.....:goodpost:......

Your boss might be reading your work messages. Here’s how to prevent that.
 

Your boss might be reading your work messages. Here’s how to prevent that.

Your boss may have access to your chats, messages and emails at the workplace. But there are ways to protect yourself.

By Danielle Abril

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-ap...ZUYM.jpg&w=916

You may have recently noticed that many of your casual work conversations, which previously occurred face-to-face, have moved to digital apps in your evolving working environment. But beware: Your messages to your colleagues may not be as private as you think.

As more companies allow their employees to work remotely, either part- or full-time, distributed workforces are turning to digital services like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat to get their work done, collaborate and bond with their colleagues. Sometimes, that might mean that casual conversations about weekend shenanigans, workplace gripes or personal relationships are happening online, creating a digital record of all communications. So workers would be wise to keep in mind which platforms and devices may or may not provide privacy and adjust their behavior accordingly, privacy experts say.

Before we delve into the topic, I’d like to remind you that the Help Desk is here to help you with your biggest questions and qualms. We also want to know what’s happening at your workplace. Are there workplace technologies you are concerned about? Are certain policies changing the way you work? How is the future of work playing out at your employer? Tell us about it, and we will do our best to dig into your biggest issues.

Now, back to your workplace privacy. We spoke to several privacy experts to understand how workers should think about their digital workplace communications and the services they use. Here’s what they had to say.

Q: Can my employer see my private messages at work?

A: Privacy experts agree that there are two things workers should think about when they send a message to a colleague. First, is the service you’re using provided by your employer? Second, are you having the conversation on a device provided by your employer?

If the answer to either of these questions is yes, be aware there’s a chance your employer could see or retrieve your messages. Additionally, even if you’re using your own device and your own personal account on a digital service, your messages still may be at risk if you have workplace software installed.
“The reality of what’s happening is a lot is changing very quickly,” said Alan Butler, executive director and president of the research organization Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Devices, software and different things are being used … and the onus is on the individual [to understand it all].”

The general rule of thumb is to assume that if your workplace is providing you a tool or device, they can and will see what you do on it, Butler said. In some cases, that might mean using administrative privileges to read direct messages or private channels on the company’s Slack workspace. It could mean retrieving emails, messages on Microsoft Teams or texts on your company-provided mobile devices. Or, it could mean screenshots of a person’s messages on other services like Facebook, Twitter or Apple’s iMessage that come from the company’s monitoring software.

The matter can get particularly consequential if workers are using messaging apps to unite against unfair working conditions or policies, said Cynthia Khoo, senior associate at Georgetown University Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology.

“There’s a standard level of monitoring that’s been on the rise,” she said. “But there’s an additional level of monitoring that’s out to squash labor organizing and activism.”

Even if employers can’t retrieve messages on your device, they may be able to get metadata that will help them map out which employees may have been part of the same conversation, said Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. They also may ask you to provide your private messages off your private device related to a workplace conversation in an internal investigation, said Edgar Ndjatou, executive director of the nonprofit organization Workplace Fairness. “You can decide whether you want to honor [the request], but you may potentially be fired for not honoring it,” he said. “It is fair game.”

So what can workers do?

First, if you want to have a private conversation with a colleague, it’s best to do that on your own device using your services, experts note. Also, look for services that provide end-to-end encryption versus just encrypted messages, Khoo said. End-to-end encryption means that your message will be encrypted the moment before it leaves your device until it arrives at the receiving device. Anything less than that means it could be decrypted somewhere in transmission.

She also suggests looking for services that offer ephemeral messaging so that messages disappear within a certain amount of time. Several experts agree that one of the gold standard services for private messages is Signal. WhatsApp is also a popular alternative, though Khoo points out users should be aware that it’s owned by Facebook-parent Meta, which is widely known for massive data collection.

Gillmor says to think about your digital conversations as in-person conversations, during which the location of where those discussions happen matters.

“You wouldn’t go have a conversation outside of your boss’s door,” he said. “You would find a more discreet way to do that — maybe when you’re out for drinks or near heavy machinery on a factory floor.”

It may be best to establish what service workers collectively will use in-person before moving online, experts say. That way there’s no record of the consensus.

But even with the best software, “nothing is foolproof,” said Butler of EPIC. While Signal allows users to disable screenshots of their conversations, the message receiver could always use a second mobile phone to take a photo of a message on the phone where the message was received, he added. And your privacy also depends on the person with whom you’re talking as they could ultimately hand over any private messages despite the service or device, Gillmor said.

That said, sometimes workers need to hold truth to power and that may need to happen on company channels. “It’d be a shame if everyone only toed the line,” he said.

And some conversations are protected by law. So if someone is talking to colleagues about poor workplace conditions and pushing them to collectively respond or act, employers would be breaking labor laws if they retaliated against that, Ndjatou said.

Ndjatou says in general the best advice for workplace messages, regardless of their level of privacy, is to know your audience and use common sense. Anything you say can always be used against you and if a conversation is particularly sensitive, it might be best to fall back on the old-fashioned way of communicating.

“If it’s possible, just meet in person and not digitally at all,” said Khoo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...mails-privacy/

I saw this tweet and just loved it . . .

you ever wonder if butterflies get little humans in their stomachs when they fall in love

Just a Random Post...
 

Serena and Olympia
 

Already missing her.

https://i.postimg.cc/WpxxVRkm/serena...r-cover-86.jpg

NYT Opinion | I'm Going Blind. This Is What I See.
 

NYT Opinion | I'm Going Blind. This Is What I See.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X04HKyW-3hc

From The NY Times YouTube page: In the Opinion video above, the filmmaker James Robinson introduces us to Yvonne Shortt, who is legally blind. But unlike the stereotype of the blind living in a lightless world, Ms. Shortt, like most other legally blind people, lives a nuanced existence between those who see well and those who can’t see a thing.

Ms. Shortt has retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that causes progressive loss of sight. She can see some things some of the time, depending on various factors, including the amount of ambient light, her distance from the object and the object’s location in her field of vision.

In this short film, Mr. Robinson simulates what it’s like to be Ms. Shortt, navigating her world with progressively declining eyesight but also recognizing what she has gained even as she has lost something so precious.

This is the first in a three-part series of videos by Mr. Robinson, who made “Whale Eyes,” a short Opinion film published last year that was nominated for an Emmy Award, about his own disabling eye condition. “Adapt-Ability,” an Opinion Video series, explores how it feels to live with a disability, and the ways in which society can adjust to be more inclusive of people with disabilities.

NYT Opinion | I Stutter. But I Need You to Listen.
 

NYT Opinion | I Stutter. But I Need You to Listen.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0E_wMIwfSI

From NYTimes YouTube page:

John Hendrickson stutters. He has stuttered nearly his entire life.

And in the Opinion video above, Mr. Hendrickson, working with the filmmaker James Robinson, explores the obstacles and emotional burden of his condition and explains the coping strategies and workarounds he has devised to make it through the day in a world that demands that we speak up and speak clearly.

The film suggests that the problem may lie not with people who stutter but with a society that is largely unprepared or disinclined to accommodate them.

This is the second in a three-part Opinion Video series by Mr. Robinson that profiles people with disabilities. The first, about a woman with retinitis pigmentosa, was published last week. The third, featuring a man who has prosopagnosia — or face blindness — will be published next week. Mr. Robinson also made “Whale Eyes,” an Emmy Award-nominated film we published last year that explores his experiences living with an array of disabling eye conditions.

Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them
 

Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them

By Kate GolembiewskiPhotographs by François Brunelle
Aug. 23, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/s...twins-dna.html

That person who looks just like you is not your twin, but if scientists compared your genomes, they might find a lot in common.

https://i.postimg.cc/4dkdLXFS/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Charlie Chasen and Michael Malone, Atlanta, 2014.

Charlie Chasen and Michael Malone met in Atlanta in 1997, when Mr. Malone served as a guest singer in Mr. Chasen’s band. They quickly became friends, but they didn’t notice what other people around them did: The two men could pass for twins.

Mr. Malone and Mr. Chasen are doppelgängers. They look strikingly similar, but they are not related. Their immediate ancestors aren’t even from the same parts of the world; Mr. Chasen’s forebears hailed from Lithuania and Scotland, while Mr. Malone’s parents are from the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.

The two friends, along with hundreds of other unrelated look-alikes, participated in a photography project by François Brunelle, a Canadian artist. The picture series, “I’m not a look-alike!,” was inspired by Mr. Brunelle’s discovery of his own look-alike, the English actor Rowan Atkinson.

The project has been a hit on social media and other parts of the internet, but it’s also drawn the attention of scientists who study genetic relationships. Dr. Manel Esteller, a researcher at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, had previously studied the physical differences between identical twins, and he wanted to examine the reverse: people who look alike but aren’t related. “What’s the explanation for these people?” he wondered.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports, Dr. Esteller and his team recruited 32 pairs of look-alikes from Mr. Brunelle’s photographs to take DNA tests and complete questionnaires about their lifestyles. The researchers used facial recognition software to quantify the similarities between the participants’ faces. Sixteen of those 32 pairs achieved similar overall scores to identical twins analyzed by the same software. The researchers then compared the DNA of these 16 pairs of doppelgängers to see if their DNA was as similar as their faces.

https://i.postimg.cc/HxgSp7h4/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Elisa Berst and Corinne Barois, Paris, 2010.

https://i.postimg.cc/B6pC47D4/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Ana Maria Sánchez and Katherine Romero, Bogotá, Colombia, 2014.

https://i.postimg.cc/2y576dFv/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Pedro López Soto and Albert Pueyo Kaotico, Barcelona, 2015.

https://i.postimg.cc/152rmqgn/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Stella Cappiello and Nunzia Girardi, Bari, Italy, 2015.

Dr. Esteller found that the 16 pairs who were “true” look-alikes shared significantly more of their genes than the other 16 pairs that the software deemed less similar. “These people really look alike because they share important parts of the genome, or the DNA sequence,” he said. That people who look more alike have more genes in common “would seem like common sense, but never had been shown,” he added.

However, DNA alone doesn’t tell the whole story of our makeup. Our lived experiences, and those of our ancestors, influence which of our genes are switched on or off — what scientists call our epigenomes. And our microbiome, our microscopic co-pilot made up of bacteria, fungi and viruses, is further influenced by our environment. Dr. Esteller found that while the doppelgängers’ genomes were similar, their epigenomes and microbiomes were different. “Genetics put them together, and epigenetics and microbiome pulls them apart,” he said.

This discrepancy tells us that the pairs’ similar appearances have more to do with their DNA than with the environments they grew up in. That surprised Dr. Esteller, who had expected to see a bigger environmental influence.

Because the doppelgängers’ appearances are more attributable to shared genes than shared life experiences, that means that, to some extent, their similarities are just the luck of the draw, spurred on by population growth. There are, after all, only so many ways to build a face.

“Now there are so many people in the world that the system is repeating itself,” Dr. Esteller said. It’s not unreasonable to assume that you, too, might have a look-alike out there.

https://i.postimg.cc/9FRynQxW/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Anna-Maria Tenta and Helena Joas, Munich, 2013.

https://i.postimg.cc/HnJ8R69S/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Garrett Levenbrook and Roniel Tessler, New York, 2013.

https://i.postimg.cc/RhjJBwPv/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Karen Chu and Ashlee Wong, Culver City, Calif., 2013.

https://i.postimg.cc/RZ16k6wz/23tb-d...uper-Jumbo.jpg
Jeanne Bédard and Jessica Gagnon, Montréal, 2015.

Dr. Esteller is hopeful that the study’s findings will help doctors diagnose illness in the future — if people have similar enough genes to look alike, they might share predilections for diseases too.

“There seems to be something pretty strong in terms of genetics that is making two individuals who look alike also having genome-wide similar profiles,” said Olivier Elemento, the director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, who was not involved with the study. Discrepancies between DNA’s predictions and people’s actual appearances might alert doctors to problems, he said.

Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns, and that the study’s findings might one day aid forensic science by providing a glimpse of the faces of criminal suspects known only from DNA samples. However, Daphne Martschenko, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who was not involved with the study, urged caution in applying its findings to forensics.

“We’ve already seen plenty of examples of how existing facial algorithms have been used to reinforce existing racial bias in things like housing and job hiring and criminal profiling,” Dr. Martschenko said, adding that the study “raises a lot of important ethical considerations.”

Despite the potential pitfalls of linking people’s appearances with their DNA or their behavior, Mr. Malone and Mr. Chasen said the look-alike project, and the knowledge that we all might have a secret twin out there, was a means of bringing people together. The two have remained friends for 25 years; when Mr. Chasen got married last week, Mr. Malone was the first person he called. While not everyone with similar DNA shares such a bond, Mr. Malone said that he saw Mr. Brunelle’s photography project as “another way to connect all of us in the human race.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/s...twins-dna.html

Those poor immigrants. They've come to the US to escape unlivable conditions in the Central American countries. Reminds me of the words chiseled at the base of the Statue of Liberty...bring your huddled masses yearning to be free. Guess, it's either old and disregarded or doesn't apply to the Southern Border.

It's shameful what DeSantis and Abbott have done with the refugees; sending them to areas where they may not be able to communicate due to language differences and without supplies, food, or money.

We are fortunate to have people in the cities and towns who have stepped up to help these poor people who were dumped in US towns they don't know after being lied to about job prospects, shelter, and more than newsprint and TV reports haven't told us about.

There must be some Constitutional Amendment to force these governors to feel some psychological pain for the misery and fear that they caused people who walked all the way from countries where they lived in fear only to find that we (US) treat them with the same disdain as their home countries.

I Have Face Blindness. This Is How I Recognize You.
 

I Have Face Blindness. This Is How I Recognize You.

When you can’t rely on facial recognition, you look beyond the obvious.

By James Robinsonm, Filmmaker



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-MzNPcEh6M

We’ve all been there: You run into people on the street, and you suspect you’ve met them before — they certainly seem to know you. But you can’t locate them in the complicated tapestry of memory. Frustration and embarrassment well up inside you, putting recall farther out of reach. So you fake it and beat a hasty retreat.

Now multiply that experience many times over, and you might start to get an idea of what it feels like to be Paul Kram. He has a condition called prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, a neurological disorder that inhibits the recognition of faces.

In the Opinion video above, the filmmaker James Robinson shows us how Mr. Kram experiences social interactions, his techniques for managing prosopagnosia and the ways the rest of society can better respond to the needs of those who have the condition.

The video is the last in a series of three films by Mr. Robinson, each of which explores what it’s like to live with a specific disability. The first is about retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition, and the second is about stuttering. Disability is a very personal subject for Mr. Robinson, who also made the Emmy-nominated Opinion video “Whale Eyes,” about his own struggles to manage and live with several disabling eye conditions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/o...opagnosia.html

Boredom is a warning sign. Here’s what it’s telling you
 

Boredom is a warning sign. Here’s what it’s telling you.

It’s our brain’s way of alerting us that things aren’t going well and to do something more meaningful

By Richard Sima
September 22, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-ap...KKWI.jpg&w=916
(George Wylesol for The Washington Post)

In one famous experiment, people were asked to sit quietly for 15 minutes in a room with nothing but their own thoughts. They also had the option to hit a button and give themselves an electric shock.

Getting physically shocked is unpleasant, but many people preferred it to the emotional discomfort of boredom. Out of 42 participants, nearly half opted to press the button at least once, even though they had experienced the shock earlier in the study and reported they would pay money to avoid experiencing it again. (One male outlier opted to shock himself 190 times.)

Boredom is a universally dreaded feeling. Being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t. It’s our brain telling us to take action, much like pain is an important signal for danger or harm.

Boredom is also how our brains alert us that things aren’t going well. Scientists who study the emotion note that every episode of boredom creates an opportunity for making a positive change instead of reactively looking for the fastest, easiest escape. We just need to pay attention.

“Boredom is sort of an emotional dashboard light that goes off saying, like, ‘Hey, you’re not on track,’ ” said Erin Westgate, a social psychologist at the University of Florida who studies boredom and co-authored the shock experiment. “It is this signal that whatever it is we’re doing either isn’t meaningful to us, or we’re not able to successfully engage with this.”

Boredom is a warning sign, she says, and it’s “really necessary.”

Can boredom make you mean?

In a 2021 study, Westgate and her colleagues found boredom led participants toward more sadistic behaviors. In one experiment, bored participants watching a mundane 20-minute video were even more likely to do something presumably none of them had considered doing before: shred maggots named Toto, Tifi and Kiki in a coffee grinder. (The researchers named the maggots to humanize them.)

Among 67 participants who watched the boring video, 12 of them (18 percent) dropped a maggot into the coffee grinder. By comparison, in another group watching an interesting documentary, just one out of 62 study subjects tried to shred a maggot.

(It’s worth noting that the maggot-mangling machine was fake. No maggots were actually harmed during the experiments.)

Other experiments have shown a link between boredom and different kinds of bad behavior, from online trolling to bullying in the classroom to verbal and physical abuse by members of the military toward one another.

The good news is that boredom doesn’t always make us meaner — it just calls us to take action, good or bad. When better alternatives are available, boredom can also make us do good deeds.

In another set of experiments involving nearly 2,000 people, Westgate and her team asked study subjects to watch either a five-minute video of a rock or a more interesting video. Everyone in the study had the option to reduce the pay of the other study participants, with no benefit to themselves. In their boredom, the rock watchers were far more likely to cut pay than those who watched a more interesting video.

But when the bored participants had two options — to either cut a stranger’s pay or increase it, the overwhelming majority of people decided to give money, and fewer people took it away.

Boredom appears to motivate the search for novelty, not evil.

In short, the quality of the options matter: If you have a distraction such as a book you’ve been wanting to read or a hobby you’ve always wanted to try, you might be more inclined to turn to those when bored instead of shocking yourself and eviscerating larvae.

Boredom in the brain

Boredom is a different experience from the idleness of downtime or relaxation. Being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t, which is an uncomfortable feeling.

James Danckert, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo, and his colleagues sat 10 adults in an fMRI brain scanner and measured their brain activity as they watched either a clip from the nature documentary Planet Earth, a video of two men hanging laundry or a static image.

Sitting quietly inside the fMRI machine or watching the boring laundry video both activated the brain’s default mode network, a constellation of brain regions that are active during internal thought, like when our minds are wandering. At the same time, the boring video shut down the anterior insular cortex, a brain region believed to signal something important is happening in the outside world.

What does all this mean? Through an fMRI scan, the bored brain looks like an unengaged, unhappy brain.

“It feels bad to be bored,” said Danckert, co-author of “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom.”

How to be better at boredom

We are most likely to be bored at work or in school — situations where we are afforded less autonomy and fewer options to do something about it. In a sample of nearly 4,000 American adults, 63 percent reported experiencing boredom at least once over the course of 10 days.

The problem with boredom is that while it tells us something is wrong, it does not tell us what to do about it. Finding healthy ways through boredom is up to us.

When the unsettling feeling of boredom hits us, it’s easy to be reactive and reflexively reach for the closest thing at hand: our smartphones.
But such a reaction can set off a “vicious cycle,” Danckert told me. Time on your phone is not particularly meaningful, which means that you’ll likely get bored again.

Instead of being reactive to boredom, try to be more mindful about the signal it is sending you. Take the opportunity boredom is giving you to reset, reflect on or reframe your priorities.

What other options are more meaningful? What are your goals, big and small? And why does what you’re doing matter even if it does not appear that way?

And take heart that boredom, and our search to find relief, is essential to our human experience.

“I think boredom gets a bad rap that’s not deserved,” Westgate said. Boredom is “linked to a lot of what most of us want out of life, like living a rich, fulfilling, interesting, meaningful life. Boredom is just one sort of helpful signal — maybe unwanted signal — that helps us get there.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/welln...dom-happiness/

How to Make, and Keep, Friends in Adulthood
 

How to Make, and Keep, Friends in Adulthood

A friendship expert shares strategies for finding connection in a lonely, disconnected world.

By Catherine Pearson

In July, Marisa Franco went on a solo vacation to Mexico. But by the time she flew back to Washington, D.C., 10 days later, she’d formed an entirely new group of friends.

As a psychologist who studies friendship, Dr. Franco has a leg up on most of us when it comes to forging connections, and she leaned heavily on the strategies she learned researching her new book, “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends.”

Dr. Franco assumed, for instance, that people would like her. And she reminded herself that people in transition — like those who’ve recently moved, gone through a breakup or who are traveling — tend to be more open to making new friends.

Buoyed by that knowledge, she struck up a conversation with a fellow traveler at a cafe whom she overheard speaking English. Dr. Franco invited him to a get-together for people looking to practice speaking Spanish that she had heard about on Meetup.com.

At the language event, I met someone else, made the same assumptions, and we exchanged numbers,” she recalled. “I invited them to a lucha libre wrestling match, and they came. This is to say: People are actually really open to friendship.”

Even so, Dr. Franco knows that making friends in adulthood does not always feel so simple or easy, and that may be one reason why friendship is in decline. In 1990, only 3 percent of Americans said they had no close friends; in 2021, nearly 12 percent said the same. The United States is in the grips of a loneliness crisis that predates the Covid pandemic.

Dr. Franco’s book acknowledges those headwinds, while also offering practical advice for making new friends and deepening existing relationships. She spoke to The New York Times about some simple best practices to keep in mind.

Questions and answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Much of your work centers on changing our scripts around friendship. What are some misconceptions you’d like to see disappear?

One is that platonic love is somehow less important or meaningful than romantic love. We have this idea that people who have friendship at the center of their relationships are unhappy or unfulfilled. It’s something I used to believe myself: I thought romantic love was the only love that would make me whole. I wrote “Platonic” because I wanted to level that hierarchy a little bit.

Another misconception is that friendship happens organically. But research has shown that people who think friendship happens organically — based on luck — are lonelier. You really have to try and put yourself out there.

Is that why you believe that assuming people like you is so important?

According to the “risk regulation theory,” we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on how likely we think we are to get rejected. So one of the big tips I share is that if you try to connect with someone, you are much less likely to be rejected than you think.

And, yes, you should assume people like you. That is based on research into the “liking gap” — the idea that when strangers interact, they’re more liked by the other person than they assume.

There is also something called the “acceptance prophecy.” When people assume that others like them, they become warmer, friendlier and more open. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I never used to be much of a mind-set person until I got into the research. But your mind-set really matters!

Still, putting yourself out there can feel nerve-racking. Any advice?

I suggest joining something that meets regularly over time — so instead of going to a networking event, look for a professional development group, for example. Don’t go to a book lecture; look for a book club. That capitalizes on something called the “mere exposure effect,” or our tendency to like people more when they are familiar to us.

The mere exposure effect also means that you should expect that it is going to feel uncomfortable when you first interact with people. You are going to feel weary. That doesn’t mean you should duck out; it means you are right where you need to be. Stay at it for a little while longer, and things will change.

You also believe that it is critical to show and tell your friends how much you like them. Why is that?

Because we tend to like people who we believe like us. I used to go into groups and try to make friends by being smart — that was my thing. But when I read the research, I realized that the quality people most appreciate in a friend is ego support, which is basically someone who makes them feel like they matter. The more you can show people that you like and value them, the better. Research shows that just texting a friend can be more meaningful than people tend to think.

At the same time, you are very clear that people shouldn’t blame themselves if they feel like they don’t have enough friends. Why does it feel so hard to make those kinds of connections?

I want people to understand that they are much more typical if they don’t have friendship all figured out. The data shows that so many people are lacking for community, and that is nothing to be ashamed about. I am trying to teach people how to swim upstream against a current that is pulling us all in the opposite direction — because loneliness is a societal issue that affects most of us. Our communities used to be built-in, not sought after.

Social media is a good example. It can be a tool for connection, but mostly we use it to just lurk, which is related to increased loneliness and disconnection. That’s not necessarily our fault, though. Social media is designed in a way so that we don’t use it consciously; we tend to just stay on it mindlessly. There are just a lot of societal reasons people feel lonely.

But I also believe we can hold both truths. Yes, this is a systemic issue. But there are things you can do as an individual to increase connection.

For those looking to make a new friend or strengthen their existing friendships, what is one easy tip you suggest they try today?

I’d say to swipe through your contacts, or look at who you were texting this time last year, and reach out. You can say something simple, like: “Hey, we haven’t chatted in a while. I was just thinking about you. How are you?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/w...nds-adult.html

Yellowstone (Kevin Kostner)
 

James and I are huge Kevin Kostner fans.
We've been watching "Yellowstone".

It is slow moving (yet scary sometimes), but we think it might get very interesting this season.

:kissy:

Happy Holidays <3
 

https://media.merryjane.com/eyJidWNr...I6ImpwZyJ9fX0=

Coconut Lime Smoothie :stillheart:

Love is ....
 

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/7d/fc/10/7...75e3e905e2.jpg

I like the perspective of Fred Rogers, when it comes to articulating your position concerning Love.

Love is not a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is. Right here, right now. ~Fred Rogers.

I have this posted on my fridge...
 

Randomly Posting Stuff...
 

Randomly Posting stuff
 

Had a nice walk in the rain yesterday in the park. Once the rain stopped the sun came out and so did the squirrels looking for lunch . (I always bring it). Met a nice lady who has started coming to the park on weekends she said . Well this afternoon is cold and sunny . A perfect day for a walk in the park *S

Randomly Posting Stuff
 

Dec. 4 2022 Kirstie Alley 71 yr, old actress passed away from cancer.

Love this. Simple and elegant with just a few strokes. And the text tells you about Brazil's love for their hero.

https://i.postimg.cc/kgbVYrm5/Screen...0-25-03-AM.png

The following was written by Jessica Walsh. It's lifted from Twitter. It really spoke to me - in fact, it gave me Gen X chills.

https://i.imgur.com/am2sKGo.jpg

Good stuff 🤫
 

We have been listening to a mid-west country artist and his band:


Don Louis & The Drifting Sages.






:listening:

Randomly Posting Stuff Cause you Feel like it.
 

Lisa Marie Presley dead at 54