tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-348803162024-03-07T01:08:53.377-08:00The Therapist MumblesPsychotherapy? yes or no?
Why do People do what they do?
What can we do to influence that in a therapeutic way, --
Or is that a foolish idea?Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.comBlogger636125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-78772068758605185012017-05-06T07:00:00.000-07:002017-05-06T07:07:23.773-07:00Other Choices/ Other Realities/ More Questions<span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">W</span><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em;">ay back in 2015 I was feeling swept along by a rapid river of changes. So many new ways of communicating, learning, moving, building and exploring were all coming at me at once. I was concerned that the changes were so pervasive and affected so many aspects of our lives that we have been unable to keep track of them. Most of us were just trying our best to act as if we know what we’re doing. All the while we were in the midst of realizing that in order to survive we would need to develop new skills. How we relate to each other is also changing, as cultures from all over the world merge and new lifestyles emerge. In many ways, we are changing our bodies, brains and minds, both directly and indirectly.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em;">As my interest in all of these innovations grew I became excited, and wanted to be a part of the whatever the future would bring. I began to read books and articles (see below), attend conferences and trade shows, and learn about new companies. </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em;"> All of the people I met were extolling how we would soon have our lives transformed at the touch of a screen or just by uttering a command or asking a question. I began to believe that these changes would have more of an impact on our lives than just the thrill of capturing animated warriors, who were posing virtually, in the park across the street.</span></div>
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Fantastic!</div>
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I was eagerly anticipating driverless cars, a cure for Alzheimer’s, genetically modified tofu that tasted like Boston cream pie, enriching relationships with new people from all over the world; new, cheap, sustainable sources of energy, and more time with my grandchildren.</div>
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But in the Spring and Summer of 2016 the clouds began to form as the political landscape began to dominate the forecasts and darken the future . There seemed to be a resentment growing and an anger brewing in many people. These people began to feel overwhelmed. The changes that I found so exciting, they felt were ruining their lives. People began to express how uncomfortable they felt with new people and the new lifestyles. They were unclear if it was the Chinese, Mexicans or robots taking their jobs. They were not happy that it often took pushing buttons on three remotes to find the TV show that used to be there if you pushed one “on” button. And where has Bill O’Reilly gone?</div>
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People seemed to want to stop, or at least slow down, the flow of these changes and reestablish the sense of security that came with living with what felt familiar, even if that feeling only came from nostalgia and nothing that really ever was.</div>
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But the pace of change has not stopped. New things quickly began to get old and newer new things were arriving. Every next thing seemed more complex and different, and whatever it did, it did it faster than before. New books kept coming, and so did web sites, articles, studies and ideas. But now, the tone began to change. There were questions raised about whether these new things were really bringing insight, knowledge, ease, comfort or joy. People began to focus on the downside of all of these changes. Who were these new people? Is Artificial Intelligence smarter than I am? How did so many people know I needed a hub cap? How do they know what kind of medicine I’m taking? Who else knows so much about me? Can I trust the new information I am being given? Can I trust my employer? Can I trust my government?</div>
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We are learning, once again, that every new technology that humans develop brings many changes, and they all come with mixed results. This has been true for fire, axes, wheels, agriculture, gun powder, internal combustion engines, plastics, nuclear energy, Twinkies, digital computers, the Internet, and now CRISPR, Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning.</div>
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Like all of those innovations, there has never much discussion about how and when to use these new tools. There have been very few times in the history of human civilization when any planning or preparation of this kind has been done. What usually happens is that a group of creative folks come up with something new. Sometimes, if they’re in the right spot at the right time, it either fills a need or creates it’s own need. Then other people figure out different ways to use it. Some of those ways work and sometimes it blows up. Clear examples of this are the internal combustion engine and the iPhone.</div>
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But soon after every innovation, the same kinds of societal difficulties begin to appear</div>
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Who gets to own it and control it?</div>
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Governments, Corporations? Individuals?</div>
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How much power does it bring to whoever controls it?</div>
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Who gets to use it?</div>
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How much does it cost, and who gets the money?</div>
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Who else is necessary? Who gets included? Who gets excluded?</div>
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Usually, the ones who develop whatever is new get to profit and to control it’s distribution and use, at least for a while.</div>
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Then, if it becomes a very powerful tool, it gets taken over by a government or corporation. If the developer is powerful and well managed, such as Apple or Ford, then they keep their advantage for a while. They get to make the market and attempt to ward off competition. The public has to pay for it, or not have it.</div>
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Problems almost always arise because the distribution and use of whatever is new and powerful is never equal across any society. The new advantages almost always go to those who had the old advantages; those with the power, access and money. This creates anger and resentment in those who are left with old tools to deal with new problems. If you are left with your horse and buggy or a land-line, you suffer.</div>
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What adds to today’s confusion, is that many of the new tools and machines that have been designed to bring us a marvelous new future of happiness, creativity and freedom, are also being used to distract, manipulate and control us. Tools are just tools, whether they are axes or Deep Learning. They can be used to cut up firewood, or chop off your hand. They can be used to treat your medical problems or change your political beliefs. It depends upon who can get them, who knows how to use them, and what their goals are.</div>
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There has never been a successful way to limit or plan the usage and distribution on any new technology. Occasionally, a government will decide that it must be the one to control something. That is usually true for any major military item, from a tank to a nuclear weapon. But we are seeing that even those can fall into the hands of non-governmental fringe groups, as so many “independent” military suppliers exist around the world. Thankfully, so far, it has not happened for nuclear weapons.</div>
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Another factor is that the confusion creates more confusion. One of the major new creations has been instant world-wide communications. Everything changes so quickly, and everybody knows about it immediately. An idea can spread so fast that is difficult to sort out all of the interpretations of what is happening. Everyone has an opinion that is usually based on partial facts. Communications run through many channels at once. Often what comes out is distorted or incomprehensible. Eventually, the truth becomes clear: “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.” (<a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgubG-MOPT4" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgubG-MOPT4" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px 0.1em; color: inherit; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">trite but true)</a></div>
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The ideal, the “mission statements” behind many of these new developments, is to make the world a safer, healthier, smarter, and more harmonious place for everyone. But that requires a complex set of skills that our species has talked about for a few thousand years, but is yet to show that it is capable of performing. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="1f2a5d5f0c4d" name="3cf044c900fc" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(233, 253, 240), rgb(233, 253, 240)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">This includes caring about people we don’t know, sharing with those who don’t have as much, and the other ideas from the enlightenment, such as freedom, justice and equality for all.</span> Those are my values, revised to really include everyone. I’m not ready to give up on them.</div>
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I’ve seen those things written down in a few places, but it seems as soon as there are a few dollars left unguarded on the table, the ideals seem to vanish.</div>
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But perhaps, maybe, this time, we can devise the right algorithm that can lead enough people in the right direction, and convince both the rich and greedy, AND the angry and confused, that if things are better for all of us, then things are better for all of us. And if you need a yacht that badly, you can still have it.</div>
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We are at a tipping point. The future still looks cloudy. We all will have an influence, either active or passive.</div>
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<br /></div>
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* * * * * * * *</div>
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Some of the Books that are relevant:</div>
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<i>Thinking Fast and Slow</i>, Daniel Kahneman, 2011</div>
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<i>The Gene Machine</i>, by Donnie Richmond, 2017</div>
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<i>The Body Builders,</i> by Adamd Piere 2017</div>
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<i>To Be a Machine</i>, by Mark O’Connell, 2017</div>
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<i>Our Grandchildren ReDesigned,</i> by Michael Bess, 2016</div>
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<i>Homo Deus</i>, by Yuval Harari, 2017</div>
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<i>Thinking Machines</i>, by Luke Dormehl, 2017</div>
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<i>Heart of the Machine</i> by Richard Yonck, 2017</div>
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<i>From Bacteria to Bach and Back</i>, by Daniel Dennett, 2017</div>
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<i>The Inevitable,</i> by Kevin Kelly, 2016</div>
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From the Web:</div>
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Oliver Cameron’s transmission about the technologies of self-driving cars</div>
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Backchannel, on Medium</div>
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Future Tense, ASU and Slate</div>
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Mate Labs</div>
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The Who</div>
<span style="letter-spacing: -0.003em;"></span><br />
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Many, many others</div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-8824222727255157862017-04-19T11:19:00.000-07:002017-04-19T11:19:08.793-07:00Standards? What Standards?<h1 class="graf graf--h3 graf--leading graf--title" id="da80" name="da80" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; --margin-top-multiplier: 0; --x-height-multiplier: 0.363; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Sans', Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 40px; letter-spacing: -0.028em; line-height: 1.04; margin: 0px 0px 0px -2.5px;">
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Spring has finally come to this New England sanctuary city. The wind stopped, the clouds disappeared and the sun filled up the the sky. The crocuses popped out of the ground and there are buds on everything. I got up and walked away from my Internet connection and spend time with actual, live people. It was a refreshing and life-affirming experience.</div>
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<span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="fcabbb2d3264" name="285892f1ccf0" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">My son’s kids were driving their parents a bit crazy; five and three year-olds are experts at doing that, especially now that there is Spring work to be done, both inside and outside of the house.</span> So, it was GrandPops to the rescue, strapping the kids into their car seats, handing them a cookie, and actual 100% juice-boxes to let them know that good times are on the way.</div>
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Fifteen minutes later we were in my city, and driving past the newly opened elementary school. As I wrote recently to a friend who lives in a vastly different part of the country, I am quite sure that the price of building this school equalled the entire education budget for his state. We pay a lot of taxes here, and we expect to get things for the money.</div>
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The new playground behind the school is amazing. It consists of climbing things, sliding things, spinning things, running areas, ball areas, and even musical structures. The climbing things were nothing like the big wooden platforms of the last decade. Now there are rope climbing, spinning, bridge structures, with bouncing platforms. The kids were thrilled. The park was packed.</div>
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It was a relief to be out in the world like this. There were kids and adults in the park of many different colors, with several different accents. They were wildly active, yet were still able to be curious and courteous. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="fcabbb2d3264" name="13d81e30b551" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">The big kids were careful and helpful to the little kids, and the little kids let the big kids move on by. It was great to see. It made me happy and hopeful.</span></div>
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The contrast to the virtual world, even to that here on Medium, and also to many of the interactions I have with adults, especially through businesses, was so striking. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="ae38d08917ca" name="8fea3bab63" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Sadly, we are living in a time where so many people keep their hostility and mistrust close to the surface, and let it out much too frequently.</span></div>
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<span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="fcabbb2d3264" name="206e2625183" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Yes, I live in a bubble. It’s a great one to be in</span>. It’s prosperous, creative, friendly. well-educated and expensive. We are very aware that there are mean, nasty, ugly things going on right around us. These days we hear about and witness more gratuitous acts of bigotry and meanness than two years ago There is also a much greater acceptance of crude behavior in general, and that includes more lying, bullying, cheating and distorting just in order to make a profit. i began writing this before United Airlines decided that it was Ok to drag a paying customer off a plane, and then blame him for being a bad volunteer. The fact that he paid them to sit in that seat didn’t seem to matter.</div>
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A short while ago I highlighted a sentence on a post here on Medium that stated that a woman had voted for Trump because of his integrity. This woman has many posts that are provocative, but they are well written and seem to be thoughtful. And I know people voted for Trump for lots of reasons, many of which I disagree with, but I understand their thought process. But when I read that sentence I first thought it was a joke. I still cannot grasp how anyone sees integrity in a man who has just paid $25 million dollars to settle a fraud case, will not show his tax returns, is known to have been sued by thousands of people for not paying his bills, has discriminated against people to make money, and has lied and fabricated stories loudly and publicly for the last thirty years. That use of the word “integrity” bent my mind out of shape.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="6a08" name="6a08" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; --x-height-multiplier: 0.35; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">
<span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="ae38d08917ca" name="90311c8d4a97 f35ae25372fe" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Certainly</span><span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="ae38d08917ca" name="f35ae25372fe 8b9d32986bd4" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">, she’s not alone, and I see that standards like that have pervaded the culture. I have had to deal with many people over the last few months as I shopped for certain expensive things I need to by to keep my home running and to keep some members of my family healthy. I can tell you, without the slightest doubt, that almost all of the salesmen I dealt with were charming, friendly and welcoming. They would answer any question and erase any doubts I mi</span>ght have. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="8cd3febe8199" name="3910b733776d" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Except, none of them were really honest.</span><span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="fcabbb2d3264" name="2c85f8a6d0a1" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">They were trained how to avoid talking about any of the known difficulties with their products, even when directly asked.</span> <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="8cd3febe8199" name="d90e0f3e9b0b" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">They skipped mention of things they knew, distorted other things, and rushed the process.</span> It was difficult to get accurate pricing information, even as they continually talked about how much I’d be saving (compared to what?). They also had been trained on how to use my name, keep smiling, compliment me on my knowledge and to up-sell when possible. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="8cd3febe8199 fcabbb2d3264 anon" name="58cd92bd935a 7809f443886d anon_4590f109b76" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">All charm and technique; no substance.</span></div>
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It’s worse than the old model of “buyer beware” because it’s possible that most of these salespeople know more about me than I can remember. If I’m buying a stove, they know how long I’ve been looking, which ones I’ve looked at, and what I paid for the last one I bought. They have a good idea of what I can afford, how quickly I spend, and my credit score.</div>
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It’s worse if your trying to get healthy, because all of the new drugs and medical products don’t have a history. We are all told that the new ones are better than the old ones, but who really gets a good look at all the studies. We only get to read about the best ones; the ones that got the drug approved. Then we get about three pages of tiny print that tells us the possible ways the drug may stop our heart or shut down our liver. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="8cd3febe8199" name="30e2f0b45d72" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">How much of a risk is a “slight” risk?</span></div>
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I know, as a therapist, than many people don’t trust their employers much any more. The larger the company, the less it seems they care about their employees. That is not a universal truth, but certainly there is a lot of truth to it. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="8cd3febe8199" name="c09ceee5324e" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Once “increased shareholder Value” became the accepted goal of corporations, then both customers and employees were demoted being less important people.</span> This has been worse since the recession of 2008. As unemployment rose and it became clear that people were easily replaceable, then the person in the job became less important than just having “a” person in the job. In many jobs, people are being replaced by machines of one sort or another. This is happening in jobs from assembly lines, to call centers, to book translation to doctors. It leaves everyone feeling a bit insecure about their future.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="c17b" name="c17b" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; --x-height-multiplier: 0.35; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">
<span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="ae38d08917ca" name="bf2684eae4c0" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">All of this seeps into a lot of areas, and it’s worse because few people trust any of the old, reliable institutions. Everything has become polemic.</span> <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="fcabbb2d3264" name="e655ed841a41" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">There are very few places that don’t offer an opinion, and those opinions are all more extreme.</span> Newspapers, TV stations, churches, colleges, police, baristas, chefs, salespeople, finance people, all seem to look at the world through a more distorted lens than before. Everyone has their own agenda. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="fcabbb2d3264" name="4fdcf73f5493" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Everyone is talking and almost no one is listening, at least not with an open mind. Everyone has learned to be more suspicious.</span></div>
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My wife and i have always enjoyed traveling. Very often we sit in a small restaurant and we are able to start a conversation with some of the people around us. We have done this many times, and all over the country. We’ve had memorable times in “Boston, in Philadelphia, PA, deep in the heart of Texas, and out near “Frisco Bay, all over St; Louis, and down in New Orleans…”</div>
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Everywhere, people are friendly, and mostly proud of where they live. But it’s changed slightly since the election. People try to get a read on each other to see which side you’re on. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="ae38d08917ca" name="1341bdbf3a5c" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Everyone seems to feel that the person on the other side of the divide is the cause of lots of trouble. That implies that there there a differences that can’t be discussed, but also can’t be resolved; major differences about what is important in life.</span></div>
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I don’t know how I’d feel these days in the local restaurant in a small town in Indiana. I am sure that all the people would be kind and caring folks, who want what is best for their families and their country. <span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="8cd3febe8199" name="55773075b301" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">But I’d also be aware that I’m also in the land that created Mike Pence, the new spokesperson for the American version of the Taliban.</span></div>
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How do we get things to improve from this state of affairs? I guess we need to start a dialogue to see if there is any common ground left upon which we can build a bridge across the great divide. Is there a way to create a foundation of respect, civility, and acceptance, with an understanding that despite all our differences. If we don’t get our act together, we will soon be living in an unsafe, unhealthy country, with a bad economy.</div>
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Is there anyone out there who would be an acceptable moderator for such a discussion? He or she may be difficult to find.</div>
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Stephen Colbet, Bill O’Reilly, Kloe Kardashian, Konya West, LeBron James, Bill Belichick</div>
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or</div>
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Lester Holt, Justice John Roberts, Judge Richard Posner, Gov. Charlie Baker</div>
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The duo of Niki Haley and Maxine Waters — that might be fun.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p graf-after--p" id="5c52" name="5c52" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; --x-height-multiplier: 0.35; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 29px;">
<span class="markup--quote markup--p-quote is-other" data-creator-ids="ae38d08917ca" name="80dc1ffa6689" style="-webkit-transition: background-color 0.2s; background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(223, 247, 246), rgb(223, 247, 246)); cursor: pointer; transition: background-color 0.2s;">Anyone? Any trusted voice of reason who would be respected by 70% of the population?</span></div>
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Suggestions?</div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-46196072754425084452017-03-15T15:57:00.000-07:002017-03-15T15:57:01.405-07:00To Alpha Centauri or The Bronx and Mississippi?<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I don’t know Yuri Milner. I know that he made a lot of money by backing some of the biggest Internet social media companies. I know that about two years ago he decided to use $100 million of his own money to launch a project called Starshot, to explore outer space, way outer space. His goal was to find a method to send measuring devices to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, which is about four light years away.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">Now, four years doesn’t sound like an impossible amount of time to get to another planet, but, despite the “warp speed” button on the Millennium Flacon, going the speed of light is something that cannot be done, except by light.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">Undaunted, Mr. Milner has assembled a top team of</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">scientists and engineers who want to be a part of this project, and they have come up with ideas that they feel, theoretically, could go almost 20% of the speed of light, if they can work out the many difficult details.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">At that speed it would take 20 years to send tiny devices to Alpha Centauri.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">What they would send would be a herd of very small chips. like the ones that are in your phone.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">They would be sent there by a push from an array of focused lasers, which would give them a giant push, and get them up to 20% of light speed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Will this work? That seems to be only part of the mission of this mission. The real fun is just getting all these skilled people to think and act together attempt to conceptualize technology, execution, and the future. The odds of getting the machines there, getting them to work during the few moments of fly by, and then getting them to send data back through four light-years of space in manner that can be received and interpreted, are quite small. But they have $100 million to start with, and about thirty years o figure it out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Fascinating, encouraging, and hey, it’s his money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">EXCEPT:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I was reading an update on the Starshot program in this mont’s <i>Scientific American</i>, which I still get in hard copy after all these years, even though it isn’t even American any more. The articles have been cut down to three or four pages to cater to an audience with today’s attention span. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">so I was able to keep reading new articles about attempts at using the scientific method to discover other factors that influence our lives. Science continues to do this even if the results are not 100% accurate, and the struggle for confirmation usually demands “further study.” The lack of clarity is part of what makes the real quest for knowledge unending. Nobody, knows it all; even if they think they do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">About ten pages further along in the same issues (March, 2017) is an article by Kimberly Noble, who is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University Teachers College. She has studied the effects of poverty on children’s brain development and, not surprisingly, she has found that children who spend their early lives in homes with the lowest socio-economic level show impairments in their cognitive functioning. These impairments are not due to their genetics, or race or location, as all those factors were controlled, they are due to not having enough of whatever is needed to develop their brains to their full potential. This includes food, social and cognitive stimulation, attention, heat, stability, and all the other parts of life that come with poverty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She cites that there are some programs that are somewhat effective and helping children who live in poverty to overcome those dangers, such as Head Start. She also states that correlation does not always imply causality, as there may be other factors that just haven’t been discovered that may actually be the cause of these cognitive deficiencies. So, this theory requires further study.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One type of study she suggests would be just to give the families money. She wonders if fancy education or training programs are necessary, or if that would just be spreading the money around to consultants and teachers, and not the families who are poor. Why not just give them money and see what good it would do? Her “hypothesis is that increased family income will trigger a cascade of positive effects for these families.” And that these effects will show up in the improved cognitive skills of these children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Her experimental design is to give 100 families $333 a month. That’s a bit of money. But not much. It’s almost $4000 a year. It’s certainly something, if you have nothing, but not enough to really move anyone out of poverty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That’s when I began to connect the two articles in my mind. What if, in addition to his fun and fascinating interstellar Starshot project, Mr. Milner could see his way to dropping another $100 million of the estimated over $3.1 Billion he has parked around the world on Dr. Noble’s project.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Then we could really study what it would mean to a family’s life, including brain development, stability, achievement and future, if they could move out of poverty and into the lower-middle class. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For around $100 million, 500 families could get $40,000 a year for seven years. i would begin it at the birth of a child, just like Dr. Noble is doing. I don’t know what would happen; that’s why we do studies. But my hypothesis would be that after seven years most of the families would have found a way to be able to keep running at that level on their own. It would allow them a better chance at keep the partners together. It would give them a better way to have one parent at home while the other one worked, and each parent could find work without having the home fall apart or the kids go unsupervised. It would allow them to keep jobs making $11 an hour long enough to move up and stating making $20 an hour. Or it would allow them to go to school and get training to make $105,000 a year. It would relieve the stress that comes from not making the rent, or from choosing whether to pay for food, shelter or medicine. Perhaps even give the family resources to get a car, which would get them to work regularly and on time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This kind of stability would assure that the child receives proper nourishment and proper attention from two parents; parents who would be relaxed enough so that the child would not be subjected to the tension that comes with poverty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What this study would also be doing is testing the theory behind a guaranteed annual income. That is something that will come more into focus when self-driving trucks are introduced, along with all the other robots that will run our factories, deliver goods, clean our streets and suck the pollution out of the air.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So, if any of you reading this know how to get in touch with Mr. Milner, tell him to talk to Dr. Noble and see if they can work out the details. You can tell him I sent you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Really, I strongly believe that both of these functions, basic research for space exploration, and practical research on child and family development, obviously should be paid for by our government. That’s what governments do well, when they are allowed to function. Mr. Milner, and all of those who possess the top .1% and the1% and even the top 5% of wealth in this country should pay a lot more taxes to allow the government to do things like this for all of our citizens. They should do this because the system in this country is designed to help those people become innovative, to take risks, and even to fail and try again. They have benefitted greatly from the rules that were written to help them. They should pay some it back to allow the society to benefit also, That way our society can develop more innovators and more problem solvers, using the talent of people from all socio-economic groups.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">However, we are living in an upside-down time. A time when science is bad and anger and scapegoating innocent people is in vogue. We are still being sold the myth that rich people are better at distributing money, and that giving them more of it helps those with less. We hear this often, even though it has not worked for over thirty years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But that is a discussion for another time. Almost every other time it seems, which is good, because maybe, if it discussed enough, things will change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Until then, whisper in Yuri’s ear, or anyone out there who you know who has $100 million that they don’t want to leave to their great-grandchildren because it will ruin their lives.</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-76791983143735434832017-03-09T17:43:00.000-08:002017-03-09T17:43:09.936-08:00So Messed UP<h3 class="graf graf--h3" name="f1b1">
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<figure class="graf graf--figure" name="88b5"><img class="graf-image" data-height="426" data-image-id="1*ARDqb_TICkiNxt7KCSCKiA.jpeg" data-width="640" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ARDqb_TICkiNxt7KCSCKiA.jpeg" /><figcaption class="imageCaption">pixabay</figcaption></figure><br />
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We drove up the west side of the east coast. Geographically, this is a beautiful country. I drove for three hours along the spectacular Blue Ridge Parkway. It was built by the government beginning in 1935, in part to give people jobs, and in part to give everyone a chance to enjoy the wonders of our country.</div>
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Although it is one of the most visited sites of the National Park Service it was almost totally empty as I drove through dozens of magnificent curves, surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains. Even with the hills dressed in their winter brown each new turn was a visual delight.</div>
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<figure class="graf graf--figure" name="d484"><img class="graf-image" data-height="2448" data-image-id="1*Li49GZFMCdQ4HSmzzkoiqA.jpeg" data-width="3264" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*Li49GZFMCdQ4HSmzzkoiqA.jpeg" /><figcaption class="imageCaption">DJB, Blue Ridge Parkway</figcaption></figure><figure class="graf graf--figure" name="7854"><img class="graf-image" data-height="2448" data-image-id="1*C-gKNzEjT9h8uH8i9-ZaYA.jpeg" data-width="3264" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*C-gKNzEjT9h8uH8i9-ZaYA.jpeg" /><figcaption class="imageCaption">DJB, from Blue Ridge Parkway viewing area</figcaption></figure><br />
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But looks can be deceiving; this great country is a mess. The politics are not the cause, they are the result of a society gone wrong. We are a prosperous, strong and creative country, yet so many are so lost, angry and stressed.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="13bd">
I am hardly working any more. I gave up my psychotherapy practice on the day with the most sunlight of last year. At that time I was tired. I had become almost immune to the craziness and suffering that was presented to me for nine hours a day. My view of life was becoming pretty cynical and suspect. I thought that if I could stay away from listening to misery for all those hours my mind would clear and my faith in the spirits and wisdom of the world would return.</div>
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That hasn’t happened.</div>
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The first thing that disrupts my feelings of peace and hope is that I am getting older, creakier and a bit crankier. I am still young-old and except for not being able to run or jump (lost my jump-shot), I am still very active. But surrounding me, many of my friends are breaking down. Several have already disappeared. Various chronic conditions have set in: diabetes, neuropathy, M.S., heart problems and several cancers. Due to the marvelous advances in medicines most have been patched together and are continuing on. But the cloud lingers over all of us. “Is this just a head ache?”</div>
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But the main disruption comes as I realize that the people I saw for therapy were at least insightful and brave enough to confront their difficulties. From them I usually heard about other family members who were raging destructive forces that negatively impacted the lives of dozens of people, but who never would come for treatment.</div>
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Now that I am away from the office I realize that it is not just the families of my patients, the entire world is full of these people. Every family has at least one. Anxiety, depression, anger, rejection, hyper-sensitivity, seem to be woven into our society, with few effective treatments. I am finding no difference between the people I interact with now, and those I was seeing at work, except almost all of my patients were much more open and aware about what was really going on in their minds and their lives.</div>
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(Yes, all of the following details are modified enough to protect the identities.)</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em">A Patient: </em>She grew-up with a very abusive mother and an alcoholic father who tried to protect her until he dropped dead. Five of her seven siblings are already dead from illnesses, accidents and addictions. She went through several abusive relationships as an adult and a long period of drinking heavily herself. She recovered and stabilized in her fifties. She still suffers from the physical pains left from all of the conflicts she endured. Now she takes care of herself, has a weekend man friend, and finally feels safe and in control.</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em">A Friend’s Daughter:</em> Grew up in an upper middle class home. She attended a good high school in which she faltered, so she was sent to a prep school, which got her into a private college that she didn’t finish. Her older brother is a software engineer with a nice family. She came home from college and got pregnant. Now, her daughter is twelve and being raised by her grandparents, while her mother watches TV, goes to doctors, goes shopping and complains about how difficult life is.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="28b6">
<em class="markup--em markup--p-em">A Patient:</em> She was raised by a father who thought he knew God, and a mother who believed that sex was the cause of all evil. She wasn’t allowed out of the house except for school until she was sixteen. She was married for six months but couldn’t take the pressure of a relationship. She now has learned some computer skills and works in a billing office. She has a few friends she sees on weekends. She has no TV and reads English novels every evening. She’s not a fan of religion.</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em">A Friend’s ex-wife: </em>In her early forties as her two daughters were becoming active adolescents, she freaked out and joined a fundamentalist church. All decisions were based on God, sin and the Bible. She started giving money to TV preachers and hovering over her daughters. Her husband finally divorced her and kept her away from their daughters. She now has limited contact with them, and they are at college. They think she is having an affair with the minister.</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em">A Patient: </em>He came from a wealthy, well educated family who had high expectations. They lived in a wealthy town and had an active social life. He started using cocaine on weekends with his friends. He really enjoyed doing that more than anything else. He started stealing from his family to pay for it. He lied to cover it up. He then began using heroin. He went into rehab. He went back to using. He went back to rehab. He went back to using. They sent him to live with an aunt who lived far away to get a new start. I don’t think it helped, but he wasn’t my patient any longer.</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em">A Friend’s son</em>: Same thing, except he’s living in a small apartment in another city and his parents pay his rent and send him a small allowance. He sends a text messages about once a month to tell them he’s still alive.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="3a65">
Those are three examples. I could easily give you sixty. I think that the mental health of the country has gotten worse, but not by a tremendous amount. What is different is that it is more apparent, and that it has less of a functional basis. By that I mean that in so many ways our lives are easier, safer, and offer more possibilities for fun, relaxation, creativity, community, and enjoyment than ever before. Everyone, except the very poorest and oppressed ten to 15 percent, are living with better food, shelter and safety than ever. There are difficulties, but there are usually pathways to improvement. Yet, it seems as if there is an uncertainty about the future which creates a constant underlying tension of insecurity. This insecurity creates a sense of distrust that make people very suspicious and defensive, and that limits cooperation, which stops progress.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="47f4">
It feels as if our primitive human brains are not equipped to take advantage of many of the technological advances that could make our lives so much easier and better. Technology has disrupted so many jobs and has intruded upon so many lifestyles that people need to learn totally new coping skills to survive.</div>
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But there is almost no one to teach those skills, because none of us have been here before.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="505f">
Instead we have a plethora of gurus advocating old-style solutions, usually based on the usual aphorisms, cliches, and homilies. These are mostly derived from the old institutions of religion, pop-psychology or business schools: Faith, Mindfulness, Perseverance. Many are popular only due to clever marketing strategies.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="5a53">
Yes, there is certainly some wisdom in the advice they offer, but they no longer really address the problems we all have to deal with.. The world has changed. It operates very differently now. The tasks that people need to survive are very different. This is true because the way people work has changed. It’s mostly connected to technology. It’s much faster. It’s much more mental and less physical. Many jobs are not even necessary, as they can be done more efficiently by computers or robots. Because economics are different, relationships are different. Men and women now play different roles. People from other countries play different roles. Many people find this confusing and stressful.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="9900">
For many of us, the goals we have in our minds as we wake up each day are less clear. It becomes easy to just chase after money, but that soon proves to be an endless grind that eats away our values, ethics and trust. So what’s next? People seem lost. It becomes an existential question about how to make life meaningful. If survival is easy, how can we feel accomplished? How can we feel grown-up? This seems especially confusing to men as it becomes difficult to prove masculinity when the tasks of life are so cerebral and require interpersonal and emotional skills. Perhaps that contributes to the difficulties many women have in finding a rewarding relationship with a man, as guys seem so 20th Century, and so immature.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="440a">
The short term coping solution in this country, sadly has been what usually happens during times of transition. The major power structure plays upon the fears of the majorities, splits them into smaller groups and turns them against each other. As newer, lower skill jobs become scarce, the affected groups fight each other for the scraps instead of planning for a better, cooperative future. Hostility between people increases, stress increases. As things become more complex and more difficult more people become overwhelmed and just drop out all together, ending up hiding in bed, living in someone’s basement, or trolling on the Internet.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="6da8">
All of these struggles are sadly ironic. The hope was that new technologies would bring positive changes for everyone. Our survival could be guaranteed. There is already the means to feed and shelter all of us. If properly employed, technology could release us from meaningless work and grant us time for more leisure and richer, more satisfying lives. But the thought of that, and the lack of structure that comes with it, seems to frighten the majority of people. Can our brains, bodies and societies cope with so much freedom? Reaching those goals demands new skills, such as cooperation and sharing. It demands communicating and compromising; listening and understanding; inclusion and acceptance.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="e653">
Those are much more complex skills than individualism, competition, and a quest for money, power and dominance. The most difficult part is that any lasting, positive change requires a basic level of trust. Humans have not shown a strong ability to do that, even within their own tribes or families. I’ve seen too many families in which a man has gotten way too involved with his brother’s wife. That usually upsets the family dynamics and trust.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="c6e8">
But adaptation to a new way of living is possible. Our early ancestors lived in tribes and had lives based on sharing and cooperation. So we have those old pathways somewhere in our brains. I’ve read that agriculture and the idea of the ownership of land put an end to that.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="9943">
We can’t go back to hunting and gathering any more than we can go back to all of us growing our own food. But we do have the capability to change, learn and adjust to new situations. The ones who are able to learn the fastest will be the ones who survive and have more children to whom they can teach those skills.</div>
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We are in a time a rapid transition. The old ways don’t work, but people are clinging to them desperately, even when it means denying obvious truths. Changes causes uncertainty. Uncertainty causes fear. Fear quickly raises the level of distrust.</div>
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Transitions are never easy or smooth. Just ask your five year-old to turn off the iPad, watch how happily she makes the change.</div>
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(references for many of the ideas mentioned are available upon request. )</div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-40235102964126049662017-02-20T18:41:00.000-08:002017-02-20T19:05:51.396-08:00This City, At This Time<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnTYDcwnMYX50mNewj2oJbCuSiFzoUe9cMCak6DFbJ3y5lgCpHUjmGxG_nSKxEJrGBqalvy_o01xoawxw5t0-ShkFATD6SGNEXAdQIbGOV4-OTQyiqyKPXQUk3jrdL-ik0Do0OMw/s1600/fullsizeoutput_4ef.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnTYDcwnMYX50mNewj2oJbCuSiFzoUe9cMCak6DFbJ3y5lgCpHUjmGxG_nSKxEJrGBqalvy_o01xoawxw5t0-ShkFATD6SGNEXAdQIbGOV4-OTQyiqyKPXQUk3jrdL-ik0Do0OMw/s320/fullsizeoutput_4ef.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">We are down south, but not really in the South.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">We are in the big city that is almost another country, but isn’t.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Many, perhaps most, people here speak another language, many languages.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I am high up in a high building. I can sit and watch the planes come out of the clouds and coast to the airport.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I can watch the boats glide down the bay and wait for the drawbridge to open.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I see the sunset turn the windows blazing red on the tall towers across the bay.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Rows of forty and fifty story steel and glass towers line the water for miles.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">All with balconies that almost no one is on, except for me, and a couple of people who sneak out to smoke.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Along the bay these towers are two, three, or four rows deep.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">They are building more all over the city; higher ones to peek over the older ones. The noise of construction, the banging, the beeping, the grinding goes on from eight to five, everyday except Sunday.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The money for these buildings comes from all over the world.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The money finds a safe home here. It is safer, at least for now, than it is in Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Egypt, Turkey, Russia or China, or any country with oil.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Four blocks away from the bay the houses are one, two or three stories tall.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">There are neighborhoods, some are going through transitions as the poor immigrants are being pushed away. Younger, more hopeful, but not yet prosperous people are moving in. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">These neighborhoods are vibrant, with night life going on late.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Cafes overflowing on the streets full of men, drinking and talking, making deals.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Designing businesses, designing designs, writing, playing music.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Flirting with women.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Women too, are now talking, drinking wine, designing, making deals, building businesses</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Smiling as the men flirt with them.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The men and women who have come from the other cultures, live in these neighborhoods. They dress beautifully, they present themselves to the world with a sense of presence and style.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">This is a city. The people have to have a style, a sense of themselves to be a part of it.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">But this is not Brooklyn or Boston. It is warm here.No big coats, sweaters, or flannel shirts,</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Bodies are clearly on display, and they look good. Often very good. Certainly to an old man.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Walk around the corner and you have to step over a man sleeping on the sidewalk with his head resting on his backpack. You won’t step on him because you can smell him a few feet before you see him.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">If you pass a dark alley a young man with vacant eyes may step out and ask you, in a voice that you strain to hear, for a couple of dollars, just so he can survive.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">He makes you feel uncomfortable and it’s very awkward, as you realize what it must take to ask like this. Even if he is just hustling he can’t be very good at it because he looks so lost and frail, but he still human. So I give him a couple of dollars realizing that my wife just spend $15 on a glass of wine at the very good, hip restaurant in this transitional neighborhood, and our Uber will arrive in two more minutes to take us back to the tower that overlooks the bay.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">In the building by the bay live hundreds of people from hundreds of places, speaking dozens of languages. Riding the elevator early in the morning you ride down with people going to work. They are dressed in everything including sharp business suits, short dresses and very high heels, fine jeans and fancy tee-shirts, and hospital scrubs. Everyone is cheerful, everyone is a little more than polite, they are friendly. Many know each other, and like being together.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Half an hour later the elevator is full of people with their dogs. Mostly women with very small dogs. Many of the dogs are in their own strollers. One women had four little white dogs in her stroller, all barking in slightly different tones</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Later in the day, the old people are doing laps up and back in the pool, many using styrofoam floatations to help them along in their exercise programs. Inside, in the elevator, as I got on with my three year-old grandson, a man joined us. He stood about six-foot-five, with broad shoulders and a trim waist. His skin was the color of a frappuccino. He wore expensive business casual. His dreadlocks flowed down below his shoulders. He spotted at my grandson, who immediately hid behind my legs. The man smiled and said, “Hey, is that Lightening McQueen on those shoes.” The kid stepped out from behind my leg and spoke in his barely comprehensible english, “Yes, these shoes go very fast.”</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Later, as the sun begins to set, it is Happy Hour all over the city. Since it is warm, or hot here, almost everything happens outside. Families gather on the decks, in their backyards, or together in the neighborhood. They cook old recipes that have come from many different lands and have been modified by each generation that has been here. In the bars, cafes, restaurants, many that line the water ways, the people begin their evenings, sitting, conversing, and laughing. Many gather in family or ethnic groups, but also many in very diverse groups of people who work together, create together or just play together. This is what helps the city grow, change, and evolve into whatever it needs to be. The world changes from here.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The TVs on the wall show mostly soccer games from Europe or Brazil. There are basketball games of the local team and local colleges. There is also the news channel, but not the one they watch in Indiana.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">On the news channel is our President, raving that he is treated unfairly. He is telling us he is making us safer, and he is the best that there ever was.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">The people here who watch him are nervous. They fear that he will deport their friends for no reason, to countries they have not been since they were six. He will deport these people to make the people living in Arkansas feel safe. The people in Arkansas, twelve hundred miles away somehow feel threatened by the people in this neighborhood. They feel that way because the President told them they were dangerous. None of these people look or act dangerous. Well, some of the women might be dangerous, but not in a way that would threaten Little Rock.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Away from the towers of steel, glass and balconies many of the neighborhoods are crumbling.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Many of the streets are full of potholes and with crumbling houses and littered lots.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">They have found a way to distract people from the rubble by painting beautiful murals all over the city.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-gatm8Sme5i_Yq82kgNbw7Fg08GwtSgHVg0pvZ2cnjnnYbYIcofJ8kT4tSG4Azb4wJircVrbJKCgS7ZutDLBgPBeoxd00f-nyACjSAOcYPqeQScVh-J6zm3VGXl26-yhxY0PxdA/s1600/WynWood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-gatm8Sme5i_Yq82kgNbw7Fg08GwtSgHVg0pvZ2cnjnnYbYIcofJ8kT4tSG4Azb4wJircVrbJKCgS7ZutDLBgPBeoxd00f-nyACjSAOcYPqeQScVh-J6zm3VGXl26-yhxY0PxdA/s320/WynWood.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The schools struggle for funds, and face the huge task of having to educate people who speak so many languages, and have so many needs. I do not live here so I don’t know the politics, but I’m sure it’s complex, and probably doesn’t work that well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is a very American city, but it is not typical, because everyone city is unique. This city will grow unless the sea continues to rise and covers it over. What it will become is not yet clear. Like every place around the world, it seems as if those who are already doing well will benefit the most. Those a step away will strive toward to join in the prosperity, with a few making it. The rest will struggle in the shadows of the towers, living lives of increasing difficulty. This is the way it has been since cities first formed. The castles were on the top of the hill. The garbage and the sewage flowed down. Why should it be different now?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Perhaps because we don’t need slaves and surfs or peasants any more to support the kings, dukes and earls. We don’t even need kings, dukes and earls any more, although many people seem to pretend to royalty, certainly in their own mind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now we have robots. We have Artificial Intelligence, and sophisticated algorithms that can help run all our lives. We even have democracy, so that everyone can be a part of choosing our future. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">At least we made an attempt at it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Like this city, it still needs a lot of adjustments.</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-32449514483379286182017-02-08T19:05:00.000-08:002017-02-20T19:00:17.918-08:00Like it or Not, It’s US!<div class="postArticle-content js-postField js-notesSource js-trackedPost" data-collection-id="469abbe3b329" data-post-id="ad8de1f7301e" data-scroll="native" data-source="post_page" data-tracking-context="postPage" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
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<figcaption class="imageCaption" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; --x-height-multiplier: 0.363; -webkit-nbsp-mode: normal; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Sans', Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'lnum' 1; font-size: 14px; left: 0px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4; margin-top: 10px; outline: 0px; position: relative; text-align: center; top: 0px; width: 700px; z-index: 300;">sleepng in the Everglades by DJB</figcaption></figure><br />
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Look at the ‘gators, just sleeping in the sun. It’s difficult for me to speculate about an alligator’s thoughts, because their ability to think is pretty limited. But anthropomorphically, they look as if they are just relaxing in the sun, affectionately intertwined. Their hearts are pure their bellies are full.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">These ‘gators, and about a dozen of their colleagues, are laying in a muddy patch near a path through the Everglades National Park. This is different than the park where the commercial tours run; the ones that also feature a guy who wrestles with alligators. The same tourist attraction they have run since 1955. Looking over at these lizards it’s pretty clear that they have no interest in wrestling with anyone. They are living out their alligator life, in their protected alligator swamp, seemingly unconcerned about anything more than when to get up and find their next meal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple any more, not even for them. Although I doubt those two realize it, they are lucky to be here. In 1955, due in part to people who captured them and put them in shows, but more because people made them into shoes and pocketbooks, and even more because people drained the swamps for farms and housing developments, alligators almost became extinct. But the government stepped in and protected them and persevered great swaths of their habitat. By 1987, they were no longer endangered.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But now, we may be seeing a government that doesn’t care as much about spending a lot of money to protect swamps and mud holes. Also, the water that comes into the swamps and mud holes maybe coming in too quickly and getting too deep, and is changing the composition of what kinds of creatures can live there. In addition the water now contains a lot of strange, man-made chemicals that are toxic to many of the creatures that live in those swamps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But really, although I do like alligators, as well as great blue herons, ospreys, and piping plovers, and also the southern toads and pig frogs, and every other fish, animal, bird, plant and bug in the Everglades, I care more about my grandchildren, and the kind of world in which they will be living. I know that if the Everglades, and many of the other estuaries that provide the basic nourishment for the bottom of the food chain become greatly diminished, then everyone’s ability to to grow and find food, all the way up to the top of the chain becomes diminished.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But, really, this isn’t really about climate change. What these two sleeping reptiles don’t seem to be thinking about is how much the lives of all of us, every creature on earth, have become so much more intertwined over the last hundred years. What happens in the Everglades affects the lives of people and polar bears in Alaska. What happens in Washington and Beijing can be a matter of life and death in Syria and Brazil. The way you treat your neighbor affects how I treat mine. It has become almost impossible to live a life in isolation. Everyone is connected, whether you want to be or not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I realize, having walked out on a starry night deep in the desert in Arizona, or up in the mountains of Idaho, that it can feel as if the rest of the world is far away and that I am alone, independent and self-dependent. But as soon as I want to eat, find water, or to talk to another human being, I will be affected by, and have an affect on, the rest of the world. Not just the town, the country or the state that I’m in; the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This is true because the people of the world are all now in constant communication with each other. People in Afghanistan were watching the Super Bowl (great game, wasn’t it). People in India were watching Lady GaGa( I didn’t like those shoulder pads). China holds billions of dollars of America’s debt. On my table in Massachusetts is coffee from Africa or Central America, fruit from South America, on dishes made in Portugal. People in those countries are eating bread made from American wheat, and driving American tractors across their farms. Many people are dependent on life-saving drugs made in America, Switzerland, Germany, Israel or India.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">People are moving all across the world, some running from terrible conditions, others going to seek better educations and opportunities. They are inter-marrying, and often their children are moving to new places. This isn’t going to stop, even if one country decides to build a wall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Ideas are flowing even more quickly across the world. Some people are trying to finding ways we can all benefit from each other’s knowledge, and improve the lives of everyone, all across the globe. Others a still pretty primitive, and are spreading ideas about how some people are different and should be driven away, or blown up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To those who say that if everyone would just take care of themselves, and not hurt anyone else, that’s enough, I have to answer, sadly, that is no longer true. We now still have to take care of ourselves, but also be aware of how we do it, and how it affects everyone else. You can’t leave your garbage in the woods. You can’t burn your garbage in the back yard. You can’t leave the water running all day. You can’t drive a car that doesn’t run clean. You can’t text while driving that car. Burning down the rain forrest in Brazil affects the air quality in Russia. Insider trading undermines the trust necessary to financial transactions. Discriminatory housing practices create tensions and anger that can ruin a city. Not paying taxes undermines the fairness of a society. Corruption and unfairness make doing business much more difficult. Everyone who feels cheated starts to cheat to protect themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The fact that the rest of the world didn’t care that the Israelis and Palestinians never settled their differences for eighty years has affected almost everyone in the world. It has created the chaos and conflict through-out the region that has now affected almost every country in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If people can’t support their families in Mississippi or Wisconsin it affects me here in Massachusetts, even though my kids have good jobs and my wife and I have just stopped working after forty years. It affects us if kids in Kansas go to terrible schools and won’t be able to understand the world in which they are living, even if my grandchildren do. Those Kansas kids will struggle and get angry and who knows who they will blame.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I would love to be able to relax and read a good mystery without feeling that something is going terribly wrong and I need to help fix it. I would love to just post pictures of my grandchildren playing with ducks, or only spend time telling you how amazing Isiah Thomas has been for the Celtics. — which he has been and I do spend time talking about it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">To all of you who spend part of the day meditating and being mindful. And to the others who are reading about how to be wildly successful by focusing on your goals, that’s great, and go for it. But be aware, that you can’t achieve your goal on your own, and also it’s worthless if the world you are living in is falling apart. If you just take care of yourself you may not notice that the freedoms of other people to just take care of themselves is slipping away. They are not sliding down a slippery slope, they are falling off a cliff, and once they go we all soon will follow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We all have to be aware of what we are doing and how it affects other people, even, and perhaps especially, the ones who don’t know, who we think of as different from us. We are all in this together. We will all live together in a better world, or we will all live like the poor people of Somalia, with constant conflict and chaos. Those are our choices. The choices are becoming clearer each day.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">So, as they say at the check-out counter: “Have a great day.”</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-28892217291367232232017-01-26T07:33:00.000-08:002017-01-26T07:33:00.745-08:00Emma Asks a Question<div class="postArticle-content js-postField js-notesSource js-trackedPost" data-collection-id="e1111b0a6ee9" data-post-id="8a7ed9e26539" data-scroll="native" data-source="post_page" data-tracking-context="postPage" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; outline: 0px; position: relative; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
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Emma Asks a Question</h1>
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<figcaption class="imageCaption" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; --x-height-multiplier: 0.363; -webkit-nbsp-mode: normal; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Sans', Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'lnum' 1; font-size: 14px; left: 0px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4; margin-top: 10px; outline: 0px; position: relative; text-align: center; top: 0px; width: 700px; z-index: 300;">none of these girls are Emma (Pixabay download)</figcaption></figure><div class="graf graf--p graf-after--figure" id="44bd" name="44bd" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.179; --x-height-multiplier: 0.35; font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; letter-spacing: -0.003em; line-height: 1.58; margin-top: 38px;">
I’ve written about Emma before: <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://medium.com/choosing-our-future/dancing-with-emma-c1dd0880baed#.ohz8era5s" href="https://medium.com/choosing-our-future/dancing-with-emma-c1dd0880baed#.ohz8era5s" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">She is six years-old and in kindergarten.</a></div>
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Like all grandchildren, she is curious, brilliant, beautiful, funny, intelligent and amazingly perceptive. More than most, she is very fortunate.</div>
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She has two loving parents and six (count them) attentive grandparents. Her aunt and uncle live near by and she gets along well with her cousins. Her parents have good, stable, interesting jobs. She lives in a very nice house, with a nice yard, in a friendly town, with a very good school system. She is secure, happy, makes friends easily and certainly feels free to express herself; a lot.</div>
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The town she lives in is only a few miles from Boston. It participates in the METCO program which brings children from Boston to many of the suburban schools for the purpose of exposing everyone to different cultures. It was established in 1968 and has been very successful.</div>
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I was there for dinner the other night, and after we all agreed on what, and how much she and her two year-old brother would eat, Emma chirped up and asked the following question:</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Why are all the kids who get on the city bus all different colors while the White kids all get on the town bus?</em></div>
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Everyone’s first response was “Wow, that’s a really good question. You really notice a lot of things.”</div>
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Her mother, who had finally sat down to eat said “ That’s an important question and the answer to that is very complicated.” She then mumbled something about institutionalized racism, and let the rest of us try to give Emma and answer. My wife, who Emma calls Nanny, told her that not everyone gets to go to a school as good as hers, so some kids come from the city so they can go to her school.</div>
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I tried to explain it a bit more by telling Emma, in my best eight year-old language (she’s only six, but you know how precocious our own grandchildren must be) that not everyone is as lucky as she is. Many people never get the chance to live in a house like this, in a town like this, and go to a school like hers. Then I added that “some people don’t give people who are a different color as much of a chance to do everything they want.</div>
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As Emma respond to that with a look of total confusion her brother announced that he wanted to play with Thomas (his train) and the usual dinner chaos resumed. I did Keep Emma’s attention long enough to tell her that very soon, I would take her to see parts of the city where some of the kids on the city bus live. That way she could see how it is different, and how they get along. She seemed very interested in taking a field trip like that, especially since it would probably include ice cream. Her brother would love it if we went on the trolley.</div>
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But we really haven’t answered Emma’s question. She did go to the Women’s March in Boston last Saturday. She was a bit overwhelmed by the size of the crowd, but people seemed so happy she was there that she felt safe and a part of what was going on. She had made her own sign on a piece of construction paper that read: “Hello. Are You Good or Bad?” The answer to that question will have a huge impact on her life. We are hoping to minimize the bad.</div>
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Still, we are left with the problem of having to explain to a happy, secure, privileged six year-old that she is a member of a flawed species. Even after 200,000 years of some kind of civilization, people still have a great deal of difficulty trusting people who look and act differently, All of our new, amazing technology has not yet lived up to its potential of making life better for everyone.</div>
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How to we tell her, without scaring her half to death, that several of her great-great aunts and uncles were murdered in Europe seventy-three years ago because they read the wrong books. How do we explain to her why the parents of her new friends who get on the city bus would like to have a job like her father, but they never seem to get them. And it probably isn’t because they wouldn’t like to work there or they couldn’t do the job. It’s just because…… it never seems to happen.</div>
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She knows that all the women in her family, her mother, her aunt, and all her grandmothers, all have or had good jobs, and were all in leadership positions. She expects that this will be in her future; right now it would be running a hair salon.</div>
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These questions have become even more important during this time of Trump. It is a time when the President talks about whole groups of people as scary, and that they shouldn’t be let into this country, or they should be thrown out. He Tweets mean things about people who disagree with him, and he tells new lies every day. People on TV are always talking about those lies.</div>
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Maybe we just tell her that there are many people right here in America who think that their money is more important than other people’s lives, and she had better learn to make and keep her own money, and the hell with everyone else. If she wants to, she can hire some poor folks as body guards and pay them $8 an hour plus benefits, and they’d be happy for the benefits.</div>
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But we don’t want to say that, because we don’t want it to be true. It was easier to tell her about what was happening when we thought these things were getting better. Now we will find away to tell her that we, along with everyone she saw at the march, are working to make the backlash to the backlash happen. And that most people really care about people, and are working to make things better for everyone, all around the world. We will show her that rooting for America is not like rooting for the Patriots, because in life, it’s much better when people help each other than when they try to make winner and losers. (And most people hate the Patriots because they win so much).</div>
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We can already tell her that she is doing her part, just by doing what she is doing and being good friends with the kids who get on the city bus. She doesn’t know why that’s such a big deal, and really, it isn’t. But it’s good, and it helps, and it will make things better.</div>
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The rest is up to us. We have to be the adults in the room. We have to work hard to get rid of the bigoted, the bullies, the greedy and the liars. We have the resources, the knowledge, the technology and the skills to do so. We just have to put in the effort, and show Emma, and all the kids of her generation, that we care about them, all of them.</div>
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</footer>Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-5689321146107462292017-01-17T06:36:00.000-08:002017-01-17T06:36:15.432-08:00Therapy for Trump!?<h1 class="graf graf--h3 graf--leading graf--title" id="f4a0" name="f4a0" style="--baseline-multiplier: 0.157; --margin-top-multiplier: 0; --x-height-multiplier: 0.363; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Sans', Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 40px; letter-spacing: -0.028em; line-height: 1.04; margin: 0px 0px 0px -2.5px;">
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David Grace responded to one of my posts about Therapy Bots with this question:</div>
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<em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">I had no idea the tech was so advanced. But here’s the Big Question, the Acid Test — Can the latest and greatest Freud-O-Bot successfully treat Donald Trump’s problems? Can it do that? Can it? If not, then we still have a long way to go.</em></div>
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My first reaction was to think about how difficult it would be just to get Trump to consider discussing anything with a therapist of any kind. Part of the reason I feel that Trump is so frightening is that he thinks he knows the answer before he knows the question. Almost all of his responses are attacks. He takes no blame or responsibility for anything. In his mind, he has never done anything wrong. Also, he never seems to “think slowly.” He just reacts, defensively, emotionally and aggressively.</div>
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But then I realized that as President he will be constantly criticized, and he will realize that he does not have the love and admiration that he so desires. He won with a minority, and he is quickly losing many of them, He will lose more as his lack of knowledge, experience, bad judgement and temperament become more obvious. He is finding that his “attack Tweets” only bring him more ridicule. This will bother him. At that point he may be open to some professional help.</div>
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As a Psychologist, I cannot ethically diagnose anyone whom I have not personally evaluated, and I have never met with Mr. Trump. If I did, I could not, and would not, discuss my findings in public. So this comes with a clear disclaimer :all I have to go on is how he acts on TV, in his rallies, what I have read, and his Tweets. The following is all just speculation:</div>
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Mr. Trump shows tendencies of having a narcissistic personality disorder. He also exhibits symptoms of ADHD. Several of my colleagues think he suffers with a bipolar disorder. He also seems prone to paranoid thinking and is easily drawn into conspiracy theories. Of course, when you are obnoxious, aggressive, and sue hundreds of people, it is likely that many people will turn against you.</div>
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I have treated several people with similar personalities and temperaments. Some of them were also very successful in business, as they also had a lot of energy, a desire to win at all costs, and were unconcerned about the damage they do to others. These people were some of the most difficult people to treat, especially when, like Mr. Trump, they were surrounded with many sycophantic lackeys.</div>
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Part of the difficulty is that people like this, when asked to explain their feelings, motivations, reasoning or actions, respond as if they are being attacked. They get hurt, which quickly turns to anger. Even the slightest whiff of criticism provokes a powerful defensive response. They quickly manufacture lies in their own defense, which they just as quickly believe. Yet, their need to be appreciated and admired is so strong that they never go away. They keep coming back, trying to convince their therapist of their perfection. The thought that they are not only unloved, but disrespected by someone who knows them well, is very disturbing to them..</div>
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However, these people can treated be successfully. Their therapist has to be able to hang in there long enough to prove to the patient that he/she will not abandon them, even when they show that they are vulnerable and insecure. That is a very difficult task, for both the therapist and the patient. I suspect it would be for Mr. Trump’s therapist, especially since some of his delusions of grandeur have been confirmed.</div>
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That is why, after some reflection, and in response to David Grace’s question, I think that a therapy-bot would have a much better chance of success than any live, actual person, no matter how skilled a clinician the live person may be.</div>
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When Lee Sedol, the world champion GO player, lost 4 out of 5 matches to the Google A.I. machine Alpha Go, he explained that he wins most of his matches like a poker player. He figures out the psyche of his opponent and he wears him down, or he intimidates them. Once they feel they are falling behind they can never recover. He could not do that against the A.I. bot. The bot didn’t get tired. It didn’t get flustered. It just kept improving it’s algorithm.</div>
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Any live therapist would have an emotional reaction to Trump; probably a mixture of astonishment, frustration and disgust. It’s unavoidable. A bot is immune to that. IF, and this is a big IF, Trump would stay in treatment with a bot for a year, it would be fascinating to see the results. The machine would be able to consistently point out his inconsistencies, his fantasies, his lack of reality testing, his bad judgement, his insincerity, and his insecurity. The bot would be connected to a Watson type computer and could immediately refute his lies and distortions, using real facts, without any partisan influences. It could read all of Plato, Jesus, Maimonides and others in under ten seconds, and point out unethical and immoral behavior. It could explain “conflict of interest” at a third grade level, so Mr. Trump could understand.</div>
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The machine doesn’t have any need to liked. The machine can’t be bullied. The machine won’t get furious and walk away. It would just keep learning more and more about how Trump operates, and it would do a better job of zeroing in on his flaws; questioning and sympathizing, as only a bot can.</div>
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I think there could be a good chance he would remain in therapy with the bot if it were shaped like a young woman with long legs, long hair, large seductive eyes and big breasts. He would continually try to win her (its) approval, and admiration. He would have to learn to live with the limitations — no sex with your therapist, even with a bot.</div>
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Given the skill level of Artificial Intelligence programmers today, I think such a bot could be created in a few months down at our local state.technical school (MIT). As soon as I hear from Kellyanne that she can get Trump to participate I’ll call Joichi Ito at the Media Lab and get the project started. I wonder if this kind of service will be covered by the new Republican, Unaffordable Care Act.</div>
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I think it’s worth a try. I hope Kellyanne is reading this.</div>
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N.B.: This is mostly (not completely) written in jest. However, having Donald Trump take over the office of President of the United States is not a joke. Even if you drank the Koll-aide and think he was a marvelous choice, it is becoming more apparent that he does not have the knowledge, temperament or experience for the job. He is impulsive, secretive, and seems to lack any consistent moral or ethical standards. Two of his appointees have already recused themselves due to plagiarism and corruption. We are facing a very dangerous situation. Pay Attention!</div>
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</figure>Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-60702002601572681782017-01-07T08:18:00.001-08:002017-01-07T08:18:56.398-08:00Dancing with Emma<h3 class="graf graf--h3" name="7acf">
Dancing with Emma</h3>
<figure class="graf graf--figure" name="564a"><img class="graf-image" data-height="640" data-image-id="1*PnqJ4l-yws_9HbOmU6UueQ.png" data-width="478" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*PnqJ4l-yws_9HbOmU6UueQ.png" /><figcaption class="imageCaption">(not Emma, just a free download)</figcaption></figure><div class="graf graf--p" name="4de4">
Six year-old Emma (not her real name) came bounding home from kindergarten. She greeted me with a big hug and then, holding my hands, she climbed up my legs, planted her feet into my chest and did a back-flip to the floor. Next, she grabbed my hand, pulled me to the computer and clicked on a page of a children’s book to show me how well she can read. She typed out “I love you. Come and play with me tom…” she began to ask me how to spell “tomorrow” but the word popped up on the screen, so she just had to push a button to complete the sentence. “Print ” she said, and a copy of her invitation slid out of the printer.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="c1b3">
Next, she opened a program that showed the two of us on the screen as it took a video. She tapped the keyboard and mirror images of us dancing appeared. She tapped it again and tiny red hearts fluttered between the two of us. Another tap produced blue birds flying in circles around her head. With a push of two more keys we are watching the video she had just made and she asked me what song to play in the background. “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine” came instantly to my mind.</div>
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Emma is my granddaughter. She is growing up in a world that constantly offers her new possibilities. She is delighted and excited, unaware that at her age it was amazing for me to see Howdy Doody through a friend’s window, after climbing up a four floor fire escape. She has TV, Apple TV, On Demand, an iPad, with many learning apps, games and videos, and an Echo She rides in a car that changes lanes and parks itself. She also has books, blocks, paints, markers and crayons.</div>
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Emma is fortunate to have loving parents who have a good relationship, good jobs, and a supportive extended family (not just me). She is living the upper-middle class American life, with too much stuff, and too many choices. Still, she seems to handle it well. She has been learning the old skills, such as reading, coloring and pumping a swing, and also the new ones that I struggle with, mostly with technology. Of course, when she gets hungry, cranky and tired, nothing works to her satisfaction.</div>
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My granddaughter was born three years after the first iPhone was sold. YouTube was already showing 14 billion videos a month. Since her birthday the CSRP-R gene editing technique has been developed, which will eventually eliminate many birth defects, and perhaps help her design her own child. Nanotechnologies are being developed which will deliver medicines directly into cells. There have been improvements in battery technology, solar collectors, and more wind farms have been built which will offer new sources of energy. The Internet of Things has connected our houses with our shopping, our calendars, our friends, or banks, and music. Both Google and Amazon have learned more about us than we know about ourselves. Several of Emma’s friends were conceived in a petri dish and have two parents of the same sex.</div>
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But also, the polar ice caps continue to melt at an increasing rate. Refugees are fleeing war, poverty and drought and overwhelming the more developed countries. Reacting to that, many of those countries are retreating behind nationalistic, xenophobic governments. There is a terrorist attack somewhere almost every week that receives a great deal of attention, and keeps everyone fearful. The threat of cybercrime, hackers and international cyber-warfare seems to increase every day, especially as the new U.S. President seems to enjoy being provocative.</div>
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What guidance can I give to Emma besides just “be a kid and have fun?” which I think is still the most important advice a GrandPops can offer. There are so many things she probably won’t have to learn that were so necessary for my survival. She won’t have to learn to write, as she can already type, or even dictate, to a machine and it will write it for her, in any font, color or style she chooses. She adds emojis to clarify the emotion. Or, she can just make a video and skip verbal communication altogether.</div>
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I had to learn arithmetic. Then came calculators. Now Emma just asks Siri or Alexa or Google to give her the square root of 2345 (48.3252, I just asked). She can jst ask for any information: who the President was before Lincoln? or how far it is to the moon? What is a quark? These things would have taken me hours, or even days to find — if I knew where to look.</div>
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By the time she is old enough to get a driver’s license she probably won’t need to drive. She can ask her electronic assistant, (R2-D2?) to order a self-driving Uber. By then the “assistant” will know her schedule and have it waiting for her.</div>
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Will she go to college? What will college be like by then? Will most of it be on-line and channeled right into everyone’s homes? Will her classmates be from all around the world, and they will meet in small groups by putting on a Virtual Reality headsets? Will the “class” be taught by her electronic assistant? Will people still go to an actual college campus for two years just to leave home, network, have parties and consensual sex?</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="df0f">
What will she do after college? Half of the adult women she knows are doctors, work for Google, or a bio-tech company. The other half stay home with their kids, wear Lulu Lemon all day, drink wine and make organic snacks. Will she seek a job growing genetically modified crops to feed the world, or make an augmented reality app which inspires children to grow up and take care of their grandparents? Perhaps, by the time she is fifty, everyone will be working only six hours a week and receive a guaranteed annual income. The rest of the work will be done by robots, and most of the decisions will be directed by algorithms and artificial intelligence. I think about this as Emma and I dance to the rhythm of a beatbox app that thumps out a strong base line.</div>
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All of this could happen within the next five to fifty years. It’s difficult to tell how fast it will come. Some of it will work and some won’t. It’s exciting. It’s frightening. What is clear is that the transition won’t be smooth. People resist changes, even when they would be beneficial.</div>
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Will this be a world that offers freedom and prosperity to all? A world in which everyone will have the security, education and skills to be creative, caring, and healthy? Will most people find ways to live the lives they choose; lives that are fun and fulfilling? It could be a world in which people will feel connected and enjoy being together. We are social animals. We feel better in supportive relationships.</div>
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I have too many doubts. I have worked closely with all kinds of people for my entire career. I have seen how some people quickly take advantage of other people’s weaknesses. Emma has already told me that some of the girls in her kindergarten class are mean to other girls. Some girls always push to be first. Others boast about having new things that other kids don’t have. She has also told me that she was frightened when one boy pushed someone down. Another boy got so angry that he threw a block across the room.</div>
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I know too well that humans have limitations. We are still a primitive species. Almost all of us are basically good and kind, but we can change quickly if we feel threatened. We have evolved to be very sensitive to all possible threats. That’s how we have survived. We have to recognize immediately if whatever is rustling in the bushes thinks we are a friend or food. One wrong reaction could mean we won’t get another chance. Humans are irrational. We count on our emotions to guide us.</div>
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It makes me wonder if all of this new technology and easy access to all kinds of information will be shared equally, or if it will be proprietary, and sold to those who can pay for it. There is the hope that these algorithms can help people make better decisions about what to eat, how to spend money, how to resolve conflicts, and will help everyone enjoy the benefits of scientific advances. There is the fear the the same technology can be used to manipulate people, influence their thoughts and divide everyone into classes of exploiters and exploited. This seems to be what humans have done for centuries.</div>
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How do I explain my concerns to a six year-old as we dance to Ariana Grande, and she askes why I don’t let her watch the video? I have done a pretty good job of passing my values down to both of my children, and they, and their spouces, are all good parents of their children. I want my grandchildren to be caring, curious and creative. I want them to be open to new ideas and new people. I want them to be able to experience the satisfaction of working to make the world a better place for everyone. And yet they have be aware that there are people who would take advantage of them, and others who could harm them. They have to learn whom to trust and whom to drive away.</div>
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Emma will have so many more choices than were available to me. Choices of how to live, where to live, who to be with, how to communicate, places to travel, where to work and how to work. Hopefully, medicine will be better; many more diseases will be treatable or eliminated. I’ve read that Emma’s life expectancy is 103.</div>
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Despite all of the new technologies, new discoveries, and new realities, there is one skill that we need to teach all of our children, a skill that we can’t allow machines to do for us, and that is critical thinking. This ability is what will determine who survives and thrives. More than even our children have to learn how to determine what is real from what is distorted. They have learn how to get as close to the truth as possible, especially when it shows that something they believe is wrong. They have to be able to evaluate which, of all these new technology offerings, is really useful for them, and which are manipulative or just distractions. We all have to realize that we are emotional and what really separates us from all of the new technology is that we care.</div>
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How do I teach Emma to be open and curious, yet questioning and skeptical? I want her to feel that the world is fascinating, friendly and fun, and yet to realize there are real dangers. She shouldn’t be frightened, but she needs to be aware. I want her to have the confidence in her own skills and her own judgement, so that she knows how to take care of herself.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="4f0b">
So we start with the basics. She should learn to trust me, her parents and others who really care for her. She should understand why we tell her not to eat too much candy or jump off of tree limbs. She should know why the moon and sun appear to be the same size, but they’re not. Learn how to meet new people and assess what’s going on, like when she asked, “What’s it called when you say something that’s not true, but you think it’s funny? Oh yeah, sarcasm.” She needs to learn what it means to have a friend and to be a friend.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="ed76">
As she demonstrates good judgement we can let have more freedom. She can learn that making mistakes is important, because that is part of the way we learn.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="5845">
As she develops her own skills of critical thinking and cause and effect, she can see that life can be fun, fascinating and satisfying. She can make her way through the world and decide where she wants to go, what she wants to do and with whom. Good values, good judgement and behavior are what constitute a worthwhile human being. The more Emmas there are, the better the world will be.</div>
<div class="graf graf--p" name="e9e6">
Hopefully, she will remember how much her GandPops cares for her, and she will keep in touch with him. She can show him what’s cool, and we can dance.</div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-39218092153354176352016-12-15T06:43:00.000-08:002016-12-15T06:43:07.984-08:00Someone Wanted this Ship<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Imagine you are riding in a large ship. A Ship that is moving slowly, but steadily through the water, under control, but not spectacular.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The elites are up in the top cabins, drinking white wine and eating cheese, thinking everything is fine and feeling that they have earned their place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">You and your struggling friends, who do not write software, and did not get fancy degrees at elite colleges, are stuck under the waterline, looking out of the few portholes. You’ve been given a few cases of stale beer to share, but are otherwise ignored.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">You’ve had enough. You get pissed-off. It’s time to do something about this situation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So what do you do? “Let’s take down the whole damn system” yell you and your friends. We don’t care what happens. We want change! Anything will be better than this! You drill holes in the sides of the ship.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Where does the water come in? Who drowns? Who gets in the lifeboats goes home and dries off. Who then goes off to design and build a better ship?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The old captain, a captain from the old school, goes down with the ship. “She deserved it.” She had her time. We want ours! “ you say, as you struggle to keep you head above the in-rushing water.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Soon the new ship gets launched. You survived, and so did some of your friends. You have a job now. It is back down in the bottom of the boat. This time you will be given oars to keep you busy. The new captain, the guy behind you with a whip, will keep you motivated. He has left the elites on the shore. That makes you happy. The top decks are now loaded with a new group that is older, richer, meaner, and more controlling that the last group. They are fighting with each other because they don’t know how to run the ship. Most of them want to turn it around or make it go backwards,</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This new group likes to stand on the high decks and piss on you and your friends. They tell you to be happy because you are better off than the Blacks and the immigrants who they threw overboard. You have a job. just keep rowing, and watch out for the lash.</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-85031782511693584032016-12-07T17:18:00.000-08:002016-12-07T17:18:58.748-08:00Repeat: Redux<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Lou Reed’s “Dirty Boulevard” popped up on Pandora. I hadn’t heard it for a while so I pushed the “repeat” button. It brought back a rush of memories, strangely memories about my mother. She didn’t like Lou Reed, she was a Ray Charles fan. But it wasn’t the song that reminded me of her, it was the repeat button. My mother was almost ninety when she died. During the last few years of her life she told me often that she was tried of seeing the world repeat itself. She would say, “I was born when there was a war in Bosnia, and I will die during a war in Bosnia.” She outlived that conflict by a year.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As I enter my later years I am beginning to feel as if I have gone through this kind of wash and rinse cycle too many times before. However, this time seems more disappointing because we are part of a time of exciting changes. New technologies have brought enticing and exciting changes to the way we live. We are now have access to anything we want to know any time we want to it. If you don’t think that is an amazing benefit to us old folks just ask us the capitol of South Carolina, or who played Carla in Cheers; you know, the curly one, you know….</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Technology has opened the gates to new discoveries in science that were unimaginable twenty years ago. What we are seeing is how complex we are, as is the world we live in. There are no simple answers to anything, a lot of what we thought was accurate is only partially so. There are many debates about which parts are true, which will be resolved through more research, but until then we are kept wondering and looking. It’s a fascinating time, unless you are bothered by unfinished details and ambiguous results.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Yet, many of the innovations which are being applied to solve so many problems are also being used to tear us apart and create deep divisions. It has become very difficult to tell the difference between a half truth and a total lie. Information comes rushing at us so fast that it is difficult to sort out what’s real. One trait we humans have is to see confirming evidence for what we already believe. That makes us feel more comfortable to think that we have it right. It also leads us to hold fast to ideas that are not true. We get angry at those who disagree with us, or show us that we are wrong. When his half-truth contradicts my half-truth I know he’s an idiot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For almost forty years I was a psychologist in beautiful Lowell, Massachusetts. I opened my practice just as the first of the Wang Towers was being built. Does anyone remember the Wang 1200 WPS? it was at the beginning of our transformation into the digital age. You could type a page, and move the words or paragraphs around. You could delete things and put them back. Amazing! But Wang filed for bankruptcy in 1992. It couldn’t keep up with the development of computers by companies like Digital Equipment, and IBM.. Digital was acquired by Compaq in 1998. Compaq was taken over by HP in 2001. By then everyone was getting connected to the Internet, and soon we all had the capability to go mobile and stay connected every minute of the day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This history of companies rising and falling in Lowell is not new, it dates back to Lowell’s founding. The mills were new technology in 1840, used to turn cotton into cloth. The looms were first run by women who came from the farms of New England. When they felt exploited by low wages they were replaced by the German immigrants, who were replaced by French Canadians. Eventually the mills moved south for cheaper labor, and now most of our cotton clothes are made in Asia. You’re probably aware of that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For a while it looked like the digital revolution would be different than that industrial revolution. Instead of long hours and harsh conditions that came with the industrial revolution, the digital age was eliminating many of the harsh repetitive jobs and offering thousands of new ways to make our lives easier. At work, at home, and at play, little bitty chips will do more and more of the repetitive, mundane tasks of our lives, such as shopping, banking, cleaning, turning out the lights, playing music, setting appointments, meeting new partners, even driving, drawing and drooling. Surely all of this will help us improve our lives, make better decisions, and understand and appreciate each other better. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Well, yes and no. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Remember that exactly one hundred years ago the new engines and mechanical marvels of that industrial transition helped bring about the biggest, most meaningless waste of human life in history: The First World War. We don’t want to go through that again.We don’t want to be blaming innocent scapegoats for all of the disruptive changes. We don’t want modern day Luddites attacking the machines, or being afraid of new knowledge. We know that once new genies are out of the bottle there is no way to put them back.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As those thoughts raced through my mind I heard the words from Lou’s 1989 song and they caused me to shudder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>“Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I'll piss on 'em</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>that's what the Statue of Bigotry says”</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As a psychologist I have seen every day that people don’t make changes easily. When things are changing all around us it leads to uncertainty. Uncertainty causes anxiety. Anxiety creates resistance. There is always a backlash. It seems as if it is in our genes. Whenever human beings are threatened they lash out. I have seen so many patients who have turned their lives around, but then, when hit with an unexpected stress, such as a lost job, a break-up, an illness in the family, they revert to their old, dysfunctional ways. They get angry, they go back to drinking, they don’t show up for work. They mess up their lives all over again. That seems to be what the whole world is going through now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But the backlash doesn’t have to destroy everything. In fact it can’t. The world will keep rolling on creating new and better. We will have better medicine because of Watson making diagnoses. We will have self-guided electric cars that will reduce accidents, eliminate traffic and reduce pollution. We will have algorithms that keep us healthy, help us make smarter decisions, and foster better, clearer communication. We will keep blending the white, black, tan and brown skin tones until it is difficult to tell the difference. Maybe we will invent even more genders.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">But right now, we have to deal with the backlash. We have to find ways to spread the benefits to everyone. We have to help everyone choose the changes that they find useful, and not just be sold crap they don’t need or want. We need to find ways to expose manipulation, fear and false prophets. Under stress it is easy to get people to trade freedom for security. People will hold on to what they know, even when it doesn’t work any more. That’s why so many cultures aren’t here any more. I want my children and grandchildren to live a world that can deal with reality. I want them to have a world that values all people equally. I want them to live in peace — a wish that has been repeated in vain for five thousand years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Transitions are never easy. To paraphrase George Santayana, it helps to learn from the past so as not to repeat it. Or to quote Mark Twain: ““History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Let’s not go back to The Dirty Boulevard, except to listen to the guitar riffs.</span></div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-76087680499807236932016-11-30T09:01:00.000-08:002016-11-30T09:01:41.312-08:00Fear Pushes Back:<h1 class="graf graf--h3 graf--leading graf--title" id="6de0" name="6de0" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Sans', Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 40px; letter-spacing: -0.028em; line-height: 1.04; margin: 0px 0px 0px -2.5px;">
<span style="font-size: 32px; letter-spacing: -0.02em; text-indent: -0.415em;">“We have Nothing to Fear, but Fear Itself “— FDR</span></h1>
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For the price of a cup of coffee I have garnered a table on the ground floor of the Koch Institute for Cancer Research at MIT. I spent part of the morning listening to papers being delivered at <span class="markup--strong markup--p-strong" style="font-weight: 700;">Neurotech 2016 </span>which describe the new and fascinating ways that many neuro-labs are probing into brains to help solve neurological mysteries. There are now technologies that have allowed people to seek answers to questions we didn’t even know to ask ten years ago.</div>
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There is irony of course, sitting here at this Koch Institute, which is funded by the same family that also funds some of the most conservative political issues in our country. They did not fund Trump, but their money did help spread exaggerated fear about what is happening in America. It is this fear that is pushing back against the adoption of many of the new technological and scientific advances that are being developed right here on this campus, and at other places all around the country and the world. It is the fear of change.</div>
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Trump, the Republican right, the Alt-right, the rightwing reactionary parties that are growing all over the world, and even ISIS, have aimed their messages at that fear. They are appealing to people to hold on to the traditional ways that have worked for centuries. In most cases these are the extreme form of the traditional ways. In many cases the arguments are based upon the unprovable and unfounded beliefs that were the guiding principles of the world before the scientific method of thought began to take hold. In other cases the arguments are put forth by those who have run the traditional power structure, as they struggle to stay in power. They have been feeling that their influence is being eroded by forces that they don’t quite understand and they can’t control. Their response is to clamp down more controls. They justify doing this by raising fears about the usual scapegoats; people who are different, ideas that are different, and any redistribution of power.</div>
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There is enough truth in this fear of change to attract almost half the world into being willing to give up much of their freedoms to feel safe. I know, from being a therapist for so many years, how difficult and frightening change can be. Even when the change is obviously for the better, most people resist.</div>
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I have spent decades working with people who struggle to stop eating at McDonald’s, stop hitting their kids, stop spending more money than they have. They understand that they need to study to pass a test and exercise to stay healthy. It would help if they could tell people what they want instead of being angry all the time. They haven’t learned that if you promised someone you would do something, do it.</div>
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When I talk about these things in therapy people agree that those are the things they want to do. They are almost all capable of change, but it takes months and years for it to happen. The biggest obstacle is fear. Feeling bad has become familiar. How does anyone know what the change will fee like?</div>
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If we move away from the being lead by old, White men, who will replace them? Will it be better? For whom? What’s the guarantee?</div>
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If I have been told all my life that there is one true god, and these people have a different god, or no god at all, how can I trust them? They are blasphemers. They are infidels.</div>
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Many wmen realize that they are as smart, capable and creative as any man. They see that they can prove themselves in the world, and be proud of their accomplishments. But many of them wonder if that freedom is worth giving up their male protectors and the financial support that often goes with it. They feel safer being supportive and nurturing. Why take on challenges when dependency is easier?</div>
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All these changes are frightening. I feel much safer if I carry a gun. Everyone on TV carries a gun and shoots the bad-guys. I want to be a hero, protect my family, and shoot bad guys too. Good guy Americans have always shot bad guys (and Indians, [and Black people, but we never talk about that]).</div>
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Changes are coming from all over. Almost all jobs have changed, or have been lost. Marriage is between anyone. People from so many countries are moving to other countries. Some are running away from being killed by militias or bombs from their own government. Some come here to start a business and make money. Some come here to pick fruit or cut your lawn. How can I tell which ones are terrorists?</div>
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There are so many new ways to communicated and get information. How do I know whom to believe? Facebook? The New York Times? Fox News, My friend Leslie? My doctor? The ads on TV? A priest? A neurobiologist?</div>
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When the changes get scary people want to hide. They want a big strong Daddy to protect them and make the decisions. They want a father, who knows best, just like in 1959, when nice White families lived in small towns with quirky neighbors and the same newspapers were delivered to everyone’s door. But we now know that comforting Cliff Huxtable turned out to be Bill Cosby, the rapist. We already know that our new leader-to-be is an overly sensitive narcissist, who retaliates against any criticism. But many are willing to give up some freedoms to feel safe, even when the danger is really slight.</div>
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As i sit here in this coffee shop, and go across the street to the conference, I see who it is who is making all of these changes. It is people from all over the world working together, sharing knowledge, trying to correct mistakes, trying to solve the mysteries of life. They are men and women who are all different colors, sizes, styles and backgrounds. Most of them are doing it because it is fascinating, helpful and exciting. Money is hardly a consideration. They want knowledge. They want to make the world better. They are amazed that given what we know today, so many people can still get so angry at each other over such irrelevant things.</div>
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What are these diverse groups of people doing? Here in this building they are developing new ways to fight cancer. Some of the treatments are already in use. They were not available five years ago. In the building a cross the street, where the conference is being held, a woman named Canan Dagneviren is describing how she is building “a mechanically-adaptive, mirco-fabricated device for chronic treatment of neurological disorders.”</div>
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Dr. Dagneviren was born and educated in Turkey, and then she came to do her graduate work in the U.S. She may or may not be a Muslim. I am sure that many people in the U.S. would yell at her to go back to where she came from. I am sure that the in-flow of people like her, who would love to come here to study, explore and create, will be diminished because of the unwelcoming atmosphere that has been created by this election.</div>
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The funding for this research comes from a combination of foundation money and a lot of government grants. But the flow of the government money has been cut by a conservative Congress. It will be worse under Trump, a man who doesn’t understand science, doesn’t want change and seems frightened of innovation.</div>
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But even he, with all of his Presidential powers can’t stop the changes from coming. They are pouring in over the fibre-optic network. They are moving in next door. They are the electric, self-driving cars that will be on the highway. They are keeping us healthy. They are warming our planet. They are taking away our jobs. They are making some new people very rich.</div>
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These new technologies could be saving the lives of many more people. They could be feeding many hungry people all around the world. They could be controlling greenhouse gases. They could be helping us all live longer, healthier, more prosperous and creative lives. But obstacles get thrown in their path because people are afraid of change. Unfortunately, the backlash seems to always be a part of the process. Change, even when it is clearly beneficial, never comes easily. Adaptation and evolution can take a long time, and many species don’t survive.</div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-20348294465496626242016-11-26T08:16:00.000-08:002016-11-26T08:16:01.515-08:00I’ve Been Replaced!<h1 class="graf graf--h3 graf--leading graf--title" id="d7f0" name="d7f0" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Sans', Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 40px; letter-spacing: -0.028em; line-height: 1.04; margin: 0px 0px 0px -2.5px;">
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Even doing a most Human Task</div>
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For that last fifteen years I‘ve been waiting for this to happen. I could see it gaining on me, but following Satchel Paige’s advice I din’t want to turn around. I began to suspect this was coming when the fees that insurance companies paid us for psychotherapy began to drop.. My colleagues thought it was due to the cheaper costs of people with Masters’ degrees, but I what knew better: chat bots and A.I.</div>
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In 1966, before there was a word for “chat-bots,” Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created Eliza, a computer program that was designed to respond to typed questions with simple responses, mostly repeating what the typer said, or saying “tell me more.” You can talk to a slightly improved Eliza on this web-site: <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3" href="http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3" rel="nofollow" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3</a></div>
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I’ve been a psychotherapist for over forty years. I can look at people and tell when the words they are saying are covering up what they are feeling. I’ve learned how to gently push people to look deeper into themselves and open up.</div>
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There were many times when I sat with couples who were trying to sort out the difficulties in their relationship. Often one of them had been caught acting like some of our past or future Presidents, which the other partner found upsetting. The guilty party would be very apologetic and swear on their children’s heads that it would never happen again.</div>
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After years of witnessing these acts of contrition I can accurately determine whom to believe and who was still attempting to deceive. I had developed two methods which aided my intuition. The first was that I became a close observer of faces. There are very subtle differences in the coordination of the muscles between the eyes and the mouth. I’m not sure if I could tell from a picture. I think it was more about how they move, or don’t move, together.</div>
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I also had the advantage of working in a small city in which everyone knew everyone else’s business I often had either the third member of the love triangle, or her roommate, or his sister, or someone else who was bothered by what was going on, who was also seeing me for psychotherapy. They had no idea that I was seeing this couple, but it bothered them enough to bring it up in their own sessions.</div>
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However, those years of experience; that unique talent, has now been learned by a tv camera that is connected to a computer that runs a “deep learning” artificial intelligence program. I saw a demonstration of one of them two months ago at The Harvard Innovation Lab during Hub Week in Boston. The program, developed by a company called <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Affectiva</em>,, would focus on a person’s face, and determine their emotional state. According to their marketing materials it has developed “norms built on the world’s largest emotional database of more than 25,000 media units and 4 million faces analyzed in 75 countries.” They also state that “we are humanizing technology.”</div>
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I my view they are taking a big step towards <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">dehumanizing psychotherapy.</em></div>
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There is a lot of research that shows that we humans are social creatures. We have evolved to care about each other. Those of us who have better social relationships, especially close ones with partners, family and friends, do better in life. Those people live longer, happier, healthier lives.</div>
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One of the major healing factors of psychotherapy as been that the patient feels a connection to an understanding, caring, non-judgmental person, especially one who has some knowledge and status, like someone you call “doctor.” Would it be possible to “transfer” such feelings of trust and hope onto a machine?</div>
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Apparently, it is. In fact, there are studies that have been done with war veterans who have stated a preference to talk to a responsive A. I. program. When asked why, many of the veterans explained that when they would recount some really gruesome battle field experience, such as having to shoot an eight year-old girl in the head because she was carrying a bomb, they could feel the reaction from any human counselor, even another vet. But a machine could be empathic and still not be upset.</div>
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Also, during the years of Facebook. Twitter, Snapchat and even Medium, people have been conditioned to seek “likes.” Those little electronic bits of encouragement evoke the positive feelings of accomplishment, hope and happiness in response to any kind of feedback on social media. It keeps people coming back. It keeps people wanting more. Each little thumbs-up, heart or smile, makes us feel a bit more connected, clever and important.</div>
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During the last ten years there have been over a dozen companies that are using artificial intelligence and deep learning to not only monitor human emotion, they are building machines that can respond in an artificial empathic manner, reflecting the emotion of the real human. In addition to responding to facial features these programs can respond to the tone of voice and the content of the conversation. There is a program that goes deeper than the facial expressions and monitors the blood flow in the muscles of the face. They feel that this can reveal when someone is trying to hide there emotions. There are also new ways of tracking other physiological components of emotions, including heart rate, neurological responses, stress and arousal levels, and other physical activities.</div>
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Could this be psychotherapeutic<span class="markup--strong markup--h4-strong" style="font-weight: inherit;">?</span></h4>
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The technology is probably available today for you to sit in front of a screen, and by talking to a deep learning machine, you could diminish your emotional difficulties and improve your life. The machine could watch and listen to you, monitor the content of what you say and determine the emotions that you are feeling. It could probably tell if you are angry with your mother, have suspicions about you spouse, are exaggerating your accomplishments or are lying about your drug use. It could offer soothing, compassionate responses, as well as questions that would push you to explore the origins and complications of your difficulties. It could point out your errors in judgement without insulting you, and probably help you sort through ideas and find better solutions.</div>
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What is new about this is that the more these deep learning machines “practice,” just like a good clinician, they get better. They would learn more about your emotional patterns and your responses. You could report back and tell them what you felt was successful and helpful. In addition, they could also get information about your physical conditions to see if your blood pressure was staying under control, or your cortisol levels were diminished. It could know if you sleep better after your sessions, and if you are generally happier and more productive. It wouldn’t have to depend on your verbal reports during the first fifteen minutes of the session. If necessary you could have a breathalyzer app added to the protocol.</div>
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Another big advantage is that your virtual, deep learning therapist would always be available, and the sessions could be as long or short as you felt necessary. You wouldn’t feel you were intruding on your therapist over the weekend. The therapist would never be tired, preoccupied by the troubles in his own life, or worrying about the fees. It would come with graphs and analytics that would help you monitor your own progress, and it could give you smiley faces and heart emogis whenever you did well.</div>
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Fantastic! 😀</div>
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Fantastic? 😟</div>
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Are there dangers with this? Sure are! Many.</div>
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So much depends upon the values and philosophies of the programmer. What gets reinforced? Does it just allow you to go down your own crazy path? Does it have a goal of making you a better cog in a conformist society? Those things are not yet clear.</div>
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The big question is: what about people? Will some people become much more comfortable with a compassionate machine and still find ‘live” people to anxiety provoking, too demanding and too annoying?</div>
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Life can be tough. Each of us “live” people have our own agenda. We want something from you, just as you want from us. That’s what relationships are. That’s why they work. That’s why they don’t work. If the machine annoys you you can unplug it. That’s not good to do to a partner.</div>
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Remember, technology is a tool. Many new innovations are offered to us every day to help us live better, easier, happier, healthier, more efficient, creative, productive and satisfying lives.</div>
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But what all those words really mean is up to each of us, individually and as a society.</div>
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Choose wisely my friends.</div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-14340844063348247122016-11-21T14:24:00.000-08:002016-11-21T14:24:09.925-08:00Fighting the Tides of Technology<br />
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The seasons are changing. It gets dark early up here on the New England coast. I walked down to the beach and there was a stiff wind blowing across the dunes, chopping up the water. I had not checked the tide clock before I left the house so I couldn’t tell if the tide was going out or coming in. It goes out a few hundred yards on this beach, so the difference is dramatic. I could have reached into my pocket and looked at the tide app on my phone but I decided to use my primitive human senses and watch the water. As I stood near the water I could tell after the third wave came rushing towards me that the tide was coming in quickly.</div>
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I can’t stop the tides, no one can. People can build a dike, a dam or levy, and hold the water back, direct it or control it. Those measures can work for a while.. The tides are constant and will keep coming, long past my lifetime. They may keep rolling in for a few billion years until the sun explodes. But unlike the tides our human societies are now in constant change, mostly due to new technologies, and despite the current chaos, and the efforts to hold on to old ways, no one can stop those changes from coming either. As Kevin Kelly said, it’s <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">Inevitable.</em></div>
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There is a battle going on to direct the tide of new technologies that are engulfing us and the winner has not yet been determined. It is a confusing struggle as it is difficult to tell who is on which side. Sometimes the innovators and developers are really on both sides at once. On one end there are the applications of technology that can bring progress toward the goal of making people’s lives healthier, happier, more prosperous and creative. At the other end there seem to be many new developments which are being used to manipulate and/ or exploit people. The determination of what will be considered beneficial has become more a question of philosophy than technology or computer science.</div>
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The New York Times, a source that I consider reliable, ran an article on November 20, 2016, about a company called Cambridge Analytics, which was based in Cambridge, UK, and funded by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire who supports many conservative causes and candidates. This company was hired by the Trump campaign.</div>
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What the company does, and I would guess that there are similar companies which work on the liberal end of the spectrum, so this isn’t a political rant, gathered data on people’s personality traits, mostly through on-line sites such as Facebook. They offered people the chance to take a personality test, a test designed by my profession (Psychology) to determine the degree to which someone possesses the personality traits of Openness, Conscientiousness,,Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (OCEAN). The person got to see how they scored on all of these, and so did the company. Facebook also gave the company access to the names and profiles of each individual. It is easy to understand how that knowledge can be used to design specific ways to approach an individual to sell them something, even an ideology. It could help determine what kind of information this person would find persuasive and how it should be presented.</div>
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I am older than most Facebook users, in fact right now I don’t even have a Facebook account and my LinkedIn profile needs to be updated. My training as a Psychologist placed a strong emphasis on trust and confidentiality. It was strongly believed that people who came for therapy would be much more open and revealing if they were assured that nothing of what they said would ever be told to anyone. We were granted a legal basis, which was not total, but almost, for doctor-patient confidentiality. Many of my colleagues of my age are amazed at how people one or two generations younger than we are seem more than willing to put the details of their lives, and in many cases their bodies, out into cyberspace for anyone and everyone to examine and analyze. This OCEAN test from Cambridge Analytics was offered for free and probably gave no assurance that the information would remain anonymous, yet thousands of people took the opportunity to explore their personality and just give so much of their psychological profile away. If you think about it, we all have given out all of the most intimate details of our lives in order to have the conveniences offered by technology. Our credit scores, our credit card expenditures, our driving records, our arrest records, our income, what we are willing to pay for, how far we will travel for a lower price, our religion, our friends….everything is out there and accessible. Your health record may be protected by HIPPA laws, but your pharmacy purchases and your doctor visit co-payments are easily discovered. There are hundreds of companies gathering data about all of us without our knowledge. In return they often feed us information that they think will interest us. We usually don’t know the origin or the accuracy of that information.</div>
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We get ads for things we were looking for. We get ads for things related to what we were looking for. We get news about the news pieces we read. We get news about what are friends are reading, doing or thinking about. We get medical information and medical suggestions. We get all kinds of news, about entertainment, sports, arts, politics, weather, finances, and anything else we ever showed an interest in. It flows in like the tide, constant and from many sources: on-line, in print, through individual apps, on the radio, on TV, even from actual conversations with people, much of which is the kind of gossip that has gone on for centuries.</div>
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There has always been gossip and news. There has always been propaganda and false news. The Spanish American War was probably started because of a greatly inflated threat delivered in huge headlines. The difference is in the volume, as the flow is continuous, and constantly being revised and updated, or else one “most important event” is quickly superseded by another.</div>
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Another major difference comes from these analytics. We are each targeted individually, in ways that have been designed to connect with our fears and desires. You looked at that shirt but didn’t buy it for $39. If you buy it within the next hour it will be $29, just for you. You signed this petition, now we will ask you for money for that cause. We can tell you supported the police in Ferguson, so we will flood you with pro-Trump information.</div>
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Is this evil or helpful? Why not get $10 off the price of a shirt, or maybe it will go to $20? Many people use the information from their FitBit to motivate them to exercise and stay healthy. There are mindfulness apps that help people focus and calm down. There are many apps that help people monitor and control their spending. We get information about how to be a better parent, a better investor, a better cook, even a better lover.</div>
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Today’s world demands that we develop different skills if we are to survive and prosper, as individuals and as a society. When I was in graduate school the search for information was difficult and time consuming. Much of what we could find, even in most of the sciences, was based on methods that were inexact and somewhat speculative, but it was the best we had available at the time.</div>
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Today, due to new technologies, the is a fantastic amount of new knowledge in every field of science, most of it demonstrating how complex we are as individuals and as a society. The skills we need today involve much more critical thinking and questioning than information seeking and following instructions. Few people get three year apprenticeships under the supervision of a craftsman. Increasingly we are taught by machines about how to run machines. We are given many contradictory pieces of information about the same topic. We barely have to to reflect upon how to make a decision when more information becomes available.</div>
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That’s why these issues become a question of philosophy. What do you want your life to be like? What do you want to accomplish? What are your values: Money? Family? Safety? Creativity? Harmony? Peace? Justice? Equality? Fun? What makes you feel good, better and best? Why?</div>
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I don’t know if these questions can be answered by an algorithm. I’m sure there is technology that shows you what you do with your time, energy and money, which gives a picture of what your priorities really are. But it is up to each of us to determine if that is really what we want to be. Then we have to weed through all of the information that comes flooding in, so that we can design our own path and choose our own future.</div>
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It is often a very difficult task. The tide keeps coming in, and there a hidden rip-tides that can pull us under.</div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-18771590234362651872016-11-15T18:33:00.000-08:002016-11-15T18:33:48.468-08:00Pay Attention!<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">For years I did my best to help people change. From working closely with people, and watching my own life, it became clear how difficult it is to make any significant changes in one’s life. Just try to lose weight and keep it off. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What immediately becomes apparent is that people are not logical. We lead with our emotions. We have evolved to act quickly to survive. “Friend, food or foe?” had to be an instant decision for our long-ago ancestors . So many studies have shown that we use our logical thinking to justify an emotional decision. We rationalize more easily than we change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">How many times have I sat with a woman whose was living with a guy who mistreated her, cheated on her, stole from her, knowing that if I told her to just leave then I would be the one she would never see again? She was not going to leave until she was emotionally ready. She would have to work through all of the strongly intertwined emotions of love/fear/sexual attraction/ loss and loneliness. Even when the right thing to do is obvious, it’s never easy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now all of us, all over the world, are struggling with major changes; changes that have affected almost every area of our lives. We have been through this before, and it was a struggle then too. Over a hundred years ago many new, disruptive technologies were being developed and introduced into the lives of people in the more developed countries around the world. Many agrarian societies were transitioning into industrial societies. The “Industrial Revolution” moved people from farms and fields into factories and cities. One generation began to live very differently than their parents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">How well did the world handle that transition? Many of the conditions of the time were chronicled in the works of Charles Dickens. He wrote about the struggles of the poor, the children of the factory workers and of life in the big industrial cities. There was poverty, pollution, disease and crime. The American Civil War was fought in the early part of the Industrial Revolution as machines began to replace individual labor. The energy policy of the slave states was coming to an end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The culmination of the use of all the new engines and mechanical marvels was the biggest, most meaningless waste of human life in history: The First World War. That was a war fought between crumbling forms of governments, run by aristocracies that were almost totally out of touch and unconcerned about the people they ruled. Millions of those people suffered horrible deaths fighting for causes that were never very clear to them, so they called it “patriotism,” and “love of the homeland.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now, a hundred years later, another major disruption is affecting the lives of almost everyone in the world. Since we are now causing disturbances in the planet itself, the consequences of these changes are impossible to avoid. Even the people sitting blissfully on a beautiful south sea island can see that their little patch of paradise is being covered by rising tides. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Everyone’s lifestyle is being threatened in some way, and just like we do as individuals, as a society, we resist. Change is uncomfortable. It takes energy to adjust. We can’t tell who will benefit and who will suffer, but we quickly suspect that we will get the short end. Those who are in power feel threatened because they may lose control. Those who are out of power have learned that they always lose, no matter who wins.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Since there is no job or profession that functions the way that it did twenty years ago, everyone feels a bit insecure. Anxiety is the malady of our times. So much is different and new. Families can be composed differently than twenty years ago. There are families of just men, just women, a single person and child, a man who was a woman living with a woman who was man. Babies can be made in several different ways, with up to five people involved in the process of creation. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">We are again, involved in wars, but they are, at least for now, more limited. They are also being fought very differently than they were a hundred years ago, as we now have the use of drones and suicide bombers. In many ways these weapons consist of limited fire-power, but are the kinds of weapons that create a constant sense of terror. Danger is unlikely, but it feels ever-present. Something could happen anywhere, at anytime, to anyone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">During the Industrial Revolution big machine changed the way people worked, and how things were made. Many things that had been made slowly, by hand, were now made quickly, and in great quantity, by machines. Clothing is a clear example. Manufacturers began to use assembly lines to make furniture or cars. Transportation went from horses and barges to cars and trains. Communication went from letters delivered in days or months, to a telegraph, and then telephone. Someone invented a typewriter. Everything began to go faster.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now, in our digital age, everything goes faster still. But the revolution is not just about work and making things, or transportation, or communication, although all of those things have been radically disrupted. This time there are a lot of changes in the kinds of things our minds and brains need to do. Our brains are constantly being bombarded with new information. The information comes in many forms, speech, pictures, videos, music, virtual reality, augmented reality, symbolic noises such as pings, beeps and buzzes. Much of the speech, videos, music and noises are created by machines and played on machines. We are often speaking to bots or some other kind of artificial intelligence that guides us through a menu, answers our questions., or tells us we have an appointment. Part of the new skills we have to learn in this world is how to sort out the real from the machine created, and the truth from the semi-truth, distortions or outright lies. That is proving more and more difficult to do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Whether we realize it or not, many algorithms do our thinking for us. They guide our medical care, They select stocks for our 401Ks, They offer suggestions about what we should read, or what music we will like. They tell us what to eat and how much more we should exercise. They manage our money. They pay our bills for us automatically, and on time. They instruct us about what roads to take to get from here to there. Without realizing it, we are turning much of our thinking process over to machines. I discussed this before the election in: <a href="https://medium.com/choosing-our-future/thinking-about-thinking-350b2d401656#.ma4698my6"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">https://medium.com/choosing-our-future/thinking-about-thinking-350b2d401656#.ma4698my6</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">How will our minds and brains adapt? Will all of these thinking aids enhance our decision making abilities? Will we become less dependent upon emotion and more guided by research that shows what actions have a higher probability of working out? Or will we become increasingly dependent upon machines and as a result lose our ability to think, and to solve difficult problems?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My initial answers to those questions, based only on forty years of dealing with how people think and make decisions, is that some people will do marvelously well and use all of these new aids to great advantage. Others will, in ways that I will discuss shorty, be more victimized and manipulated. Still others will remain on the outside, hardly aware of what is going on, and will suffer as society moves on without them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is the second group about whom I have the most concern. I also feel that they may be the largest demographic. They are the folks who just want to live their lives in peace and harmony. They want to work at a decent job, take care of their families, have a good fun, relaxing time when they’re not working, and just go along to get along. These are the people who feel that if they take care of themselves, their families and their own responsibilities, then our society, and whoever is running it, should do a good enough job to not mess things up. Life is difficult enough for everyone, especially if you have, or you are, an adolescent kid. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Obviously, this is a dangerous assumption. The people who have run almost every country, anywhere, have always found ways to mess it up. They usually do that by taking too much control, and by allowing corruption. But by not taking enough control, things can get bad also. There will always be some people who will take advantage of others, whether they are in or out of government. Those who do not pay attention are the ones who are most easily exploited. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What we have learned is that we have to pay attention, not just to government, but to everyone who is trying to get at your mind and your money. These days that is a lot of folks, and there are lots of ways to do that, many more than ever before. Our lives are a constant stream of inputs from everywhere: family, friends, neighborhood organizations, political parties, banks, stores, tech companies, health companies, drug companies, media companies, TV, cable, movies, video games, augmented reality games, your work, your boss, your FitBIt, Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and your dog. It’s constant, and it’s addicting. We can’t turn it off. In fact we keep turning it on, like that rat pushing the lever for a reward.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It has become a chore to be selective. There are many apps that help organize and prioritize your apps. It is very difficult to determine whom to trust, what to believe, and how to respond. Most people tend to stick with what’s familiar, and that allows them to miss what is going on on the other side of the mountain. We could be watching football when the volcano blows and we wouldn’t know about it until our phone gave us an emergency text. By then the lava could be fifty feet away.. There may have been other warnings put out on-line but they weren’t on Facebook so we didn’t know.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Also, and more dangerous, we don’t know who has all this Big Data that has been gathered about us. We only know that many companies and organizations do. In many ways they know more about our behavior patterns than we do. They know where we go, what we buy and how much we are willing to spend, They know whom we hang-out with, and what we like to do with them. They know what we eat, how much we weigh, and if we exercise. They know if we drink or take drugs. They can tell how much sex we are having and probably with whom. They, whoever “they” are, know more than this, and we don’t really know who they are, what they know, or what they are doing with all of the data.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And, if you don’t pay attention, they will sculpt your behavior. If you like this, you’ll like this better, and here is a coupon for it. For you, the price is $39.99, but I’m charging him $109 because I know he doesn’t care. He likes to feel rich.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Many people know the system and can work it to their advantage. They take the bargains they want and leave the rest. They have developed their own core values and they know how to stick to them. But most people look around to see what is happening. They want to be part of the flow and hip to what’s going on. These days that can be very dangerous, and it’s is going to get worse.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">My advice is PAY ATTENTION!!. Stop, as Dr. Kahneman says, and Think Slowly. Choose your own future.</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-59727882472190572612016-11-10T11:18:00.000-08:002016-11-10T11:18:04.874-08:00It’s Much More Complicated Than That!<h1 class="graf graf--h3 graf--leading graf--title" id="0088" name="0088" style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.8); font-family: medium-content-sans-serif-font, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Sans', Geneva, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 40px; letter-spacing: -0.028em; line-height: 1.04; margin: 0px 0px 0px -2.5px;">
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Trump won.</div>
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For me, who now spends too much time on the Internet, it wasn’t a surprise, but it is still a great disappointment.</div>
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For all of us who are educated, secular, informed, and who try to think rationally, believe in science, keep most of our emotions under control, and read the NYT and the New Yorker, this victory is hard to endure.</div>
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How could a man who lies about everything, seems to know so little, and campaigned on racism and misogyny, be elected to lead the land of the free and the home of the not really so brave?</div>
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It’s really not so difficult to understand. (I wrote about it before the election here <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" data-href="https://medium.com/@therapistmumble/it-isnt-just-the-coal-miners-it-s-most-of-america-that-got-left-behind-8e2c153343bf#.26xmk8o7v" href="https://medium.com/@therapistmumble/it-isnt-just-the-coal-miners-it-s-most-of-america-that-got-left-behind-8e2c153343bf#.26xmk8o7v" style="background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6) 50%, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0) 50%); background-position: 0px 1.07em; background-repeat: repeat no-repeat; background-size: 2px 0.1em; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">https://medium.com/@therapistmumble/it-isnt-just-the-coal-miners-it-s-most-of-america-that-got-left-behind-8e2c153343bf#.26xmk8o7v</a> )</div>
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Trump was brilliant. He gave simple answers to complex problems. He played up fears and stayed away from reason. He invoked a mythological past and avoided the real present and looming future.</div>
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That worked because what is really going around the whole world is very confusing to everyone. In involves complex interactions of many factors, and that makes every outcome uncertain. Working hard does not guarantee success as much as working smart. That makes the divide between the rich and poor even greater. Most of the “working hard” jobs are being replaced by machines, algorithms and robots. That includes doctors and lawyers, as well as the garment workers in Vietnam. Soon we will have driverless cars, trucks and planes. We don’t really need waiters any more. We no longer go to department stores or malls, unless we are poor and out of date.</div>
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The people who are doing well, those who work smart, or whose parents or grandparents did, now compose an international class. They are not necessarily loyal to one country. Scientists are working all over the world, they go to international conferences and read international journals.. The money to finance new companies comes from hedge funds, sovereign funds, venture capitalists, and investment banks that are international. All major corporations have offices all over the world, and they send people all over the world to work in them. The people in all those professions know each other and work together. They have formed their own class.</div>
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They have no contact with the White couple in Wisconsin who lost their union jobs, or the Black family in Flint who can’t drink the water.</div>
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One thing that became very clear from the election results is how much all of us are living in our own bubbles. We associate with, and think like, the people in our own neighborhood. The Blue states were very Blue. The Red states were very Red. In the swing states the rural areas were very red and the urban areas very blue. In the Blue areas the LBGTI people flourish, and there is a great deal of diversity. In the Red areas, not so much. There is more religion in the Red areas, while the Blues are more secular.</div>
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It is the interaction of these evolving demographics with all of the changes consistently being introduced into our world by technology that most of the people who voted for Trump find so unsettling. The Tump voters are attracted to the idea of living in an America when it had half the current population. That’s when men worked nine to five for a decent wage, if they were White. Women stayed home and baked cookies ( and always ready for sex). If you got cancer, had a heart problem or drank too much then you died at fifty, but health care was paid by your employer..</div>
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Neither of our current political parties, or anyone that I can think of ( tell me if I’m wrong) who is in the political sphere now, has any idea of how to deal with this much change. They don’t really understand how the new world is working so they still try to solve the old problems. They try to create jobs, control the deficit, and keep everyone in their place. Those problems are no longer relevant. That leaves older people feeling confused and younger people feeling screwed.</div>
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We all know that Trump can’t bring the jobs back, immigrants are not the problem, and women have more of the necessary skills to do well in this environment.</div>
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What no one can tell us is what life will be like when driverless Ubers take us to very expensive restaurants, Watson tells us when to take our pills, Tinder tells us whom to date, Amazon tells us what to buy, Facebook tells us what our friends are doing, and Wells Fargo is automatically deducting our student loan payments from the bank accounts where our unemployment benefits are automatically deposited. Our Amazon Echo will play us music, turn on the lights and order food. Women will be taking care of their mothers and going to book groups while men will be having virtual-reality sex with images of Melania.</div>
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Yes, those of us who really care about others, and it is half the nation, should continue to do what we can to establish real justice and equality for all. That is something that America has always carved into marble, but it never paid attention to the “all.” We need to do that even if it means trying to bring about a single payer health plan and a guaranteed annual wage. Those ideas will always be a tough sell here in profit-oriented, private-enterprise, free-market USA.</div>
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But while we keep trying, we have to realize that there will be a strong resistance due to the influence of a few thousand years of human culture. This pull is so strong that it seems that it must come from our genes. One such primitive behavior is a man’s to need to dominate women. Those alpha-male types have always seemed to feel that it is their role to force themselves onto women in order to spread their sperm, or just to get their rocks off. Women have learned to tolerate that, knowing the harm that resisting can bring. Another very strong tendency is to fear people who we don’t know, especially if they are a different color, worship a different god, or cook food that smells weird. In such cases it seems justifiable to slaughter a whole lot of those people. We do that out of fear that they will rape our women, take our food and cut our throats. That’s not an unreasonable fear. Those things still happen: Rwanda, .Bosnia, Syria, ISIS.</div>
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Those kinds of tendencies make it very difficult to convince any group of people to share their food, shelter and money with a group of different people whom they don’t even know, even if they live in the same country.</div>
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That is why our way forward to a peaceful, just and more verdant world is not clear. These problems are new, different and very complex. They are different than the usual struggles between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, North and South. We have to take into account that demographics are changing, science is changing, medicine is changing, relationships are changing, families are different, what it takes to make children is different, and the climate is changing rapidly and dangerously. The skills that people will need to survive in the next few decades will be different than the skills people needed during the past few hundred years.</div>
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These problems will need different kinds of solutions than anyone in any political party is offering. <em class="markup--em markup--p-em" style="font-feature-settings: 'liga' 1, 'salt' 1;">The first step is to recognize that</em>. We need to find a way to get over the anger, develop some modicum of trust, and look at what’s going on. If not there will be more people left behind, a bigger division between the have and have nots, continued conflict, and a lot of dead fish.</div>
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Please note: This post was first written for my other blog which can be found at <a href="https://medium.com/choosing-our-future" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px;">https://medium.com/choosing-our-future</a></div>
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I have been posting more stuff there than here. I would appreciate it if you would sign up for Medium and check it out.</div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-17936032340586846782016-10-20T08:11:00.000-07:002016-10-20T08:11:14.175-07:00Tools that Think for Us<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Section - A</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">— Big Data and Algorithms</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In March of 2016 a computer named Alpha Go, took another big step towards showing that our new tools are capable of solving more complex problems. It beat the world’s best GO player at that ancient game which has almost an infinite number of moves. This was more difficult than just combing through tons of data like Deep Blue did when it beat the worlds’ best chess player, Gary Kasparov, in 1997, or when Watson beat <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Rutter">Brad Rutter</a></span><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(37, 37, 37); color: #252525;"> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Jennings"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black;">Ken Jennings</span></a> at Jeopardy in 2011.</span><span style="font-kerning: none;"> In this contest, Alpha Go beat Lee Se Dol four matches to one. It showed that a software program developed at Google could learn from experience and improve its own performance. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The program was designed to improve itself based upon it’s successes and failures, even in very complex circumstances. That’s what smart humans do, but the machine’s approach was very different. Another major difference between the machine and human competitors, is that the machine was unaffected by fatigue or psychological pressure. Lee Se Dol emphasized that difference in his post-match interview. "It is different, there's no doubt. First of all, its not human. It took time for me to get used to its playing style," Lee said."It's not shaken up psychologically and stays focused right until the end," he said. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It seems that one of the reasons that Lee is such a great champion is his ability to read his opponent and to push a person to his limits. People react when they feel they have made a mistake or if they think they are beginning to lose (see: Trump). That was not true with Alpha Go. Observers felt the machine made a strategic error early in the last match, but that didn’t upset it — it was unaware of it really, since it is not really “aware” of anything, and it never gets “upset.” As play continued it was able to make the necessary corrections. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Besides the obvious advantage of computing power, it is this lack of emotion that is the major difference between people and our machines and tools. Machines have no prejudices or biases; they just look at the data. And the data is another big difference. The start of the new millennium was the time that the term “Big Data began to gain a lot of traction. People in many fields were realizing that the amount of information that was being produced, and the amount of different factors that computers could collect and analyze, was way beyond what any human mind could keep up with, or make sense out of. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Big Data” is now the term for how machines do that job for us. Big Data is the answer to the problems of being overwhelmed by the five “Vs” of information: Volume, Variety, Velocity, Variability and Veracity. What many people don’t realize is how pervasive the use of Big Data has already become in our lives, and it will play a much greater role in the future. It is what every retailer uses to follow what we have looked at, what we bought and then determine what they can sell us next. It is what every political party uses to see who we may vote for, and how they can try to change our mind. It is how sports teams decide what players deserve a lot of money. It is what your insurance company uses to decide how much risk there is in your life. It is what doctors are using to help with diagnoses and treatment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For several years now I have been trying to persuade my colleagues who do psychotherapy to take advantage of the capabilities of Big Data to improve their diagnostic skills and clinical interventions. The overwhelming response I’ve received has been that would be one of the most counter-productive and anti-clinical actions anyone could take. It would remove the element of therapy that is most important to making it work, the “human” element.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I strongly agree with that. Because what the “human” element really means is to make a decision based upon intuition, and emotion. A person’s intuition comes from his or her own experience and that experience is very limited compared to all the data that is complied by a super-computer. Likewise an emotional decision, which is a major element in almost all human decisions, is very biased as it is based upon that person’s immediate, protective needs, or short-term desires. This is true, even for therapist (imagine that).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Big Data takes the huge volume of data that is feed into it. Sorts through it all with great speed (velocity). It finds regular, reoccurring patters in the Variety of the data, and can check on the Veracity of those patterns. It does this with no pre-conceived ideas ( If it had a mind it would be an open mind, but of course, it doesn’t have a mind), and it does it all much faster and more accurately than any person can.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Big Data can find early indications of depression in ways that no clinician can. In fact it can detect signs of depression even earlier than the person who is becoming depressed. There are examples of machines showing that when a person’s activities show minor changes, that it could either be a good sign or a bad sign. If a man has been going to Home Depot, or Auto Zone almost every weekend for five years, and then he stops going, it may indicate that he has found a girlfriend who he values more, or he is getting depressed and no longer cares about his home or car as much as he always had.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There are many such patterns that Big Data already has about all of us. We all have generated data that gets fed into huge data bases that are kept by retail companies, credit card companies, governments, political parties, and who knows who else. It is not hard to track what we buy, how we spend our disposable income, what books and movies we watch, how much we exercise, what kinds of foods we eat, who we spend time with, and what vices we enjoy. From all that it is easy to generate what we are about to do next. “People who listen to David Bowie also like David Bryne” is one of the more innocuous examples. If anyone could access the data you have voluntarily complied on you phone they would know much more about you, and be able to make more accurate predictions about how you will behave than you probably could for yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But the main advantage / disadvantage of Big Data is that it doesn’t care. It shows things that are counter-intuitive, or that people don’t want to accept, for example that children who are raised with two parents of the same sex grow up to be heterosexual at the same rate as children of children raised by heterosexual parents, or that Republicans have the same general IQ level as Democrats, or that it’s better to have LeBron on your team than Stephan Curry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>These computer tools we have created will only get better at what they do. As we can see from the GO game, they will improve by correcting their own mistakes. Many more of our decisions will be guided by computer algorithms. This will be true for large scale decisions such as finance, city planning, health care, and elections, as well as individual decisions, such as our choices in music, restaurants, schools, or job fitness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Do we want this kind of guidance? Will we accept it and use it? Will we even be aware of how much we are being influenced? How many of these algorithms are made for our best interest, or are the there to promote someone’s profits?</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Coming Next: Section B: But We Are Human</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-71865321368006038212016-10-17T17:11:00.000-07:002016-10-17T17:11:18.771-07:00Tools 2: Tools That Do Our Work<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Anyone who is working at a job in any scientific field is aware of how new technological tools have increased their ability to explore almost any question, and to do so a thousand times faster than anyone could thirty years ago. Genetic studies that would have needed thirty years to observe twins to grow-up can now be done in a matter of hours by looking at their DNA. The availability of techniques such as CRISP-R are dramatically changing the way people are attacking genetic diseases.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Super-Collider is another widely-publicized research tool that is allowing cosmologists to answers questions about the formation of our universe. We are beginning to get answers to questions that had previously been based only on faith.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Watson computers are not only playing chess and Jeopardy, they are being used as a “clinical decision support system.” This machine can process four terabytes of information in the a tiny fraction of the time that it takes your doctor to stare at the ceiling and try to recall what he knows.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Advances in brain science have are being done using improved FMRI machines as well as PET scans and variations of electronic brain stimulators.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The list of fields that have been totally changed since the start of the new millennium is endless. It goes from the examination of ancient scrolls to the exploration of asteroids. No one who does any kind of research or scientific inquiry today does it in the same manner that their predecessors did as little as twenty years ago. If they are they are wasting time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Of course, it isn’t just science, technology has now disrupted almost every job in every field: farming, journalism, law, music, art, even waiting on tables and doing dishes. Delivery services such as UPS now not only monitor their trucks and packages, they can monitor how fast each driver is driving, and how many packages they deliver in an hour. Almost every job, from analytics to zeppelin construction, has their own specifically designed software packages to guide the workers. The trend is that the software and hardware is quickly replacing most of the workers, and doing a better job.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Increasingly, unpleasant jobs are being done by bots and robots. Assembly lines, which are full of repetitive tasks, such as those that build cars, sort medicines, and fill soda bottles were one of the first adaptations of using machines to replace workers. Machines don’t get tired, don’t take breaks and remain accurate. Robots go into burning buildings, Robots disarm bombs. Robots clean-up hazardous waste. Robots go into battle, Drones observe, track and can kill enemy combatants, (and sometimes their families).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Robots are being designed to take over more tasks. It has become clear that any job that pays under twenty dollars an hour can probably be performed better by a robot. That includes the cooks at McDonalds and home health aids. There are studies the show that many elderly and somewhat demented people respond very well to being guided, reminded, and talked to by robots. There are also robots that can take a person’s blood pressure and monitor other important bodily functions. They can do this while the persons sits at home. Many people do this for themselves with small devices such as Fitbits or other health apps, of which there are now thousands. Once any doctor, insurance company or therapists gains access to the information on your cell-phone they will know much more about you than you know about yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A self-driving car, which is right on the horizon, is a specialized robot. In fact, they are here, just waiting for the laws to catch-up. Eventually, these will be easier, safer, more fuel efficient, more time efficient, and cost less. Self-driving cars will probably eliminate traffic jams, as they will be in touch with each other, know alternate routes, and not be subjected to the random actions of individual drivers. They will put hundreds of thousands of people out of work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All of these things are just the most obvious kinds of technologies that will all almost certainly become part of our lives in the not very distant future, probably within twenty years. They will alter the kinds of skills that will be necessary for people to successfully run their lives. There will be a need for physical exercise, but that will be in the service of keeping your body healthy or for athletic pursuits. The need to use human muscle power to do manual labor will be greatly diminished. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This will change the nature of human bodies and, since we know there is a strong mind/body connection, that will change people’s thoughts and emotions.. For me, as a psychologist, I have no way of predicting if people will feel more relaxed, capable and able to enjoy themselves, or if these changes will result in more obesity and sickness. Will we develop an awareness that our lives are so much more dependent upon different kinds of machines, or will this just happen, drop by drop, until many of us think differently, solve problems differently, and slowly change into a different form of our species?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There will be a continued deterioration in many skills that were very basic to human adaptation. I suspect that people will lose the sense of where they are in the world, how to get from place to place, how to traverse difficult terrain, and how to find your way home on your own. All of these will probably become competitive sports, but most people won’t bother to learn those skills.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I am just one or two generations away from the time when people had to grow their own food. Many also hunted, fished and trapped for protein, or else they raised and slaughtered animals themselves. My generation saw the rise of supermarkets, shopping malls, and strip malls, all with huge parking lots. I learned how to drive when i was sixteen and that gave me the freedom to live on my own, go anywhere I wanted, see friends easily and get myself to work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The next generation who comes into the developed world will probably not have to shop, cook, or drive. They will probably not even have to keep track of what they need, as all they will have to do is ask the descendant of Amazon’s Echo to make sure that they have all their supplies of food, milk, bread, wine and wafers. Most of the usual supplies will be on a regular delivery schedule and be put on the shelves, or into the refrigerator. Many of our meals will be specifically designed for us and come completely prepared and placed directly on the table by a friendly robot. All of these things are very possible, but only for those who can afford them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The effects of all of these work saving tools are two-fold. They make life physically easier for people, both at work and at home. There will be no need to carry heavy parts and tools, to use a hammer or saw, or drive or fly hundreds of miles. No need to vacuum the floor, walk up and down the isles of supermarkets, or clean-up after grandpa. It will all be done by robots and the Internet of Things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Another positive effect will be to eliminate human error. Self-driving cars will be safer and more efficient than human drivers. They will not be affected by bad moods, loud music, texting, traffic, or road rage. That will be true for trucks and planes also. Already, computers tally bills more accurately, make change, keep track of who is buying what, give out rewards, and keep records, with no mistakes. They are unaffected by fatigue, repetitive actions, ADHD, the urge to steal, or flirting with customers. They are vulnerable to hacking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The unintended effects of these technological advances will take place in our brains. It will be more pronounced in the brains of the children who will be raised surrounded by all of theses robots, interconnectedness and embedded artificial intelligence. What skills will they need besides coding, wanting, and fending off social media attacks?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Other questions revolve around the unresolved issues regarding if machines are doing all the work, what will people do? If people aren’t working, how can they afford these devices? Will we just play games or will we learn to get along with each other? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Or, will our primitive urges still be the most powerful and we still divide into tribes and use all of these new tools to destroy each other?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What is clear, especially clear at this moment, is that our so called leaders are pretty clueless and unprepared for what is coming. Most politician don’t understand the technology and have trouble using email. They all, from your town council member to the President of the U.S. are talking about creating better jobs when they should be thinking about how people will live if one third of them work, or if everyone works fifteen hours a week. What about security? What about privacy? What about generating enough power for all of these machines without ruining the planet? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>These are just the most obvious of the questions that need to be confronted starting now. I haven’t heard a word about any of them.</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-42829855446308045332016-10-11T14:23:00.000-07:002016-10-11T14:23:52.111-07:00Fancy Tools - 1<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This will come as no surprise to any of you but I am writing these words on a laptop computer. I am sitting at my desk at home but I could be in my office at work, or in a local coffee shop, or in a hotel lobbying Boston, or a hotel lobby in Mumbai, or the airport in Timbuktu. Most of the world is not at all surprised by this, but my twenty year-old self would have been writing with a pencil in a spiral notebook, misspelling twenty percent of the words.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In a few paragraphs I will cite some research done by Dr. Dietrich Stout, of Emory University, who is a neuro- anthropologist, a profession that did not exist ten years ago. I first read about his research in a magazine, but when I wanted to learn more I just clicked on a search engine and I was connected to 364,00 references to him in .53 seconds. I’m sure that none of this is surprising to any of you, but again, when I was in college, way back when the world was colder, the Celtics were champion every year and Bill Russell was paid $100,001 for the season, I may still have received a magazine describing Dr. Stouts’s work. But to learn more I would have had to go to the library and search through the stacks and hope to find the right anthropological journal among the hundreds of journals in the library. Now of course, here are thousands of journals, and almost all of them are accessible in .53 seconds, right here where I am sitting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Clearly, my computer is a tool, a complex, electronic tool that is connected to a power source. One of the distinctive behaviors that have differentiated humans from other species is our ability to make tools. We are not the only species that can do this, but we have certainly taken this concept further by far than the crow who uses a stick or the orangutan that uses a rock. Birds can fly, but we have built planes. Whales can live under water for hours, people can stay under water for months. As far as we know there is no other species that uses calculus. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We have reached the level of tool development at which tools are totally interwoven into every aspect of our lives. It has become impossible for us to live the lives we do without them. We live in homes that are heated and cooled. We move from place to place in cars, boats, trains and planes. We use tractors to plant our food and huge harvesters to bring in in from the field. There are refrigerated trucks and planes that ship the food all over the world. We have drugs to kill harmful bacteria, and drugs to keep our hearts beating and drugs to relieve pain. Yes, there may be some people who try to live their lives “off the grid,” but it is impossible for them not to be affected by those whose lives are lived on the grid, even if it is just the negative effects of climate change and pollution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This brings us to Dr. Stout’s work. He has been studying what happens to people’s brains when they learn to use tools. He is starting at the beginning. He is watching what happens to the brains of people when they learn to make and use the first tools that humanoids made 500,000 years ago, which was before our species,<i> homo sapien, </i>emerged. He has been teaching himself and many students how to make stone axes. He is using more sophisticated tools to watch the changes that occur in their brains as they learn. First he used FDG-PET, fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography, then he used an MRI , magnetic resonance imaging, to explore how learning to make tools improved the brains of our ancestors. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dr. Stout and his colleagues have been able to show that learning a new skill, a skill that is difficult to learn and takes a great deal of practice, will produce changes in the brains of people of any age. These are the kinds of changes that once they are learned, give the person an adaptive advantage. The people who learned to make and use axes had a better chance of surviving than people who didn’t. These people also learned to show others whom they associated with, their tribe, how to make tools, and that gave the whole tribe an advantage, and so their society changed, along with their brains.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That is what is happening today. We are all learning to use new tools, and new tools are being invented and created at a much faster pace than they were 500,000 years ago. Obviously, the rate of change is much faster. We will not wait another few thousand years to turn an axe into a spear, or a car into a driverless car.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The speed of creation of new tools has been greatly amplified because we now build tools to build tools. In order to build new planes we first write software programs to write software to design the programs to build the planes. We have already built the computers to run the software. Our lives have become so involved with our tools that the most important skill a person needs to live well and prosper is to be able to control the tools. However, in many ways, it now often seems as if our tools have such a strong impact on our lives that they control us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Our tools, especially the electronic ones, have greatly accelerated the speed of change, and this will continue to accelerate due to the changes it creates. The electronic tools we create help us make those tools faster, help us aggregate more data, which helps us find more patterns and create new algorithms, which shows us more options.. These options are communicated at an increasing speed to everyone and anyone who will make use of that information to create new tools.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>If they have not already, these tools have changed the way almost everyone on earth lives their lives. Jobs have shifted all over the world because people who are in company headquarters in New York can know instantly what production is going on in China, how quickly the product can be shipped to Denmark, and how much money will be sent to the bank in London. Money itself is only an electronic blip on a screen, and can move at almost the speed of light.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This kind of instant, world wide communication has changed how people meet, learn about each other, and in many cases mate and start families. I have had several patients who have made friends with people thousands of miles apart, sometimes on other continents. Based on virtual communications they have decided they are in love and have left what they considered boring, unfulfilling lives to seek love and romance miles away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yes, several have been swindled and fooled and have returned broke and broken hearted. But I have seen several people who have found what they had hoped for, or at least enough of it to begin new lives. One woman left Massachusetts for Hawaii, another young woman had a young man come from Alabama, and another woman began a romance with a soldier who was in Iraq. He came home wounded, had his leg amputated and a prothesis put one, and then they got married.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All of this would have been very difficult before 2005, when Facebook began, and helped the world to keep in touch. There were dating sites earlier than that, Match began ten years earlier, but by 2005 a huge portions of the world was on the Internet. In 2007 the first iPhone was sold. The world, and our brains, have been changing rapidly ever since.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>If learning the skill to make a stone axe changes the shape and connectivity of a person’s brain, what does learning to write computer code do to the brains of young, or old, coders? Is the shape of my eighteen month old my granddaughter’s brains altered as she learned to take my smart phone and push the right spots on the screen to find Elmo? If getting a ping on the corner of your field of vision every twenty seconds alerting you to some new bit of information, one of which may make you change the entire piece of work you’ve been doing for two weeks because this new piece of information says that three old pieces of information are now deemed questionable, what does that do to your brain? or blood pressure? your emotional stability?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The biggest impact of the rapid development of all of these electronic tools has been on our ability to expand our knowledge about who we are, how the world works , and even the universe that we live in. Since the beginning of the new millennium more has been discovered and learned in every field of science than had been known in the previous four thousand years. A research question that could never have been asked thirty years ago can now be answered in a week, sometimes in seconds. So much of wha I learned in college and graduate school is now considered obsolete, or just plain wrong because so much of it was based on speculation, or the best possible guess, when now we have very clear data. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It is often pointed out that the warehouse size computers that were used to guide the first moon landing did not have the computing power of an iPhone 5. If we use all the tools we now have we could solve almost all of the world’s problems such as hunger, climate change, water distribution and disease. The obstacles that remain are financial and political. We are still searching for tools to help interpersonal relationships, and then to get people to use them.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><i>Many questions keep floating into my consciousness: Is this what we want? How can we choose? How can we adapt to these changes? What skills will be necessary to live and prosper in this new world? Who will possess those skills? What about all the rest of the people?</i></span></div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-7441251789374418352016-09-30T07:21:00.000-07:002016-09-30T07:21:22.716-07:00Stem Cells<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What’s that?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That is Boston’s festival of science, medicine, art and technology. They call it a<i> Festival of the Future.</i> It is sponsored by Harvard, MIT, Mass General Hospital and the Boston Globe. It lasts a week and has a few hundred events, ranging from breathing exercises to groups of scientists explaining their work to the general public. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The “general public” in Boston and Cambridge is not very representative of what is usually considered the “general public.” The group at these meetings are generally very informed, very intellectual, very scientifically involved. The people in the audience are either quite young and academic, or older and successful. The presenters and the audience at these meeting is also very diverse. People from literally all over the world. These are people who not only represent every continent and race, but often several continents and races are combined in one person (not very diverse politically, however).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The first event I went to was a discussion by a panel of doctors and scientists who are developing a cure, not just a treatment but a cure, for Type-1 diabetes. They already have learned how to take stem cells and get them to evolve into the beta cells that make insulin. In Type-1 diabetes these beta cells have been destroyed by the patient’s own auto-immune system. The presenters had formed a team from Harvard, The Joslin Clinic, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a bio-tech laboratory that will do the manufacturing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>They were working on a method to take a persons’ blood and from that produce stem cells with that person’s own DNA. Then they then use the proper enzymes and RNA procedures to turn those stem cells into the kind of beta cells that make insulin. These cells had been destroyed by the person’s own immune system, and thus created the Type-1 diabetes. The beta cells would then be injected into the person so they could again be able to naturally monitor their own glucose level and produce their own insulin to convert glucose into the kind of molecules the body needs for energy. They have already done this for mice, and now they are beginning to see if it can work in humans.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Obviously, this is very complex. The panel members were all excited about their progress and felt that they will be able to overcome the many obstacles they still face. They also made it clear that the availability of this treatment is still years away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To me, this is one of the many examples of how we are entering into a new world. We are on the brink of really understanding how we are constructed, and how we can get into the most basic structures and fix some of the flaws. This is radically different from how medicine has worked until now, which has been to do our best to treat the symptoms. I have a close family member who has Type-1 diabetes and I see every day how she has to treat her symptoms. It also feels as if the companies that have worked on the medicines she uses see her as much as a revenue stream as they do as a patient. The treatments of so many diseases these days are designed to have a patient take medicine regularly to stay healthy, thereby keeping a life-long revenue stream going for the company. There are very few actual “cures” for chronic diseases so far. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I realize, in part, that is because finding the underlying, causal mechanism for any such disease is very complex, as these people made clear. Still, the profit motive does play a role in what kind of medicine is developed. The presenters on this panel are not paid by any drug company. They work for universities and hospitals. They had to fund their own company to make the supplies they will need, and that company will lose money for a long time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Unfortunately, another factor that has delayed the progress of this group has been politics. Again, it was objections from the right-wing, anti-scientific community. As I said, these people feel that their methods are still five to ten years away from application. But for the eight years of the Bush administration they were prevented from using any government money to develop stem cells. Somehow Vice-President Cheney decided that developing stem-cells encouraged abortion and had to be stopped. Therefore people who were alive would have to continue to suffer and possibly die, due to the misconception that this was protecting some unborn zygotes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Of course, it seems nuts and foolish. But as a psychologist I know better than most people that logic and reason is not how any of us make decisions. So much depends upon the people we hang around with, the information we get, the lens through which we view the world, and how comfortable we are with change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A lot is changing now. We all feel it. This is one, very positive example. But, as I said, we are beginning to deal with the basic building structures of humanity. It is very complex. That makes it all a bit unpredictable, exciting, yet also frightening.</span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-6898678169888062212016-08-12T11:50:00.000-07:002016-08-12T11:50:18.864-07:00<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>During the last few months I have been reading many of the posts one The Mission. I read how people are trying to help others find pathways improve their careers, their finances, their relationships, and where they fit into the world. Most are focusing on short and intermediate time frames. I am older than most of your readers, almost as old as Bernie, and I am interested in the longer term. I wonder about the lives of my children and grandchildren. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I read how many of your readers are working hard to create a future that will be different in many ways from how we live now, and hopefully, it will be better. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My Mission, is to start a discussion about that: where are we going? What are we creating? Why? What do we want? What may be the unintended consequences?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> I want help people think with a wider perspective. What will happen to their lives, to their families, to communities, to the world as a result of all of these changes?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I am proposing to write a series of essays, each 1000 to 2000 words, which highlight the many significant changes that are affecting all of us. These essays will describe changes in areas such as technology, genetics, families, population demographics, the earth’s environment, sources of energy, and medicine. Most importantly, I will focus on how all of these areas interact with each other to increase the impact on our lives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>At the end of each essay there will be a few questions for people to consider. These questions are designed to help people clarify how they want to participate and benefit from the opportunities that are being created. I hope to be able to stimulate a discussion about how each of us can influences the direction and consequences of all of this change. The flux will always be with us. We can either be swept up and dragged along by the swift current, or we can take some actions now to control the direction of the river, while we each choose the best ways to steer our own kayaks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Things are changing. Many things already have. The world is being disrupted. More change is coming, and coming faster. Constant change is now the norm.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>As we change the world, the world is changing us, as a species. The type of tasks we need to survive and prosper are different than they were fifty years ago when I was just facing the world as a young adult. Everything in the world moved much slower.I had to search for information in places well beyond the palm of my hand. The information I could find then, especially in sciences, was probably less than a third of what there is now. What I was learning in graduate school about Psychology at that time has mostly been disproven or relegated to the archives of “long ago.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All of the sciences are completely different than fifty years ago. So are almost all of what happens during the daily lives of everyone in the developed world: how we communicate, how we work, where we work, how we get food, what we eat, how we spend our leisure time, how find mates, how we create our families, what constitutes a family……. Almost every aspect of our lives has been affected by changes in technology, medicine, and the changes in our biological environment and our social environment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The result of all of these changes is that the people who do well in the future will require different skills than the ones who are doing well now. In many ways, they will be different kinds of people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What will you be doing in ten, twenty or thirty years? What about your children or grandchildren? Do you know how all of these changes will affect you, and them? Do you think you will be able to choose the benefits these changes offer while avoiding the dangers? Do you think you know what is coming or will it all just happen to you, and you will have to struggle to cope?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We are living in an fascinating time, a chaotic time. Many of these new developments are marvelous and fascinating, but so much is happening so quickly that many people are feeling very insecure. I have been a psychotherapist for over forty years and I have witnessed how, even though in many ways our lives are much easier, there still has been a widespread rise in the amount of stress, anxiety and depression in people all over the world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>On the positive side, it is clear that more than any other time in history, many people are very aware that there is a lot going on. This is good, but we have to take advantage of this realization. We have to ask ourselves many difficult questions, and they are questions that we will each have to answer for ourselves. There really is no one best way forward. But if you don’t consider many of these questions, you could be swept away and who knows if you will like where you end up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That is my Mission: to highlight the impact of some of the many changes in our lives, to make the issues clear, and to ask some questions. My purpose is to start a discussion so that we can all share ideas and perspectives. We all hope to build a better future. Let’s create the future we want instead of letting it shape who we become.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">*<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>*</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>1. Hey Gottlieb!</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Let me begin with a hypothetical:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It’s sometime around 1885. You are about to attend a meeting with Gottlieb Daimler and a few of his buddies. He is the guy who constructed what is generally recognized as the prototype of the modern, gas-powered, internal combustion engine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Let’s get all of those innovators together and brainstorm about the long-term consequences of their new product. Do they have any idea of the effect it could have? Is there anything they might do differently if they could see how the world looks today?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The invention of the internal combustion engine was the beginning of one of the great technological transformations of the world. That technology changed the world dramatically in ways that we take for granted today. Almost all of the those changes are seen as “progress,” but many of the secondary consequences are a bit troubling. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Here are a few of the obvious changes: </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— There has been a great reduction in the need for backbreaking human and animal labor. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— The improvement in the transportation of people and goods has totally transformed how people live, work, and relate. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— People are now spread across the world and still get to wherever they need to go, rapidly and easily. We have cars, trains, planes, buses, trucks, and boats. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— We have billions of miles of paved roads to help us get places. We can live in suburbs or exurbs and still work in cities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— Internal combustion engines now do our farming, build our buildings, pave our roads, fight our wars and blow our leaves away. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— There is no part of our lives that has not not been affected, and in may ways made much easier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Of course, there have been some unintended consequences:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— The burning of fossil fuel has been a major contributor to changing the atmosphere and heating our planet. There is now the possibility that it will cause great harm to many people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— Easy, rapid travel and big machines have allowed people to live in climates and environments such as deserts, jungles and mountain tops in a way that has destroyed a great deal of the natural balance between the flora and fauna of our planet, </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— There has been an unmeasurable amount of corruption and a great many wars fought to insure access to the gas and oil needed to run these internal combustion engines. Many of the poorest and most oppressive countries in the world have become unbelievably rich due to having vast deposits of oil and gas.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">— Wars have been fought involving the entire planet, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, mostly due to the more destructive power of the planes, battleships and tanks that have been powered by internal combustion engines. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>No one would think to place the blame for the destruction, corruption and pollution on the people who designed and built those early engines. They had no way of even imagining what was gong to transpire in fifty, or a hundred years after their spark-plugs began to ignite the fuel in those cylinders. They were really just trying to find something that was stronger, easier to care for, and more dependable than a horse or an ox. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But perhaps, if there was a way of trying to consider the long-term possibilities, some small revision may have been made the could have kept many of the strengths while avoiding many of the difficulties. A man named J. J. Étienne Lenoir tried, in 1858 to make an engine using hydrogen as fuel. Perhaps we should have stuck with that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Today, we are in the early stages of many such transformational technological creations. Due to the interactions of science, technology, entrepreneurship, and rapid communications, many of these new creations are appearing at once. We are developing digital technology, nano-technology, and quantum technology. We are making amazing advances in genetics, engineering, medicine , brain science, robotics, virtual reality, and human/machine combinations. We are working on new, clean sources of energy that will be necessary to keep all these things operating We are also seeing huge migrations of people who are blending together to create new communities. This is leading to large shifts in the values, expectations and behaviors of everyone, all over the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We have the opportunity to use many of these advances in communications and technology to anticipate, in ways that no one possibly could have back in 1885, what the consequences of all of these changes could possibly be. Since we are at such an early stage in so many of these advances we should try to use our new powers of analysis and prediction to help us make choices of what we want to achieve and how we want to use it? </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>How can each of us determine which parts of this new world we want in our lives? We have learned that we cannot depend on governments or corporations or any institutions to be watching out for our best interests. We have to be able to watch over them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There will be scientific studies, algorithms and protocols to direct us, but we need to be sophisticated enough to understand them and know what they are designed to do. The hope for the future is that we will gain more freedom and prosperity. These changes will affect our lives and the lives of future generations, Now is the time to choose, and we need to choose as wisely as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That is why I am writing this series of essays. They will contain descriptions of many of aspects of our lives which are rapidly changing. At the end of each section will be questions </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">i hope you ask yourself, and discuss with your family and friends. I hope you will add your comments here. It should help you decide, as much as possible, which of all of the new possibilities you want in your life, and which ones would lead you away from the kind of life you hope for. I hope you will pose your own questions. The more people who are involved, the more successful we will be. We should all be part of the process of making the new world a better place to live in, and one in which we can all live there together, in peace, with freedom, prosperity, health and happiness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1. How much time do you spend on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Linked-In, <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Google+, Pinterest, YouTube,Tumblr, Instagram, etc)?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Do you control it, or does it control you?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Are you getting what you want more than you are bothered?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>How many apps do you have to help manage your other apps?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Can you stay away? FOMO?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">2. If you are experiencing some strange physical symptoms, would you rather have your diagnosis be determined by a your personal doctor? a Watson computer? or a combination of the two?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Which would your doctor prefer?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>How old is your doctor?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">3. How much different will our lives be in 2045, the year I turn 100? There are many predictions you can look at: Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Michael Bess, Steven Kotler, many VC people, as well as Mad Max. Many others such as sci-fi writers or corporate think tanks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What are some of the things we do now that will amaze people in 2045?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">That we:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>— Let humans drive cars and fly planes?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>— Eat food that comes directly out of the ground or the ocean?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>— Work more than fifteen hours a week?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>All of these questions, and many more will be discussed in the weeks ahead.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>Please join me by pushing the green heart and adding a comment in the discussion.</i></span></div>
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Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-34071342321060012832016-08-11T12:52:00.000-07:002016-08-11T12:52:35.381-07:00<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i></i></b></span><br /></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"></span>I'm back.</div>
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I'm starting to write about new things. The past was prologue. </div>
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I'm putting some test drafts here for the 20 of your to read. I have not done anything to broaden the readership of this blog, but that may happen. We'll see.</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b><i>Something’s Happening Here</i></b></span></h2>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>1. Realization</i></span></h3>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Way back In the Spring of 2012 I was sitting across across from Carrie, an attractive, articulate, sixteen year-old young woman. She had come to me because she was having panic attacks. These attacks often came when she was studying for exams at school. She said sometimes she felt as if her head was going to explode, and at other times that she couldn’t breathe. Carrie spoke in a very animated fashion about how difficult it was for her to maintain her excellent grades and still keep up with the constant influx from her social connections. As she spoke her voice cracked a little and her dark hair fell in front of her dark eyes that would fill, but not overflow with tears. Her parents, Sandra and Joyce, were sitting in my waiting room, while her friends, many of them, were wondering where she was and why she was not answering their text messages that were making her phone ping every thirty seconds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have been a psychotherapist for over forty years and have been closely involved in thousands of people’s lives, yet that was the memorable moment when it became undeniably obvious to me that I was living in a new world; a world that is not only creating changes in how we all live, it is creating changes in who we all are. Changes that will alter the basic make-up of our species,.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The changes are technological, environmental, genetic, and societal. The most powerful changes are the result of how all of those factors interact. This new world will increasingly require people to learn different skills in order to adapt and succeed. Many of the ways of thinking and acting that were adaptive and helpful two or three generations ago, are no longer useful; others are now counter-productive. The time and effort that our ancestors needed to learn how to hunt or to grow for food has been replaced by knowing how to talk to Siri or an Amazon Echo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Our grandparents lived in a world that was very different from the one that their grandparents lived in. The early twentieth century was a time of change, especially compared to the early nineteenth century. It was a time of significant industrial and mechanical advances. The pace of that change has continued to increase so that now, in the early twenty-first century, we live with constant change. We expect it to continue. But as we are changing the world, the world is changing us. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For thousands of years the personalities, beliefs, and behaviors of all people have been shaped by the same basic forces: our genetics, then our families, then our communities, and we are all also limited or enhanced by our general health.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Who we all are, as individuals, begins with our own genetic structure, 99.9% of which we share with every other member of our <i>homo sapiens </i>family. We are all the product of millions of years of evolution. All human babies are born with the genetic scripts that have been passed from generation to generation, with occasional mutations, for two-hundred thousand years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Next, we are all plunked into a family grouping, whatever shape takes: two parents, a tribe, a refugee camp, a single parent, a mother and a sperm donor, whatever. This “family” immediately begins to teach us their version of how the world works. We all quickly begin to understand how we are expected to behave in order to get what we need.. We have to adapt to that specific environment to survive. Babies are very dependent so we all had to learn fast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The third powerful influence on our behavior is the community, the subculture in which we find ourselves as we emerge into the world. This consists of our friends, our school, our church, our neighborhood, our diet, the climate, and all of the experiences that we find outside of our family, which now, of course, includes all of the Internet and social media.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>These three factors interact with each other to shape us all. To this mix of influences we have to add our health. If we are strong and robust we can partake in much of what we wish. If we have a major illness or deformity, our lives will be different, not worse necessarily, but different. If we are obviously different in some way it will cause many people to react to us differently. Most people will be kind and helpful, but others will be mean, many will just look away. We, in turn, will react to their reactions to us. Everything interacts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Combined, these influences shape what we believe, and how we think, feel and act. It has been this way since our ancestors first walked upright and formed groups.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To me, Carrie is the symbol of how these basic, long-standing forces are beginning to change. The pace of these changes will only increase. Carrie was conceived in a petri dish. An egg was taken from one of her mothers and fertilized with sperm from an anonymous man who was selected from a profile in a data base. Her parents were not allowed to be married at the time, but they were living together. As soon as the law was changed they got married. Carrie has a little brother now, and they all live in a happy, caring family. The community in which Carrie lives accepts her family without question. These are circumstances that her grandparents would not have believed possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The visit with Carrie happened in 2012, and already so much from that time seems out of date. This is mainly due to new technologies, and to the new scientific knowledge that these technologies have helped us acquire. The aspects of Carrie’s life that seemed unusual then are commonplace and well accepted now. In just the past few years there have been changes in all of the basic powerful forces. There has been constant scientific advances in our understanding our own genetics., many new variations in the definition of a family; major shifts in demographics and composition of societies around the world, and significant advances in medicine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All of these changes have affected the expectations of how Carrie will live her life. The skills she is learning, and how she learns them, are changing. Her life will be vastly different than the life I lived, growing up in the middle of the twentieth century. All of these things are not only changing how people behave, they are changing our DNA, our bodies and our minds. Some of it is intentional; most of it is not. The more we all are aware of what is happening to us, the better prepared we will be to make good use of the changes we feel are beneficial. We also need to stay vigilant,so that we can avoid the ones we don’t wish to have thrust upon us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><b>Questions</b>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">1. Do you know anyone who has two mothers or two fathers?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What do think of it? How old are you?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Are there some kinds of family combinations that would make you uncomfortable?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Polygamy? Three fathers with six children?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">2, Take a look at yourself in a mirror.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Are you White? Do you realize how that has affected your life?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Are you tall? Well endowed? Have a symmetrical face?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">3, How close are you to the members of your family?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Do you feel you have absorbed their values, or have you explicitly rejected them?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">4. What is your favorite piece of digital equipment?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>How long have you had it?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>When will you need to replace it?</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Did you think you needed it before you learned there was one?</span></div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-40500475148284908202016-06-09T17:50:00.001-07:002016-06-09T17:50:43.076-07:00Transition, But First, Going Away<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal; min-height: 13px;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I am pretty sure that I am finished being a hands-on, face to face psychotherapist. I cleaned out my desk. The office is being rented to someone else. I have kissed all of my patients good-bye. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It was difficult, kind of earth-shattering in a very personal way, but now it’s done.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I did this gradually, over a two year period, so I think it went as well as possible. It also gave me time to transition to the next phase. I have worked with so many people who needed to navigate through difficult transitions, They had many different reasons: job loss, death of loved ones, illness, accidents, divorce, recovery, new job, new move, new partner. I tried to help them develop new skills. Now it’s my turn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What I seem to be doing, just by having the time now to do so, is to step back and look around. I had been focused on so many individuals who each had to deal with unique situations. Now I want to look up at the sky. I want to try to put everything in some kind of perspective, to see how everything ties together. The world is changing very rapidly. It is creating a great deal of excitement and hope, but also disruption and fear. You can se e that in the politics that are in such turmoil.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I also see so many educated, dedicated, creative, caring people who are doing exciting, transformative, world changing things in so many areas, such as genetics, brains science, communications, space exploration, immunology, business management, sustainable energy, product development, medicine, food science ….. on and on in almost every field, even psychology.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I guess what I’d like to do is help everyone take a moment to step back and see how all of these changes interact with each other, and what kind of a new world we are creating. How do electric cars relate to genetic editing, to transgender marriages, to sustainable energy, to drone warfare, to on-line education, to a mars landing, to guided meditation?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Is all of this taking us where we want to go or is it just keeping everyone busy and making some people very rich?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have become very aware that everyone’s lives will be very different in just twenty five years. I have also become very aware that, if I’m here, I will be 96 in twenty five years.(WTF?)</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Therefore, before I ask the two hundred basic questions I have been thinking about, and try to generate a discussion about how we should all participate in designing our future, I will be going away. Far away, to the other side of the world. Got to do this while we can, ya know.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>When I return we will begin the next phase, unless I decide that it’s enough to just play Shoots and Ladders, Pony, trains and ball.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-size: 11px; white-space: pre;"> </span>See you in month or so.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Enjoy the summer.</span></div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-61686021411426598802016-06-01T18:34:00.000-07:002016-06-01T18:34:36.931-07:00The Day After<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Helvetica; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Now it’’s Thursday, after the Tuesday which was the last day in my office, except for cleaning out the draws.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Tuesday was much more difficult and complex than I thought. I had a full day of appointments. It was my last meeting, as a therapist, with all of them. It was my last day of being a professional, in that capacity, after forty-three years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Two days ago I was talking about the frustrations, about how I often felt that my job was a lot like having to redirect a tide that has been coming in, every day, for years, over the same path. There was just so much I could do to change to constant flow of the water, the moon and the earth. There is also the realization that those forces continue whether I am in my office or not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Today, the day after, my feelings are much different than I had expected. Instead of that frustration mixed with relief, I feel much more a sense of loss, mixed with satisfaction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Each hour I said good-bye to someone I had been intimately involved with ( in a professional way, of course) for anywhere from six months to twelve years. Two of them I have actually known for almost twenty-five years, as they have returned to visit me through several life changes. I know the names of their parents, children, lovers and friends better than I know the names of my aunts and cousins. We have been together through losses, tragedies, addictions, bad decisions, distorted thinking, and serious illnesses. We have also been able to achieve marvelous successes, in recovering, in business, in relationships, in finding ways to put their lives back together.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>During the past two weeks I have said good-bye to my last ten patients. It is very gratifying to say that they all are doing well. Only one of them requested a referral to another therapist, which was fine. But the other’s, even the two who are completely nuts </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">(diagnosis code:WOW) feel ready to take on the world on their own. And they are. Three have new, better jobs, two have moved to better places and feel secure, two are in new relationships, one is getting married and one is pregnant. Marvelous stuff!</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don’t let me mislead you here. There were dozens of others who I have referred out, or let go over the last two years who will not do as well. They are part of the frustrations that haunt me. The ones I stayed with until the end are the ones who I knew were doing a lot to pull things together. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The point I want to make is that while there are still huge problems in our society, and worse problems in the rest of the world, yesterday really made it clear to me that we, as a species, are social creatures. We live better, feel better, and do more when we feel connected to other humans. That makes up a large part of what I did for people: I was there for them. They knew that. I understood them, as best as I could. I didn’t judge them. I helped explain them to themselves, and I tried to nudge them in a better direction. For many of them I was the only one who ever did this for them. Many had been pushed around, neglected, demeaned, ignored, abused, pressured, rejected and worse. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It was their responses to me that kept me doing this for over forty years. I know I received so much for almost everyone I saw. Most of the people I saw came to trust me. They were able to tell me things that had happened to them, or just about the thoughts that ran through their minds Things they had never told anyone. I took that as an honor. It was a great feeling to be granted this special privilege.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I am not a religious person. I do not expect to experience a great spiritual awakening. I am very comfortable not having complete explanations for things, yet knowing that somewhere there is a cause for every effect, and that someday it may be made clear and understandable. I don’t believe in uncaused (miraculous, paranormal) causes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have listened to the stories of thousands of people. I have seen the rich and poor, and everyone in between. I have seen geniuses and some who take a bit longer to understand things. I have seen people of all races, creeds, national origins, sexual proclivities, and different levels of power. I have seen many people who have very unique beliefs. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"> I have come to some conclusions. The most important one is that their is no intrinsic way to rank order who is worth more, or who is more important. Money and material wealth are clearly false goals. There is no real meritocracy. Every soul, every spirit, every mind has the same value. We are a species who are both blessed and cursed by being able to wonder why we are here. We are all here, and despite the many advances in medicine and science, at some point, we will each be gone. It is up to each of us to find our place in the world, to try to figure out what we feel is right and important. We each have to do what we need to do to stay alive, stay connected, find some pleasure and find some satisfaction. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Its not an easy task. It is a life long process of trying to get it right, without having any idea of what “it” is. Usually we find our answers with other people, in mutually caring relationships. We do this first with people who are very close to us, and then with others, in our communities, in our societies and in our world.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Now, like all of my former patients, I am movin’ on to the next stage, eager to see what kinds of interactions that will bring. Change is difficult, but it can also be exciting.</span></div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34880316.post-49591730529391060972016-05-25T11:23:00.001-07:002016-05-25T11:23:08.593-07:00Last Day Tomorrow!I wrote this on Monday.<br />
I see that it is a lot like my last post. Obviously, that's the way that I feel, so I will post this here, now:<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This Tuesday will be the last day that I meet with patients in my role as a psychotherapist. I have been slowly working my way to the end after doing this for over forty years. I have been closing the practice in slow steps so this ending does not come as a shock or a disappointment. It is more of a “finally, it’s over.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have spent over thirty of those years running my own practice in a mill city in Massachusetts, less than an hour from Boston. It is a fascinating city with a long history. It is a city with a constantly changing population of immigrants, who move through a very stable core of long time families. The city is surrounded by suburban towns which range from working class bedroom communities to towns filled with very wealth families and some large estates. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>During my years here I have seen everybody. I have seen some of everything. It has been a fascinating time. In many ways I feel that this was what I was meant to do. From the feedback I received over the years I was reassured that I was good at it, and that the work I did was successful and appreciate. It has been gratifying that since I have announced that I was not beginning with any new patients I have received many calls from patients I had seen who told me how much I helped them get through difficult times in their lives. I will certainly miss that. Of course, there have been many people who I have not heard from.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Another thing I learned through the leaving process was how exhausting and stressful the job was. I never really felt that when I was in the middle of it. I remember that for years I would see thirty-five to forty clinical hours a week, and at the end of the week I would be happy to take a break. But I always felt stimulated by the work. I always had things to think about, interventions to try, strategies to plan, and puzzles to solve. I didn’t realize until I had reduced my workload drastically, how totally absorbing and tiring it was.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Some of that of course, is due to my getting older. But more I think is due to seeing that once I was able to really put the weight of it down, it seemed so much heavier to pick up again. When I was in stride, and carrying it with me and thinking all the time, it seemed to just flow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There is still down-side that I feel more acutely now that I am finishing, and that is the frustration of how difficult the whole process is, and in many ways, how little gets accomplished. Yes, I was helpful, and many people, over time, were able to change aspects of their lives to either learn to cope better, change some of their circumstances, or learn many new skills about how to run their lives and make decisions. But, and it’s a big But, there were so many aspects of a person’ life that I could not touch, change or influence in any way. So much of mental health difficulties are intertwined with other factors, A person’s genetics, poverty, loss, some kind of victimization, racism, some kind of illness, crazy families, economic pressures, bad jobs, bad bosses, or just some random occurrence in life: luck. Often it was two three or four of those things happening at once.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And now, I spend more time with friends and family. I try to spend more time just doing more of the things that are interesting and fun.Still, I find I can’t get way from that feeling of frustration. I feel that those underlying causes of psychological and emotional distress still surround me. It’s not just the craziness and tragedies that I see in the news, I see it in my friends who are anxious, in their kids who are struggling, in the city schools that we visit, in the neighborhoods of the city where I worked for so many years, and in almost every city around here. And what makes it more striking, is that Massachusetts is one of the most prosperous, healthiest, best educated and well governed places on earth. I know how bad it is everywhere else. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We keep pushing the rock up the mountain, and it keeps rolling back down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Seeing all this still bothers me, especially with the current craziness going on politically. In my youth, in the sixties, I felt we were really taking the right path and making a difference. I do feel that things have moved in the right direction, and that there are a lot of good people who try and who care. Yet, change always comes with a backlash. And now change is constant, and change is always hard to accept. It affects everyone differently. Often, the resistance is powerful.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It’s a shame. The rock is still there, fifty years later. The mountain is still there. I had hoped, especially with all of our new technology and new knowledge, that more of us could agree on some longer lasting solutions. I had expected that by now we would have broken down the rock and leveled off much of that mountain. </span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sad. I don’t know, Maybe soon. Not holding my breathe. But still trying. </span></div>
Therapist Mumbleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06493049591043233421noreply@blogger.com0