Category Archives: Fresh Perspectives

Holiday. Fun?

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With the arrival of December, many people experience angst over the approaching holiday. For some, this has to do with awkward, difficult and/or impossible family relationships, which come into focus under the cultural expectation of family togetherness at this time of year.

However, consumer debt is a more pervasive source of December dread. Yesterday’s news reported on Bank of Canada concerns about increasing levels of consumer debt. The Globe & Mail referred to “insatiable borrowing,” quoting a senior director of Equifax, a major credit reporting agency: “Following a frenzied start to the festive shopping season with more to come in the countdown to Christmas, we can expect the consumer debt to rise even further. Tis the season, so we can anticipate credit cards getting a strong workout throughout December.”

Living in a consumer culture puts us under enormous pressure to spend mindlessly. And our ready access to credit cards has been the marketers’ dream, fuelling the attitude they want us to have: What the heck, spend beyond your current capacity because you can.

Naturally, they love it when we pay their 20% interest for years and years. However, the financial consequences are far beyond what most people imagine. The system is complicated and complex, and there is much we don’t know. Early in my teaching career, I discovered that students generally thought that if they made the minimum payment on a credit card, they weren’t in debt. By using their cards and paying the required minimum, they thought they were doing the smart and adult thing. However, that is an illusion. It takes a shocking length of time to pay off debt Continue reading →

Conscious Spending: A Solution to Stuffocation

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Stuffocation-the-feeling

In a BBC viewpoint article about the hazards of too much stuff, trend forecaster James Wallman describes an American study documenting what most of us already know—that we have a lot of things in our houses.

According to Wallman, 2 out of 3 people wish they had less stuff. These people are experiencing what he calls stuffocation—an intriguing word that describes the feeling of drowning in stuff. Not surprisingly, the resulting clutter crisis leads to mental stress, which causes physiological symptoms such as elevated cortisol levels. In this way, the mental stress of excess damages our physical health.

I’m with him until he proposes that we solve the problem of excess stuff by spending our money on experiences instead of things. Continue reading →

Perspective

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How fun is that!? A catchy tune and cute kids. I hope it brought a smile to your heart, even if Christmas isn’t your holiday.

Sometimes it’s helpful to look at the origin of things, behaviours, and practices. It gives us perspective.

This song, for example. I don’t remember it during that time my kids were growing up in the 1970s. It resurfaced a few years ago, but had its origins back in 1953 when 10-year-old Gayla Peevey was invited to sing a new song on Oklahoma television.

I love seeing these two videos in sequence because it reminds me that times have changed.. and yet some things are enduring. I’d say the charm of children and this catchy tune are among them.

Happy holidays, however you celebrate…and even if you don’t get a hippopotamus.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions.

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I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. It doesn’t mean I don’t accomplish things. But I go about it differently.

The problem with resolutions…

Resolutions are cousins of goals, and both are fraught with similar difficulties. One problem is that goals and resolutions are pass/fail propositions. They come with baggage. You make it or you don’t. If you don’t, you are judged—by yourself and others—as a failure, a bad person, less than.

Another difficulty is the inflexibility of resolutions and goals. Stephen Covey, in First Things First, compared goal-setting to placing a ladder against a wall and resolutely climbing to the top, only to get there and discover you had placed it against the wrong wall and wasted a lot of time and effort getting somewhere you didn’t want to go.

Adam Alter on Goals

Often the goal was achieved at a cost—the sacrifices that were made to push through and get to where you said you were going. Perhaps there’s an element of character-building when we say we’ll do something and follow through no matter what. But I think we do better when we set up our lives in ways that allow us to respond to changing conditions.

Sticking to old plans isn’t useful in rapidly changing conditions…

I’ve noticed that business researchers are now writing about how important it is for companies to be able to pivot as circumstances change. The same applies to our personal lives. Heaven knows, we are living in times of rapid changes of great magnitude. In the last year there have been numerous occurrences—political, environmental, social—that would have been  unthinkable a short time ago.

It’s tempting to act mindlessly…

Goals are easy in that you have rules and parameters along the way, so you can put yourself on autopilot. Psychologist Adam Alter has something to say about that. He’s an Associate Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and the New York Times bestselling author of two books. In a recent interview he said, “When there’s a goal, humans move mindlessly toward it. This is a principle that’s used to advantage in designing slot machines and video games.”

Alter’s view is that goals are a broken process that can’t help but be unfulfilling, as he explains in this brief video.

His alternative is to set a system that emphasizes the process instead of the far-in-the-future result that seems like an anticlimax when you reach it. This approach gives more immediate reward for effort but, like goals, still has the potential to be inflexible and unresponsive to changing conditions.

We are in times where we can no longer afford the luxury of mindless, knee-jerk, habitual behaviours. My alternative to goals is based on intention and following the energy.

Life on the unfolding path

Following the energy is a mindful way of engaging with the activities of life, Setting an intention puts things in motion. You follow the energy by tuning in and being alert for subtle messages as you move through your days. The trick is to not overlook those messages or discount them when they present themselves.

Here’s a mundane example that I know many of us have experienced in some variation: You’re in the store picking up groceries and something catches your attention. It’s an ingredient you rarely use and your mind says, ‘What do you want that for?” Since you haven’t plans to make anything using it, you move on. A couple days later, in the midst of a snow storm, you are cooking dinner for an unexpected houseguest. The recipe calls for—you guessed it—the ingredient you left in the store. If only you had paid attention.

I had my first direct experience of the unfolding path when I went to England for the first time many years ago. I knew I wanted to travel from Schumacher College in Devon to Stonehenge, and had a time frame but no specific itinerary arranged in advance. By paying attention to prompts and information that appeared along the way, I had some surprisingly profound experiences.

This was a revelation to me because until then I had been someone who liked to have every detail nailed down. In the years since then, I’ve come to appreciate that living by intention and following the energy makes for a much more interesting life.

The first step is to cultivate your ability to pay attention to the promptings, your intuition, or however it is they present themselves. Make it your intention to open up to them, and you might be surprised what happens!

Normal is not something to aspire to

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For a long time, I have thought that we live in a culture where “normal” is the lowest common denominator and, therefore, not something I want to aim for.

I thought I was alone in my opinion—until I heard and interview with Pilar Gerasimo. She is a health journalist and change agent best known for her work as founding editor of Experience Life, a whole-person healthy living magazine that reaches more than three million people nationwide.

In an article titled “The Making of a Healthy Deviant: Choosing a Healthy Life in an Unhealthy World” she says,

Becoming and staying a healthy person in our culture is tougher than it ought to be. You can’t just roll merrily along with the unhealthy status quo, or you’ll become part of it. You have to maintain a base level of hyper-vigilance just to avoid getting sucked into the dominant-culture machine.

From The Healthy Deviant

Healthy deviance is a term she coined. According to Pilar, it means “being different—in a weirdly healthy, happy way.” She elaborates…

Choosing to be a healthy person in an unhealthy world means becoming an outlier. It means frequently walking against the traffic of a mass-hallucination — and that’s not something most people are prepared to do.

The good news is that we can live outside the “normal” culture without moving to a cave or shunning the good things in modern culture. According to Pilar, healthy deviance is a change in awareness and behaviour that involves…

  • Waking yourself up and noticing what’s going on within and around you.
  • Reclaiming your energy, attention and autonomy.
  • Learning to think differently, choose differently, be different in ways that please you.
  • Hopping off the conveyor belt and tossing some well-placed wrenches into the dominant-culture machine.

[tweetshare tweet=”Healthy Deviance is choosing to become and remain healthy even in the midst of an unhealthy culture. Pilar Gerisimo ” username=”LauranaRayne”]

The Living Experiment

Pilar has recently teamed up with Dallas Hartwig to produce a podcast called The Living Experiment. Dallas is co-author of The Whole30 and It Starts With Food. He’s a functional medicine practitioner, Certified Sports Nutritionist, and licensed physical therapist

The Living Experiment is one of my favourite podcasts. I appreciate their thoughtful conversations about the issues we encounter in trying to thrive in an unhealthy world. These are some of my favourite topics, but there are many others so scan the list and see what appeals to you.

  • Purpose vs Pleasure
  • Eating Meat
  • Conscious Language
  • The Health of Others
  • Conscious Eating

So…I’m interested in your thoughts on the concept of healthy deviance. Can you relate or not? Do you have experience in trying to thrive in an unhealthy world, even though you didn’t call your actions healthy deviance? I’d love your comments if you have anything to share about this post.

Wills…getting down to business

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*** Time for this post?  Reading… 7 minutes. Implementing… however long it takes to make the call that gets the ball rolling.

Most of us cringe when we think about making our wills.

Such a pain!  Don’t even want to think about it.  I know that I should…and I will do it… one of these days.

“One of these days” doesn’t come for all of us.

Some die suddenly and the family is left scrambling to find out what is where.

Others find themselves very ill, debilitated, and in the hospital—with family members delicately trying to find out if there is a will without appearing to hope the person will die so they can get their inheritance.

Not a pretty sight, and not what any of us would want if we were thinking rationally.

Interesting thing about death, though…

The topic of dying tends to evoke irrational responses. Here are a few reasons for this. What would you add? Continue reading →

Clinging doesn’t work .

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Life on Earth was designed to evolve. That’s why we’re here,,,for the ever-changing opportunities to experience life and grow in our humanness. Yet as we move through daily life, we seem to have forgotten the fundamental principle that makes growth possible.

I think it’s fair to say that most of us, me included, fall into the trap of wanting things to remain the same. That’s not surprising, because no-change feels like security. Life seems easier when we know what to expect and how to navigate it. Continue reading →

Answers & Questions…

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After doing research about the ins-and-outs, pros-and-cons, I decided to have a ChatGPT experience.

My ChatGPT experience…

I started with three questions.

  • I am a human. How can I best relate to you?
  • I’m wondering if you are trained in human values.
  • From what you’ve learned in your training, what is your opinion of humans? 

As expected, the answer to the third question was essentially that ChatGPT has no ability to form subjective opinions on any topic. So I rephrased the question:

  • What are the prominent values that humans express in their interactions? 

With caveats about variations across individuals, cultures and societies, a list came back with 6 points, each elaborated by a couple sentences: respect; empathy and compassion; honesty and integrity; fairness and justice; cooperation and collaboration; freedom and autonomy.

This didn’t address the nuance of my question, which was values that humans express in their interactions. So I replied:

  • This sounds aspirational, but I question that these values are exhibited in practice. Would you please give me a more realistic answer, based on observation of human behaviour.

With caveats about human behaviour being complex and multifaceted, another list came back, again with two-sentence descriptions: self-interest; cultural and societal influences; conflict and disagreement; bias and discrimination; altruism and kindness.

If you’re curious, you can read the full chat by clicking the icon below…

Limitations…

The free version, GPT 3.5, is not connected to the internet. All answers come from the databank of information it was trained on, so its knowledge does not extend past 2021. The paid version, GPT 4, is more current.

A recent article in Forbes highlights The Top 10 Limitations of ChatGPT. Here’s the first one:

Lack of common sense: While ChatGPT can generate human-like responses and has access to a large amount of information, it does not possess human-level common sense — and the model also lacks the background knowledge we have. This means that ChatGPT may sometimes provide nonsensical or inaccurate responses to certain questions or situations.

This means that you, the human, must practise discernment in assessing any answer you get from your chatbot.  Does it make sense? Is it accurate?

At the moment, ChatGPT invents information with great facility when it doesn’t know an answer. In one case, it produced a list of 5 books that supported the topic under consideration. When the human fact-checked the list, not even one of those books existed.

The industry refers to this as hallucination. The current rate of hallucination is said to be 15 -20%, although it’s anticipated that this situation will improve over time. (Perhaps someone will teach ChatGPT about the human value known as honesty?)

Keep your wits about you…

While researching AI, I came across a compelling quote that reminds us not to blindly accept answers.These days, questioning answers seems crucial since a chatbot can provide an authoritative-sounding answer in 3 seconds. (No kidding, to each of my questions, the response started within 3 seconds and printed rapidly, without a pause, to completion.)

Implications for safety…

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His writings examine free will, consciousness, intelligence, happiness, and suffering. Here is a video of his interview about Safe and Responsible AI?

Key points from the interview…

AI has developed much faster than expected by the experts. Three things everyone should know about AI:

  1. It is the first tool in human history that can make decisions by itself. That is nothing like any previous inventions.
  2. It’s the first tool in human history that can create new ideas itself. Previous  tools could only disseminate our ideas.
  3. Humans are not very good at using new tools. We often make mistakes. It takes time for us to learn to use them in a beneficial and wise way. We know this by looking at examples of what happened during and after the Industrial Revolution. The crucial thing is that while we are learning to use AI, it is learning to use us. So we have less time and margin for error than with any previous invention.

The rest of the interview discusses implications and regulation of AI as it spreads in use. Good to be aware of.

My second ChatGPT experience…

I started another line of inquiry with my friendly chatbot, which had kindly concluded our first session with “If you have any more questions in the future, feel free to ask. Have a great day!”

My question was…

  • How would you interpret this quote from Yuval Noah Harari: Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

As I read the response, I noticed that Harari was referred to in the answer. I wondered what the reply would be if I did not include the source of the quote. So I removed his name and asked the revised question.

Comparing the two replies, I saw that the overall organization was identical. Concepts in each paragraph were the same, with slight variation in arrangement of words. Click the icon below if you’d like to see what ChatGPT said about the quote… and maybe reflect on whether or not that would be your interpretation.

And one more chat session…

Having recently written about discernment, I asked ChatGPT to write a song on the topic. The result came back in about 10 seconds, with 3 verses, a chorus, a bridge, and an outro. When I asked for a shorter song that did not lose the essence, the request was met.

The lyrics consist of appropriate buzz words about discernment, strung together with some sense of cadence and rhyme. Hokey is the descriptor that immediately came to mind in terms of both structure and content. This is a demonstration of another of the weaknesses identified in the previously mentioned Forbes article.

Lack of emotional intelligence: While ChatGPT can generate responses that seem empathetic, it does not possess true emotional intelligence. It cannot detect subtle emotional cues or respond appropriately to complex emotional situations.

When I asked for the music, I was advised that ChatGPT does not do audio. This was followed by loads of advice about musical style, genre, and arrangement.

Below is the full chat. The last phrase of the first verse doesn’t make sense to me; it doesn’t fit the context—an example of AI’s lack of common sense.

Good resources are important when navigating…

When we’re heading into new territory, as I was here, good resources pave the way. I did a lot of reading before opening a chat account. Here are two resources that I found particularly helpful…

And now I’m wondering…

What struck you about any or all of this?

If you found this of value, please share it with someone.