Athena, goddess of war and cleverness, shows up to offer Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, the life his father craved. Kleos. Glory. Songs sung about you for a thousand years. He tells her I don’t need that shit.

“Penelope.” The word was a lash. “Speak to your son.”

Penelope’s face was bent to the floor. “I have, goddess. He is set in his course. You know his father’s blood was always stubborn.”

“Stubborn in achievement.” Athena snapped each word like a dove’s neck. “In ingenuity. What is this degeneracy?” She swung back to Telemachus.

“I do not make this offer again. If you persist in this foolishness, if you refuse me, all my glory will leave you. Even if you beg, I will not come.”

“I understand,” he said.

His calmness seemed to enrage her. “There will be no songs made of you. No stories. Do you understand? You will live a life of obscurity. You will be without a name in history. You will be no one.”

Each word was like the blow of a hammer in a forge. He would give in, I thought. Of course he would. The fame she had described was what all mortals yearn for. It is their only hope of immortality.

“I choose that fate,” he said.

A god told a man he could be Achilles and he said nah, I’m good. For three thousand years of civilization, we continue to adopt Athena’s view of what men (in particular) want where the hero says hells yes!!! Madeline Miller offers an alternative ending where the man shrugs at symbolic immortality through conquest and chooses relationships and interests instead. I have been moving in this direction myself, detailing bits to friends like , and still this scene motivates me to solidify this further.

We still worship Athena’s offer because the culture told us so. Now she is the CEO profile in the business magazine, the athlete who signed a 5th endorsement deal to add millions to their salary of millions, the actor who took one year away from his family to adopt the method approach of becoming someone else, the pursuit of the Teacher of the Year plaque, an obscene income that allows for a helicopter pad near the home compound. Non-fiction authors seek these people out to illustrate their stories, ignoring the role of luck, as exemplars of success.

It is shallow to equate wealth with success. By this logic, Jesus was a fucking failure. So was Mother Teresa. And Martin Luther King, Jr. And your grandmother, who you adored.

Telemachus knew what lied underneath his NO. Consider some alternative versions of glory:

Consider alternative versions of glory:

• A person who knows themselves intimately, who understands that others are fundamentally like them, and who is graceful with the next stranger they meet in line or on the street.

• A person who managed to treat their kids better than they were in youth.

• A person who understands wealth is created when one person gives something that costs them because it gives the receiver more than it cost the giver, and the differential IS wealth creation, distal from capitalism's model (spend money on somebody else and your own happiness ticks up more than spending it on yourself does - LINK).

• A person who transformed pain into something useful, which Freud called sublimation.

• A person who leaves life for death with a sense of peace, sorrow, and love. Ready to go someplace where they will not exist in current form.

None of that gets a song. None of it leads to a kick-ass wood carving of your face. Telemachus knew that going in, and he chose it anyway, in a room with a god who was furious at him for wanting something other than her rigid perspective of what makes a good life.

Somebody in your life chose a fate that the Ancient and Modern gods might rate as…….rather plebeian. If it fits with what you want then put this in the win column for mortals over silly temptations. Choose love and passionate interests over glory as many times as humanly possible. This is the easier, downhill path to living well.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

Readers Loved The Last Issue, Find Out Why:

That result on anger’s contextually specific value should have produced a big impact on well-being science. Instead, the field mostly ignored this work, continuing the long arc of studies, podcasts, social media posts, and self-help books as if feeling good was the primary thing worthy of consideration.

My friend , somewhere in a pub in Adelaide, has been arguing about who possesses the greatest decade long run of scientific brilliance in well-being science. It is a niche argument that sport enthusiasts have about who is the basketball GOAT (Jordan? LeBron? Stockton?) or ultimate movie director (Kubrick? Hitchcock?). Matthew picked Corey Keyes from 1995 to 2005 when he blasted out a cluster of papers with something like 50,000 citations that included his dual-continua model and concepts of languishing and flourishing (read his case HERE). It’s a strong pick as I have taught Corey’s work for over 22 years and he wrote a rebuttal to my target article (HERE) that was…..interesting.

In my view, Matthew chose a runner-up.

My pick is Dr. Maya Tamir, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem roughly around 2007 to 2017. You may not have heard her name before and this is one of many embarrassing things about this thing called positive psychology.

Clearing the giants

But before we get to Tamir, let me push some of the obvious responses that other well-being scientists might throw out. Obviously, the kingpin is Ed Diener who built the runway everyone else took off from by initiating this field. Do make sure to read my ode to him (and two other giants):

If Diener didn’t create a computational model to think about and measure subjective well-being as more pleasant feeling, less unpleasant feeling and a sense that your life is going well (HERE) then there is no edifice for Corey Keyes and Maya Tamir to build on. Then of course you have Barbara Fredrickson, who build on the edifice of Alice Isen (READ THIS GEM), by giving us broaden-and-build to understand the function of positive emotions to widen attention and stock the elements of constructive living for later (LINK). Then she bolted to quantify the critical amount of good feelings for every bad one - the ratio of 2.9013 built from fluid dynamics equations and packaged in an influential trade book and still carries a long tail in helping young scientists develop and test new predictions about their role in aging, sport, work, love, etc.

Tamir’s awesomeness in five papers

Let me argue for a few scientific articles that make the case for Tamir’s yet to be appreciated influence listed from the oldest onward.

1. Implicit theories of emotion (2007). Following students through their first year of university, Tamir showed that the ones who believed emotions were fixed, that you get feelings and cannot do much with them, adjusted worse across the year with greater depressive symptoms and weaker friendships than the ones who believed feelings were material that can be modified and used like a tool (Tamir, John, Srivastava and Gross, 2007).

2. Hedonic and instrumental motives in anger regulation (2008). This is the fury experiment from the opening of this article. Men expecting a fight chose to make themselves angrier waving off the pleasant option, and the angry players then outperformed. Anger helped them. The music served as a tool for them to harness their darker emotions and some part of them knew they had the skill and internal knowledge of the self to pull this off (Tamir, Mitchell and Gross, 2008).

3. Sad as a matter of choice? (2015). Across three experiments, clinically depressed participants given the choice picked sad photographs over the cheerful ones and the mournful music over the upbeat, and when taught to reframe an upsetting scene they used the technique to twist it sadder. This raises all sorts of interesting questions about what does depression make us do? Or what do we do that (accidentally) maintains depression and self-sabotages? And how does this kind of approach to decision-making play a role in the dysfunction at work, in relationships, and in childcare for adults with depression? (Millgram, Joormann, Huppert and Tamir, 2015).

4. Why do people regulate their emotions? A taxonomy of motives (2016). This is an integrative paper that reorganized the field around a question of why people bother to regulate emotions. This has always been assumed and rarely tested. Her answer is that we chase useful feelings even when they make us feel like shit because sometimes guilt before an apology or anger before a fight is what is necessary to get the best possible outcome in the moment (Tamir, 2016). This work is what led my team to add a new dimension to the concept of psychological flexibility called harnessing (HERE).

5. The secret to happiness: Feeling good or feeling right? (2017). Across 2,324 people in eight countries, from Ghana and Poland to China and Singapore, the happiest were the ones feeling what they wanted to feel, even when the wanted experience was foul tasting (Tamir, Schwartz, Oishi and Kim, 2017). The power of this finding is illustrated in this image I created with AI:

Half the argument of the book I wrote with Robert Biswas-Diener, The Upside of Your Dark Side (HERE) is derived from her work and those of her colleagues. Anger and guilt and boredom and anxiety and embarrassment and doubt and disgust and discontent are motivational fuel when treated as such. Check out Tamir’s data and you will find the vertebrae that served as essential knowledge for the spine of our argument. And more and more articles and books continue to hit the mainstream with the same argument that there is more to the good life than the positive…

Where did the citations go?

Now Matthew loves citations as the argument for esteemed scientist. Keyes has 50,000 citations for his decade. Tamir’s whole career, every paper she has been an author on, sits near 21,000 (Google Scholar). By these criteria, Matthew thinks he is right and there is no contest. But what I see is a travesty. Read the work and you will ask the same question as me as to why the hell are people writing about emotion generation and regulation and well-being and not citing her? I wonder why she has so few and I have plenty of potential explanatory attributions.

Because she is a woman? Affective science is full of women doing decade defining work, so a flat sexism story is not that compelling (but if I led with this culture war take more people would read and share this article). That said, I do want you to pay attention to the demographics of who gets crowned a founder of positive psychology, who gets paid the most to give keynotes, and who gets the space for the airport paperback. I got into a lot of trouble for mentioning that the first fellows of the International Positive Psychology Association, who were brought on stage and applauded for in a packed auditorium had something in common. They were all (white) men. The program coordinator who I mentioned this to was so pissed that I was never invited back to give a talk at their annual conference….ask them about it if you are a member. My hope is they are willing to say we were wrong, and looking back this is the benefit of having a group that welcomes and appreciates minority voices who dissent from the status quo - they liberate us from cognitive biases (LINK).

Because she works in Jerusalem instead of Cambridge or Urbana-Champaign? A scientist’s reach is still affected by their pedigree (one of the lamest things about academia is the elitism). An idea hatched inside the American positive psychology apparatus, with its summits and its millions of grant dollars from Templeton , flies first class in their private orb. An idea hatched in Israel and published in a strong journal still has the progenitor buying their own economy ticket where there are no signs of a warm chocolate chip cookie.

The likeliest reason is worse than either. Tamir never knelt down and prayed at the altar of positive psychology, a group that you kinda sorta had to join as a member. She did not feel the need to label her findings as part of the positive psychology movement, and she did not soften the complexity of her research for good marketing and publicity. She has been laser focused on high quality theory and evidence irrespective of how other people categorized her work. Social psychology? Affective science? Well-being science? Behavioral economics? These make sense. Positive psychology is a brand and some people don’t care about branding and if you do care, you miss out on so much exceptional work because it is off-brand. People chase the right feeling more than the good one, and a branded body of work built to maximize positivity skipped over this complexity.

What Keyes did

None of what I wrote about is meant to minimize the incredible work of Keyes. He earned every citation as he gave us a new form of consciousness in detailing this concept of languishing and he gave a generation terms for the grey blankness felt inside (Keyes, 2002). New terms that are useful in everyday life is a fantastic achievement. Tamir did something even rarer. She moved the coastline of how we study emotion. She showed us the territory of emotions that we had not even considered previously.

Use her work

You can leverage Tamir’s insights tomorrow. Before the next hardship or obstacle, the conversation about why you deserve a salary boost, the awkward conversation you have been avoiding with your kid about smartphone overuse, stop trying to get calm. Skip the box breathing and the gratitude list. Ask what the moment demands, and if you think it requires a cold burst of anger, let it rise, because you will handle the moment better carrying it than pretending a feeling of serenity that you do not possess. The unpleasant feeling is frequently what will lead to competence.

Matthew, you know I adore you, and Corey Keyes is a giant in psychology. But the best run our field has produced arose from a scientist in Jerusalem and we honor that by refusing to leave her off the marquee when those of us speak on human emotions and self-regulation. Give her work the long overdue attention. Maya Tamir.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

Read Past Issues Here Including:

This definition is far removed from the IQ test we sweated through on whether a Tetris-like shape could be rotated.

A billionaire with a private island argues that intelligence is getting what you want. And this is how IQ evolved since the test Alfred Binet built in 1905 to discover which French schoolkids needed extra help. Binet described intelligence as judgment, good sense, initiative, and the knack for adapting yourself to whatever the day throws at you (sounds like psychological flexibility - SEE OUR MODEL). He warned that treating intelligence as a fixed quantity stamped on a child was a cruel misuse of his scale (LINK). And yet, this is what schools most likely did to you….

That said, intelligence scores predict wonderful things, and for those heavily interested in education, cognitive ability tests predict school achievement. The LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, GRE, and other testing determinants of graduate school worthiness predict how people fare, especially first year grades.

Whether g (the funky cold medina term for general intelligence) earns the crown is an intellectual brawl for another day. What intrigues me are comparisons between narrow numerical evaluations and the definitions others offer as alternatives.

When I shared Naval’s definition online, the pushback came fast.

• Loads of billionaires get what they want but this speaks nothing of their wisdom.

• If everyone started from the same line, sure, getting what you want might pass for brains.

• People get what they want by lying.

• Everyone gets what they want, but not what they say they want.

This last one was by a student in my college class who points at the gap between the goals you tell others versus what you are truly into, and ignoring that self-delusion is problematic with Naval’s definition.

took a swing at the definition in Ungifted claiming intelligence is the dynamic interplay of engagement and abilities in pursuit of personal goals (LINK). Treat g as the full story and you miss what a person might become once raw ability starts reacting over years with directed curiosity, opportunity, and intrinsically motivated strivings. A boy gets hooked on marine biology in elementary school, finds a mentor, and turns ferocious at pursuing knowledge. Engagement lifts ability, ability feeds engagement, and developmental research on expertise has plenty of research documenting this upward spiral.

The formula is where I might quibble.

Ability belongs in a theory of intelligence. Engagement probably doesn’t. Engagement is influenced by some combination of motivation, perseverance, openness, opportunity, self-regulation, and a half dozen other psychological constructs. Personal goals drag in values and identity, that often are irrelevant to intelligent thought. Multiply them together and you get an exquisite model of human development but not quite this thing called intelligence.

Consider a girl who turns into a great violinist because she has sharp ears, practices like a lunatic, loves the instrument, has parents who drive her to lessons throughout childhood, and stumbles onto a career path. You cannot pry apart the element that is intelligence from those that are its causes, complementary features, and the aftermath of intelligent decision-making. How do we know she is intelligent? She chased a meaningful goal and got it. Why did she get it? Because she is intelligent.

A second problem is about the notion of personalizing intelligence. John D. Mayer, one of the co-developers of emotional intelligence published his own construct called personal intelligence in 2008 (LINK). Mayer’s version approximates the opposite of Kaufman’s, reflecting the capacity to reason well about personality, your own and everyone else’s, and to act on what you figure out. You can discover where you stand with Mayer’s Test of Personal Intelligence. Use personal intelligence without stating which and it is hard to understand what you mean.

Then, of course, we must drag Howard Gardner and his multiple intelligence model into the storyline with a separation of linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, and existential tacked on later. What makes his work a regular target of criticism by scientists is that Gardner assembled these categories from intuition and case studies (no researcher found support for separate, independent intelligences in a factor analysis) (LINK). Musical talent is obvious, and so is physical coordination, and being an excellent listener and communicator with people. It is such an alluring framework because referring to these talents as intelligences is incredibly flattering.

Robert Sternberg also attempted a definition with his triarchic theory (LINK) and later his successful intelligence framework which suggests three parts: analytical (think of those asinine analytical problems on the SAT), creative (producing ideas that are new and useful), and practical (being able to get home when dropped off at Grand Central Station with $1 - LINK).

His later work defines intelligence as whatever lets a person attain success inside their own culture, by their own standard, leaning on strengths and overcoming weaknesses. With greater empirical support than Gardner’s list, this model extends Naval’s definition in that success is judged against your own baseline.

You might have noticed that I have yet to describe a definition that is led by a woman. I wanted to wait because the field’s consensus statement was led by Linda Gottfredson, at the University of Delaware, who wrote the 1994 statement Mainstream Science on Intelligence, signed by 52 scientists (LINK).

Her definition is close to an official answer in psychological science with intelligence as a general mental capability that involves reasoning, planning, solving problems, thinking abstractly, grasping complex ideas, learning quickly, and learning from experience. She is explicit that it is not book learning or test-taking skills but rather a wide talent for making sense of the world and working out what to do next.

Her colleague Elena Grigorenko emphasizes this point with fieldwork in Kenya, where children’s practical mastery of local herbal medicine, knowledge about how to best treat illness, showed no positive link to their scores on a standard cognitive test; the knowledge says nothing about whether you work with environmental forces to produce healthcare gains.

Intelligence is the general mental capacity to reason, learn, and solve problems across situations, mostly what psychometricians call g, decently measured by standard tests. It predicts school and job performance, occupation, social mobility, health, illness, life longevity, goals reached, shaped by motivation, opportunity, culture, timing, and now and then by a willingness to take action when the odds tilt your way (LINK). Naval’s aphorism and Kaufman’s model grab some of these downstream results. It feels right because achievement and intelligence often co-exist in a person and this makes the distinction feel blurry.

The quote by Naval describes what a good life looks like once you already exhibit high levels of the baseline quality plus everything else that has nothing to do with your mental wattage and much to do with the family and community you were dropped into.

NOTE: Below are a few things I would rather not say with the entire internet looking over my shoulder. (There is a hidden section of provocations and thought experiments only visible to paid subscribers.)

The kid rotating shapes in a windowless evaluation room and the man with the private jet plane are not measuring the same thing. One is a mind. The other is a biased autobiographical account. Confuse the two and you will spend your life feeling stupid when there are things outside of your control. So put down the excessive judgments on what you accomplished then and what you hope to accomplish later. Go be brilliant at something that has nothing to do with mandatory schooling or paid work.

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There was ferocious curiosity in the room. Our first Q&A break had to be forcibly terminated or it would have turned into Jorge Luis Borges’s infinite library, except every book would have been titled Why Is This Person I’m Dating So Fucking Complicated? The final Q&A lasted more than an hour, until I finally said no más because I had developed an urgent post-lecture need for a Korean corn dog.

The audience kept my brain humming as these were not softball questions. People wanted to know:

• When you’re dating someone with an avoidant attachment style, can the relationship move toward greater security? If so, how?

• What do you do when someone’s religious upbringing has left them uncomfortable with sex, inexperienced, or reluctant to explore it, while your own sexual needs are going unmet?

• What are ambitious, career-oriented women supposed to do about the hypergamy problem, when some men appear uncomfortable dating women who match or exceed them in intelligence, income, status, or achievement? Check out this Reddit thread.

• How should we think about a partner having an extremely close friendship with someone of the sex they’re attracted to?

• What is the evidence on whether polyamorous relationships work, and what is your advice?

This is the part of my job I love. Take psychological science out of the sterile university conferences, add a pub, add people with romantic histories, disappointments, desires, insecurities, kinks, divorces, dating apps, attachment wounds, and just enough alcohol to loosen their social inhibitions that keeps the interesting questions trapped behind timid temperaments. Suddenly nobody wants another list of five communication tips for success. They want to know how human beings work when sex, status, rejection, jealousy, love, ambition, fear, and desire co-exist on one phonecall.

A decent amount of what we discussed would make your HR department visibly perspire so I’m putting some details from the night behind a paywall.

Read more

• A Science-Backed Guide to Raising Kids with Synesthesia

• Subpar Parenting: A Dear Provoked Column

I remember having a conversation in the hallway of the Psychology Department at George Mason University. A faculty member asked me if I’m religious and I replied that I’m atheist. He referred to my role as a scientist and with great confidence claimed the most intellectually honest position would to be agnostic since there is a lack of clear evidence for or against God. I loved this non-heated exchange and nodded my head. Feel free to disagree but I think this is relevant to the conversation about autism below.

A reader read an article of mine about autism and offered the followed unprovoked comments.

JK writes: I’m used to your dog whistle posts and misinformed opinions, as well as your practice of placing the burden of proof on anyone who disagrees. I’m just surprised when you get likes for such posts…There is abundant high quality research that shows that autism overdiagnosis is a myth, and, in fact, the reverse is true.

She raises an interesting question even though it is phrased as an iron-clad fact. Is autism being overdiagnosed? Well, I searched for whether an answer exists and because this reader appears to be interested in neurodivergent conditions more generally, let me expand the discussion to ADHD as well.

Instead of Picking a Team for this Debate, Consider Being Open-Minded to the Data

If a boy born in the summer enters first grade 11 months younger than a classmate born the previous September, he is far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and given a prescription for stimulant medication. Despite the same teacher and classroom work, children get judged differently for disorders based on minor age differences. This is called the “ADHD late-birthdate effect.”

These kinds of findings suggest that something is going on beyond the mere presence of neurodivergence. There is something awry with how we perceive youth, in this case boys, based on preconceived notions (the politicization of science is real - see the special issue led by - LINK).

Returning to autism, the received wisdom has hardened into a team sport. One side says the prevalence rates are exploding because something is wrong in society from DNA to ill-suited environments for humans being asked to sit still in box shaped rooms staring at screens while eating processed food. The other says the rise of autism is a natural consequence of finally showing positive attention to kids who are different with a desire to help those who diverge from what is so-called normal.

What the evidence shows is more than the debate lets on. Autism is roughly 80% heritable, estimated across nearly two million people in five countries (LINK). It is worth noting that a mother’s environment during pregnancy has no measurable influence on autism rates (we really do have to stop the intense blame of mothers for psychological problems, which is worthy of a separate article). A trait inherited to this degree does not quadruple in a population in 20years, because the gene pool does not turn over that fast. Which raises concerns with the leap from 1 child in 150 diagnosed with autism in the year 2000 to 1 in 31 by 2022 (CDC REPORT HERE).

So where did these other children come from?

Is it from a real surge in the underlying condition?

When Swedish researchers examined autism symptoms in the general child population over a decade, the symptom rate sat flat while the diagnosis rate kept climbing (LINK).

In Denmark, about 60% of the entire increase was accounted for by two boring bureaucratic events, a change in diagnostic criteria and a decision to start counting outpatient visits (LINK). I will rely on the authors interpretation:

Now there’s a meta-analysis people often cite to prove overdiagnosis is a fantasy…but when you re-diagnose the same people under successive editions of the DSM, you find that the criteria for autism did not loosen from DSM-IV to DSM-5. They tightened, by about 15% (LINK). This wasn’t a bookkeeping trick from folding Asperger's and PDD-NOS into one category. The study re-diagnosed the same people under both manuals with six studies and over 111,000 individuals and about 15% who qualified as autistic under DSM-IV no longer crossed the DSM-5 bar. The label obtained a wider umbrella term and a higher threshold at the same time. So when someone says the criteria loosened, this mega study that holds the people constant says the opposite.

That combination undercuts two narratives. It wasn’t looser rules and as we’ll see, it wasn’t the environment either. What may have done it was us, looking harder and in more places, at children we used to file under something else (the kids we once belittled with pejorative terms like slow, quirky, or a bit off in the 1980s).

We even know part of the mechanism. In California, a child who lived near another diagnosed child became more likely to be diagnosed the following year, an effect that explained about 1/6 of the overall rise (Liu et al., 2010). Aha, you say! The rise in autism is clearly nonsense. But then you read the study further and realize that the same researchers ruled out three alternative explanations including viral transmission, environmental toxins, and non-random living choices. I hope this is not a surprise but you cannot catch autism from a neighbor. Biology does not reorganize itself by zip code over the course of a mere decade. What can change in a few years is….access to a well-trained clinician!

None of this makes overdiagnosis a myth, which is where my reader lost the thread. Let’s return to the neurodivergent condition of ADHD. A review spanning 334 studies found evidence that ADHD is both overdiagnosed and overtreated, and concentrated in children with milder symptoms. It’s an open access article so read and interpret the results yourself:

Kazda, L., Bell, K., Thomas, R., McGeechan, K., Sims, R., & Barratt, A. (2021). Overdiagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children and adolescents: a systematic scoping review. JAMA network open, 4(4), e215335.

The underdiagnosis case is legitimate too, even though it sounds like I am trying to be on both sides to avoid hate mail. Autistic girls and women are often missed because the diagnostic profile was assembled based on observational studies with boys, and many of them learn to camouflage symptoms with an exhausting series of acts to fit in (LINK). Do read this interpretation by the authors:

Underdiagnosis and overdiagnosis are not opposites that cancel each other out. They happen to different people, in different situations. This is why I am an individual differences researcher who tries to avoid choosing singular, simplistic camps on these and related topics.

Summary

My reader’s mistake was pushing three separate claims under one heavily invested position they were willing to fight me to the death for.

• One, the measured rise is mostly an artifact.

• Two, individuals are not over-labeled

• Three, the right/true/accurate/clear picture is underdiagnosis.

For autism, the first and third have some empirical support but by no means does it suggest that the second is a myth that has been busted. The prevalence rate of autism tells you nothing about whether kids or adults are getting labels they should not have. The test has yet to be conducted on false positive diagnoses and whether they are on the rise, especially now that it’s moved toward an autism spectrum where it is unclear how someone can be so low that it’s inaccurate to refer to someone as having autism. To be fair, it’s a complicated study to conduct over time. To be even more fair, this is why I’d be careful about saying these confounding ideas have been ruled out. There is an act of word smuggling here because whether a diagnosis is “over” or “under” depends on what you think the label is for, and no p-value in a scientific study settles that. Be wary of people who claim a myth has been busted when there are a vast number of alternative explanations, varied populations, and a near infinite atlas of situations. Be on the lookout for financial and psychological conflicts of interest.

Which leaves the position I hold that often leads to a few slaps in the face in a culture that rewards choosing a side with a group status triceps tattoo. Lean where the evidence leans, which means leaning hard toward better data collection on autism (with a careful consideration of alternative explanations such as low social skills as per my original article).

And the current evidence suggests that ADHD is being overdiagnosed. As for the open question as to whether autism as currently practiced pins the label on people who might be different without the need for a psychiatric condition, be on the lookout. Our goal is to help people and reduce the number of times this happens. Careful calibration is only a problem for people who cannot utter the phrase I don’t know yet. Intellectual humility is the unsung hero of intellectual growth:

The next time someone tells you the science on autism is settled, watch what they do with evidence that runs counter to their calcified belief system. It is dreamy when they revise their views. Watch to see if they reach for their team jersey.

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In mine, you get the almost awesome experiences back. You choose which one you walk into next.

There is a version of you still parked outside a house, the CD volume turned down to almost nothing, engine ticking as it cools, and beside you is your date who stopped talking because they’re waiting.

There’s that sentence you’ve thought about uttering since walking out of the movie theater. Instead of saying it, you lean your head toward their shoulder for a second that is way too freaking long, say see you later and watch them ease out and walk away. Your head drops slowly into the steering wheel with hands placed perfectly still at 10 and 2.

It sucked then. Envisioning it now still sucks…and there are a vast supply of related (unfinished) memories.

There is a vast warehouse stocked floor to rafters with our hesitations, each folded and shelved under a thin coat of dust. The kiss you were too unsure of is somewhere on aisle 12. Farther back lies the I love you filed under next time. There is a friend you let drift away because he mistakenly thought you flirted with his ex, along with the father you never properly reprimanded in person for failing to pay child support, and then there’s the blond at the gym front desk you kept meaning to talk with once the busy work stretch ended, and behind a counter sits a clerk who hands you a ticket and tells you to take your time (there are no heinous QR codes here).

You wander through everything you flinched away from, choose one, step inside, and this time you do the thing.

The clerk is mildly bored and speaks with a hint of vocal fry because she has processed every untaken kiss in the history of the species and yours fails to crack the top 30,000. There is a queue, and part of you starts wondering whether some deranged meta-moment is about to happen where you make soft eye contact with the person in the next line, fail to say anything, and then three days later come back to the counter asking for a re-do of the afterlife because you once again chickened out.

You get one re-entry at a time. The counter never closes. Forever gives you plenty of opportunities to return to the parked car and say the swallowed sentence.

Psychologists have been taking inventory of this warehouse for decades.

Tom Gilovich (who taught my first psychology course at Cornell) discovered something wonderful about regret: time changes which mistakes bother us. As the years pile up, your failures to act become harder to dismiss. In one of their studies, 84% of participants said an inaction bothered them more when comparing their biggest regrets (LINK).

went looking for regrets on an industrial scale. His World Regret Survey has now collected more than 26,000 from people in 134 countries, and one of the recurring piles is connection regret, the person we wanted to approach, call, forgive, reconcile with, or remain close to and somehow did not.

The problem with my heaven is the built-in loophole. If some patient clerk is filing tonight’s awkward handshake for later, there is less urgency to do it now. The fantasy provides fodder for procrastination. You can leave the porch light on, leave the message unsent, and assume that eventually eternity will provide superior customer service.

Unfortunately, the living person may want the message while both of you still have functioning phones.

Peggy Liu and her colleagues ran 13 preregistered studies on what happens when people reach out to somebody simply to say hello, check in, or communicate that they were thinking about them. Again and again, the person initiating contact underestimated how much the recipient appreciated it. Even better for those of us who have been stockpiling messages under the category of It would be weird after all this time, the prediction error grew when the two people were less socially close.

You are imagining the recipient studying your text like a suspicious package in a greasy cardboard box secured by black masking tape (a la the Unabomber). Meanwhile the recipient gets an unexpected signal that, despite months of silence, they occupied space in your mind. The surprise they will feel is part of what makes the gesture land.

Which brings me back to Todd’s heaven.

Find the gesture you have been saving for the afterlife. The line you would ache to deliver if a clerk handed you a ticket and gave you one more entrance into the scene. Maybe it is an overdue declaration of affection. Maybe you want an old friend to know that something you did to them twenty-five years ago still haunts. Maybe a person altered the direction of your existence and has no idea.

Do it. You do not need to detail how you have been contemplating mortality.

Time passing is how the warehouse gets inventory.

I made up the returns counter. The parked car story is real. There are several parked-car stories, along with an embarrassingly large archive of walk-your-date-to-the-front-door scenes that ended in a pregnant pause, a nervous little goodnight, and one of us waving while walking backwards. The biggest regret is real too, though that one rests hidden on this page for premium subscribers. She is probably reading this.

Maybe death does offer a gigantic cosmic reclamation department where every aborted kiss and cowardly, unopened conversation gets handed back to us one at a time. I would love that. I am prepared to defend my version of the afterlife against all competing heavens over an old fashioned.

But I don’t want to depend on it.

As I told my 14-year-old daughter yesterday while doing back-to-school shopping, live the last line of my speaker bio:

Say it before you have to die to.

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There are hundreds of thousands of social science studies. And yet, everyone seems to converge on the same ones, especially when someone gets social media traction. Like this one, with the really sexy data visualization of how personality is related to life satisfaction:

Across three countries (Estonian, Russian, English) personality pooled together predicted life satisfaction almost perfectly with correlations between .80 to .90. Personality more or less is your happiness set point, stable across a decade, with emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness doing the heavy lifting (LINK).

Then there was this one, showing that the line running from lifetime adversity to mental health is not a downhill ski slope. It is a U.

People who had been through some serious things, injuries divorces and losses, came out with lower distress, fewer post-traumatic symptoms, and higher life satisfaction than people buried in adversity, and better off than people who had sailed through with almost none (LINK).

Think about this in workout terms. Never train and you are never sore, and you also never get stronger. Never get stressed and you never build the regulatory skills to manage stress when it shows up (and it will). Even something as ordinary as a speech lays down a little toughness.

These are great studies, all of them. If this is your first exposure to them, fantastic, this means you life a life offline and I hope you enjoy them. But there is so much great science. And there is one study in particular that has not been discussed by a single soul I know online or offline. It is a massive study of over 30,000 people over two decades. It is an absolutely essential piece of work for anyone who wants to understand emotions, teaches on emotions, or facilitates workshops on emotions…

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I only saw any of this because I started hunting for things to wonder about. Animals, weather, strangers, inanimate junk, any of it is fair game. I walk 1.2 miles each way to the gym now because what a waste to drive when I’m aiming for a daily does of 3.5 miles (I’m on a 519 day streak). This is great intervention for a cranky back and a widening yogurt belly (LINK). So now I look.

A quarter mile on, I reached the crosswalk at a four-lane interstate besides a pedestrian button where you wait five to seven minutes for a green. On the far side stood a younger guy, headphones in, both hands cupped around his phone, watching something that was clearly captivating. I watched him stab the walk button over and over without once lifting his eyes. So I looked left, looked right, saw no car for at least 300 hundred meters and crossed four empty lanes as a jaywalk. By the time I reached his side he came up for air, looked at the road, and found it full of cars again. He missed the window. Thirty meters later I glanced back. Still there. And because this is my neighborhood, I happen to know that light. He had a long time to think.

I did not feel superior but he did lose a tiny battle for a moment

Then, near the end of the walk, the raven. And with a daughter named Raven, I’m partial to these creatures.

It was perched on a big industrial light poles, the 40-foot kind that lines an arterial road. And looking up it occurred to me that we humans are not leaders in strength. Put a human being and that raven on the same frequency distribution for tolerance of height and the bird lies far out on the right tail past the free soloists, past the Ninja Warrior contestants. However you define courage (use these), several animals wandering Earth sucked out a bigger slice.

This expose of morning roads fits with what my field of curiosity calls joyous exploration, the appetite for seeking out the new and the unexpected for its own sake, which happens to be one of the two curiosity dimensions most tied to living well (see our multi-dimensional model). And it is not merely pleasant. When researchers had older adults take a 15-minute walk once a week for eight weeks with a single instruction, orient toward things that are vast and not immediately understandable, they came back reporting more joy and less distress in daily life, their selfies drifting toward the world, their smiles measurably wider months later (LINK).

Leave the earbuds out, pick a direction, and conduct ordinary exploratory hunting. Enter into the interstates of wonder which are open all day, for free.

Most people are still at the button, waiting for a light.

Provocations

Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

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Andy Kessler wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The Happiness Industrial Complex” (Inside View, July 26)

It is a strange article suggesting that trying to measure happiness is futile. He argues that happiness is immeasurable, which mirrors what one United States senator once said about love.

In March 1975, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire announced the first winner of his Golden Fleece Award, a publicity stunt designed to expose preposterous government spending. His inaugural target was the National Science Foundation for awarding $84,000 to University of Minnesota psychologist Ellen Berscheid (who is amazing - LINK). Her actual research examined psychological dependence, interpersonal attraction, and how fairness operates within romantic relationships. Proxmire repackaged this as taxpayers handing over $84,000 to discover why people fall in love. He declared that no amount of money would produce an answer anyone believed and, besides, Americans preferred love to remain a mystery. This is a remarkable standard for deciding what deserves scientific attention. Leave the complicated parts of human existence to poets and bartenders, and only fund research on questions an arbitrary senator already understands.

A Chicago newspaper asked readers to vote on whether Proxmire or Dr. Berscheid was right in a ridiculous audience call-in contest. Proxmire won with 87.5%% of the vote. Science had been defeated by people near telephones. The lesson received by other scientists was to avoid studying risky topics. The weird part about this government overreach is that even a partial understanding of romantic love, marriage, disillusionment, and divorce might qualify as a spectacular return on federal investment, especially if lean conservative and really want intact, healthy, fertile families. Since this stain, relationship scientists learned how attraction forms, why relationships deteriorate, how partners affect one another’s health, and what separates a combustible romance from a bond that can outlast the loss of a child. The subject was measurable after all. The measurements were imperfect, then improved, which is what happens when scientists are allowed to continue doing science.

Read the full story - HERE

Half a century later, the Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler serves the same argument. Happiness is complicated. People define it differently. No single questionnaire captures every corner of a worthwhile life. All true. But none of it leads to the conclusion that happiness cannot be measured or studied.

So I wrote a response and after a lot of editing, it was published! Enjoy:

Here is the link to unlock the article: Todd’s Rebuttal

Read Kessler’s article first, then my rebuttal, and let me know what you think in the comments.

My published rebuttal in The Wall Steet Journal is the final edited version. Below is the slightly unhinged version, that is more than twice as long, that I originally submitted…

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I am writing this from a pool chair. Chlorine is drying into a white film on my forearms as Kim Thayil’s memoir (A Screaming Life: Into the Superunknown with Soundgarden and Beyond) is propped against my knees.

Thayil, Soundgarden guitarist (best riffs here), altered his guitar’s tuning from the factory setting. He needed the standard strings to loosen up enough to growl, so his guitar riffs could be thick enough to spread on challah.

I am 52 years old. It is Tuesday afternoon. What am I supposed to be doing instead? A shit ton. There are 30+ emails waiting for me. Several invites to give a keynote, collaborators waiting for feedback, and as hell on Earth probably two strangers requesting a “brief 30-minute conversation” so they can monetize curiosity workshops at a company that will never me a nickel.

I am in the decade that outwardly successful humans describe as harvest season.

It’s such a tidy story.

has made a persuasive case that economic security comes first and freedom after. “Balance is a myth,” he has said. “You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.”

His formula is to surrender much of your twenties, thirties, and forties to work then reclaim your life once you possess a stable financial base. To his credit, Galloway admits a substantial portion of his fortune is due to the luck of the Irish (unsure what us Polish characters get). His humane definition of wealth is when passive income exceeds what you spend. Not bad, unless you think about wealth in terms of time, energy, and money.

Grant Cardone preaches using the same religious verses. “Wake up! No one is going to save you,” he writes in The 10X Rule. He also said, “If you know what day it is, you’re not busy enough.”

Cardone intends to work indefinitely. He would regard my pool chair as drug paraphernalia for underachievers. Fine. He can have the treadmill and I hope somebody wipes it down after his sweaty, tired, fancy brand attired corpse slides off.

There is much missing from these stories of heroic output. A surprising number of productivity empires are supported by people who never appear in the book acknowledgements. Somebody handles the orthodontist. Somebody notices the toilet paper is nearly gone. Somebody absorbs the emotional shrapnel from the thirteen-year-old who got benched at volleyball practice and now hates the coach, the sport, and apparently the entire family (yes, this is autobiographical).

When this work is conducted by a spouse, an assistant, or several people on payroll, the day can look like an untouched slab of marble waiting to be sculpted into revenue. Every hour appears monetizable because someone else is doing the dirty deeds. Cue AC/DC.

I respect hard work. I have been getting up before sunrise for years (you can build time self-efficacy - LINK). I have answered email from airport gates and once while a dental hygienist briefly left briefly to get rid of a burrito.

Grinding is a legitimate skill. But do you want your kids to be learning this in….grade school? college? The trouble begins when you become proud of having someone else in control of your weekly schedule.

A yet to be considered cause of despair

The United States has the largest gap between lifespan and healthspan among the 183 countries examined in a recent analysis. Americans live to 78.6 years on average. We spend roughly the final 12.4 years managing medical appointments to earn a color-coded binder (LINK).

Healthy life expectancy in the United States sits around 66.2 years. It declined despite the rise in total life expectancy over the past decade (LINK).

So let’s do some meaningful self-analysis.

I am 52.

Start with 78.6. Subtract 52. That leaves 26.6 years of average life.

Now remove the 12.4-year stretch when jumping down three stairs or playing 2-hours of pickleball leaves you wincing. I am left with roughly 14 years in which my knees, heart, balance, and frontal lobe have a reasonable chance of chilling together.

Some people will get 30 healthy years. Some will get four. A few will be doing pull-ups at 91 and will be deserving of one of those age-gap romances (resist the Netflix show Age of Attraction).

You do not know which hike is your last difficult one. You do not know which concert is the last one where you enjoy standing for three hours because its blissful.

The hustle formula asks you to accumulate resources for a future version of yourself who may have a digestive system that requires you to remain within visual range of a bathroom.

This is the problem with waiting to do what you love as you leverage those prime earning years. Earning years and able-bodied years are both fighting for your prioritization, every single day.

People who prioritize time over money report greater happiness than those who prioritize money, and the pattern exists regardless of income level (Hershfield, Mogilner, & Barnea, 2016). Spending money to remove an unpleasant task from your day produces more happiness than using the same money to buy another object (Whillans, Dunn et al., 2017).

Regrets about what people failed to do tend to outlive regrets about what they did, and the difference grows with time (Gilovich & Medvec, 1995). The embarrassing thing you attempted usually loses its teeth. The trip you kept postponing is what infiltrates your nightmares whether you remember them or not.

Our motives also change when we begin to feel the edge of the calendar. When people perceive more time ahead, they invest in information, expansion, and future possibilities. When time feels shorter, they become more selective. They choose emotionally meaningful experiences and people who matter now (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999).

Your brain is not becoming lazy. It has noticed something that is a source of meaning or even purpose.

Calculate Your Supply of Hooky Days

Look at the orange bar in the graph above.

Take 78.6.

Subtract your age.

Then subtract 12.4 years for the average American stretch of poor health at the end.

Your personal number might be much larger or cruelly smaller than the population. That uncertainty is precisely why you gotta do this.

My number is roughly 14.

That means I may have about 14 years left for hard hikes, red-eye flights, standing-room concerts, wrestling a suitcase into an overhead bin, and staying out past midnight without spending the next afternoon lying sideways on the sofa like a tranquilized zoo animal.

Write your number on a sticky note. Put it on the corner of the screen where you do most of your postponing. Before accepting an unnecessary meeting, look at it. Before volunteering for another committee whose final product will be a shared Google Doc that is mostly a waste of time, look at it. Before telling someone you love, let’s find a weekend later this fall, look at it.

The number will not tell you to quit your job and follow Phish through Delaware. It will remind you that nothing is being stored later for you.

You do not require a housekeeper named Consuela and a personal chef plating fennel. Buy back one hour.

Pay the teenager next door to mow the lawn. Order the groceries instead of wandering the cereal aisle under fluorescent lights. Take the toll road if it returns 35 minutes to your evening. Replace one professional lunch that to chow beside the person who makes you snort. Spend the reclaimed hour before work finds it and eats it.

People often save time and immediately refill it with smaller work. It’s what freakazoids are doing with AI. It saves them time and then they just do more crap with Ai to fill that time. And boom, they are a machine working for the man even more for…..for what? Your workload behaves like a gas. It expands until it reaches the walls of whatever room you give it.

Do not purchase an hour from the laundromat and donate it to Microsoft Outlook.

Use it while it is still warm.

Go somewhere your laptop is unable to function.

A caveat to everything above because the pool chair is not equally available

Everything I have written so far assumes you possess some control over your day. Millions of Americans do not.

For them, playing hooky is not a cheeky revolt. The United States welds health insurance to employment, which means stepping away from a job can mean stepping away from insulin or the next round of chemotherapy. COBRA may let a family keep its plan temporarily, but the monthly cost can approach $2,000.

These trapped people do not need a lecture about boundaries. She needs healthcare. Wages create the same confinement. Someone working 40 hours who cannot cover rent and one broken car transmission has no spare hour to convert into a whimsical train ride.

Healthcare separated from employment and wages sufficient for an ordinary life are what allow for personal freedom. I don’t see this mentioned in all those self-help books on free will.

No one can 10X an uninsured gallbladder. Stop taunting the disadvantaged.

So take the hooky day when you can. Leave your phone in a bag for such a long period that several friends wonder whether you died.

Detune your life from the factory setting. The standard chord was selected by people with different appetites, opportunities, debts, and household staff.

Then use some of your money and political capital to widen the number of people who can occasionally disappear on a Tuesday without losing their health insurance or missing rent.

I am closing the laptop now.

My emails and tasks will still be there after I get in the water.

The more troubling possibility is that the water will not always be waiting for me.

Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

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My childhood had its share of sharp edges [LINK], but poverty was not one of them. I never had to sleep in a car, ration toilet paper, or calculate whether asking for lunch money would make things worse at home. So memory could only take me so far. To understand the many ways childhood can go sideways, I had to step outside my own life and listen to other people. I spent hours reading Reddit threads where adults described the strange, humiliating logistics of growing up insufficiently.

• A cheerleader whose teammates cleaned a toilet with her toothbrush, abandoned her miles from a competition, and drove her into a bathroom stall for lunch.

• Emergency testicular surgery as a high school freshman turned into a rumor that he lost his manhood. His mother over-explained the reason for a few missed school days when she called in. A teacher who got the details told an entire class. He came back to find the whole school convinced he’d lost a testicle. He had not. The jokes ran for a very long time.

• A boy beaten, robbed, and stuffed upside down into a trash can until a janitor found him hours later.

• A girl told a teacher, in confidence, how cruel the popular girls we’re being and asked her specifically not to confront them. The teacher did anyway. The girls stormed her math class screaming and threatening to beat her up after school. She had to be escorted to the principal’s office and leave through a back gate. Same year, at a “friend’s” sleepover, girls covered her in shaving cream, then a seventh-grader poured her own urine on her. The host later showed up at her house with flowers to apologize.

• A girl whose ponytail was cut off from behind and who still cannot wear her hair up without tremoring, paranoid that someone lurks behind her with scissors…everywhere.

I suspect you’re thinking what I’m thinking, I wish I could have been there to shield them, to take the pain for them.

The stories grew more complicated the longer I read. A child was hospitalized after a beating by a boy who showed up the next week to play Nintendo because his own family could not afford one. An 11-year-old fought back against a much older refugee classmate, then learned after the boy’s death that he had watched his family murdered during a war. A terrified student brought an unloaded gun to school after months of death threats and was led away in handcuffs. In these stories, the victim and the villain often occupied the same frightened body. These are underage children dealing with plots used in barely believable R-Rated films.

Some of these children grew up without money. Others lived in homes that would have looked perfectly respectable on a census form. What they lacked was harder to capture, something in the vein of safety, dignity, trustworthy adults, protection from humiliation, somewhere to sit at lunch without locking the door.

Household income (or socioeconomic status) matters enormously. It can predict what is in the refrigerator and whether the lights stay on. Entire categories of childhood suffering still slip through it untouched.

So let’s try a different test. Ten questions, drawn from remarkable science that deserves far more attention. In about thirty seconds, your answers will reveal whether you received the minimum viable conditions of childhood, or were forced to become an adult far too early.

The opposite of a shitty childhood

Now describe the other end of the spectrum.

The reflex answer is fantastic. A golden childhood. Bikes dropped on lawns at dusk. Pancakes on Sunday. A 529 college fund humming away, collecting interest to almost pay for those six figure annual tuition costs.

You mean well but you’re at the wrong end of the ruler.

The opposite of a shitty childhood is adequate, beginning with a safe route home from school or wherever else you traveled to. Four researchers built an assessment to measure that floor. Before you the test below, know this, roughly half of American teenagers live below the minimum floor line.

For decades, researchers decided whether a child was deprived by inspecting the household from the curb. Family income. Parents’ education. Eligibility for free lunch.

Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the 20th century’s most influential developmental psychologists, spent his career arguing that children cannot be understood apart from the worlds surrounding them: families, schools, neighborhoods, institutions, and the larger culture pressing down on all of it. In 1979, he warned researchers about relying on what he called social addresses.

Two teenagers can have identical family incomes and inhabit different psychological spaces. One has a bedroom of their own, where nobody enters unannounced while they’re changing, with a grandmother upstairs, a reliable bus, and an adult who asks for the day’s highs and lows. The other has none of these. These are not equivalent lifestyles.

The proxies are not especially impressive. Teenagers rarely know what their parents earn. Free-lunch enrollment is a strange peephole into a family’s finances. We have been sorting children by variables many of them cannot report and if they could, it would fail to capture what morning through evening feels like.

Bad measures survive because they are convenient and already being used in district databases. Nobody loses their job for using the same mediocre strategies as their predecessors.

Ten questions in less than one minute

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I’ve been thinking about how I want the trolls (LINK) liars (LINK) and abusers (LINK) in my life to be punished, but not in the traditional way…

In 2002, a man in Painesville, Ohio stood on a public street beside a 350-pound sow, holding a sign that read This is not a police officer. He had nearly run a cop down with his car and shouted PIG out the window with spittle dripping down his chin and oversized big gulp. Judge Michael Cicconetti offered him a choice of 30 days in jail, or two hours with a livestock pig. He took the pig. For two hours he stood on a busy corner while drivers slowed to point and laugh.

Cicconetti spent 25 years on that bench and seemed to have a constant flow of material (far different than the lame Kevin Hart roast on Netflix).

• He sent a woman who dumped 35 kittens in the woods in wintertime to spend a night alone in those same woods.

• He made a cab fare skipper walk 30 miles, the distance she had ridden before bolting. (Do you feel the schadenfreude yet??!!)

• Three men caught soliciting sex were forced to stand around in chicken suits.

• He sentenced a man who stole a Salvation Army kettle to spend 24 hours homeless

By the time he retired in September 2019, he was nicknamed Judge Chick, with plenty of copycats across the country (link).

Set the chicken suit against the numbers and you can see why we cheer. Roughly 1.9 million people are locked up on any given day in the USA (where our country really sucks compared to say, Japan), in a country with about 4% of the world’s population and close to a fifth of its prisoners, at a cost of $182 billion a year (yes, billion). In comparison, a judge who hands a mail thief a sign instead of a cell becomes the epitome of imagination + pragmatism.

There is now data on how much we love imaginative punishments. Across 13(!) studies, Timothy Kundro and colleagues found that observers hate the usual trade-off where harsh sentences seem to deter crime but also seem cruel, whereas proportionate sentences seem fair but toothless (LINK). Creative punishments dissolve the tension. They appear to teach through experience rather than raw severity, so they read as effective and humane at once. Transgressors preferred them too. When the researchers ran an AI analysis of more than 17,000 social media reactions to creative sentences for criminal/immoral activity, the delight was intense.

Cicconetti’s stated philosophy was to make the punishment fit the crime. That is overused phrase is nearly word for word with inhumane acts and humane alternatives, depending on the politics of the speaker. In the 1980s, states rolled out intensive supervision probation, an intermediate sanction pitched as something between a cell and a slap on the wrist, meant to fit the punishment to the crime and save money doing it. The RAND Corporation ran a randomized experiment across 14 sites in nine states to see if it worked (LINK). It did not reduce new arrests. It put more people in jail. Closer supervision meant more drug tests and more rule-breaking caught, and the humane alternative to the status quo produced MORE incarceration.

We should discuss unintended asshole consequences. Invent a punishment that feels gentle and clever, and you will not save it for the people bound for prison. You will spend it on the people who were going home. A prosecutor who might have dropped a petty case now has a humane-adjacent option, so the case does not get dropped. The net grows wider, and once someone is inside it, a single slip drops them into a cell. A technical violation is breaking a rule of supervision rather than committing a crime: a failed drug test, a fee you could not pay, a county line crossed without a form. Miss one meeting because your shift ran long, and you can be sent to a cell, having harmed no one.

Probation has no bars and no razor wire, so nobody considers it incarceration. They should. Roughly 3.7 million American adults are on probation or parole, nearly twice the number behind bars (LINK). These are the alternatives. They did not replace the cage.

Creative punishment is the newest version with one advantage the old alternatives lacked. It is fun to watch. A man in a chicken suit is content that can earn money to social media posters. The 17,000 delighted reactions in Kundro’s data recruit fans. Every viral clip of a judge dispensing poetic justice makes the public a little more chill with the idea that the state should be creatively involved in more lives, for smaller and smaller things. That pleasurable emotion is what allows the net to widen.

Now look at who is holding the gavel. Creative sentencing is judicial discretion with the guardrails pulled off. Sentencing guidelines exist because unbounded discretion produced wildly different punishments for the same act, and reliably harsher ones for some defendants than others. When the judge is a charming ex-Eagle Scout, two teenagers who defaced a nativity scene lead a donkey through town under a sign reading “Sorry for the jackass offense” (Cute, right?)

When the judge is a bully, you get Shawn Gementera, ordered to stand outside a San Francisco post office in a sandwich board reading “I stole mail. This is my punishment,” a sentence a federal appeals court examined and let stand (seriously, read the case - HERE). The legal power is identical. The creativity is identical. What has transformed is the emotional tone.

None of this makes creative punishment a mistake. A creative sentence that replaces a prison term is a gift. But, But! Give the sentence to someone who would otherwise have walked out free and you have spared no one. You have widened the state’s reach which is how we get to terms such as the Prison Industrial Complex that financially supports small towns and leads to protests when there is a possible prison closing. Not because citizens care about human lives because they don’t want to lose paychecks that incentivize locking more and more people up, even if innocent.

Probation, studied carefully, works as a genuine alternative in some places and a net-widener in others, depending entirely on how it is used (LINK). The viral video doesn’t detail what would have happened to this person if the judge had done nothing clever?

Carry that question out of the courtroom, because you hand down creative punishments too, from a phone. Every time you share the clip of someone getting what they deserved, you become one more reason the next judge reaching for the chicken suit. So be skeptical of your own joy. For one month, when a clever sentence makes you want to share it, ask what the person would have gotten otherwise. A warning, a dropped case, or continued freedom. If the answer is freedom, you and the others did not experience the residuals of justice. You dragged someone back into the net who had already slipped it.

A Few Provocations

Laugh if you want. Just know that somewhere a person who was going home is standing next to a pig instead, because you shared the last news article or clip.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

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I started with goblet squats, a 50-pound dumbbell held against my chest, which is a squat with a bit more commitment. And I kept noticing two camps. Some people do it flat on the floor. Others prop their heels on a 45-pound plate. I’d done the movement for weeks and couldn’t have told you the point of the plate if you paid me.

So I asked a guy doing the elevated version. AirPods in, mid-set, a stranger I’d never said a word to. Hey, quick question. He pulled out one AirPod, not both, so I understood the clock was running.

“To be honest, I have no idea,” he said.

“I just feel it less in my lower back, and I’m scared I’m going to pull the shit out of it.”

We both laughed. Two grown men doing the same lift for opposite reasons, neither able to explain it. He asked my name, I gave it, he gave his, and I went back to my shoulders. I now, bromance in the making (like Haaland and Bellingham???).

He was right, though. Propping your heels up increases ankle dorsiflexion. That lets you stay upright as you drop, which loads the quads and cuts the forward lean that strains your lower back. Flat-footed isn’t wrong. It just asks more of your ankles and could lead to that painful electrical voltage in your lower back.

Two psychologists ran a study with a title I wish I nabbed first, “Smart People Ask for (My) Advice” led by (LINK). People assume asking a question makes them look incompetent. Lean toward the opposite. Ask someone for advice and they tend to rate you as more competent, because you just handed them a stage to show off on.

Provocation

The person too proud to ask stays wrong and looks no smarter for it. The one who leans over mid-set and asks walks away with an answer, and maybe, just maybe, a new friendly fame to see in the gym repeatedly. Two for the price of a few seconds of awkwardness.

The most confident people I know ask the most questions. Go ask one. And work those scrawny legs.

String bean leg photos of myself on demand.

Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

Below is One of My Favorite Articles that I Spent Weeks On:

My babysitter was named Todd, same as me, and he was one of the coolest adults in my orbit as a kid. Leather jacket. Women melted in his presence (think Billy from Stranger Things). I would have followed him into traffic. He was also, it turned out, a coward, because as I wrote about previously, he once watched an older kid beat me up and ride off on my bike, then collected the night’s cash from my mom as if he was a saint.

Todd liked SCTV, so that became one of my new shows.

One sketch called “Oh That Rusty!” ran a ridiculous premise with a child star who played the same adorable eight-year-old boy for almost thirty years. Rusty is now a forty-something man. Thick around the middle. Balding, which they patch with a tiny-boy wig, bangs and all, sitting on a liver spotted scalp. And he still has to scamper into the kitchen and get caught stealing cookies, except this Rusty lumbers. You can hear a knee creak as he rounds corners. The adorable dash to the cookie jar is now a wheezing forty-yard trudge requiring a sound guy to cover with extra footsteps.

To pretend as if aging never occurred, the producers make the furniture enormous so Rusty looks smaller. The cookie jar is a kettle drum. A glass of milk is a modest aquarium and Rusty has to lift it with two hands and a grunt. They shoot him from angles usually reserved for hobbits, down by the floorboards, up from inside the oven, crane shots you would expect in a Kubrick film, all to sell you a bald, winded, forty-five-year-old man as a rascally third grader with a sweet tooth.

His TV mother keeps blowing the illusion by being a normal-sized woman standing next to a normal-sized man, and worse, the script makes her hug him, and she did not want to hug a middle-aged man-boy on network television so they fire her. They replace her with a seven-foot-two father, because a human skyscraper to make the middle-aged child star look grade-school adjacent. It works for exactly one episode, until the seven-foot-two dad stands next to the squash-court couch and suddenly looks average, so now they need a nine-foot grandmother, and a Great Dane on quiet stilts to play the family beagle, and by season 12 the front door is fourteen feet tall, the mailbox needs a forklift, and the entire show requires nine-figures to pay for the production value.

I was about eight when I first saw it, the age Rusty was faking and thought it was fucking hilarious (watch an episode). There are tricks inside this skit about absurdity and now there is research on why this skit killed and why you gravitate to particular comedy (and not others).

The latest science on humor

Two psychologists ran 999 people through four experiments to test whether a joke gets funnier when it is easier to understand (LINK). It does.

They photoshopped memes to be blurrier and harder to read, and the same joke stopped being funny. People who scroll through more memes rate memes funnier, because their eyes are less fatigued and their fingers are barely moving. Rhyming punchlines beat non-rhyming versions of the same joke. Alliterating nicknames beat the alternatives. Then they ruled out the alternative explanation that easy jokes feel safer and that puts audiences at ease to smile and laugh more, and judge less harshly. Comprehension accounts for the effect. You laugh harder because you got there faster.

If you’re like me, you might view this as science as disconcerting because the magic has been lost. (I had the same reaction to the science of music which is why I never finished This is Your Brain on Music - I want the aesthetic feels with my critical thinking apparatus deactivated.) Except, once you know the secret sauce, you can do a better job at running a crowd.

Rusty works because he wig on the giant couch is understandable from a single frame. You smile before your head turns to grab another smoky bacon Pringle chip from the can.1

Strategies to Be Funnier

1. Make it rhyme

Rhyming punchlines beat non-rhyming ones, and rhyme even makes a line feel truer (LINK). Land the rhyme on the last word, where the door slams shut.

Mock if you must, here is my attempt to use this strategy: Most diets eventually die, so my nutritional guide is if anything is beige and fried is homicide with ranch on the side.

2. Alliterate

Sloppy Steve beats Sloppy Greg. Peter Parker and SpongeBob SquarePants sound born for posters, lunch boxes, and unnecessary sequels. Peter Gundelfinger sounds like the man who denies your dental claim.

With great reluctance, here’s my attempt with this strategy: My gym has three regulars: Grunting Gary, Mirror Marcus, and Conference-Call Carl, who performs one bicep curl before returning to the bitcoin crisis unfolding inside his phone.

Do read about the real characters at my gym - HERE

3. Match your sentence shapes

Build the setup and punchline from the same grammatical bones. Parallel structure gives the reader a pattern, and that allows them to have fun using their prediction machines (that is, their brains). Once the first half teaches them what belongs in the second, you can then replace the expected word with something warped.

Some people meal-prep. I meal-regret.

The repeated shape makes regret feel inevitable and surprising at the same time. Without the match, the joke limps:

Or:

Some people follow their dreams. I follow people who have snacks.

The closer the two halves resemble each other, the more violently one altered word can redirect the sentence.

4. Get specific

A pigeon is funnier than a bird. A 1994 Camry with one hubcap is funnier than an old car. Your weird neighbor is not funny. Gary, who edges his lawn in Crocs and a bathrobe at 6 a.m. while narrating it to a GoPro, is funny. Detail the brand, the year, the breed, the exact detail of how and why you blushed. This is why this young comedian is the jam, notice how he moved from general to a level of specificity nobody in the audience expected:

5. Steal a familiar format

A format your audience already knows comes with the plumbing installed. They understand where the setup goes and where the body will eventually be discovered. You only have to supply the surprise.

Pour your joke into a template that sets you up for success.

Here is my initial attempt (test driving it on my kids during my youngest Violet’s 14th birthday dinner last night):

Nobody:

My colon after one sip of oat milk: RELEASE THE KRAKEN.

You have barely written anything, yet the audience already knows where to laugh.

6. Make it legible

Gorenz and Schwarz made the same stand-up routines less funny by burying them beneath background noise. The jokes did not change. The audience simply had to work harder to catch them, and comedy works better without competition with the mental equivalent of a leaf blower.

The same principle applies on the page. A joke should challenge people with its idea, not its font size or sentence construction. Use large text, strong contrast, and enough white space to let the punchline breathe. In a text message or social post, break the line before the final blow.

My therapist told me to stop catastrophizing.

So now I assume things will end
reasonably badly.

The blank space creates a fraction of suspense and keeps the eye from wandering. Do not bury your funniest word beneath an explanation or disclaimer. That was my attempt at psychology humor, don’t give up on me yet.

Read the joke aloud. Your mouth is a copy editor. When it trips over a word, cut it. When you need a second breath, shorten the setup. This same wisdom applies to all public speaking.

8. Reuse the bit

A callback is recycled laughter. The room already understood the joke once, so the second appearance arrives and you do not need another setup.

Someone mentions their energy healer named Braydon, and now Braydon can be a recurring character.

An open parking spot? Braydon.

The entrées arrive suspiciously fast? Braydon cleared the path.

The check takes forty minutes? Braydon is teaching you patience.

Callbacks become funnier through accumulation. Each return adds another layer, while the amount of language required becomes minimal. The first mention may need a story. The fourth needs a few words.

COMMON MISTAKE: Do not force it into too many sentences.

10. Say less

The one-liner beats the three-minute story. If you are still talking after the funny part, you are losing social capital. Land the line and take a sip of your drink and let is sink in. Have the confidence to shut up.

11. Keep a straight face

A straight face creates useful uncertainty. For half a second, the listener has to decide whether you truly believe the waiter is punishing the table for sins committed in a former life. That tiny wobble between sincerity and absurdity allows the joke to develop.

Do not grin before the punchline. Do not laugh over the final word either. You are stepping on your own oxygen hose.

Compare:

“I think my dentist is flirting with me,” you say, giggling.

Versus:

“My dentist touched my shoulder twice, so naturally I have begun planning our winter wedding.”

The second is better because the delivery treats the audience as intelligent enough to spot the weirdness.

Deadpan does not mean becoming a corpse. Your voice can carry warmth, irritation, or fake concern. The key is commitment.

The second you explain what you meant, everyone loses.

One last demonstration, at my expense

I am 52, and if you are a regular Provoked reader you know I go to the gym to stay in shape and live a few more years. I strolled over to my community pool, I took off my shirt to jump in when I discovered my one true superpower: invisibility.

Not a head turns. A toddler looks straight through me at a rocket pop. The lifeguard scans the water, skirts past me, and gazes at far more interesting humans. I suck in a stomach that has begun requesting independence from the rest of my torso, and continue past a teenager who cannot see me because to them, I am patio furniture.

Then it happens. A woman my age looks up. Even stares at the large tattoo on my right arm. She smiles and opens her mouth: Excuse me. Are you done with that chair?

Now go do it

People need to get the joke before they can laugh at it. Make the setup easy to follow. Make the details specific. Put the funniest word where it can do damage.

Babysitter Todd would steal your improved version, tell it better, and accept payment from your mother.

Share this with people who suck at telling stories.

Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

Read Past Issues Here Including:

Sometime today, in a windowless conference room at a research university, around a dozen professors will settle around a long laminate table with a printed dossier at every chair and a carafe of coffee. The agenda says they are deciding whether a colleague gets promoted. Somewhere around minute forty, a senior professor will raise his hand and offer the room a piece of social media gossip about the candidate. He has not checked it. Nobody else at the table will check it either. They will trade the grim, pursed-lip nods people exchange when someone confirms the worst thing they suspected about another human being. It will change the outcome.

Multiply that room by every research university on the continent and you get a fair map of how academic careers get decided. Academic politics is, in meaningful part, a continuation of middle school by people who served at the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. I have been a professor for more than twenty years, and I have a story about this kind of meeting. It involves a photograph. The story is waiting further down the page. Before you get there, you need to know how the trick works, who ends up paying for it, and what to do when it is aimed at you.

This is not the first time I have spoken about terrible workplace behavior. Do make sure to read prior articles on Ostracism, Conformity, and Stereotyping.

The pettiness

You might have ignored the recent influx of books on group psychology (by etc.) and still think the smartest workplaces full of people trained to demand evidence would be the last place a rumor would be weighted more heavily than fact-check requests. Researchers tested something close to this on 4,874 university employees across 339 work groups, and found that the employees most likely to be targeted with exclusion and sabotage were the highest performers, and a driving emotion was envy (LINK). The better you do, the bigger the target.

Organizational psychologists call the behavior social undermining, first documented with the most obvious sample you thought of: police officers in Slovenia (LINK). First thing to know, undermining damaged people more than support helped them. Second, the worst outcomes belonged to people whose underminer and supporter were the same person. Think of the Godfather maxim, keep your friends close but your enemies closer. The colleague who toasts your book over an old fashioned at dinner and blasts your character in a closed meeting is worse than any adversary because of the unprepared/unexpected betrayal.

One psychological activator of social undermining is social comparison (the ultimate review is here). Think of the protégé who lands a better job than the mentor ever held. Mixed emotions often bubble within the mentor and one of them is often envy. But this is too imprecise. Recent envy research splits the emotion in two:

• benign envy pushed people to climb to higher heights and feats, and made people better

• malicious envy pushed people to drag an adjacent climber down

What personality trait is highly linked to malicious envy? The fear of failure (Lange & Crusius, 2015). And this fear infects all types of people and jobs. The infection even spreads to tenured full professors, with one of the most protected jobs in the American economy.

Too political, too aggressive, too self-promotional

If you spent time in a university, you know how sabotage operates. Someone gets dropped from an email chain about work related to their expertise. A search committee develops a sudden deep concern about “fit.” A senior colleague warns a graduate student that a junior faculty member is “too political” or “too aggressive” or “too self-promotional,” precisely selected words because no evidence on earth could falsify them. An external reviewer gets picked for a promotion case precisely because of a known grudge.

The behaviors are small, and they cost careers.

Who pays

Graduate students pay first. They often start their hopeful calling at the tender age of 23 believing in the meritocracy of intellectual life. They watch their advisor freeze out a competitor. They watch an invited speaker get ripped apart by someone in the audience who lost out to them for an internship a few decades ago. Within three years of graduate school they learn the part of the job they are working towards, where science is created, where creative ideas are generated, where beloved hypotheses are falsified, is maybe a third of the job. The rest is managing other people’s wounded ego.

Then there are predictable people who pay….those who are publishing the most, drawing the best students, giving the most talks, earning the largest paychecks, receiving the greatest public accolades, doing the work senior people hoped for.

And the payments are extracted from people who shows signs of non-conformism and thus, unpredictable in terms of their loyalty.

My complaint is narrowly focused on unverified claims, deployed in situations that the target do not discover until later, against which no defense is possible. And before I describe a story, let it be known I have felt the warm surge of schadenfreude when a rival’s grant got rejected. I have murmured agreement at gossip because it flattered my side of a feud. Being a clinical psychologist who studies social relationships and emotions did not install immunity. The difference between me and the man in my story comes down to integrity.

If you are targeted, by one or many, here is what to do, in ascending order of difficulty.

Keep a folder

Document everything. Save the emails. The day a friend leans across a conference dinner and tells you what your chair has been saying about you, type the quote into your phone before dessert arrives, with the date marked. Share your thoughts in a text to close friends, a therapist, someone in HR. A timestamped record is the best thing to defend your reputation.

Make your career shatterproof

The fastest way to defang the people who can hurt you inside one building is to make your standing depend on something bigger than the building. Publish where people outside your discipline read. Build relationships with editors, journalists, practitioners, and the students who graduate and go great things in the world. The narrower your audience, the more leverage the small people hold over you, because they can still drive the rules of the game you are playing. Give yourself a second, third, and fourth game.

Resist politeness

The petty colleague is betting that the thing they claim about you will never reach you and if does, it will not be attached to them. A dozen decent people keeping their mouths shut out of professional courtesy is what lets a rumor run rampant. So disrupt the chain. When word reaches you, call them in. Give them an opportunity to speak of the issue. Sometimes there will be a demeanor change, even a willingness to begin the retraction. If not, bring in a third party who can be privy to the exchange. Your task is to let them know this is unacceptable and the consequences will not be absorbed without a fair fight.

Reminiscing about my workplace in 2013, what I experienced was ludicrous.

The guy said I had been posting pictures of my butt all over the internet.

It was my knee.

Be generous

Do not become him. The high school nerd with tenure was once a graduate student getting humiliated by somebody with more power, and when this happened he probably made himself a vow that one day he would be at the head of the table dishing out hurt. Most senior academics learned their model of behavior from others who undermined them, so the pattern reproduces like a bad accent. When a graduate student outpublishes you, congratulate them in public. When a junior colleague wins the grant you wanted, promote them as a rising star to watch for. When a peer’s book sells more copies than yours did, read it carefully and detail the stories and phrases that impressed you.

There is even a self-interested case, buried in the same study of 4,874 university employees. High performers who felt woven into their work group got targeted far less, because envy is deprived of oxygen when it feels as if your win belongs partly to me. Generosity given freely serves as a healthy psychological defense mechanism.

My cowardice

I would love to tell you I confronted him. That I stormed into his office
(vastly larger than mine) and made him say it to my face. I did not. I sat with the resentment, told a few close friends, and let it metabolize into an anecdote I have not shared until now.

What I should have done is detail a problem that can be easily eradicated from the workplace.

Part II is coming.

And so is first access to my Well-Being Lab’s new articles on curiosity and purpose in life.

Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

Read Past Issues Here Including:

Two minutes after the final whistle in Dallas, while half the crowd was still filming itself losing its mind, a cluster of fans in blue Japan jerseys pulled blue garbage bags out of their backpacks and started working their way down the rows, picking cups and wrappers off the concrete seat by seat. No single activist organized it. Nobody filmed it as a stunt for micro-influencers trying to make a buck on Instagram. Japanese supporters have done this after every World Cup match since their team’s first appearance in 1998, and the word they use for it, atarimae, translates loosely to “obvious.” The usage is the same way it would be obvious to wash a plate of spaghetti and meatballs off a place that you almost finished. Their own elite soccer/futbol team also acted like house guests with the chairs stacked, the trash gone, and the towels sat folded into neat squares in the center of the locker room, as if the visiting side wanted to leave the building so that fathers could let their toddlers roll around the floor and then not have to take a shower when they get home.

A few weeks later, in a locker room at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, the Iranian national team left something behind unrelated impressive towel folding skills. A handwritten note, thanking the city for its hospitality and calling for peace and friendship among nations, posted publicly by one of their own players. Iran had not been allowed to spend a single night in the country during the tournament. Flown in from their base in Mexico hours before each kickoff, flown back out the moment the final whistle blew, a restriction that said how little trust exists between Tehran and Washington. Regardless of how you feel about this (which matters little) and how government and military officials feel, these guys wrote the note anyway.

I watched both moments the way most people did, from a couch, with a slightly embarrassing swell of admiration for strangers whose language is not on the radar for future Duolingo sessions (of note, I’m on Day 989 for Spanish, in case you cared). Underneath the moral elevation sat an assumption that these gestures reveal something distinctly Japanese or distinctly Iranian, some disposition so foreign to an American sensibility that I am reminded that America might be a great country but could benefit from adopting customs from elsewhere. Every four years the World Cup hands us new cultural entries to consider. Different anthems, different ways of grieving a loss, and a sense of certainty that players in those other jerseys must want fundamentally different things out of life than we do. Mostly, they do not!

And for this sentiment, we turn to scientific evidence that is bigger than trash bags or handwritten notes. Researchers surveyed 1,854 college students across 15 countries and territories from Egypt, India, and Romania to Germany, Australia, and Colombia, on eleven separate life goals:

1. financial success

2. self-acceptance

3. community feeling

4. spirituality

5. hedonism

6. and seven others.

Using 1997 World Bank figures, the poorest country had a gross national income of about $420 a year per person. The richest had $30,030. That is roughly a 71-fold gap, more than enough to produce wildly different psychologies if wealth and culture matter (and many people think wealth gaps are where it’s at). Cue Beck:

Map eleven goals as points on a circle based on which are linked together and which conflict, and two dimensions account for 92% of the pattern. Is your goal being pursued for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons? Does your goal relate to the self or transcend it? The map built from the eight wealthiest countries in the study and the map built from the seven poorest line up at a correlation of .99!! Psychology rarely produces a number that high, let alone across a 71-fold income gap between countries. This doesn’t mean income is irrelevant. What this means is people tend to pursue the same type of goals irrespective of income. This is worth pondering through the image below. If you earn substantially more money in the future, the content of your goals will tend to remain the same.

Conformity, the drive to fit in and live up to what your community expects of you, clustered tightly with popularity, image, and financial success in 14 of the 15 cultures surveyed - which happen to be the three goals where concerns revolve around what other people think of you. Fitting in and being famous are, statistically, close to the same motive. Now the importance of conformity is extremely distant from the pursuit of affiliation and self-acceptance - goals centered on trying to better know and feel close to other people. Fitting in and appreciating who you are, right now are basically incompatible. This dovetails with that shitty feeling of giving up what you want to say or do or dress to meld into the desired crowd.

Then there is the importance of feeling safe. The standard model of human values used before this study (Schwartz, 1992) predicted that the desire for safety would sit next to power and control, built on the hypothesis that craving security means craving a sense of control over your surroundings. Across 1,854 people rating what they wanted, safety landed next to self-acceptance, physical health, and close relationships instead, the same intrinsic cluster tied to knowing yourself and the people you love. Wanting to feel safe has almost nothing to do with wanting control over other people.

Then there is evidence on the value of financial success. On the same circular map above, financial success sat at 108 degrees in the wealthier countries and at 81 degrees in the poorer ones, a shift that pulled it noticeably closer to affiliation, the goal of taking care of the people you love, and further from hedonism and status.

None of this knowledge on goals and motives requires humans to possess a special decency gene, not in the fans with the garbage bags and not in the team that could not even spend the night in the city it was thanking. Community feeling and self-acceptance sit in the same intrinsic cluster in all 15 cultures measured, present in a Japanese fan section and an Iranian locker room and Americans sharing Really Big Gulps with their kids, expressed through whatever behavior a given culture’s norms clarify as human decency.

My mind has been culturally trained to process both scenes under the file that is such a Japanese thing to do or such an Iranian thing to do before either clip finished playing. And yet, when I dive into the data, there is additional sophistication worth considering. It appears prosocial motives are similar across cultures but the expression of them is where the uniqueness of citizens raised in a certain region rise.

Stop letting the jersey tell you what a person wants out of life. Go find out the exact inputs a person absorbed from birth to adulthood (songs, stories, myths) that alter how they translate the same eleven goals most of Earth’s inhabitants are chasing. Then pick up the trash nearby, even if someone else is the asshole who left it.

Provoked is for playful, intelligent, discerning readers. If you like what I’m doing and want to support this work, join for free or upgrade with benefits. And share this with highly cultured friends and on social media.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

Read Past Issues Here Including:

Provoked is for playful, intelligent, discerning readers. If you like what I’m doing and want to support this work, join for free or upgrade with benefits.

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She wakes at 5 a.m. without an alarm, on purpose, as one more self-inflicted punishment for entering the adulting phase. For most of us, when an eye opens at 5 a.m. you might as well be pissed off and crying because it usually due to something that sucks like a colicky kid (I am looking at you Chloe Kashdan), a red-eye flight, a defective bladder, or a deadline you mishandled.

I did not decide to become a morning person. Nobody sane decides that. My girlfriend and I would talk late, I would want to keep talking, and around 9:45 her head would get heavy and her sentences would get shorter, and by 10 she was gone, not rude-gone but near oblivion the way a phone at 4% is finished. If I wanted to stay in her orbit, I could get a tiny section of text or phone time with her….but it had to be at the godforsaken early hours. So my bedtime crept back from somewhere disgraceful toward 10 and my alarm crept forward, and one morning I was awake before the sky was, doing some trunk rotations between the sheets (G-rated) as my phone lit up with her texting from a kitchen across state lines.

The exchange was ridiculously flirty. Little jabs, a photo of her half-eaten cookie that was supposed to represent XXX, and a countdown to when she had to leave. Seven minutes of it, and then she was out the door and I was lying there with an entire morning to relish. A pleasure captured beautifully by Chuck Klosterman:

Yummmmmmm, mono, on a weekday!

What mattered was the slab of time that I used to be unconscious, and guarded myself against, that I now experienced with a surge of meaning. I read (LINK to The Better Mother authored by my neighbor). I wrote articles that I cared about without fatigue. I walked the dog while the streets looked like a scene from The Day After. I worked out at my gym and found a new cast of uber-healthy, extra cheery, insanely fit characters.

I was ready to file the entire experience under new relationship makes middle-aged man temporarily insufferable. Then I uncovered a scientific study that described my psychological upgrade.

The hour you believe you can take

The study is titled, “Can I extend my day? The impact of chronotype on organizational citizenship behaviors via time extension self-efficacy.” The researchers introduce a construct called Time Extension Self-Efficacy, TESE for short. TESE measures whether you believe you can extract more moments in a given day, off the books, without asking for administrator access. Two people can possess an identical twenty-four hours and feel like they live in different economies because one of them is certain that a 5 a.m. or an 11 p.m. is hers for the taking, and the other runs into the edges of the day with dried, crusty contact lenses itching for removal.

A big chunk of this belief stems from chronotype, which is normally minimized into the categories of whether you are a morning person or a night owl. Your chronotype dictates which parts of the day feel like doorway portals and which are a closing vise.

The researchers then connect TESE to organizational citizenship behavior, which captures the unpaid, thankless crap nobody puts on your annual work performance review until you stop doing it and everybody suddenly realizes you are essential. This might be mentoring the new hire nobody assigned to you, staying twenty minutes late fixing a problem you didn’t create and will get zero credit for fixing, or planning a retirement party for someone who is older and thus often ignored by the oh-so-cool young folk. The coolest finding, however, buried under regression tables to bore teenage boys into a coma, is that time works like currency you can print at home if you believe the printer is plugged in, and the people who believe they can do this turn around and spend this new found resource on other people. And there is plenty of research showing this is the most reliable way to boost your well-being no matter what World Cup team you root for:

TESE benefits even get stronger in people who score high on what they call communion striving, which basically means you are the kind of person who cannot walk past a coworker drowning in a spreadsheet without offering assistance, you absolute sucker. I will spare you the interaction plot of the moderation effect. You are welcome.

Then the twins kicked the door in

Everything I have described about the benefits of transforming from an evening into a morning chronotype because of a girlfriend happened because I was holding the controls. I chose to drift into sleep earlier. I chose to find social opportunities with the one who makes me crack up the most in the morning. A voluntary time extension feels like wealth, because you stretch the day and pocket the surplus. That is exactly the condition TESE needs, the belief and the reward confirming each other on your terms.

Run that same mechanism backward and you get my late thirties.

Nineteen years ago my twin daughters arrived. I adore them. They are the center of my universe and I would walk into I-95 Florida traffic for either of them without breaking stride. That said, the twins detonated my relationship with time. A 3 a.m. opened eye socket was a door kicked in. The morning was triaged before my feet attempted a squiggly yoga mountain pose. My work suffered, my marriage cratered, and there are phone call messages to my childhood friend Martin confirming a level of exhaustion akin to tripping balls.

The real wellbeing question is who holds the dashboard when your day stretches or snaps back. A morning I steal at 5 because I am swooning for someone is the same sixty minutes stolen from me at 5 by a colicky infant, as the two sit at opposite ends of human hedonic experience. If I were designing the next study, I would put internal sense of control at the center of the model and observe TESE bend around it.

Whose hand is on the clock

Most advice about time is about getting more of it, which is the wrong target. You can win an extra hour and resent every minute of it, and you can lose an hour and barely flinch, depending entirely on whether it feels as if you are the author of the story.

I got lucky. A woman who likes sunrises offered me extra hours that I now treat like one of those deranged treasure candles, the kind where you light the wick thinking you bought lavender serenity and later, some tiny object starts clanking around in the wax like a drunk pirate left you a message. You do not know what is buried in there. A joint? A set of AirPods? A small metallic reminder that there are free periods previously neglected for the taking?

You do not have to wait that long, and you do not have to lose what I lost when two people in tiny socks took the reigns and kept them for the better part of a decade.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

Read Past Issues Here Including:

I normally do not like to wade into culture war crap, even when it brings in more subscribers and engagement. But this World Cup story is too juicy to pass up.

One caveat before we start. Do not stop reading if you despise gay people. I promise this is not a post that will demonize you. It is a case study in how to challenge a dysfunctional system effectively, regardless of your demographic or your political affiliation. If you want skills, stick around. If you want to defend yourself against people more persuasive than you, stick around.

A man drove a flatbed truck down the street outside Lumen Field on Friday night with a billboard bolted to the bed that read “Kick L.G.B.T.Q. Ideology out of the World Cup,” and a few seconds behind him a man on a bicycle pedaled into the same frame waving a pink, blue, and white trans flag at the truck’s tailgate, letting the flag snap in the truck’s wind until the driver gave up the block and turned off. Around them the street had turned into a carnival of people who did not match.

• Egypt supporters in red

• Iranians waving the lion-and-sun flag from before the 1979 revolution

• Free Ukraine shirts

• A couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses working the crowd with pamphlets

• One woman, Karolyn Sharp, wearing a rainbow flag as a cape because she is a Pacific Northwest girl and when Seattle does Pride she said it goes big (from this New York Times article)

I decided to make that unnamed bicyclist today’s hero, so hold onto his image. What happened outside and inside that stadium was a live experiment in the thing I spent eight years researching for a book titled The Art of Insubordination, which is how a person or a small group with no power, no title, and barely any numbers still manages to move a crowd that holds all three. I can assure you every person on that street or at the field used the persuasion strategies without having read a word of scientific articles showing how they work.

The soccer draw

Seattle’s World Cup host committee stamped Friday’s match its official Pride Match back in December 2025, long before anyone knew who would play because the organizers wanted the celebration on the calendar. Then the draw, which a novelist would normally have to invent, handed that Pride Match to Iran against Egypt.

Both federations spent six months lobbying FIFA to scrub the designation, ban the flags, and cancel ceremonies, and Iran’s federation would not even type the word, referring to Pride in its official statement only as the movement. FIFA let the flags stay. The match ended 1 to 1, Egypt continued through to the round of 32 but the one contest both governments lost in the fight against a square of colored fabric.

The science of how this happens is much older than the match. When people read an argument as coming from one of their own rather than from an outsider, they give it more than twice the favorable consideration, and the effect holds when the argument goes against their own group. Across a synthesis of 143 experiments on minority influence, the single strongest predictor of whether a small faction moved a large one was consistency over time, the willingness to hold the same line for months without curdling into rigidity. The carnival outside Lumen Field, whether or not it could cite a single study, was doing exactly that. Hundreds of people showing support in their unique ways. It was not a monolithic entity - which doesn’t work as well.

The first two strategies were on display out on the street before a ball was kicked.

STRATEGY 1: Work It from the Inside

The people with the most standing to indict Iran were Iranians. The loudest voices on that street had not flown in from somewhere progressive to scold a culture; they were exiles, men like 47 year old Iliya Miramin who laughed when he heard the draw and then said that he supports Pride because it throws light on the regime that runs the country he had to leave. The bar owner near the field handing out scarves noticed how many of the Iranian Americans chanting that night were in Seattle because they escaped that government. That is credibility earned from inside the tent and spent at a soccer game.

STRATEGY 2: Spark Curiosity, Not Fear

None of them tried to frighten anyone into agreement. A member of the host committee speaking to the visiting teams before kickoff did not threaten or lecture. She told them she hoped they felt welcome. The truck, by contrast, cranked the threat level up. When you scare people their reasoning switches off and a hostile crowd already scrutinizes a minority far harder than it scrutinizes its own, so the rainbow side kept the temperature low on purpose and let the open hand do the work a raised fist cannot.

That Said…

A person can believe, out of religious conviction or a worked-out moral philosophy, that sex between two men is wrong, and hold that belief seriously, and not once reach across the table to control how another adult loves. The San Francisco Giants pitchers who wrote Bible verses on their Pride-night caps this month did something a free country has to leave room for, which is to register a sincere dissent without caging, outing, firing, or laying a hand on a single human being. I will defend a pluralist stadium that holds both the rainbow flag and the Bible-verse cap.

I am keeping this article narrowly focused on purpose. It does not touch what you believe in your conscience, preach from your pulpit, or teach your own children. The handcuffs are the problem. A state that flogs and hangs adults for a private, consensual life that is nobody’s business is the problem, alongside two football federations that flew across an ocean to ask the most powerful body in sports to help them pretend those adults do not exist.

Your belief is yours to keep. The gallows is where I get off the train and stand in your way so that you cannot harm anyone.

I have spent years researching how people persuade across a divide, and I still catch myself going preachy at the wrong moment, alienating the relative or colleague I most needed to bring along, mistaking the small hot rush of being right for the slower work of being heard. So when I lay out the strategies the soccer stadium ran, understand that I am rehearsing them for myself as well.

STRATEGY 3: Be Flexibly Consistent

The Pride Match message did not waver from the first reports in December 2025 through the final whistle in June, which is six months of saying the same thing, and yet the crowd kept changing the message display. For one person, it was a flag as a cape, a banner against a truck on another, a chant here, a scarf there, an argument in a comment thread at two in the morning. One message in a dozen frameworks and mediums and tones is how you stay consistent without lulling the room to sleep, and the research is clear that the minority who flips into hypocrisy, forfeits the crowd it spent months persuading bit by bit.

STRATEGY 4: Lean on an Objective Record

The supporters put absurd laws front and center. Iran imposes death for same-sex relations, the human rights documentation says so, and a senior Iranian official once defended that penalty as a way of keeping society safe from perversion. You read the laws with a microphone, you step back, and you let the regime be on their back foot trying to defend itself, because hard behavioral evidence that cannot be modified by sleek sleights of hand persuades a skeptic in ways that rhetoric cannot.

STRATEGY 5: Concede the Hard Part First

The strongest people on that street admitted that when they heard the matchup it was laughable irony. Nobody pretended the stands were a wall of rainbow, because the seats were packed with Egypt and Iran fans there for the football, and the Pride contingent was a thin bright minority threaded through a much larger crowd. Owning that, and owning the real risk that a Western city waving rainbows at two Muslim teams can seem like a political comedy skit is what made the rest of the case believable. A person who concedes the realistic nature of the situation has shown you that they are not there with malevolent intentions.

STRATEGY 6: Recruit Your Audience as Collaborators

The organizers aimed their actions toward the people all over the world who cannot come out safely, which means the closeted teenager in Tehran watching on a smuggled stream and the gay man in Cairo who knows that debauchery is a mental note inside the head of a police officer waiting, just waiting for him to kiss a man in an alley. The visiting players got an invitation to feel welcome and ask questions and the exiles on the street used the language, the food, and the faith they share with those players to pull people gently away from the regime that claims to speak for them. The win belonged to the kid who could not buy a ticket. They now know they are not alone!

STRATEGY 7: Build a Coalition

The host committee set the date, a bar owner handed out scarves, exiles brought chants and the old flags, a woman showed up for her gay family, and a few thousand strangers online carried the conversation to extend reach. A minority rarely wins as a single brave soul holding a sign. It wins as a messy overlapping crowd of friends who each agree to carry one edge of the thing, so you may as well ask for the help and take the offered scarf.

And what do I mean by winning? Yes, you might get someone to alter their view from against to supportive. But that is rare. Just hope to introduce some skepticism. Aim for 5-15% belief alteration. Enough to initiate some doubt and consider the beauty of gray.

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BONUS STRATEGY 8: Refuse to Be Disingenuous

I have written before about how much of our public rot comes from people who will not speak of the truth in public (Society Is Struggling Because of Disingenuousness). Egypt’s federation objected to any activities related to supporting homosexuality and insisted the whole matter was about cultural and religious values rather than about the men and women its police arrest, both of them acting politely and asking the referee to treat their requests with respect.

The rainbow side, for all its disadvantages of number and power and home-faith, carried a structural edge which is that it was willing to say exactly what it meant. The flag stands for the proposition that these people deserve to live, a sentence with no euphemism anywhere. The disingenuous side sounds reasonable until the moment someone describes the flogging and death sentences and lives ascribed to constant threat for being nothing more than someone who is attracted to and seeks relationships with adults different than you.

After the game the flags stayed up over an emptying stadium and somewhere in the footage there is still that man on the bicycle, pacing a billboard truck with a scrap of pink and blue and white held out behind him, seemingly outmatched because he can be mowed down. And yet, he is winning because of a set of strategies that work. Online comments and their ratio mean nothing. That is not the real world.

If you ever find yourself the smallest voice in a room run by people holding every card, do not borrow their euphemisms, and do not pick up their handcuffs. Earn your standing, lower the temperature, hold your line, bring the behavioral evidence, own your weak spots, share the credit, build your coalition, and then say what is actually happening in society in words a child could follow. Say it on a bicycle if that is all you have got.

Send this to Someone with Strong Views on Gay Rights

Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

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Separate checks, please

The diner sat off a two-lane road in La Posta, up in the mountains east of San Diego. It’s the type of place where people spread out a physical version of the daily newspaper while sucking down white mugs of coffee. Tiger Woods slid into a booth with five or six Navy SEALs who spent the day letting him fire their weapons. They walked him through a building with simulations of gun-toting villains and scared civilians. One of the SEALs jumped out of a plane with Tiger strapped in close. After these exhausting activities, they sat down for burgers and the waitress laid the check on the table, waiting patiently.

Nobody reached for it. Tiger did not reach for it. The surprised SEALs stole a few bombastic side-eyed glances at each other. After all, this guy Tiger earned more in one week than the whole table will earn in a year, and he is letting the check decompose. Finally somebody turned to the waitress and said, “Separate checks, please.” Wright Thompson reported the scene for ESPN in 2016, and the SEALs have been repeating it ever since.

We expect one of the wealthiest humans in the world, at the table, to exhibit a bit of perspective-taking and showcase a little generosity, to grab the check as a small tax on what he asked of his companions (who are not his close friends). When he lets it lie there, the brain searches for an explanation. And in 2026, the explanation often reached borrows from diagnostic terminology used by psychologists and psychiatrists.

He must be on the spectrum. You have heard people say it. Maybe you have said it. Someone cannot figure out what is the obvious social behavior to enact in that moment, they miss the cues other adults caught and linger a beat too long during an interaction until there is collective unease. The term is autistic, or autistic traits, or a little on the spectrum. We hand out the diagnosis now the way doctors used to give every child patient a lollipop after a blood test.

Defining terms

Autism is a psychological condition with a specific definition. To meet it, a person shows lasting difficulty with social communication and a pattern of restricted, repetitive behavior such as narrow fixations, a hunger for sameness, and evaluating the sensory world as overwhelming because of excessive sound or brightness or the physical proximity of objects or people. All these symptoms are present from early childhood and lead to substantial difficulties when trying to complete daily activities, especially school or work. Struggling socially, on its own, falls short of the bar for meeting the diagnostic criteria.

In the CDC’s latest count, about 1 in 31 American eight-year-olds meet criteria for the diagnosis, up from 1 in 36 two years earlier and 1 in 150 back in 2000. Close to 40% of those children also have an intellectual disability. For a large share of them, autism is a serious developmental condition that interferes with healthy development, and this extends to family dysfunction. Contemplate those details against an unacknowledged check sitting on a diner table. Part of that climb is sharper detection. Part of it is the boundary moving. When researchers followed a population of children for a decade, the rate of autistic symptoms in the population held steady while the rate of registered diagnoses kept climbing, a sign that the criteria, not the children, had shifted. Psychologists have a name for the slow stretching of a clinical concept until it swallows milder and more ordinary experience. They call it concept creep. Autism is one of the few diagnoses that measurably loosened across revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the psychiatric bible by the American Psychiatric Association).

You can distinguish who excels and underwhelms at social skills in children as early as 6 months of age, as this is a trait. There are individual differences in social skill similar to how there is a spread in height and grip strength across the population. Most of us cluster around the middle. A few socially effervescent, extremely popular people sit at the top, the ones who enter a room and find plenty of characters who willingly choose to sit next to them or be entertained by them. And according to the math inherent to any distribution, a few sit at the bottom. Someone occupies the lowest 25%. Someone occupies the lowest 15%, the lowest 5%. This arithmetic is maintained in every generation, every country, every office, and at every diner booth, forever.

We already had descriptors for adults at the low end who is otherwise functioning fine in most life domains. Doofus is one of the informal ones. The wealthy guy who is returning from a day of activities that the others paid for, lets the meal check sit there because it never occurred to him that picking up the tab is the right thing to do. Calling him a doofus suggests nothing about his neurological functioning nor the presence of a mental health diagnosis. It merely refers to how he is unskilled at one set of behaviors, perhaps in a single instance. Framed as a momentary skill or performance deficit, it is framed in the same way some people suck at parallel parking.

Two things occur when we rely on the term autistic to explain a doofus.

1. We insult people that the diagnostic category references. Stretching a clinical term until it covers every awkward social experience does a disservice to the kid who for biological reasons cannot hold eye contact, who melts down when the school bell rings, who needs years of support to complete a grocery store trip.

2. We let ourselves off the hook for the fact that a doofus, with inadequate social skills, can get better with concrete feedback. Call a coachable weakness a disorder, and you mistakenly assume a fixable problem is permanent and out of control.

Sometimes the bottom of that social skill distribution truly reflects autism, missed for decades, and the label finally allows a person to understand what is happening and the types of evidence-based interventions that could help. Plenty of adults feel a sense of relief and agency upon learning that what they have been trying to overcome with pure willpower is a genetically influenced impediment that requires assistance. I am the last person who would ask anyone to give up a diagnostic term that offered clarity in someone’s life narrative.

My complaint is narrower. It is the reflex to diagnose a stranger from one scene. You cannot read a man’s neurobiology off a single unpaid check. That is the whole trouble with the inhibition at the diner booth. It tells you he behaved poorly in the moment. It tells you nothing about the underlying psychology behind the behavior.

I cannot prove Tiger Woods is often a doofus instead of autistic, because nobody can prove either one from a few highly selected stories. I get to say he was being a doofus at that table, because the word describes what he did, and there is behavioral evidence of what happened. Thompson, who spent more time with him than the SEALs did, landed somewhere close by describing one of the greatest golf players in history as shy, socially inept, basically well meaning, as unsuited for public life as he is suited for hitting a ball.

A Plea

The next time you are tempted to promote the awkward characters in your life to a clinical category, consider the more likely explanation first. The uncle who corners you with forty minutes on his roof gutters. The kid who stands too close and chews loudly in your direction with mouth open. Based on statistical probability, very few of them will turn out to be on the autism spectrum. A comprehensive clinical evaluation will determine if this is valid, and if so, can change their lives for the better. Most are simply sitting at the low end of one skill, and it would be relatively accurate to call them occasionally low in social skill but can learn.

The same reflex extends far beyond autism. The arrogant guy who gets a kick from explaining to experts what they misunderstand and assumes that everyone admires their intelligence, looks, and wit gets called a narcissist, when narcissism runs as a continuous trait with no natural cutoff and the disorder itself sits near a mere 1% of the population. He is most likely parked high on entitlement and low on humility, which is a spot on a normal personality distribution. Your cousin who is inhibited and clammy when she walks into a party full of beautiful strangers (who wouldn’t?) gets called socially anxious, as though she requires immediate mental health treatment for a disorder. A room of attractive strangers rattles almost anyone. Most shy people do not meet criteria for social anxiety disorder, which is reserved for fear sufficiently persistent and severe that it is hard to function in daily life.

Pin a diagnosis on a person who is merely higher or lower than you on some personality trait, and you swap an accurate sense of human range for inappropriate labels. Shyness, bluntness, arrogance, and social clumsiness are positions on a distribution, and some of us experience these moments more frequently and intensely even if it leads to greater stress.

Stop Diagnosing Everyone You Dislike

Therapy language was supposed to help us understand each other. Somehow it became a junk drawer for every awkward, annoying, selfish, confusing, or socially unusual person we encounter. A bad boyfriend is a narcissist. A blunt coworker is dealing with intermittent explosive disorder. A needy friend has insecure attachment intergenerational trauma. A disagreement becomes gaslighting. A request becomes a boundary. A personality flaw becomes a clinical event that requires an autopsy on a 45-minute podcast episode.

Save psychiatric diagnoses for the experts hired to conduct comprehensive clinical assessments. For the uber-wealthy guy who let the check sit there, a face plant emoji will do.

Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

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As fewer people read books and long articles, there is a growing preference for short videos. Though I tend to be blirtatious, enjoy my experiment with a new feature called One Minute of Psychological Science.

A slight complication emerged while trying to nail the inaugural video in a single recording. It landed at 2 minutes and 59 seconds. Apparently my relationship with the concept of one minute is closer to a cult leader’s misunderstanding of captive audience.

Most people think social skills belong in one giant bucket. Eye contact. Duchenne smiles. Handshakes. Radical listening. Benevolent humor (please, no puns). Networking. Small talk. Charisma. But this is like making the technically true statement that a tricycle and fighter jet are both transportation devices.

Some social skills are parsley. While they show up in conversations, nobody cares if they’re absent. Plenty of social skills help you produce pleasant interactions. Far fewer help when a friend lets you down, a colleague takes credit for your work, or somebody you love keeps repeating the same irritating story for the eighteenth time.

Today’s inaugural episode focuses on a social skill that is closer to oxygen than parsley. The people who lack it often compensate with resentment or elaborate internal monologues about what they wish happened if granted a do-over.

Watch the episode and see whether you’re as good at it as you think. What would you do in this situation?

If you are a rare reader of long form articles, I fleshed out the topic in greater depth here and in a follow-up.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.