Your smart phone could be making you miserable. Young Americans today are facing levels of stress, anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses that are higher than they were a generation ago. And the rest of us aren’t doing much better.
The human mind did not evolve for the world we live in. Over the last twenty-four hours I’ve gazed at the image of a reporter about to be beheaded. Moments later in the same newscast I watched a mother and father express their rage, sadness, and dismay when their teenage boy was shot to death …
Ferguson, Beheadings, and the Psychological Challenge of Living in the Modern World Read More »
Not too long ago, perhaps a couple hundred thousand years, an obscure primate species called “human” learned a new trick. We learned to relate one thing to another arbitrarily — we learned to have one thing stand for another. We acquired symbolic thought. The comedian Emo Philips has a saying that captures the situation we …
