psychology

Words make our reality and make our universe real.

Our jobs have become prisons from which we don’t want to escape

For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Karl Marx had a different view: that being occupied by good work was living well. Engagement in productive, purposeful work was the means by which people could realise their full potential.

The dollars and hours pile up as we aim for a good life that always stays just out of reach. In moments of exhaustion we imagine simpler lives in smaller towns with more hours free for family and hobbies and ourselves. Perhaps we just live in a nightmarish arms race: if we were all to disarm, collectively, then we could all live a calmer, happier,

One of the facts of modern life is that a relatively small class of people works very long hours and earns good money for its efforts. Nearly a third of college-educated American men, for example, work more than 50 hours a week. Some professionals do twice that amount, and elite lawyers can easily work 70 hours a week almost every week of the year.

The single most important thing a boss can do, Scott has learned, is focus on guidance : giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it. Guidance, which is fundamentally just praise and criticism, is usually called “feedback,” but feedback is screechy and makes us want to put our hands over our ears. Guidance is something most of us long for.

If the vertical axis is caring personally and the horizontal axis is challenging directly , you want your feedback to fall in the upper right-hand quadrant. That’s where radical candor lies.

“Radical candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.”

The belief that human behaviour can be perfectly modelled, predicted and controlled entrains as a consequence the collapse of equitable relations between individuals and trust in institutions, and the substitution of algorithmic certainty for any semblance of participatory, democratic society. There is no appeal to collective, contestable decision-