Those terrible things really are that terrible but also: bike tricks!
Plus Severance, funhouses, and helpful recipes
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Severance is not what I thought it would be
When I heard there was a new tv show called Severance, made by Ben Stiller and starring Adam Scott, I figured it would be a workplace comedy about being laid off. Or about someone who had to lay people off. Something like that.
I didn’t expect a futuristic Orwellian version of Office Space. Which is what I got.
In the show, Mark, Adam Scott’s character, works in a job that requires a procedure called Severance that makes it so he can’t remember his personal life while at the office and can’t remember his professional life when he’s not. And it’s got this kind of amazing title sequence that you really shouldn’t skip past.
Before I ever got into radio and podcasting, I worked a lot of traditional office jobs and I remember thinking that to get by in that situation really requires a kind of dissociation. For instance, I had a long temp assignment at a company that sold industrial valves and pumps. I worked in the accounting department, tracking down invoices that had never been paid. For eight hours every day, I had to wear professional clothing and care a lot about unpaid industrial valves and pumps and the missing payments for them.
And it wasn’t interesting. And I didn’t care. But I had to turn into a guy who did care about industrial valves and pumps in order to do my job effectively and to make the day bearable. Unlike Mark, I did remember my life while at work and vice-versa but I tried not to.
That’s not insanity. I guess. But it reminds me of insanity. Which makes me wonder about capitalism.
Thing we all kind of knew gets reiterated
Social media can screw up any of us. It’s a funhouse mirror of reality and it’s an unnatural way to engage in a social life. It can be fun, sure, but so can a funhouse, until you get to the scary clowns and off-key organ grinder music, which is where a lot of young people keep ending up.
According to a new study, the social medias are mucking up the youths:
Narrowing in on adolescents, the team found that for people in the 16- to 21-year-old age range, both very low and very high social media use were both linked with lower life satisfaction. In 10- to 15-year-olds, there wasn’t much difference in life satisfaction between kids reporting low and high social media use. But in that group, girls with high social media use had lower life satisfaction than boys.
The team also examined data from a survey given to over 17,000 10- to 21-year-olds, identifying separate windows for boys and girls in their early teens where higher social media use was linked with lower life satisfaction a year later — 14 to 15 for boys and 11 to 13 for girls. The relationship showed up for both sexes at age 19. The windows seem to map on to the start of puberty for both boys and girls (girls tend to hit puberty earlier) and a major social transition — many young adults in the UK leave home at around 19.
What Everyone Gets Wrong About High-Achieving Black Women and Depression
Julia Jordan-Zachery, writing in Harper’s Bazaar, says that our society teaches Black women to bottle everything up.
Suppressing our emotions is often encouraged in Black women as a means of control and, most poignantly, for perceived protection. When our bodies experience emotions, those feelings are delegitimized because some, in our intimate lives and beyond, become uncomfortable, as they do not know how to respond to our emotions. Consider, for example, that the “mammy,” a stereotypical image of Black womanhood, never showed emotions. Thus, instead of dealing with her discomfort, she’d rather say no to the emotion. This sets up a vicious cycle—young Black girls learn to link their feelings to negative responses from their caregivers and society at large, which can further compound shame about how we feel. Meanwhile, our intellect and our beauty get praised.
More research about things you might have already suspected
Or here’s maybe a better headline
Go for a bike ride, why don’t ya!
New research suggests that you can feel the positive effects of exercise on depression and you don’t have to run a friggin’ marathon to make that happen.
The University of Iowa ran a study where 30 people experiencing depressive episodes were told to either sit still for half an hour or ride a bike for half an hour. The next week, they switched. The subjects monitored their mental health symptoms before, during, and after they were doing this.
Participants in the cycling experiments showed improvements in their depressed mood state throughout the period and all the way to the 75-minute post-exercise mark. Those dealing with anhedonia saw that relief began to decline after 75 minutes but it was still better than participants who were sitting during the experiment.
“The cool thing is these benefits to depressed mood state and anhedonia could last beyond 75 minutes. We would need to do a longer study to determine when they start to wane, but the results suggest a window of time post-exercise when it may be easier or more effective for someone with depression to do something psychologically or cognitively demanding,” Meyer said.
This thread is what I wanted
I was looking for good, easy recipes to make for family dinners.