Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
This week economist Carol Graham released her latest book, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair. Reading her publisher's announcement reminded me of one of the reasons that I write this letter. By gathering and curating apparently disparate examples of creativity, cooperation, learning and caring, I find reasons for hope. I wish that reading what I find does the same for you.
Happy Friday.
How We Live
Hope matters as a metric of economic and social well-being.
"In a society marked by extreme inequality of income and opportunity, why should economists care about how people feel? The truth is that feelings of well-being are critical metrics that predict future life outcomes. In this timely and innovative account, economist Carol Graham argues for the importance of hope—little studied in economics at present—as an independent dimension of well-being. Given America’s current mental health crisis, thrown into stark relief by COVID, hope may be the most important measure of well-being, and researchers are tracking trends in hope as a key factor in understanding the rising numbers of 'deaths of despair' and premature mortality.
"Graham, an authority on the study of well-being, points to empirical evidence demonstrating that hope can improve people’s life outcomes and that despair can destroy them. These findings, she argues, merit deeper exploration. Graham discusses the potential of novel well-being metrics as tracking indicators of despair, reports on new surveys of hope among low-income adolescents, and considers the implications of the results for the futures of these young adults."
Publisher's Announcement: The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair
How We Live
Learning to live between despair and hope
Renée Lertzman. Photograph by Marissa Leshnov
"Whether you call it eco-anxiety, climate distress, or something else, it’s powerful for us to have language to name and acknowledge the phenomenon of having an emotional, existential response to what’s happening with our planet and climate. And those responses point to another question: what does it mean to be human during a time when we have become aware of what we as humans have done to life on the planet? For some people the response to what is happening may be anxiety, for others it may be a form of despair. Others might feel a combination of the two, or it might show up as ambivalence. Or extreme rage, anger, a sense of betrayal. But what matters is to be able to acknowledge the experience you are having, because it’s part of the feedback system for registering what’s happening in the world." - Renée Lertzman
Article: How To Channel Eco-Anxiety
How We Live
"With all of the threats from the identitarian left and the populist right and the nationalist leaders and the religious fundamentalists, is there any hope?"
Steven Pinker takes comfort in the fact that when considered in the context of game theory - the identification of the rational thing to do in a situation where the outcome depends on what other rational people do - shared values help find common ground.
"Humanistic values have a kind of built-in advantage in that they're the only things that you can defend when you have a negotiation with someone who is unlike you.
"We'd all rather be alive than dead. We'd rather be healthy than sick. We'd rather be educated than ignorant and illiterate. There's a long list of things that we share because we are human, despite all of our differences." - Steven Pinker
Video: Game Theory Can Explain Humanity’s Biggest Problem | Steven Pinker
Personal Development
"Taking a break isn’t lazy – learning to recharge is a skill that will allow you to enjoy a more creative, sustainable life."
Woman Resting (c1942) by Lilian Westcott Hale. Via the Florence Griswold Museum
"In his book The Use of Life (1895), the Victorian author John Lubbock wrote:
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summers day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means a waste of time.
"Lubbock spoke from experience. He himself was an innovator in the world of finance, a noted archaeologist (he coined the terms Neolithic and Palaeolithic, and used his wealth to save the ancient stone circle at Avebury), and a political reformer who led the campaign for bank holidays; yet he found time to retreat to his family estate at Downe in Kent, where he spent time playing cricket, entertaining friends, and talking about natural history with his nextdoor neighbour Charles Darwin." - Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Article: How to Rest Well
Learning
Ouch. Are we really this easily swayed?
Infographic: 50 Cognitive Biases in the Modern World
Civics
New research uses Google search data to better understand who is thinking about human rights, and where those people live.
"Human rights aren't going anywhere, or at least the language of human rights isn't going anywhere," Geoff Dancy says. Refugee Children in Immigration Detention Protest Broadmeadows by John Englart (Takver) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Critics say the 'human rights-based approach,' defined by the United Nations as a 'conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards,' is no longer useful for people struggling to bring about change.
"But that’s not the story Google tells, according to political scientists Chris Fariss of the University of Michigan and Geoff Dancy of the University of Toronto.
"Using Google search data from around the world, the researchers show that human rights are the most popular in the Global South, and that people in countries such as Guatemala and Uganda search the internet for information on human rights far more frequently than people in countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom. Their results appear in the American Political Science Review." - Morgan Sherburne-Michigan
Article: Google Searches: Human Rights Is Still A Popular Concept
Advice
Henry Miller on self-organization
Henry Miller Library by leyink is licensed under CC BY 2.0
"The world is not to be put in order, the world is in order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order." - Henry Miller
One-liners
Article: Judy Blume's Books Are Some of the Most Frequently Banned in America — Here's Why
Article: Research: Banks Divesting from Coal Directly Leads To Real Impact—More Than Anyone Thought
Article: Reading Books is Not Just a Pleasure: It Helps Our Minds to Heal
Article: The Cannabis Industry Was Supposed To Be More Inclusive. What Happened?
Article: Sexual Wellness Brand, Roam, has Launched What it Claims are the World’s First Skin-Toned Condoms in Original Latex, Light Brown, Medium Brown and Dark Brown.
Playlist
Video: Tiny Desk Meets AFROPUNK: Luedji Luna
Raised in Salvador, Brazil, the daughter of militants in that city's black movement, Luedji Luna, reports being deeply affected by the racism she experienced in her childhood at school, and from colleagues. She started to channel these feelings into song at the age of 17 performing them in local bars. In 2012 she joined Bando Cumatê, a collective that promotes traditional expressions of Brazilian culture.
She performed this mini-concert in May of 2021 in support of her second album, Bom Mesmo É Estar Debaixo D'Água. Her music is a soulful mix of Afro-Brazilian rhythms, R&B, jazz, blues, and MPB, or música popular brasileira.
"Bom Mesmo É Estar Debaixo D’Água (It’s Really Good to Be Underwater), replete with references to Afro-Brazilian religion, Black feminism, love, revenge and celebration, is one of the most rapturously reviewed albums in her country this year. 'It’s an album that talks about me, that is about me,' she says over a video call, 'but I also bring other voices and images of Black women. Because it is an ‘I’ that is an ‘us’, that is collective.'” - Dom Phillips
Interview: ‘Brazil is a Racist Country, Statistically’: Luedji Luna, the Bold Voice of Bahia
Weekly Mixtape
In the concert linked to above, Luedji Luna says: "Music has been a safe place for me." This mix is inspired by the idea of music making a safe place.
Mixtape: Bom Mesmo. Easy now #7
Image of the Week
Girl spraying the peace symbol on the clouds. Mural by Eduardo Kobra in São Paulo. Photo by Alcindo Filho.
"In times of so many conflicts, it is increasingly urgent to build peace. In the neighborhood of Tatuapé, in São Paulo, I made this simple image in order to convey an important message: we cannot lose hope that one day we will live in a world without wars, with humanity united in search of a better future for all. Do you believe that this will one day be possible?"
- Eduardo Kobra
Post: Street Artist Eduardo Kobra
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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