Step into a world ...

this is an exploration of other people's lives.

look around you, there are streets like this in every town.

they are all connected.

Some may prefer to browse at Flickr.

From the archive, see also, Faces of Meth.

the street

John Sterns:

I hear voices (“auditory hallucinations”, technically). Before my treatment, hospitalisations and incarcerations, these voices were all separate and distinct, with individual sounds, tones, rhythms and pitches. Now they are one voice--my voice. Once a chorus, they have become a soloist, though attacking me with the same message. Treatment has meant that I have finally found a “self”, a “me”, after four decades. But the me I’ve discovered is now my enemy.

Being Crazy Is Noisy

Gold Star. Take a moment to consider Matthew Crawford.

Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. Beneath our gratitude may rest envy.

...

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules.

Publishers Weekly gives Crawford's new book a starred review:

Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Matthew Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls “manual competence,” the ability to work with one’s hands. With wit and humor, the author deftly mixes the details of his own experience as a tradesman and then proprietor of a motorcycle repair shop with more philosophical considerations.

Paul Graham:

If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them.

Richard Sennett:

It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician -- but what makes a true master?

Pleasure in making comes from innate necessary rhythms, often slow ones.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

The Case for Working With Your Hands

Drake Bennett:

If you were given the choice, and you wanted to reduce human suffering by as much as possible, would you cure blindness or back pain? It seems a silly question. The thought of losing one's sight is, to most people, as frightening as it is depressing: we would no longer be stirred by sunsets or landscapes or the expressions on the faces of our loved ones. Everyday chores would become more difficult, crossing the street perilous. Many sports and pastimes would simply be off-limits, and we would lose a good deal of our independence.

Back pain, on the other hand, is just back pain.

But in fact, it's back pain that causes more misery.

From the archive:

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone.

Perfectly Happy

Joshua Wolf Shenk:

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

Have you seen Seven Up!?

Happiness Isn't About "Me"

Martin Walker:

It is apparent from the urban landscape across the developing ­world—­whether in Mumbai or Shanghai, São Paulo or Moscow, Dubai or ­Istanbul—­that a growing proportion of consumers seek to emulate a ­Western-­international lifestyle, which includes an air-conditioned house with a car in the garage, a private garden, satellite TV, and Internet access, along with the chance to raise a limited number of children, all of whom will have the opportunity to go to college. Whether the biosphere can adapt to such increases in consumption remains a critical ­question.

The world has changed. There is more and faster change to ­come.

The World's New Numbers

Ashby Jones on a story by Karen Sloan:

When we write about lawyers and unhappiness, we typically have a specific kind of unhappiness in mind. It’s more a restlessness than a deep despair, more a malaise or vague sense of dissatisfaction than an outright sadness. Whenever we write about this (which we and others tend to do with a certain amount of glibness), we do so with an unspoken assumption — that this category of unhappiness is entirely fixable — especially for big firm lawyers, what with their smarts and connections and hard-earned degrees. It’s just a matter of finding a new job or going part time or leaving the law altogether. Happiness exists just around the corner, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

But the unhappiness discussed in a National Law Journal story out today strikes an entirely different chord.

In Down Times, Depression Taking Hold Among More Lawyers

Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity

Larry Brilliant:

Why are more new viruses with pandemic potential jumping from their traditional animal hosts to humans now? If I had to choose a single word answer it would be: "modernity." If I had two more words, I would add "human irresponsibility."

Two from the archive:

The grace of wildness changes somehow when it becomes familiar.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

A dialogue between Dyson and Brand:

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Brand: Do you have a list of these principles?

Dyson: No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

Brand: In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

The Age of Pandemics

Neil Strauss has a new book.

Before the next disaster strikes, you're going to want to read this book. And you'll want to do everything it suggests. Because tomorrow doesn't come with a guarantee.

From the archives, a trio of Jim Kunstler:

What we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

World Made By Hand: a novel of America's post-oil future

All parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life, as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality.

How long will these games go on?

A parting thought:

“People loved comedies during the depression, too,” said R. J. Cutler, executive producer of “Flip That House.”

Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life