Meaning, Melting Pot, Flow
Links and recommendations
You can now catch my conversation with journalist Meghan Daum and clinical psychologist Andrew Hartz, Ph.D. on the Open Therapy podcast.
The 3 of us have decided to get together and record biweekly episodes, speaking about psychology, psychoanalysis, current events, and more. Here’s the first episode.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
Wall Street Journal:
I have a new piece out in the Wall Street Journal about work and meaning.
Work Is Essential to Happiness
Excerpt:
As artificial intelligence advances, some are beginning to welcome a future without work. But giving everyone a universal basic income won’t reveal most people’s inner Mozarts. It will make them profoundly unhappy.
In his 2020 book “Suicide: The Social Consequences of Self-Destruction,” the sociologist Jason Manning points out that those who lose their jobs are more likely to kill themselves compared with those who had not lost their jobs. This effect was particularly strong for men. If losing a job can do that, we should think carefully about what happens when an entire society is organized around not having one.
Read the whole thing here.
The Psychology of Morality:
My new lecture series “The Psychology of Morality” is now available exclusively at Peterson Academy.
I delivered six lectures in front of a live studio audience that explore the origins of morality. The course examines the distinction between moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how emotions and intuitions often guide our judgments more than rational principles. It also investigates frameworks such as Haidt’s moral foundations theory and Gray’s moral dyad theory. The series also covers dark personality traits and their relationship with moral behavior, and concludes by examining the relationship between morality and happiness, sex differences in moral judgment, and moral development across the lifespan.
Enroll here for immediate access.
Here’s the trailer:
Links and recommendations:
How Well Do Americans Understand the Melting Pot? by Gil Guerra
F**k Changeism 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. In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. (source).
2. The expensive slice of fish that graces plates in nice restaurants under the name “Chilean sea bass” actually comes from a fish that for many years was known as the Patagonian toothfish. No one was going to pay $40 for a plate of Patagonian toothfish. Call it Chilean sea bass, however, and the rules change. (source: Alchemy by Rory Sutherland).
3. Some men have a preference for male therapists. The most common reasons men gave for preferring male therapists were feeling more comfortable (46%) and feeling better understood (26%). They also felt more empathy from and less judged by male therapists. (source).
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
Order your copy now:
Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
"The course examines the distinction between moral philosophy and moral psychology, showing how emotions and intuitions often guide our judgments more than rational principles."
Apropos of which, a nice article in Quillette by Steven Pinker on the recently deceased Robert Trivers: https://shorturl.at/BdzHC
Freud of course famously said that the two things necessary for human happiness are work and love.
On the other hand, too much work can be a problem too. Samuel Gompers, who pioneered organized labor in the United States, said that the answer to new labor-saving technologies is a commensurate reduction in the hours of labor. Thus a family-friendly six-hour day and thirty-hour workweek might make sense to replace the current eight-hour day and forty hour workweek that was enacted into law way back in 1937
Even better, I've long advocated two half-time jobs outside the home to support a family in rural areas where people would have time to do useful things that today they pay others to do for them (childcare, eldercare, and building and maintaining their own houses).
For reasons that Henry George first made famous, this could not be achieved within or close to our major metropolitan areas, where two-income families and crowding have bid up the price of urban real estate far beyond what part-time working families could afford.
It's a complicated idea, not easy to achieve, but well within the realm of possibility: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW