Your mess has no moral weight. Your data is for sale. Your a-hole boss really is driving you nuts.
And real Decemberists record fake Decemberists.
Prompt to Chat GPT: Write a poem about how you should donate to Depresh Mode instead of a walrus.
Why donate to a walrus, so plump and so round, When there's a better cause that needs help to be found?
Depresh Mode, a nonprofit*, works to relieve, The stress and the pain that so many believe.
They offer support to those who are lost, And guide them through struggles at any cost.
So why give to a walrus that just sleeps and eats, When you can make a difference in people's lives with your treats?
*We’re technically not.
How to take care of you when you’re taking care of your home
or
How to take care of your mind while you’re taking care of your hygiene
Lots of headlines to choose from in writing about this week’s episode of Depresh Mode, where I welcome KC Davis. She’s a professional therapist and she’s become a guru in the somewhat sarcastically titled movement of “struggle care”. The sarcasm comes in that it’s a statement about the often indulgent, privileged, and ungrounded phrase “self care”.
KC takes a bold and healthy approach to taking care of yourself and your home, arguing that all those tasks around the house are morally neutral and you needn't feel like a piece of crap if you're mentally struggling while trying to accomplish them. It’s an alternative to beating yourself up if the living room isn’t tidy or if some of the laundry hasn’t exactly made it, neatly folded, into the appropriate drawers every time.
6 important pillars of KC’s struggle care philosophy:
1. Care tasks are morally neutral
2. You deserve kindness regardless of your level of functioning
3. Shame is the enemy of functioning
4. Rest is a right and not a reward
5. You can’t save the rainforest if you’re depressed
6. Good enough is perfect
Your mental health data is for sale
If you are in mental distress and you find an app that you think might help, it’s kind of unlikely that you’ll read through every item of the user agreement before just clicking OK and getting on with it. And it turns out that in doing so, you might be saying OK to things that sure don’t feel OK.
The Washington Post reports on the market out there for personal mental health information.
After contacting data brokers to ask what kinds of mental health information she could buy, researcher Joanne Kim reported that she ultimately found 11 companies willing to sell bundles of data that included information on what antidepressants people were taking, whether they struggled with insomnia or attention issues, and details on other medical ailments, including Alzheimer’s disease or bladder-control difficulties.
Some of the data was offered in an aggregate form that would have allowed a buyer to know, for instance, a rough estimate of how many people in an individual Zip code might be depressed.
But other brokers offered personally identifiable data featuring names, addresses and incomes, with one data-broker sales representative pointing to lists named “Anxiety Sufferers” and “Consumers With Clinical Depression in the United States.” Some even offered a sample spreadsheet.
Why there ought to be a law against that, you might say. And yeah, good point. But for the moment, there isn’t. It’s all completely legal. Gross, sure, but legal.
Your jerk boss is driving you crazy
I mean, that’s one way of putting it. Another way is
That’s an article in Scientific American.
Managers who adopted a transformational leadership style had the biggest positive impact on their employees’ mental health. First defined in the early 1970s, transformational leaders inspire others by painting a vision, encouraging team members to engage in creative thinking and tailoring their approach to the individual needs of each employee. This style had far and away the most positive results, as measured by employee reports of their own well-being. It even beat out the leader-member exchange approach, in which the manager and employee have a tight-knit relationship, and the relationship- and task-oriented leadership styles, which emphasize supportiveness and efficiency respectively.
On the flip side, the researchers also found that destructive leadership styles, where bosses engage in aggressive and hostile behavior, have the largest negative impact on employee mental health.
Rainbow Connection: A Benoit Blanc Mystery
It’s not real, of course. It’s a mashup. But scripted movies aren’t real either so who cares? Just enjoy it.
Colin Meloy asked Chat GPT to write a Colin Meloy song
So it did and he recorded it. It’s not bad but it’s certainly not very good.
For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness. No, it’s got some basics down: it (mostly) rhymes in all the right places (though that last couplet is a real doozy), it uses a chord progression (I-V-vi-IV) that is enshrined in more hits from the western pop canon than I care to count. But I think you’d agree that there’s something lacking, beyond the little obvious glitches — the missed or repeated rhymes, the grammatical mistakes, the overall banality of the content.
It sounds like what it is: an algorithmic regurgitation of Decemberists’ music but without the innovation and soul that the real humans’ music has.