Doctors Tell All—and It’s Bad

Technology is helpful yet has the potential to scrub the human element that is central to medicine.

Ours is a technologically proficient but emotionally deficient and inconsistent medical system that is best at treating acute, not chronic, problems.

Nice re-framing.

Jack Cochran, too, appreciates a core tenet of the slow-medicine spirit: fulfilled doctors make for more-satisfied patients. Tackling the problems of Kaiser Permanente’s Colorado medical group, he took the counterintuitive step of demoting “patient-centered care” as a goal, and elevated “preservation and enhancement of career” for doctors to first place. He restored to them the sense that their work is, as Barron Lerner’s old-fashioned father put it, a “rare privilege” to be pursued with a sense of responsibility, rather than harried accountability.

System-level processes are grinding down bright people. We all do want something different.

Currently, we must seek it in a system that excels at stripping our medical shepherds of their humanity, leaving them shells of the doctors (and people) they want to be, and us alone in the sterile rooms they manage. What makes our predicament so puzzling, and what may offer hope, is that nearly all of us want a different outcome.

Doctors Tell All—and It’s Bad

The ‘Busy’ Trap

We’re all in this together, for better or worse.

It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

So, continue the self-delusion.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

The creeping concern – so true.

I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

Paradoxical indeed, so perhaps rest/stillness is woven into the fabric of life.

The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

A value worth anchoring the rest of life around.

I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love.

The ‘Busy’ Trap

Who Killed the Weekend?

Ah, the good stuff.

The sociologist Robert Stebbins identifies “serious leisure” activities as the most fulfilling: pursuits that require regular refinement of skills learned in earnest.

Dysfunction arising from an unmet need.

A hobby is an activity undertaken purely for its own sake, but technology attempts to monetise it…What was leisure became labour. The side hustle is a weekend thief, but in a time of stagnant incomes, many must choose income over time.

Who Killed the Weekend?

How Cultures Around the World Think About Parenting

Sounds reasonable.

“We’re supposed to be raising our children to leave us,” she says. “They must develop self-reliance and resourcefulness and resilience, which is a challenge, because we must allow our children to make mistakes.”

Ah, the undercurrent and subsequent unfolding dysfunction.

This is enormously hard for American parents to do…“They displace all of these fears of things they can’t control onto the one thing they believe they can control, which is children.”

How Cultures Around the World Think About Parenting

Tapping Into the Power of Humble Narcissism

This counterpoint is the best thought I’ve heard in response to “hiring based on culture”.

Hiring on culture fit reflects a lack of humility. It suggests that culture is already perfect — all we need to do is bring in people who will perpetuate it. Sociologists find that when we prize culture fit, we end up hiring people who are similar to us. That weeds out diversity of thought and background, and it’s a surefire recipe for groupthink.

Cultural humility is about recognizing that your culture always has room for growth, just like we do. When Larry Page returned as the CEO of Google, he told me that he didn’t want it to become a cultural museum. Great cultures don’t stand still; they evolve.

Tapping Into the Power of Humble Narcissism

Your Bedroom Is Too Hot

Self-soothing rationalizing for cold winter nights.

The basic physiology is that your body undergoes several changes at night to ease you into sleep: Your core and brain temperatures decrease, and both blood sugar and heart rate drop. Keeping a bedroom hot essentially fights against this process. Insomnia has even been linked to a basic malfunctioning of the body’s heat-regulation cycles—meaning some cases could be a disorder of body temperature.

Your Bedroom Is Too Hot