Life Design and Life Designers (combined post)
These are all people or projects who have been living experiments in life design and chose to pass their knowledge to us.
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Social Technology
Why We Work
Barry Schwartz has written a book and given a TED talk on this subject of “Why we work?” He asserts that a small group of people work for meaning and purpose and, perhaps, because the work is important, but that most people work in jobs that give them none of these things. For those people,
Robin Hood & Other Ethical Cheating
A brief exploration of the ethics of lying.
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(Dis)Honesty, the Documentary Movie – Notes
Humans are liars. A great deal of scientific research demonstrates that most people lie, especially under the “right” circumstances. Do a search for Dan Ariely, a Professor of Psychology & Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and you will find many mainstream press articles summarizing his work. This article is about the documentary, (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About
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Great Talk: Real Communication and the Empathy Dialog
Competency in basic relationship skills is a key component of moving from our dysfunctional status quo to a future of thriving on one planet’s worth of resources (one planet thriving). Building relationships and community are two necessary social technologies. The heart of these social technologies is dealing with reality instead of using avoidance. Being able
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The Four Horsemen of a Relationship Apocalypse
John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of a Relationship Apocalypse are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Replace these with healthy halos — complaints, self-compassion, realistic thinking, and negotiated breaks — for a better relationship.
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The Great Courses: Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations – Notes
Humans have been on the planet for 3 million years (Homo habilis), 2 million years (Homo erectus) or 200,000 years (Homo sapiens sapiens) depending on what you want to call “human”. The structure and organization of life we know as “civilization” has been around for about 8,000 years. It took us about 8,000 years to discover that our modern way of life, as possibly civilization, itself, is unsustainable (meaning that it will end). Perhaps we might consider the fact that for 96% to 99.6% of human existence (190,000 to 2.9 million years) we lived sustainably on one planet’s worth of resources. What lessons might we learn from our history to guide us once again to sustainable lifestyles, or, even better, thriving on one planet? Because writing, itself, developed with the lifestyle we call “civilization”, we never did have anything like a written owner’s manual for how our ancestors lived sustainably for so much time. Hopefully, archeology, anthropology, and related fields of study will help us create one. These are my notes from a course that may provide some clues.
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Willie Smits Restoring the World: One rainforest and village at a time
Willie Smits, born in the Netherlands but living in (and citizen of) Indonesea for the past 35 years, works in tropical Indonesia to re-establish not only forests which then increase rainfall by 25% (using only 5,000 acres) but also to re-establish the communities of people needed to make those forests permanent. Resources to learn more
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Adverse Childhood Experiences: Role in Health
What happens if we can eliminate a child’s experience of (1) crime in the home, (2) neglect, and (3) abuse (physical, mental, and sexual)? We see reductions in a host of health problems these early stressors cause with rates of return on our investment of up to 150%. Among the problems that can be reduced
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Movie: Reversing the Mississippi
What happens with a guru in creating affordable physical technology for farming meets a guru in creating social connections for youth to teach them farming? I have been waiting to find out since I first saw the trailer for Reversing the Mississippi in June of 2015. Thanks to Ian Midgley, the film premiered on the
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