Joblessness, Moneyball, Antidepressants
Links and recommendations
I recently appeared on Stossel TV. I’m in the video for only a few seconds, starting at around 28 seconds:
Wall Street Journal:
I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about the psychology of joblessness.
The first major finding is that people’s mental health begins declining well before they actually lose their jobs. This might seem obvious. If you think you’re about to be fired, of course you’ll feel stressed. But the paper challenges this interpretation.
The researchers did something clever. They looked not only at whether people lost their jobs, but also whether they expected to lose them. Survey participants were asked to estimate the probability that they would be fired within the next year. Those who expected to lose their jobs showed almost the same mental-health decline—both before and after the layoff—as people who didn’t expect it. Being mentally prepared didn’t provide much protection. The effects of job loss looked remarkably similar.
Read the whole thing here or here.
The Only Reading App I Use:
I’ve been using Readwise since April of 2021.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter/X, you’ll know I regularly share screenshots like this from books or articles I’ve read:
These screenshots come from my Readwise app.
Readwise aggregates your reading highlights from various sources like Kindle, Apple Books, Substack, Twitter, and so on. It stores your highlights in one place, making it easier to stay on top of your reading.
Each morning, it emails me 8 random excerpts from different books I’ve read. Since 2021, that daily message has been a quiet ritual for me: fragments from books I half‑forgot are resurfaced, like my own past self giving me a tap on the shoulder.
Moreover, when I’m thinking about a particular topic, a quick search pulls up not just my notes but every highlighted Kindle passage I’ve ever saved on the topic.
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use this link → https://readwise.io/robkhenderson/ to try Readwise free for 60 days (double the length of the standard free trial).
I suspect, like me, you’ll wonder how you ever read without it.
Links and recommendations:
Half of Los Angeles’s street homeless are from somewhere else. by Charles Fain Lehman
When Mayhem Counts as Progress: Eight Percenters Are Everywhere! by Ted Balaker
Moneyball for book publishers and Substack writers by Paul Bloom
Tyranny of the online minority by Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel and Raunak Pillai
The Health Risks of Alcohol Are Widely and Systematically Overstated by Roy Baumeister
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Although sex differences in most personality traits are modest, when considered together, the resulting multivariate differences are larger. One study found a multivariate effect size for the personality sex difference of 2.71 (an enormous difference). As the psychologist Paul Erwing put it, when it comes to personality profiles, men and women are virtually different species. (source: A Billion Years of Sex Differences by Steve Stewart-Williams).
2. Roughly 1 in 6 American adults, an estimated 44 million people, are now on antidepressants. In young adults, those numbers are even higher. Thirty percent of college students take psychiatric medication, up from 9% in 2007. (source).
3. Who are the most physically aggressive human beings? Tremblay’s (2000) research provided a surprising answer: small children. 25% of two-year-olds’ social interactions involved some degree of physical aggression, such as pushing or hitting another child. (source: Concise Introduction to Social Psychology by Roy Baumeister).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
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Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
The psych effects of sustained job loss don’t surprise me at all. Part of the purpose a job serves in one’s life is to be an anchor, the reason you get up in the morning whether you want to or not. Now that I’m retired from paid work, I use weekday morning Mass as my anchor habit. I find I’m happier and more productive, both in my household duties and in the avocations and hobbies that fill my post-work life, if I have a place to be every morning that means something to me. I knew a guy who got up and went to a morning AA meeting every weekday when unemployed. I wonder if a habit like that could stave off some of the job-loss depression? People think it will make them happy if they could just sleep late and have no obligations, but everyone I know who lives that way is chronically unhappy — even if they have the financial means to not need an actual job.