you up to Christmas.
Hey all,
It’s the time of year that we review our personal settings and talk about ourselves a lot.
I am no exception.
I have been thinking about what I wrote in my book, Finding Calm, about building a personal platform for resilience. In particular, I’ve been thinking about putting too many eggs in one basket:
Nothing goes well all the time. Everyone goes through periods when work, or some part of work, is going badly. Or there are difficulties in close relationships. Or life in general seems to be full of problems.
If you place all your sense of self-worth into just one aspect of your life — often this is work, or being a ‘good’ parent — there will be times when you can feel very vulnerable. When you do feel low, think about how much of your sense of self-worth is bound to just one aspect of your life.
If your pattern of low mood suggests too close a connection with just one part of your life, it’s likely that you have too many eggs in that one basket.
To protect yourself from this kind of dependency, it’s wise to place importance on several different areas of your life: work, friends, kids, pets, family, hobbies, inside and outside the home, social and solitary. At any point when one part of your life doesn’t seem to go well, you can draw comfort and support from other parts. Diversify your interests not only to protect your mental well- being, but to increase your opportunities for flow experiences, too.
I don’t think I’ve seen a clearer case of taking your own medicine.
Purely from a creating / media point of view, I suspect I’ve been piling up a lot of eggs in the Substack basket, when I have other outlets, pursuits and interests that I have neglected. Like my website, my YouTube channel, and my identity outside of being a psychologist. All good things to be thinking about as we go into 2023, and I figure out how Noise Reduction will continue.
As always, thanks for reading and all the feedback you’ve given me over the last couple of weeks. It’s really helpful.
Here’s another opportunity to give me some feedback. Do you miss the community threads I used to do, like this one?
From last week: You miss Christmas cards (or at least maybe)
This week, I’m looking at some of the big stories of the year as well as the usual, fun, inspiration and the odd spot of guidance too.
Ukraine: Still happening. Here’s how it started and how it’s going
I debated whether or not to include this in this week’s edition, but it really is the dominant story that underlies and symbolises much of world insecurity right now. Scroll down for more uplifting content, but if you can stomach it, get a cup of tea and read through this. It may take several sittings, but it really is a masterpiece interactive and investigative story from the New York Times.
Mr. Putin’s isolation deepened his radicalization, people who know him say. He went 16 months without meeting a single Western leader in person. He held just about all his meetings by videoconference from nondescript rooms that left his exact location a mystery. Those who got to see him in person saw their influence rise in a system in which access to Mr. Putin — referred to as “the boss” or “V.V.,” his first initials, by insiders — is the most valuable of currencies.
The world is challenging right now, but good stuff happens too
It can be hard to remember that as well as the global challenges, there are positive developments too. All the good stuff that happened do not negate the calamity of Ukraine or other miseries around the world, but it does show that we should not overly fixate on the negatives. That's only part of the story.
Traditional news media often miss the very biggest stories because they take time. Like 415 million Indians have left poverty in the last 15 years. That's about the same number of people living in the entire EU.
In India, a lot of rice is eaten, so the fact that a research group succeeded in creating a super rice that managed to increase the yield by 40 percent, is good news.
Or that the number of fatal accidents among Swedish children has halved in the last 30 years.
We learned in April that a lot fewer people died in natural disasters in 2021. In 2021, a total of 10,492 people died due to natural disasters. That is well below the 61,212 deaths per year that was the average from 2001 to 2020.
For the tenth year in a row, the Swedes broke records in recycling.
More like this here.
Social media in 2022: Can we put out the dumpster fire?
What with Elon Musk taking over Twitter and then setting up a Twitter poll to seemingly orchestrate his own departure as CEO (as his Tesla shares tank), and the ongoing terrible decisions at Meta, not to mention all the pop-up far-right disinformation everywhere, you could be excused from retreating from social media entirely.
Yet we don’t.
So, who’s going to clean things up so that it becomes at least a force for some good in the world again and doesn’t continue to poison of public discourse and undermine democratic institutions?
It looks like the European Union is going to have a good crack at it with the Digital Services Act.
Intended to tackle misogyny, protect children, stop consumer fraud, curb disinformation and protect democratic elections, the Digital Services Act (DSA) is wide-ranging. The UK is introducing its own statute, the online safety bill, but the EU’s rules are likely to have a bigger impact because they cover a bigger market, and the EU is more influential as a regulatory power.
And the DSA already has tech firms in its sights. Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has been warned his platform is not ready for the new rules, which could come into force for major platforms next summer. Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner overseeing the legislation, has told Musk he has “huge work ahead” to ensure that Twitter is complying with the act.
Check out how American Teens are opting out of the quest for social media likes, switching to old-school flip phones.
A few members took a moment to extol the benefits of going Luddite.
Jameson Butler, a student in a Black Flag T-shirt who was carving a piece of wood with a pocketknife, explained: “I’ve weeded out who I want to be friends with. Now it takes work for me to maintain friendships. Some reached out when I got off the iPhone and said, ‘I don’t like texting with you anymore because your texts are green.’ That told me a lot.”
Vee De La Cruz, who had a copy of “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois, said: “You post something on social media, you don’t get enough likes, then you don’t feel good about yourself. That shouldn’t have to happen to anyone. Being in this club reminds me we’re all living on a floating rock and that it’s all going to be OK.”
More 2022 links with pictures and words
The World Economic Forum’s “what happened in 2022 in 10 striking pictures”
Nature science journal’s biggest news stories of 2022
TIME's Top 100 Photos of 2022
The year in pictures from Greenpeace
The Guardian’s Landscape photographer of the year 2022 – in pictures
That’s it from me for today, and indeed until Christmas 2022. I hope you’ve enjoyed the selection of articles, links and insights this week. What did you think of this issue?
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